Another short has had an outing and come back home. 🙂
I was never too sure as to the title of this piece: Care Returns for Rachel Bride or Time for Rachel Bride. I ended up settling on the latter as time is a recurring theme throughout and ‘care’ is a sticky subject nowadays in competitions, apparently, due to overuse. Nonetheless, this is also about the final care and why.
In the Developmental page I explain some of how and why. In brief, the story rose from a memory of someone very dear, now gone, coupled with experiences in care homes as a relative and undertaker. The story ended up having to be written as it blocked other creativity for a while – no doubt due to the emotional load. It’s a laid-back, subdued piece: Time for Rachel Bride.
I’m also conscious that I haven’t produced a ‘What’s Cooking’ update for a while. The reason is simple: some of the novels and stories are submitted to anonymously judged competitions, so giving out the titles here breaks the anonymity. Nonetheless, I am working on the MA novel, as well as other shorts, and I can say that the start-stop nature of the work on the final MA piece makes it really difficult to progress, breaking the subsequent story and character development and train of thought to focus on individual bits for the MA submission. It hammers the process something awful, as they say.
Very frustrating. And a lesson: once you start, don’t stop. Only then go back and edit, rework and adjust.
Take care.
Tim's Sceap Tome 