Leah Cutter — writer/traveler

Here it is — the twelfth story in twelve weeks: The Third Raven.

The raven clan takes pride in three things: the education of their children, the fierceness of their warriors, and how they care for their own. However, Pedrek, a retired raven warrior, finds a raven clan boy alone in a remote mountain village, ignorant of his heritage as well as cursed: looking like a dreaded half-breed, with one human arm and one black raven’s wing. Can Pedrek break the curse and bring the boy into the clan? Or has he been too long on his own?

This story was inspired in part by the two ancient songs, “The Three Ravens” and “The Twa Corbies”. Wikipedia page

As usual, this story will be available here on my web site for free for a week. Then I’ll pull it down and post the last story.

One of the unusual things about this story: about halfway through I realized that I could easily set a novel in this world. Not necessarily that I would, but the world is so developed in my head. It’s more complete than some of the other places I wrote about. If it was earlier in the challenge, say week three or four, I’d probably already be planning on writing another short story in this world. As it is, this is the twelfth story and I already have the next one planned. Still, I may revisit this world at some future date.

One of the things I paid attention to while I was writing this story was how I wrote it. As usual, there were scenes that I started wrong, that I had to run at more than once (by run at I generally mean throw away everything I’ve written so far and redraft.) When I’m writing by hand I recognize when I need to redraft a scene fairly early, generally within the first couple paragraphs, and almost always within the first page.

When I am typing a story straight to the computer I miss those warning signs. I keep pushing when I should just stop and redirect. I think it’s partly because it’s too easy to type and keep going, while writing things out by hand takes more effort, so when it’s not going correctly it’s easier to slow down.

Writing by hand doesn’t mean I won’t abandon a story, I did that during week two. But the warning signs are clear very early on.

In addition, I’ve been taking some notes about statistics, as well as what I’ve learned doing this challenge. I’ve had such a good time. I’ll post about those later. Michael Stackpole just wrote a blog post about how much more fun writing has become since he’s taken over the production side of things. I have to agree with him. I’m writing more, and I’m looking forward to writing more because I don’t care if I’m writing sideways pieces that no one will ever buy. (And that’s the other thing — people are buying them.)

My word count for the year isn’t that impressive. I had a lot going on in terms of life events. Still, I got words onto a page and made them public and I enjoyed the process so much. And honestly, I think that’s worth more than just about anything.