When more is less

I've been pondering for the past couple days what I will write when I compose my entry for the Writers of the Future contest. It's one I've been meaning to enter for a while, and damn it, this summer I will. So I got to thinking of what -- they want fantasy or sci-fi, but from the research I've done on it, it seems they lean toward sci-fi. Okay, I can work with that.

And it hits me. I get a story idea, but the origonal idea is full novel length. The contest only calls for 17000 words or less. My idea was fine, but it wasn't hardcore sci-fi... more like speculative fiction, kind of a dystopian, near future thing. For me to make it shorter, to fit the wordcount... I'd need to make the plot bigger. I'd need to add more in order to write less. Although I'm well aware this blog gets minimal hits, I don't want to write the story idea in here for fear of theft... but I figured out how to make it bigger. The plot that is, not the word count. It does however, push me violently into sci-fi territory.

It involves aliens. I'm not too worried about the alien thing... if you write it, and they read it, they'll go with it. Readers will say "That's what an alien looks like?? Okay, that's what an alien looks like." I'm a bit more worried about the science part of the sci-fi -- I'm gonna have to do research on like galaxies, and NASA, space travel, molecular biology... can we say "eww"? I'll do it though... for the sake of my craft. Because I think it's a good story idea. I'm not great at keeping stuff short, I may end up pushing the limit, but that's okay as I'll need to tighten afterwards anyway. I'm excited about it.

I will write it down somewhere. I don't want to risk losing the story. I'll start it after the romance novel, probably around the second week of August.