That’s not the name of the book. If you’ve been paying attention to my running total as I meet and miss targets every day (achieving the overall target, I should point out), it’s Father Lightning, and I just managed to finish the first draft.

As with all first drafts, it sucks.

It does also, like all good first drafts, behave like the most detailed outline one could write, and it laid out bare all the weakness and plot holes and missing plot points and opportunities for character growth and change that a basic outline never could.

Tomorrow begins the unenviable task of figuring out just exactly where I fucked up, and creating draft after draft to fix all the mistakes that inevitably live in this draft, until it resembles something cohesive and worthwhile.

Because that’s the point.

It’s not enough that it’s written well. If it doesn’t suck you in, make you feel, make you think and take you somewhere you didn’t know you wanted to go (or maybe somewhere you didn’t, but the emotional impact exists anyway), well, then, hell. You’re not doing your job.

The Mungk was a fatalist screed, short and sweet existential terror encompassed in a young boy and the monster under his bed.

This is an screed of institutional kindness, and what that actually fucking means.

What is true kindness?

Well, that’s what this story aims to find out.

At least, it’s a starting point, like all first drafts.

Target: 1400 words
Written: 1277 words, novel: Father Lightning