may day, may day

Okay, so it's not May Day anymore. But it is a day where I have enough time to write a long-overdue blog post! So that counts.


Of course, that also works in the sense that instead of taking it easy in May, I've signed up for yet another writing challenge! To me, this one is scarier than the Screnzy and NaPoWriMo game I played last month, because it combines both short fiction and endings: (drumroll) Story a Day in May! I noticed it first via Debbie Ohi's tweets (who is a great writer to follow, if you haven't already) on April 29th, conveniently enough. That gave me just enough time to decide that, yes, I like taking on crazy writing challenges, and to throw myself completely in the ring by the time May 1 rolled around.

I finished a story yesterday, and am working on my second now. What makes this especially hard for me is that, as I've mentioned in prior posts, I'm a discovery writer. I start with an idea, a scene, a line, a character, and go from there, most often making things up sentence by sentence. I almost never know how all the ends I create are going to tie up (one reason I have lots of trouble finishing anything). So this is scary uncharted territory for me.

Usually I hit a hard point where I have no clue what's going to happen next, and I set the story aside for a day (or a week, or a year. . . sigh) to give myself time to think about it. But not with this challenge! Now I have to not only press forward and finish the next scene, but find how that scene connects to the next, until I hit the end. All in one day. The only way I'm confident about managing this: the perfect placement of this challenge. Although this is technically 'finals week', I only have one teacher actually doing the test this week--all the others just finished class with the last week of school. So without full time college biting at my heels, I'm free to devote as much time as I would to school or a job to my writing. Which, since I'm looking to make writing at least a partial profession, is a very good habit to get into!

Now then, a quick run thorough April.

Last time I blogged, I was only 1/3 of the way through the month, but the schedule I kept then was basically how the rest of the month went. Every day, I set out to write at least 250 words of fiction, at least 3 pages of script, 1 poem, and 750 words on 750words.com (which, did I mention I'm also doing the May challenge of writing every day for that? Silly overachieving me). I only missed a few of those goals all month: one day of 250 words, and a few days of script near the end after I'd already finished. Oh yeah, about that: I finished my first Screnzy! After failing twice before, I managed it! And now, having completed it once just for bragging rights (well, not just for that, but anyway) I can ignore it the next time April rolls around, because I'm most definitely not a scriptwriter! I'll do NaPo again though, because I am a poet. This was also my first time seeing that through to the end.

Anyway, I have the feeling this post is mostly a word-dump of writing news, and I do have a story to finish, so I'll wrap up by saying that, in non-writing related news, I've also restarted my goal of taking a picture a day. But now I don't have to stress about updating them all to my blog every day (which was a pain). Now I just post them to Flickr straight from my phone! I've taken quite a few cool pictures since making this a goal, so I'm proud of myself for actually trying it again.

Oh, and back to writing news: each quarter in my writers' group, we have a prompt that we can write a story for, and if you haven't passed anything out to the group to be critiqued by the end of the quarter, you're expected to have a story. This helps us to continually get fresh stories from each member written and through the group, since we're focused on trying to get published. When the quarter is done, we have a special meeting where we read our challenge stories out loud and vote on the best one. Well, what with school and all, I hadn't passed anything out this quarter, so I made sure I finished my story for once, instead of just starting it. And I won my first quarterly challenge! Oh happy validation! Take that, low self-esteem!

Anyway, I have to get back to my story. I hope I'll be posting here more often now that I'm out of classes for the summer, and also getting my thoughts down every day at 750words. Thanks for reading, and for surviving my crappy pictures!

edit: Since it's now summer, and I'm doing the story a day, I've officially changed my goal from 250 words a day to 1000 words a day. So I kept my 250 word goal from 02/19/11 'til 04/30/11, with only 3 days missed in that. Also, 22 days where I wrote over 500 words, and 8 days where I wrote over 1000 words. This is all here mainly because I like stats. :)

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Listening to: The Problem with Saints by 8in8. On repeat. Ah, Neil Gaiman. Youtube it. It rocks. :D