To the Sound of the Ocean has been published. It’s a m/f story of about 1100 words that has no fantasy element, something that rarely happens with me. I still thought it had merit, even if it isn’t my normal style.

I’ve been trying to practice how to control and contain story ideas, something that I still haven’t mastered. Mostly it’s about understanding how much space a subplot will take up once it sneaks into my story and knowing when to allow it to happen and when it needs to be tossed in order to make the story feasible and manageable.

For this story, I just couldn’t find a way to enter a magical element without exploding the story by thousands of words. Had I come up with a good fantastical idea, I would have shrugged and gone with it anyway because I believe that a story is as long as the story needs to be, but nothing seemed right in this case. In the end, trying to force something magical into this story would have just drastically hurt it, so I decided against trying to turn it into something it wasn’t.

Next Sunday, July 20th: Only One Worth Kissing – Part 1 of 2 (fantasy, serial, m/f) – A hundred frogs in the pond, a hundred kisses gone astray.