Flash Fiction Fun

I’m almost a week away from officially working on my Weeping of the Willows edits.

I look at the past couple of weeks, and I’m glad that I’ve given myself a month to rest. If you’ve been following me on Facebook the past couple of weeks, you’ve noticed I mentioned entering a Flash Fiction contest 8 minutes before the deadline. It wasn’t a planned thing; the deadline for this contest was January 1, but instead, it got extended to the 15. I had been toying with a story I wrote back in December, so I thought, I bet if I trim this down to 500 words, I can send it in.

Mind you, I learned about the extension on the 11th.

My friends, that was the most brutal writing experience I ever did. I thought working on She’s All Light was hard. This was flash fiction–something I’ve done a couple of times, but not that seriously–and it had to be done within four days. I worked on that sucker day and night. My hubby donned his editing cap to help me make sure it flowed well and made sense. He also donned his cheerleading cape (which is invisible, because if he really did have a cape, I would be a little nervous) to give me encouragement when I was all ready to forget the whole thing because writing flash-fiction is harrrrrrrrd and I just couldn’t do it anymore and forget the stupid prize–we don’t need $500 bucks. Well we do, but I’d rather file for 8 hours straight than put all my energy into writing…

It’s really nice to have a supporting husband who tells you to: “aww quit your whining and get back to the computer. You said you were going to do this; you put all your energy into it; so you’re gonna finish it, dammit, or else I’ll never hear the end of it!”

Paraphrased, of course.

I got the flash story off, and I have to say, I don’t think I ever pushed myself to work that hard before. What came out really impressed me. Time will tell if it will actually win anything, but it feels nice knowing that I didn’t just write a story haphazardly and threw it into the contest bin just to have something there. This was all sweat and blood and tears, baby. Then again, I could open it back up next week and think it’s the worst crap I’ve ever written. Ah, the joys of being a writer.

So after all that work, my creative side pretty much crashed and I couldn’t do any writing at all for a few days. No surprise there: what I did was equivalent to having the flu during midterms and pulling an all-nighter on Mountain Dew and Nyquil (which I don’t recommend–it’s a brutal combination, especially when you wake up in the dorm’s lounge in your pajamas with absolutely no idea how you got there). So instead of pushing myself to write, I decided to be good to myself and take it easy. I finished reading a bunch of books. I got back into my podcasts. And I spent some quality time with Daniel (which will be talked about in a separate post).

But most of all, I’ve been psyching myself up to work on Willow again. This week, I’ll gather some resources together so I’ll have them at hand when I open up Willow next week. I’ve also been backing up files–I do that anyway–because my hubby plans to rebuild my computer this week. Normally, that throws me out in a loop, but this time around I’m glad he’s doing it. I want my computer to be in the best shape possible when I start working on Willow, and it gives me more time to refill my creativity well.

One more week, folks, and then the fun begins again.

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