Victory: Premonitions is Completed!

I was able to get a final edit of Chapter 6 uploaded last night. It took a few small adjustments to get the overall word count under 20K. Thankfully, nothing significant was lost in that transition. The original version of the final edit was 20,126 words compared to the final count of 19,997 words. That cut it very close to the contest's cap! In all of the site views that display the truncated amount of words, that gets commonly rounded up to a perfect 20K words. It wasn't a significant struggle to squeeze it into that gap, due to some careful planning on my part, but I need to say something here:

I really don't want to do this again.

There were a lot of points in this story where I wanted to break into deep and meaningful explanations of the concepts involved. Giving the characters a voice through the lens of their own analysis is a fascinating thing to me. There are projects I have planned where entire chapters will be lengthy explanations of complex subjects. Those teaching moments are as much a way to characterize an individual as they are an opportunity to inform the audience of what's actually going on. I couldn't do any of that here.

To be clear, I don't think readers are liable to get lost reading Premonitions. I tried to keep every complex idea to a superficial, easily searchable context. All of the major scientific theories in this story are a one-word google search away from complete understanding. This is all by design. However, the reality of a short project like this is that telling a compelling story and spending time explaining interesting things are fundamentally at odds with a word cap like this.

I completely dumped the explanations here and leaned heavily into characterization. The hope being I'd have enough space to make everything happen and confused parties could just ignore it like techno-babble or figure it out on their own. I think that was the better of my two options. The other option would've been to completely dump characterization and spend 20K words explaining a really interesting scientific phenomenon. I find this idea a lot harder to think about, and it's also extremely counter to how I tend to want to write things.

It was the baby or the bathwater here, and I feel like I chose the baby.

That said, even though it's marked as complete, I do plan to update the story's description with details on how it did in the contest. I also plan to finish the cover-art and replace the Work In Progress piece that I'm currently using as a cover. There's supposed to be a space ship in the image, I just didn't have the time to finish more than the background. That said, barring any complaints about how it's rated or tagged, nothing else about Premonitions is going to change. That story is done. Now it's on to the next one!