Things I Know I Know

I am declaring Later, There Will Be Fireworks finished.

Technically, it is not finished because it doesn't have an ending (some people probably will be thinking cheater, but I am not counting this as one of my finished works for the story-a-month challenge. So, there).

This story needs a second draft more desperately than many of my stories. There are things that need to be set earlier in order to lead inevitably (but, one hopes, unexpectedly) to the ending. And there's no sense writing the last page or so when it will be so much easier to write the last page or so after I fix the beginning (to write the last page or so would require big heaping whacks of exposition since I have not set up the things I need to set--if I can manage to do that, then the ending will more or less write itself).

It's been awhile since I've managed to hose up a story as much as I've managed to hose up this one and I'm not sure why this one is in such a mess. There are parts of it that I really like, but it doesn't resonate yet--all the disparate parts--the minor characters, the setting and the events--don't yet do their jobs. They hold places. They connect one bit to another. But they're not yet serving the overall whole in the way they need to.