Handwriting fiction is so strangely fluid compared to typing. I hate that I need to relearn this every few years.
Slow as syrup but always moving pleasantly, discardably forward. Unlike the bursty, halting, redo-regret of the ‘faster way’.
Words have been written! A tiny number, thousands behind schedule, and badly, but we’re well underway. Might amount to a full paragraph by the end of the month.
Didn’t progress past round one in the NYC Midnight short story competition, but the judges’ feedback is so good that I’m considering redrafting it and actually submitting somewhere. It’s been a long while since I had enough enthusiasm for a story to try a second take.
1,400 increasingly unhinged words deep now, including a plot-justified bad haiku. Might as well just ship me that first place hat now.
… and of course despite having a week, I choose to leave myself with a last day sprint.
I have an absurd idea that almost certainly won’t play. So obviously it’s the only thing I’m even considering.
Giving the short story challenge another try. I now have one week to write 2,500 words on:
GENRE: Ghost StorySUBJECT: Always a bridesmaid, never the brideCHARACTER: A developer
Just got some surprisingly positive feedback from a short story competition earlier in the year, despite, on a re-read, now realising how completely unhinged it was.
“They drink their drinks and defecate happily.” « genuinely the final line of the story.
My first prompt: a crime caper in a kindergarten featuring a proud mother…
So just your bog-standard Muppet Babies / Oceans 11 mashup.
“His eyes seemed to root back under all the bulk of that forehead, too thick, too jammy, all full of resistive meats and fluids; exhausting to cut into sections, should such a thing come up.”
I think I may have the turkey sweats.
Something I wasn’t expecting with ChatGPT is its non-trivial use in gamifying ‘the blank page’.
As a non-writer sounding board you can feed it some half-thought-through notion for a story, ask it to produce an outline or where to start, then essentially find ways to do the opposite.
If it produces a standard, formulaic approach to an idea, you can then tear that apart, or invert it. You can much more easily see your story, the one that it wouldn’t tell.
Is there a term like nerdsniping that applies to fiction writers when presented with an endless, winter photography stream of isolated, spooky roads?
“You’ll die. There’s always a chance… but in all honesty, you’ll die.” …
“It’s not an actual written language. He was French. It’s the phonetic spelling of something he overheard.” …