Challenge Accepted!

Hello, everyone. Again.

You all are going to get a special treat today: two posts! Well, sort of. I wanted to separate the actual first challenge and my explanation of the challenge that I’ve set myself. This is the introductory post.

I’m not sure if any of you are livejournal people or if you’ve read fanfiction, but as one of the original HP fanatics, I’m quite familiar with both. Well, on the site in any fandom community there’s a challenge community known as fanfic100 where you have 100 prompts for which you need to write 100 different fics. I did the challenge once before for Harry Potter, but I’d like to attempt it for original pieces.

I’ll be doing it in order, and I’ll number each one. It might involve the characters and situations from the story I’m working on (yes, I’ve decided on which one I’ll do), it might involve characters from some of the other ideas I have, or it might be something completely new. It’ll depend on what I’m able to crank out for the day. I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to do it, but I will post it at least every Thursday.

Right. So, I shall see you all later with my first post of original fiction.

Noticing the Ideas

Hello everyone! Seems I’m actually going to post on time.

I figure since I’m writing a blog about writing, I should start at the beginning: ideas. Whenever anyone finds out I’m an aspiring writer, I get asked the same question without fail.

Where do I get my ideas?

As annoying as that question is, my answer is probably more annoying. I get them everywhere.  So do you. So does everyone.

Ideas are everywhere. You can get them when reading a book or watching a movie. You can get them when you overhear an argument or see the view (or lack thereof) from your bedroom. The difference between a normal person and a writer is that writers recognize that they’re getting ideas and they make something from it.

So, the problem with me isn’t I don’t get ideas, but trying to form the ideas into something usable or just writing in general. That’s the problem now, too. I have at least three ideas floating around in my head and I don’t know which to use. Maybe I’ll sketch out some ideas and see what you all think I should do. At the least, I’ll have more formed ideas for the story.

How about all of my readers (as few as you may be)? Do you have difficulty coming up with ideas or making them into something that’d work for a book/short story/poem? Are you like me and your ideas come from everything ,everywhere, all the time or do you have to sit down and focus to form ideas?

(Sorry I’m a day late– we had a pretty big storm yesterday and the internet wasn’t working. I will be on time tomorrow.)

Pages Unfilled

Okay, so it didn’t work so well last year. Or for the first two months of this year, but I used those for prep time and it was (mostly) intentional.

Last year was rough for me. I had serious personal, real-life problems ranging from friends to family issues to guys to losing the one job I’d really ever enjoyed (I’d worked at Borders, so I wasn’t fired or anything; they just went out of business). I’ve learned that I don’t deal with stress very well and it affects my writing in a very bad way: I just don’t write. It resulted in several abandoned stories, many crying sessions in the shower, and a difficult look in the mirror to see what I really wanted from life.

Unfortunately, I still don’t know that one, but I do know that I want to, I need to write. It doesn’t matter if I ever manage to get published; I will write and I will strive to be good at it. So, that leads to this revamping of my blogs. For once, I’ve planned things out. I have a month’s worth of posts ready to go and a plan for at least another month.

I don’t mean to whine to a bunch of strangers, but I wanted to update everyone as far as what’s a going on. Give me a few weeks and it should all be running relatively smoothly. We’ll see how it goes.