Working Through It

I pulled several prompts so some ideas could simmer on the back burner, and guess what? I still got stuck. I know, I'm doing a lot right now between fighting the exhaustion still, training a temp, and dealing with the terrible twos. Regardless, the writing is still there. The stuck wasn't laziness, it was in indication something was wrong.

So I decided to let the idea-in-progress sit on the back burner and I'd proceed with another idea for now. I went with a premise I came up with on my own and was pretty charged up about it on the way home from work. I narrated parts of the story to msyelf on the drive, and it's the one I want to write next. Then as I'm driving home, trying to remember the bits of dialogue I entertained my steering wheel with, I realized what was wrong with the other story idea.

I had actually combined two of the prompts I pulled and deep down, I think my brain knew that and was struggling to seperate them. Well, forget that. Now that I know what I did, I like it! And I'm going to work with it more as soon as I'm done my current piece. I wrote about 400 words this evening, and can probably finish it off tomorrow.

If only I could have two more hours in my day. Oh, well.

Short Story: Bound

I wrote my first story this month about a mother's love for her lost child, and now I've written this one about a father trying not to lose his daughter. Somehow the only way to save her IS to lose her. Being a mom has sure changed the way I think, the way I write. My characters tend to be older, with more serious problems, and serious solutions that hurt as much as they help. So long as I never have to experience what my characters do, I think I can live with that.

Short Story: Sunguard

Ashelle is hallucinating, and doesn't know what's real anymore. But her duties as a Sunguard do not end simply because of her illness.

I think this story has an interesting twist. After watching all the Star Trek and Stargate episodes where we the explorers do something terrible (accidentally of course) to the natives of some friendly and unsuspecting planet, I wrote a story such a thing from the point of view of the poor natives who have been damned. But you don't get this to the end. I hope it delivers this at the end, but I have a feeling the first draft is very rough. I'll have to work on the delivery in the edit.

Short Story: Anthony

It needs renaming, possibly, but I don't know what is suitable at the moment. I finshed it on Mother's Day. The protagonist is a mother who lost her five year old son to a kidnapper, but who now appears to her in ghost form to send her on a mission to save children. She keeps hoping he'll send her to his body or to his killer, but that isn't Anthony's mission.

This one holds some speical meaning for me. While the situation thankfully resembles nothing in my life aside from motherhood, it has granted me freedom from the nightmares I've been having. They are pregnancy induced, I remember this kind of vivid dream from my last pregnancy. Though, last time they were about something happening to my cats, and this time, they are always about something happening to my daughter and husband. Writing the story has tied my brain up with Anthony and his mom, and spared me the nightmares of my daughter's disasters. As for my husband, I think his place in the dreams were only because he would have protected our daughter, had he been able.

Amazing what writing can do!

Working Away

So it's not recordbreaking progress, but it is progress. I pulled two prompts for the challenge, and am close to finishing one ("Anthony"), and working out the ending for another ("Sunguard"). I also am eager to finish "Once A Thief", which is also from a prompt, but one I pulled two months ago. My plan is to use it for my 5th story for the challenge, which allows for my own source of inspriation. The news sparked an idea for a SF short story which I'm affectionally thinking of as "Broccoli" if only for the cute way my daughter says it. I'm writing over my lunch breaks a little bit, and writing on paper in the evenings until we get a nasty computer situation worked out.

The point here is that I *am* writing. Hopefully this weekend, I can bring something to completion. :)