Play Pause is now a full-fledged manuscript and not a flash fiction. What started out as a 100 word short story has today evolved into a 50,000 word novel. The transformation didn’t happen overnight. Here are the chronological changes—from an ultra-sleek short to a standard fiction book. The title of this literary piece also changed with each transition.
Elevator Ride – Flash Fiction
The journey of Play Pause began with a 100 word flash fiction. I’d written this piece for my fans / website visitors. Months later, one of the readers commented that the story would have made an even more gratifying read had it been written in long format.
That Girl in the Elevator – Short Story
This got me thinking. Over the next few months Elevator Ride transformed to a 3000+ words short story. However, this time around, I experienced a sense of incompleteness. I made no attempt to introduce newer, compelling subplots / events. The Girl in the Elevator rested within the hard disk for a long time.
Love Happens – A Novella
Years later, during one of my not so productive periods, I dug out “That Girl in the Elevator”. I rewrote the entire story, tying up loose ends, introducing meaningful twists / subplots. When I finally checked the word count it sported a little over 21000 words—perfect count for a Novella.
Play Pause – 50000+ Word Novel
Although the beginning and the end of this “Story” remained unchanged, the transitional scenes of the novella failed to evoke the required emotions. The story arc, the narrative arc, didn’t shape up well. The rise and fall of different “Acts” needed further tweaking and “Space” in terms of timeline. With the newer additions the manuscript swelled by thousands of words, and in the end everything fell into place. Although the task of fine tuning the story this time turned out to be quite intimidating I did manage to wrap up without any loop holes in the story structure / development, and one of the reasons was “Dual Protagonists”. With just a couple of characters it somehow made the task achievable.
Is Play Pause a horror or a psychological genre? Neither! It is a witty, quirky, intelligent romance saga with a shocking end. The language is lucid, the pace just about what readers demand these days, and the message— heart wrenching. The manuscript has been sent to several traditional publishers and literary agents for representation. Keeping my fingers crossed!
Although Play Pause is still unpublished, you can preview the writing here – CHAPTER | EXCERPT or buy the book from AMAZON.