'The Hundred Things'

For two years or so I've been going on and on about my hobby of writing 100-word prose pieces at 100words.com.

I will now be shutting up about it, because I've 'finished' what I'd been wanting to do with it. I've put them into a collection of one hundred 100-word stories.

I actually wrote quite a few more than 100, but a lot of them were rubbish. These are the decent ones, by my reckoning anyway.
Thanks very much to those who helped me with this. Really, to me (I have a very limited imagination) this was quite a challenge and I feel like a boss now.

Another 6100 words

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!

12,000 Words

Yes it's another '100 Words.com' post from me. On the plus side, this will be the last one!

After writing exactly 100 Words of fiction / poetry every day in October, November, December and now February - I'm just about done with it. I've hugely enjoyed the challenge of it, and the unusual / difficult experience of writing such short bits. But now I'm out of ideas, I'm repeating myself, and I'm a bit bored of it.

So - here is the last little advert from me. My FOURTH BATCH of 100 word-stories is now done! Because it was February I went with the ingenious and original theme of 'love', and sometimes I even remembered to include it. There seems to be an accidental theme of 'whining misery' in there too, which caught me by surprise when I re-read them.

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Like I say, I've really got a lot out of this curious online writing game. It's a brilliant website - I urge you to look through some entries (there are some amazing ones hidden in there) or better yet, write a 'batch' yourself.

I maybe might have another go sometime in the future, but for now I'm tapped-out and could do with writing something of decent length for a change. However, I like to think of all 120 of my entries as one piece - or at least four pieces - of writing. They kind of flow together and I even put a (very flimsy, extremely silly, half-arsed) motif in there which connects all four parts!

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One last plug for this.
Here are my 'batches' for October (Halloween theme), November (memory / remembrance theme), December (Christmas / Christianity theme) and February (love theme).

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All right. Thanks. For what it's worth, next time I post a writing update I swear it will be a proper story.

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Serenity will rise again

Knight made me feel pretty good the other day when he put up a link here to my new fanfiction. Luckily, the situation is right to return the favour.

Knight's Firefly new fic, 'Take the Sky' is, I think, the best fanfic he's written so far (well maybe except for The End is Neigh), and also the one he's working on now!

If you like Firefly and weren't happy with letting Mal's story end the way it did in the movie... as Knight was not... then..... here is a Frefly fanfic that's better than some episodes, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet. Read it.

Take the Sky

Fanfiction Shenanigans

I finally finished my Star Wars fanfiction!

I've been working on this story, on and off, for seven or eight months. It really feels wierd to leave the characters behind now.

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I just realised that I've been writing internet fan-fiction for just over 2 1/2 years. I really had no idea it had been so long... but I happen to make a note of the starting and finishing dates for all my pieces of writing.

And it made me nostalgic. I'm going to drag this story out, so here we go.

A few years back, I was seriously depressed, studying Psychology (a subject I was really bad at) at University and very lonely. As a kid my hobbies had been writing/drawing little comic books and playing Nintendo. As a teenager I had more or less stopped playing Nintendo and instead obsessed over TV and film comedies. I saw this as 'growing up'. When I was at my most miserable, I started to miss the Nintendo and I bought a second-hand X-box and a copy of Star Wars: Jedi Outcast. It was a 3D shooting/platform game I had played at my mate's house, which was fairly ordinary except for three things: Billy Dee Williams was in it, you could get a lightsaber which would actually mark the walls if it touched them (OMG), and John Williams' amazing 'Star Wars' score played every time you were in a gunfight.

I loved the game, and I suddenly gained a deep appreciation for the original trilogy of Star Wars films. In the game you got to drive an AT-ST, shoot at stormtroopers, fire lightning from your fingers and choke people to death, talk to Luke Skywalker, and explore the galaxy far, far away as a rough, wise-cracking 'Just a guy with a lightsaber' who, of course, eventually matures into a proper Jedi knight. Unlike most Jedi, he matures by eviscerating several hundred enemy troops, but there you go.

Hungry for more, I went out and bought the game right next to it on the shelf - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I think Knightfall and I have told this story to death, but I really liked the game. I started watching the movies more and more, and even became extremely fond of the 3 new prequel movies. When Revenge of the Sith came out, I skipped an exam (the anticipation for which was crippling me) to watch it. The movie was just good, but the experience was one I will always remember. At the very height of my Star Wars fandom, and in my saddest days, I saw a Star Wars film for the first time, on the biggest of big screens.

Three years passed, in which I dropped out, came back, dropped out again, developed a hobby playing Bioware role-playing videogames and fell in love. At the start of 2008, inspired by comedy websites I loved and egged-on by my brother, I started up Microsoft Word and dashed out a parody script to Episode 3 - 'Revenge of the Angst'. (I took it offline eventually when I re-read those websites and realised I'd subconsciously ripped some of them off). But I had a lot of fun writing it.

The joy of writing it made me read more. I slowly made my way through a few books, and then a glut of Star Wars books. In the first half of 2008 I wrote two more pieces - a giant parody script of Bioware's Mass Effect and a short Star Wars story about a werewolf on Tatooine. The latter was terrible, but the former was actually really successful.

'Mock Effect' got me over a hundred reviews from people who had read it, and that just blew my mind. This was the best time of my life. I was madly in love, not at University anymore and writing comedy which was being read and enjoyed by lots of people. The parody script even led to a fanfiction website being created to house it, which has now outgrown it to become an awesome community and an excellent Mass Effect fansite.

Needless to say, my ego swelled massively. I began writing more and more (fanfic), trying out different styles and genres, and reading a little more still. At the same time in 2009, I wrote my second big project - a 35,000 word story about... Mass Effect. Mass Effect is a very good game. That year I also wrote a few little poems, more fanfics and a short story with a completely original concept.

Now we're halfway through 2010. I'm starting a new course next year, studying English and creative writing. I have been wanting to leave fanfic behind, and move on to become a serious penniless amateur writer still living with his parents.

I've found it very hard to get started on new original stories, and ended up leaning back on fanfic. I was happy to 'move on', but there had always been one story concept at the back of my mind, since way back when I played Jedi Outcast. I had always wanted to write a story about a Guy With A Lightsaber.

It would be about an ordinary civillian who finds a jedi laser-sword and has a brief, low-level adventure fighting the Empire. It would be set right before the time of the original films, but it would incorporate the Jedi mythos that had come into it in recent years, and dominated the novels I loved.

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So - my new Star Wars fanfic - also probably my last fanfic - Star Wars: A Thousand Generations. Yes, this big, personally-revealing biography was nothing but a cheap plug for my new fanfic, Star Wars: A Thousand Generations. Works every time.
Now, I don't claim you can have a better time with Star Wars: A Thousand Generations than without it.... but why take chances?

It's another big writing project (31,000 words) and it's finally finished.

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Now... I don't know what's next! Hopefully a lot more writing, in any case. I really enjoy it.

New Chapter: Revan's Shadow

Yeah, yeah, I know it's only been a week or so (if that) since the last update, but here's the next chapter for the story: right hmeah.

The reason it came so quickly is because this was one of the few scenes that I had actually written all those years ago...in a way. It was already in my mind, I should say. 80% of the dialogue that I used for HK-47 was stuff I ripped from my old mini-novel that I had started to write after I played both KotOR games.

It also came rather quickly because it was the one day I wasn't stressing over how I was going to write the Battle of Malachor V. I realize that I shouldn't be stressing so much over fanfiction, but it's important to me that I have something that I'm proud of on my account. I would never publish every idea I've had for the story; I still want a large chunk of the novel to remain in my head for possible official use in the future. Again, I realize I shouldn't be stressing over that either, but the story is very important to me...very important to me.

But! I'm still gonna go all-out with what I'm willing to put online. The Battle of Malachor V will be a while in the making, but I have an idea of how I'm going to handle it. After that, I only have maybe five chapters left to go...maybe. Then the ending that I've already written. And after that: I think I shall rest.

Aside from the projects that I've already started, by myself and with Buch, I'll probably take some time off from fanfiction for a while. I really want to get serious about my second novel, get it done, and send it off to some agents before the end of the year. The reason I want it done by year's end is because both Mass Effect 2 and Fallout: New Vegas will be coming out in 2010, and I don't think I'll be able to resist the urge to write stories about them. Just can't help it! xD

New Chapter: Revan's Shadow

Got a new chapter for my Knights of the Old Republic fanfic up now. You can find the story here!

It's by far the longest chapter of the story at four thousand, two hundred words. Was up till 3 AM writing the bastard. What took the longest was thinking up the most dramatic way for Revan to succumb to the dark side...which had to be dramatic. Dunno if I succeeded, but...you know, whatever.

We're sorta nearing the end of it. I'm estimating that it might be near 80,000 words by the time its completed: just 10k words short of novel-length. Which is good, I guess. If someone wants the whole novel, they know were to find me!

*waits patiently*

Anyway, yeah, I'm really excited for the story to be over; mostly because I just can't wait to write the ending. I have all sorts of elements lined up that I was excited just to get done. That's why I've kicked the writing habits into overdrive. Plus, I got a nice sense of fulfillment going on. It's been four years since this story started taking shape. To see it come together in some form has been exciting.

Gotta get the next chapter going. Later!