This morning, I finished the second draft of my first new short story in far too long. The second draft came in at 10,660 words vs. a first draft length of 5,338 words. I could have given you a ballpark figure for this new draft before I even began my revisions—my second drafts are invariably twice the length of my first drafts. It’s not intentional. I’m not deliberately aiming for that doubling. That’s just how my mind works when adding detail to the armature of a story.

As for the title, I don’t have one yet. Oh, I have plenty of working titles, but all of those have been tested and rejected. A few of the ones unlikely to end up attached to this tale are “People, Like Balloons,” “We All Deserved Better,” “This Impossibility, This Inevitability,” and “Impossibility, Inevitability, and the Space Between.”

There’ll be several more drafts before I’m ready to unleash the story on an editor. But why should you have to wait for a peek until someone else deems it worthy? Here’s some of the first draft which I been sharing immediately after having written it over on Instagram and Twitter. As you can see, I start off working in a longhand that’s scribbled so quickly and illegibly that the result is barely decipherable even to me.

Enjoy. Or something.