November 23rd, 2004

A dream intermission, a break from word counts.

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You know what I do with drafted posts?

Yeah, that’s right. Nothing.

If I start a post, save it to drafts, and don’t go back to it within 2 days it sits in drafts forever. I’m thinking of going in there and just deleting all those old posts because they’ll never be.

I’m starting to feel just the slightest bit guilty about not ever writing anything but writing updates lately. There are plenty of other things going on : unpacking, exploring the new town, visiting with friends, mishaps. I could be writing about all sorts of other probably more interesting to people not me stuff but I don’t. Part of it has to do with my energy level. It’s my duty to report my writing progress and to do the actual writing, everything else gets relegated to if I have time and energy. I never do. My life is a series of neglecting things while I focus on other things. Right now I am focused on getting the house straight and writing.

That said, today I started writing on a new short story. I think of it as a children’s tale. I would say fairy tale, but there are no fairies in it. You know what I mean, I think. It’s in that vein and in that tone. It’s not yet shown itself to be for children, though. At any rate, today’s progress on the story was intermittent fits and false starts and grasping, but ended up being a respectable 1743 words. I kept thinking that I needed to stop and do research, so that I could be more specific. I value specificity. Still, at the time, I felt like research was at cross purposes to the writing itself. Anything not actively typing out words seemed like it was cheating somehow, procrastinating. So I forged ahead. Ultimately, I don’t think they were particularly great words, but they’ll do, for now. The story is tentatively called “The Egghead Kingdom”.

I’m very, very happy with Ennui, and Kurt liked it also. He laughed more than once while reading it, which was worth a million bucks. It’s so, so hard to write things that are funny. Well, maybe it’s not hard for other people but it’s unbelievably difficult for me. So much so that I hardly ever even try. I don’t know if Ennui will do well in any sort of writing contest but I’m still considering it for The Writer’s Digest 5th Annual Short Short Story Competition. It’s not particularly angsty or edgy or gripping, but I’m willing to let it try to find its place. It’s a good candidate for eventual posting to the site, too, if no one else wants it.

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