I haven't written much this year at all. I finished the first year of my creative writing degree in May, and then promptly fell into a 'writer's block' that lasted the entire summer.
After starting a story five or six times and not getting anywhere I eventually decided to fall back on my 100Words.com entries. This is kind of interesting, because when I first began writing on that site, it seemed like a great challenge and now (after writing four months' worth of entires) it seems a lot easier and less daunting than the short story I had planned.
If I've never explained it or advertisied it at you before, then 100Words.com is a 'social tasking' website where writers, bloggers and others commit to writing a piece of exactly a hundred words every day for a month, no breaks and no exceptions. In my experience it gets tricky around two thirds of the way through the month.
Anyway, last winter I wrote four 'batches', with a general mix of rushed poetry, story ideas from my notebook and little 'funny' entries, which I ended up relying on. After the last one I decided that I was out of ideas and that I ought to end there. But I guess I thought up some more, because...
Here's two more! My August batch is here and rambled a lot and has a very vague theme about dreaming and celebrity... and my September batch (just finished) has an even more vague theme about school and childhood.
So there you go - I've written something. I am still technically a writer. And I enjoyed myself with these batches, too, even after I realised I had nothing interesting to say about school. But here are two of the more random excerpts that turned out all right:
1.
Catharine stared and wept for hours before she finally made a shaking V-sign with her fingers and dropped it onto the skin just above Jane's eyes. She dragged the eyelids down with far too much force, jamming them shut and pressing slightly into the pupils, like holes in a pair of bowling balls meant for someone more slender. She had expected less give, some kind of stretching sensation.
'Are you still a--wake?' Catharine was going to say 'alive' but caught it just in time. She already knew the answer, but she didn't see any need to rush it.
2.
My first partner had a saying about situations like this. Said there were three kinds of cops, regardless of rank. First there were police officers: the ones who pray their life is never on the line.
Then there were asshole cops. Guys who dream of killing some perp, just so they can sleep without jerking off.
And third, you've got movie cops. These are the people who plan for everything, don't enjoy it, and don't let on until it happens. And suddenly they're amazing. Heroic. And they truly save the day. And ninety minutes later, they're dead.
Well let's see.
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Thanks for reading. I've now written six months' worth (six seperate months, too) so I may return to this next year and end up with one batch for every calendar month. That'll be 36,500 words of flash fiction, so... maybe.
If you're a writer of any description, especially one who needs some practice or wants to get out of a rut - give 100 Words a go. I love it.
Happy October!
