To get him back | part eight

This is my light fic­tion piece that I’m writ­ing to try to get back into the habit of writ­ing some­thing at all. Since it won’t be a “ seri­ous” thing that I intend to pub­lish, I thought I’d share.

(Did you miss read­ing parts one through seven?)

It was dark out still when she woke, with no sounds of any­one else in the cot­tage being awake. During her bath the night before, she’d had the chance to really think about her sit­u­a­tion. It seemed far­fetched, even though she lived it. Somehow be mag­i­cally trans­ported from her world to this one, only to be snapped up in tran­sit to “safety,” then to fol­low a strange man through a for­est to a city, only to aban­don that city into a for­est again. The men she was with were both an unknown, and not par­tic­u­larly friendly. She had worked her­self into exhaus­tion chop­ping wood that didn’t need to be chopped, with poor tools and next to no light­ing. All of that work and pain had only resulted in being laughed at for try­ing. They thought she was gullible for trying.

Her cheeks heated at the mem­ory. The din­ner she’d been left was the remains of some fish and veg­eta­bles that they had eaten shortly after their arrival. It was cold and rub­bery by the time she got to it. Granted she had taken a long bath, but they hadn’t even men­tioned she had food wait­ing for her.

Then there was the wiz­ard. He seemed nice enough, almost friendly, but some­thing about him didn’t sit right. Why was he orga­niz­ing a war against a face­less Fae Queen. She had only his word about how things were run here. What if she was on the wrong side?  Continue read­ing →

An odd thing, planning

In an ironic twist, for some­one who lives by lists and fig­ur­ing things out ahead of time, plan­ning my writ­ing is supremely hard. Even in col­lege, writ­ing out­lines for essays was a chal­lenge. In the end, I was good at writ­ing papers, even long ones, but that ini­tial plan always felt like the death of me.

I waver because I don’t want to take away any of the organic ideas as they occur dur­ing the writ­ing. At the same time, I gen­er­ally can’t just sit down to a blank screen and make some­thing up out of noth­ing. Ideas for me bub­ble up out of the sub­con­scious like, well, bub­bles. A blip here and there that hits the top and bursts. For my big project, I car­ried a note­book around in my purse to jot down notes. Then from those notes, I made an out­line, wrote a first draft, read it and made more notes, before spend­ing about a month work­ing on a new outline.

Continue read­ing →

It’s best not to think

My hus­band and I went bowl­ing today, and I did bet­ter than I have before. I didn’t beat my best score (by one point), but I had a higher aver­age score. Usually, I bowl in the high 40s to low 50s for two games, and maybe I’ll break into the lower 60s for the third. Today I was in the low 70s. I had a strike, and a spare (which would have been a strike if I didn’t throw a gut­ter ball first XD )

The dif­fer­ence? I wasn’t run­ning through the long list of steps my hus­band keeps try­ing to help me with. When he explains it, it does make sense, but it also seems overly com­pli­cated  There’s just so much to focus on, that I inevitably for­get some­thing vital. Today, on the way to the bowl­ing alley I decided I was just going to ignore all of that and do what I wanted to do. By the end of the day when we go, my hus­band has had enough try­ing to coach me into doing things right. By the end of the day, every time, is where I get my best score.

Maybe he knew my deci­sion with­out my say­ing any­thing, because he didn’t try to coach today and I did much bet­ter than my aver­age. As much as he helps, try­ing to remem­ber every­thing he’s telling me is a distraction.

I think writ­ing is the same way. I like to read help­ful arti­cles on the proper way to plot, or to develop a char­ac­ter, but in the end try­ing to remem­ber all the rules gets in the way of the cre­ativ­ity. Sometimes, it’s bet­ter just to ignore the rules and trust that you know what you’re doing on some level. Go with it, and see what happens.