Fourth Draft

Finally, the short story is a) 2,200 words long after being in excess of 3000, and b) feeling OK, reasonable. No. 1 son - easily my biggest but most creative critic- likes it, although it's not the sort of thing I normally write.

It's ended up in four scenes, and the biggest weakness is that each section needs to start and end on a strong statement. Apart from that,I just need to listen to the music of it. It has some nice phrases in it, but they feel diluted down by the story a bit. It's drifted a long way from my sister and her own death now.

Now the commentary! I wrote 700 words but frankly, it's still very analytical. Then I checked the assignment brief and found out it had to be 500. Somehow I have to prune it down while expanding the emotional interpretation! This is confusing - but that's where I lost quite a lot of marks in TMA01. I'm going to have another go. The one thing that has really grabbed me from the course and section 2 is Flannery O'Connor, and I want to get some of her stuff in. Not to mention the difficulty of working out how to reference CD tracks and the BRB. Still ignoring the OCA assignment.... Ooops.