Done, and done

Just completed my latest short story, "the Milky Way Dance Hall". I started Tuesday night and finished it up Saturday. First draft was over 3,000 words, but after editing it tightened nicely and dropped down to a final word count of 2,868 – in general, a good sign.

The story uses two pieces of business I heard over the years from old-timers who grew up here in East Texas. One was that years ago there was so little light pollution that at night, that not only could you always see the Milky Way up in the sky, but --according to this one fellow --you could see the glare of the Milky Way reflecting on the blacktop during the dark of the moon.

The other story I heard was that there was so little traffic on a rural road at night that the teenagers would go out and park the cars along the roadside and dance in the middle of the road to the music from the car radios.

I incorporated both these ideas into the story, which is a first-person narrative by a old man who's a teenager at the time (the story happens in 1956) and tells how he lost his date about one fateful night out there at the Milky Way dance hall.

This is my 119th short story I've ever written. I submitted it said a night; right now I have 17 stories in various slush piles.