After a few hellish weeks at work, I’m finally free to write again.

It’s not that I didn’t have time to write for all this time, but when things get bad at work, I feel like I’m drained on the evenings. As I do my writing between 6 and 7 pm, I really didn’t feel up to the task.
And then, I was in a state where I needed more to think about the next writing than actually write.

In fact, this is how writer’s block works for me : if I’m in a state where I have no idea what I’m going to write next, I can find no energy to write. Add that to a state where I have no energy left after work, and you’ve got something like a dry spell of writing.

But today, nothing of the sort.

I’ve set myself that challenge a few weeks ago to write a short story on spec for the next Blizzard writing contest.

I thought long about what I wanted to write, and ended up with a nice story concept; not what the usual crowd would produce anyway. The trouble is that I have to shore up a large quantity of work, since I have to work within one of Blizzard’s franchises.

Let me tell you that research for me is a giant time sucker. I can spend hours (literally) browsing Wikipedia, jumping from topic to topic. I can begin with some simple research about a very defined subject to wind up reading some fascinating article about the war of roses, which has no bearing with what I was researching about in the first place.

Yes, research is my weakness. I’m very weak when it comes to accumulate information. Consider this a weak case of world-builder’s disease (since I’m not actually building anything in this case, just amassing information).

At any rate, I searched my subject thoroughly, and came up with a nice setting and a character.

Last week, I started to write the short story, and the character’s first lines. I had a really hard time there. Words were stuck; I felt sluggish, drained, and stupid. As with every author, there’s a nagging feeling that I had only one book in me, and that I’ll not be able to produce anything else.

And there is my own personality here : I love to try new things. Over the years, I took up many interests, but after one year usually, I wind up taking something else. This happened with bridge, online gaming, astronomy when I was young, and perhaps a ton of other examples. So, is writing something I’ll abandon in a year?

I hope not, because writing makes me happy. I use a large part of my waking hours imagining things, but without a purpose, those things are like baby ideas that I never nurtured. When I write, I’m forcing myself to make those ideas grow into something tangible, and not stay some embryo of idea instead my head. I love that feeling to see my infant ideas grow into something that could be an entire book.

In fact, when I gave the book to my alpha reader, I specifically asked for comments about holes in the story structure or inconsistencies in the character. I got those, but I also got an ending comment I didn’t request : “Thank you for an original story.” That single phrase made my day (or week) : I love to see my ideas on paper, and having someone else call those ideas original was very warming to me.

So, I like to think that this is something I’m going to do for a long time. Maybe I’ll never be published, maybe I will but no-one will care to buy the book; I don’t know. All I know is that for now, I want to go on writing.

And then, there’s the whole writer’s aura going on…

So, I forced myself today : keep the research to a minimum and write. Judging by the last session, I expected to have a difficult time again.

A short story is different to me with writing a book. When I write a novel, I know I can invest myself with the characters : I know who they are, what they want, where they’re going. For a short story, I’m not going to be able to invest that much time in my characters, and to me, a discovery writer, characters are propelling the story (and I don’t know where they’re going). How am-I going to build a proper short story with no character development, I ask you?

Well, today was a nice example of discovery writing at work : I had 500 words written. Not that much to begin with. I had left the character in the middle of a scene, so it was easier to start today.
I put myself before the keyboard (BIC-HOC as would say Howard Tayler), and started to write.

I’m still astonished each time I see discovery writing at work. How I start with nothing, and end up with words flowing out of my fingers, building a story that, amazingly, holds together.

I saw that once again today. 8 pages written without any idea about what would happen.

So I stand today, with 2.5K behind my belt. The spec says that the story should be between 3.5k and 7.5k. I’m almost at the lower end of the bracket, yet I don’t feel like I said much. Were it a novel, those 2.5k would represent a chapter (and barely). Here, I can probably consider that I’ve just hit the one third mark (and guess what? 2.5×3 = 7.5! I’m already projecting a story at the higher end of the bracket).
Story-wise, the point where I left is the end of a scene, that I could consider like the end of act 1 (I don’t know if the three act format translates well into short stories). That leaves me only two scenes of equal length to complete the story.

I hope to be able to write well next week. That way, I can have the whole story by next sunday, to start the revising process. The stories have to be posted by august 23rd, so I’m back on track.

I hope editing won’t add length this time, because I won’t have any to spare!