The Order of Winter

I mentioned in my first post something about not being entirely on top of my game at time of writing. I’m attempting to act on that now.

I’m quite pleased to have had this project up and running at last, whatever it amounts to in the end. However I’m off to a great start. I asked for a little help from my friends yesterday, and they duly granted it. Having had an experience that has given me the worst case of writer’s block I have had in years, I have decided the cure is to kick some writing out, and try my best with it, no matter what turns out.

I’ll let you all into a couple of little secrets at this stage. I have a Masters in Creative Writing. The reason I did the course in the first place is that I wanted to force myself to have the discipline to finish a long story somehow. I’ve been writing myself stuff from a very young age. But it was rare that I got to finish it.

One time this happened was when one of my teachers back all those years ago at school got me all excited about writing a story. Anything we liked, just purely creative. It was one of the very few bits of homework I got excited about doing, and certainly one of the few I spent more than the prescribed set time doing. So in the end, I kicked out several pages and was all excited about handing it in on the Monday.

Monday came – and then the later afternoon saw me get excited about hearing a little feedback. Well, our teacher happened to be in one of his legendary bad moods that day, and decided to rip (hard) into a bunch of kids in the class who didn’t do their homework. That was one thing. Then he decided to rip hard into several who did. In my opinion (which remains to this day), I got ripped into the hardest. There I was, wondering what he was going to say, and he waves the book into the air and declares to the class that I wrote “seven sides of rubbish.”

Guess what? Devastation ensued. As you can see, over 15 years have passed and I never forgot his words. He had a real problem with my fixation with aliens at the time as well. But the more he bitched about it, the more the fixation stuck around. And the thing is, I can’t stand here and tell you what I wrote was great, but the way he set about humiliating me in that manner was something I never quite got over. In fact, one of the other things driving me to write and get published was to be able to hold a printed book with my name on it high into the air and remember that day for one last time.

Now, after that brief detour, back to the help I received from these friends. I wanted a challenge. That challenge was a sequence of short stories, with one premise I could be provided within the space of a Facebook status. I have seven of them now, and aim to deliver at the earliest opportunity. When I’ve done them, drafts will appear on this blog site, and perhaps other places too depending on how organised I get with this little pet project. So watch this space and I’ll put them up as I get them done, hopefully this side of 2011.

Ah yeah – the other secret. I find short stories the hardest kind of story of all. So much to get in; so little time. So in effect I have two challenges here; the first being to get the stories done. The second is the effort to make them good.

The great thing is at this point, I have now done two posts and whatever their quality level, they’re out there.

I can’t wait to start on the stories…