And the writing…?

The main point of setting up this blog was to advertise the writing I was doing (and to prove to a writing friend of mine that I was listening to what she had said to me…). Sorry to report that the main part of what I’ve been doing over the last few months relates to going out, having fun and getting the garden in good order. Though to be fair – while I was working, I wasn’t able to take more than a few days’ leave between October and July of the following year without proving that the whole section wouldn’t collapse in my absence. Fridays were all but impossible as days off. So taking a long weekend off without a lot of forward planning and negotiating is still a treat.

When I decided to pack in the paid work and wind down to paid retirement, I promised myself a few treats. Getting on with my writing was the topmost of those. Alongside getting on with the patchwork, making a decent go of growing my own vegetables and not wearing shoes in summer. See my feet. Hobbits have more hair but less hard skin than I have right now. Barefoot everywhere – warm soil under the feet is one of life’s free pleasures.

And the writing? I get on with it, a bit. Not enough. I submitted a long short story to the Storgy Shallow Creek competition, but haven’t heard anything yet. I wasn’t shortlisted in the Globe Soup 7 Day competition in which I submitted a historical short about a man who sold his wife’s body to a medical student in exchange for treatment while she lived (the research for that one was pretty interesting). I was shortlisted for the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation’s short story competition, with a piece about how Mrs Bennet’s character was formed – that came from one person’s remark that everyone laughs at the silly Mrs Bennet and admires the sarcastic Mr Bennet, but it’s a fact that the Bennet girls had been left to an uncertain fate by Mr Bennet’s lack of foresight, and only Mrs Bennet’s determination to see her girls married well would secure their future. I’m still waiting for the verdict on Globe Soup’s 7 Day competition about an unlikely friendship – I chose science fiction, as it’s the main genre I’ve read since I was eight years old, and then had no damn idea what to write about for four of the seven days allowed.

Next up – a friend has pointed out two competitions for short stories, one in science fiction and one for a dark story. That’s you in a nutshell, she said – and she’s right, but the stories themselves are just no getting written. I’ve spent today rescuing my poor kale from some tiny black beetles that have eaten most of the green from their leaves, and not spent more than ten minutes thinking about what I could write. One week to the deadline for both, so tick-tock.

What I am really looking forward to is the return of The Literal Challenge’s Scriptly in October. That zing of getting a peculiar challenge and writing a screenplay for it within 24 hours is addictive – and relevant to writing short stories. Anyone who gets immersed in a book is running the scenes in their mind – it’s a film running in their brain. Being made to think of a story as if it were a film is good practice for writing a story that plays out in a highly visual way.

In the meantime… back to the dark and the sci-fi.