I’ve just experienced a drought.
Two weeks ago, my output hit a
level that I would love to maintain. 9 Flash Fiction stories in four days and a
great start to the 2nd draft of my WIP.
However, all I managed (fiction-wise)
in the last seven days was 1 piece of Flash Fiction. That’s the complete
opposite of the previous week. And it wasn’t even a very good story (you spend
all day with a three year old at Peppa Pig World, finally get round to writing
at 11pm, and see what you come up with J).
I was not happy with that.
On the plus side, I only failed
in fiction, I did manage other things, so the last seven days haven’t been a complete
loss.
Every year around this time, I take
three days off from work and enjoy having the house to myself. I fill up the
cupboards with my favourite food. I chuck on the lazy clothes. I play video
games. I watch movies.
This year I looked at Wednesday
the 9th and Thursday the 10th with a writers hunger.
Think of the writing I could get done in a nice quiet house. My son goes to
nursery at 7:30am. My wife is at work by 8:00am. It could be heaven.
It should have been heaven.
My neighbour likes to do noisy
DIY. I’m not talking about putting together a wardrobe on a Saturday afternoon.
I’m talking about a remodelling on all floors and a rebuilt extension at the
back. It started just after we moved in 18 months ago, and the end is still a
way off yet.
This noise has sometimes impeded my
writing in the evenings, as the neighbour likes to start a couple of hours of
drilling and hammering not long after I get in.
I had hoped that my days off
would avoid this; that I’d be done writing for the day before the neighbour
returned home. But when I got back from dropping my son of on that Wednesday
morning, and the neighbour’s car was still parked outside, I began to wonder if
the universe hated me.
A two hour reprieve around lunch
allowed me to get last week’s blog post done, but the DIY carried on into the afternoon.
Creative writing was out of the question. I could have slinked off to the
living room, I could have curled up on the sofa and watched a movie or carried on
playing Minecraft. But I worked around the problem.
Even though I didn’t add or edit
a single word to the 2nd draft manuscript, small breaks in the
noise, coupled with the lower amount of concentration required, allowed me to
do some harder work on the outline of my WIP. Adding detail to character
sheets. Fine tuning the order of scenes. Fine tuning the scenes themselves.
Planning and tinkering, hoping that the work would make the rewrite easier, if I
should ever find the time, peace, and quiet to do it.
And, after making the best of a
crap situation, I looked up to the universe, stared it straight in the eyes and
said “I have another writing day planned for November 30th. If you
f**k with me again, I’m gonna punch you so hard, you’ll think it’s a second Big
Bang.”
Your call, Universe.
Fingers crossed I can get back
into the swing of things, starting this Thursday with Micro Bookends.
I was absent last week due to the
judging duties (the most difficult judging session I’ve done, to date). The
down side to accepting the honour of judging was that I couldn’t enter my own
work.
But what of Chris and Mike, I here
four people near the back ask? They’ve had an unbroken run of adventures since
first appearing back in January.
So, while I didn’t know the
picture or the bookends, I did scribble a Chris and Mike adventure to mark the
sad occasion. You can check it out here. It looks at just what the adventurous
duo get up to when there are no monsters around.
And that’s the lot. A poor week,
far from the one I had planned.
How about you guys? Any stories
about the universe interrupting your writing? Or are you lucky enough to have
access to a personal dimension where time it self sits on pause and allows you
to just relax and write in peace?
Hope you all manage to hit your
targets this week.
See you in seven.
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