Whenever I finish a story, a full Wagnerian orchestra breaks into music and I ride onstage on a big white horse wearing a helmet with wings on it (I’m wearing a helmet, I mean, not the horse) and I sing, “I finished a story! Finished a story! Finished a STOry! Ha-ha-ha-HAAAAA!”

I’ve been working on a (supposedly) humorous mystery called “Still Life With Peanut Butter”, and I finally finished the rough draft. Mamie, who, along with her fiance’s sister, does a webcam cooking show called The Kitchen Bitches, decides to promote the show by catering her own reception. She gets sponsorship from Jumbo All-Natural Peanut Butter, a local business trying to recover from a dead body having been found on its premises. During her pursuit of the sponsorship, she stumbles onto more than she expected.

I can’t seem to outline a short story. I have to approach it like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, with a machete. Hack through all those thorn bushes. Hack through! Then I find I’ve hacked through to a blank wall, and have to hack my way to an actual DOOR, duh. Then I have to get through the door and search the whole stupid palace and when I finally find her and wake her up, that’s the triumph. But THEN she’s a mess, you know, all covered in dust (no cobwebs or mouse poop, thankfully, since the spiders and mice have been asleep for 100 years, too, could be worse, right?). Rough draft.

The anthology I want to submit this to closes at the end of October, so I need to get beyond the rough draft stage, but finishing the rough is the hard part. Now is the Time of Wagerian Triumph! “I finished a story! Finished a story! Finished a STOry! Ha-ha-ha-HAAAAA!”

WRITING PROMPT: What is your main character’s Time of Wagnerian Triumph outside of the extraordinary circumstances of your book? When he balances his checkbook? (That’s another one for me.) When she parallel parks? (Again, me.)

MA