Hobo Lilly – The Process

Posted on by pcmccollum

Hobo Lilly is story number thirty in the #52ShortStories challenge.

**SPOILERS BELOW. If you have not read the story and want to be (hopefully) surprised, come back to this when you’re done.**

I love it when I get to a story where everything slips into its proper place. The words are flowing, the influences and ideas undergo rapid gestation, and there seems to be nothing standing in my way…if you’re a writer, you know this feeling.

You also know how rare it is.

Though I hope the good times will keep on rollin’, after story #30, I’ve wised up enough to know the dark times be a’comin’ once again. So I’ll just savor the moment and take Walt Whitman’s advice from the poem I posted last Friday:

Happiness not in another place, but this place..not for another hour, but this hour.

But I feel like, with this story, I’m beginning to find my voice as a writer. I’ve by no means found it, but everything just felt…right. Hard to describe, but I wouldn’t surprised to look back at some point in my career and see this story as a potential turning point.

Or maybe that’s all just nonsense. 🙂

The seed for this particular tale was planted by the Louis L’Amour memoirs I recently finished. He’d spent time in his youth hoboing about and you can read quite a bit about that in a scan of the particular pages discussing it (check the scratch file linked to below).

I’ve also been reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, refreshing myself on classic Greek mythology. This lit the general theme of the protagonist looking for her daughter (see the tale of Demeter and Persephone).

Why is it all occurring in the future and outer space? Why not. No deep reasoning there. Just sounded fun.

Here’s the general scratch file:

And the daily journal entries:

-Phillip

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