Hello all,
It’s been so busy lately, what with my new reading glasses coming in, and me catching up on all the work I couldn’t do while I couldn’t see, that I haven’t gotten a chance to write a post.
But here we are! This is a celebratory post. As any of you who write know, sometimes writing is hard. Hard, hard, hard. So hard you’d rather do anything else, like give your dog a bath or hit a wasps’ nest with a baseball bat. Or write a blog post.
But sometimes it goes beautifully. Sometimes it pours out like the words already know where they want to be, and in what order, and your characters are doing everything you ask them to. And that’s what happened this week.
I started a story on Tuesday morning, and by last night, the (remarkably polished) first draft was finished. The only thing that gave me any trouble was the title. Let me give you some advice: if you’re stuck on something–a title, a plot point, a character’s name–take a shower. Something about the hot water gets your neurons firing a little faster, I guess.
So this story is headed for critique very soon, and then probably to Shimmer Magazine, which publishes tragic, weird, fantastical tales. It’s sort of an odd, mannerpunkish-not-actually-magical-fantasy. I described it on Twitter as this:
Meets this:
Plus fascists. Or actually, my exact words were: “It’s like Fosse and Leonard Cohen had a baby and abandoned it on a doorstep in Weimar Berlin.”
At any rate, I wanted to share with you my elation at a story well-written and easily finished. They don’t come along all that often. You writers out there, you know how hard it can be. I hope this post encourages you–when something like this story comes along, we remember why we fell in love with writing in the first place.
ETA: I promised to post an excerpt if I hit 100 Twitter followers by the end of the week. It’s not five o’clock yet, so you have some time to find me and follow! I’m @larazontally, and I try to be entertaining.
Lara Elena Donnelly 