I am struggling with the story now renamed “Termination Seven.”

Perhaps the title changes will give some clue to the problem I am wrestling with. This story was initially known as “Execution Fourteen.” It has gone through numerous iterations — as “Execution Eleven,” then “Execution Nine,” then “Termination Nine,” and, now, I have come to “Termination Seven.”

I am hoping this truncation of the “protest” part of the story will help me focus more on the characters and the plot, while still retaining the “protest.”

I have set myself a tricky problem in that the story re-occurs, seven times, in exactly the same location with the same cast of characters. This repetition is an intentional part of the narrative, but it does set up a problem in terms of scene structure because, of course, the players, physical location, and much of the action of each scene are the same.

You might be thinking of Groundhog Day, or Live, Die, Repeat at this point but I can reassure you there is no time loop here — which seems to heighten the challenge, at least for me, of driving the plot forward when relatively little changes.

Still, I will have to persevere because I am determined to include this story (technically a novella) in my next collection of stories, “The Four Ages of Death.” [Sunday, 11 February, 2024]