Smooth Sailing This Month

I’ve been wracking my brain all day trying to figure out what to post this month for the Insecure Writers Support Group, but you know what? Other than the usual doubts and fears (“Am I good enough to be a published author?” – “Are my ideas boring?” – “Do I have what it takes to do this?” – and so on.), I’m doing surprisingly well this month. I’m coming down off the Nano high, took a few days off of writing to put in some well-earned Warcraft time, and I’m diving right into my next project. My Nano novel was a mess, but I sure had fun writing it, and fell in love with some new characters in the process. I’ve been getting daily motivation from the authors over at WritingExcuses.Com – they help me plow on when I’m feeling my worst. So, yeah. I’m doing pretty good at the moment =)

So, what’s my next project? Well, sometime over the month of November I discovered the Writers of the Future Contest. It’s a SciFi/Fantasy writing contest that runs every quarter, with one big winner at the end of the year chosen from the quarterly winners. This month, I’ll be working diligently on a short story with the intention of submitting it for the current quarter. I even had a nice little stroke of inspiration, getting an idea for the story in the same day I found the contest.

On a totally unrelated note (well, at least it still pertains to writing), earlier today I had a very fond memory of a time when I used to live near my family in Florida. My grandmother had a pretty little home in a quiet retirement village, and my sister and I would often go to visit and stay the night. I remember sitting at her little dining room table by myself and writing, often long after my sister and grandmother went to bed. I wrote by hand, as I didn’t have a laptop back then. My favorite pen was a blue and silver fountain pen that had to have had some kind of magical power within it that made me write like a madman. Those were the days I didn’t worry and fret over what I was writing. I could just sit and write for the simple joy of it, knowing in my heart without a shadow of a doubt that I was a writer. Such bliss… the smell of the ink, the faded yellowish paper my grandmother found in her closet for me, the black stains on my fingers…

I want to reclaim that feeling.

 

~B