Story stuff's

I blurbled on a bit about a short story I was trying to write that just didn't seem to want to...well...write.

Today I decided to bite the big one and give up. It was a tough thing to do, I haven't had to do that before now. It's not deleted gone, but it's off the 'lets write something here today' list.

Thus far everything I have written has been pretty good straight off the hoof, so to speak (Okay, except for Position Vacant's first draft, which sucked arse - but its really good now!). Maybe needing a little added extra here and there to help bring things together or show extra depth since my stories aren't big 'otherworld' builders being mainly contemporary set. Essentially I started, I wrote the story, and I finished. Now good is of course subjective - I mean it flowed, I didn't have to stare at the screen for hours waiting for the brain fart that was going to tell me where my story was going etc. I wrote and wrote, pondered a bit, and wrote. It was all there and ready to go in my head.

This one just wouldn't do that. I would sit and stare; I would write a sentence and go get a coke. Write another and go get a cookie; a word and do the washing (not the folding mind you just the putting it in the machine then the dryer). I sat in front of the TV and instead of knocking out 1500 words I managed 150 and discovered all over again the shock and awe trainwreck of American Idol auditions. I haven't even gone back to see if they were 150 usable words!

Instead, I found a notebook this morning that I had written in with a couple of other ideas for the same submission, and realised one of the half page, half formed, hand-written synopsis/storylines I had started was 100 times better than what I had been struggling with.

So I sat down, did a little naming research because one of the characters is going to be part Indian (India Indian here not American Indian - think smooth skinned , cafe coloured bollywood hotty here folks), figured out my main players, and about 3pm today I sat down and started writing. In the mean time, hubby came home from gym and needed me to rub down a muscle he had pinged, kiddo came home from school so there went another half hour, we needed to eat so we went to do that - another hour or so down the drain. Now it's 9.20, I have been blogging here and elsewhere for a good 30mins and I still have 2400words done, on what was a clean slate at 3.30 this afternoon.

OMG! No fissing, no fuddling, the scenes just bloomed in my head, the people know where they are going (well, they soon will once this first confrontation gets out of the way), it's descriptive, it doesn't sound like 80's porn (well we haven't got to the sex yet, but it doesn't sound like the prologue movie scenes to 80's porn). WTF did I sit round so long trying to make the other work. In roughly four hours I have done more than I did in the last five days on the other!

Eh, figuring this writing gig out can sometimes be...um how can I put this remotely politely? A Pain In My Ass!

But I now have Alison Kent's "Complete idiots guide to being a Romance Writer" ( FYI, Alison, if you happen to see this: I had to wait and order it online, as not one single damn seller in all of Jacksonville stocked this book!). It came in the mail today, and I've even learnt something - I bet I was the only one who had no clue what the favoured little term "Deus ex Machina" meant. It was worth 12bucks for that alone - though why I didn't think to Google it before now I don't know - vagaries of the mind and all that.

So maybe I will learn something about the great challenge of being a writer courtesy of Ms Kent. Here's hoping...here's hoping.