I’ve just been writing, and enjoying it.

This is weird for me because I usually hate it. I love the idea of it. I love having done it. I quite like the editing process, especially if I’m weeding out the excess words to make a flash hit its limit. But I don’t normally love the writing itself. But at the moment I am.

I think it’s partly because I haven’t done any for ages so I’m coming back to it fresh. Partly it’s that I’m trying to follow this idea I read about where you do 20 mins a day and stop when you hit the time limit, even in the middle of a sentence. Especially in the middle of a sentence as that gives you somewhere to pick up on.

Actually I’ve done more than the 20mins for the three nights this week that I’ve been doing it. At least my ‘writing time’ has been up to 2 hours and more but time actually spent on a personal project has been 20mins – or a little more. The rest has been reviews and crits and reading others stories and writing forums. Also tonight I spent some time organising my folders and creating a document template for the Eurofiction ‘house style’.

I’m also at the beginning of a lot of things. I’ll list my current projects in a second, but it feels like I have all this time stretched out in front of me. Days and days before I have to hand anything in. So I can spend a few minutes noodling around and brainstorming and well, playing, without having to worry about forming it into a story. But actually that’s ok. Because all joking aside if I avoid the 10 days of procrastination and 2 days of actual work of my “stages” then even actually putting ideas down at all gets me one step ahead. If none of my ideas are formed, at least outlined, as real stories by this time next week then…

Current Projects

Eurofiction Task 1 – got the prompt for the first round of EF 2009 last night just after midnight. A choice of three settings for an argument. I’ve sketched out vague ideas for all three and real possibilities for a couple.

AFO September Challenge – this one’s a good one. There are about 5 required elements – Travel, Alcohol, Loss, Dialogue and something Jaw-dropping. Except that none of them are required if you really don’t want them to be as long as the story’s good. So they’re more jumping off points, inspiration. I’m glad the challenge setter took this approach. Sometimes these multi-requirement challenges can be more about puzzle than prompt. Which is fine but I do the challenges to improve my writing not to prove I can fit 14 Beatles lyrics into a 500-word story about ducks. Anyway I’ve got an idea for this and I like it.

TWI Monday Flash – a 250-word flash competition that runs from Monday evening to Friday night. I’ve got a 270-word rough draft of an idea that’s fun but silly. I’ll polish and bring it up to 300 and then pare it back down to the needed 250.

It’s interesting because if you look at deadlines etc then I should work on TWI (tomorrow at 9pm) then EF (13 days and a couple of hours) then AFO (a whole month, nearly) but it’s measure of how much I like my AFO idea that I’ve worked on it tonight anyway. Though to fend off potential guillt I have in fact worked on all of them tonight.

Oh and I wrote in my blog

😉