The Suitors of the Glade of Willows

I have a story, The Suitors of the Glade of Willows, in which a young man pursues the middle of three willow-like girls.  I wrote it as a direct reaction to some Thomas Hardy I was reading, and the plot is that the son must find a suitable suitor for the eldest sister in order to marry the middle one.  In the end, the wild hunt swings into town and Herne or whatever you want to call him carries her away on the back of his stallion.

I returned to this story a few months ago and wrung my hands in embarrassment at how awful it was.  I almost deleted it on the spot.   But I have another story brewing that necessitates the youngest daughter (the goat-willow) so I went back and looked at it again.  The first 100 or so words were awful, a faux-Victorian failure in rhythm and structure.  (My father characterised my writing as containing lots of "such-and-such was quite good; not the best but adequate".  This was just a list of those splattered with extraneous words.)

But when it got going it was great.  Really pacy and full of ideas and subtleties.  I am proper glad I didn't delete it now.  So I fixed that introduction and now I've got 3,000 words which are again usable.  That's great because I need this story for other parts to work and I wasn't looking forward to blank-page rewriting it.

Now to begin the goat-willow sequel.

(As an aside; writing these blog posts is a really useful warm-up or warm-down.  Cures writing block fo sure.)