Dancing in the Pale Moonlight

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Moon Dancer is my favorite short story. Like Seven Floors, it received buckets of hate before it was loved.

I used to live in the city. At thirteen, my family and I moved back to the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, just in time for a high school full of kids who all grew up together. I was the "City Indian." In the end, it was all right. I made awesome friends and I had the greatest time of my life.

One of my friends and I would tell scary stories to each other. One day, she told me about a centaur lurking in the woods. I'd never heard of such a thing in my life, at least as far as the reservation was concerned. Centaurs belonged in Greek Mythology, not on the reservation.


After graduation, my friend died in a car wreck the next winter. Several months later, I headed off to Brigham Young University in the worst of spirits. I graduated with only one thing in mind: to write. Short stories were beyond me, but I really wanted to build a platform. I ended up writing a halfway decent fantasy, and of course, nobody would take it. I changed its title, revamped it several times, and nothing. So I put the story away.

Almost a decade later, after I'd been in the horror business, I wanted to try fantasy again. I pulled out the story, the name which has been forgotten, and began a major re-write. This time, I had new skills. Changing the title to "Moon Dancer," I cut out several characters. By this time, the monster had migrated over to "Toni's Land." Of course "Toni's Land" got published first. It left me with a fantasy story with no monster.


While thinking, I remembered my friend's centaur. Now there was a monster "Moon Dancer" could use. I redesigned the centaur to rival what had deserted over to "Toni's Land." I renamed my characters and changed the story's premise. In the midst of all that, I added a car wreck in the middle of winter.

My friend has inspired this story, but in no way reflects her family, except maybe their sorrow at her passing.

For my friend Deidre, "Moon Dancer" is dedicated.


Comments

  1. David J. RogersNovember 2, 2019 at 1:38 PM

    I love the way you returned to your story again and again--and applied your new skills to improving it. Highly motivated people will return and compete uncompleted tasks--even tasks that were interrupted many years before—the so-called Zeigarnik Effect. I wrote about this in a post "13 High Achievement Skills for Artists and Writers." https://davidjrogersftw.com/2015/07/15/13-high-achievement-skills-for-artists-and-writers/ which I think you might like.

    Sorry about the loss of your friend. Your using a character from her story is a lasting tribute to her memory

    ReplyDelete

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