I woke up this morning with a stuffy nose, sore throat and feeling like my body had been hit by a truck. And here all I was expecting was a hangover. No hangover, so yay for that! But omg, could this come at a worse time.
I have a rough outline for my story now, for the challenge, so I'm going to work a little bit on it today. I ideally want a first draft before the day finishes, but at the rate I'm going, it might be the roughest first draft I've ever written.
The funny thing about ghost stories is that their themes are consistently unoriginal, and the more I try and walk away from the conventions, the more my story won't read like a ghost story. I remember in the flash fiction challenge, my story (horribly titled 8-Bit Folly) scored better than another story that I thought was better. Except his did not stick with the standard ghost story themes. His ghost story was about a man who died playing a game of Galaga. When he woke from his death, he could see the arcade, and the game he was playing. He decided he needed to finish this game. And as he did, he realised he had wasted his life and left the mortal plane both fulfilled and unfulfilled. It was a nicely written story, and it had that hint of regret that ghost stories often had. But it was not really a ghost story. It had a ghost feature prominently in it, but that was not enough. He didn't score any points. My flawed story about a haunted arcade scored 11 points. I was 4th place that round. And if I had fixed some of the things that had haunted me about the story, I could have possibly scored 1st.
So all of this is in the back of my mind, hoping I can find that fine line between original and conventional. Fingers crossed the conventions I do use (handprints on windows, foul weather, etc) are not too cliche.
Fingers crossed it doesn't suck!
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