NYC Midnight

As previously stated, I'm currently unencumbered by gainful employment. It was sudden, unexpected and now, here I am. I went from working 40+ hours a week and carrying a full load of college courses to being an out-of-work college grad in about twelve seconds.

What's that mean? Lots of spare time, hardly any money.

So, I posted on Facebook, jokingly suggesting that one of my wealthier (read: employed) friends might want to consider sponsoring my entrance fee for a short story contest that was coming up. Key word there was "jokingly". But my friends never cease to surprise me and I got a couple offers and, after considering the reality of it for about another twelve seconds, I took the cash.

I feel slightly guilty about taking money from friends, but my contest sponsor and I have a little bit of backstory that made me stop feeling guilty and start feeling flattered: he wrote for me back when I was going to be a journalist and was on the editorial board of my college paper. He's a phenomenal writer and, nearly twenty years after the last time he read anything I've written, to have him say,"Yeah, I think you're good enough to win this thing"...well, that means a lot to me.

So, cash changed hands and we shared a chocolate chip cookie at the Lucky Lab and I signed up for my first post-college writing competition.

I was assigned a genre (fantasy) and a kicking-off point (home improvement) last weekend and set off to write a short (2,500 words) story to be submitted no later than yesterday. I don't think I've written a short story since high school. Of course, I also haven't finished anything I've written since then, either, so this at least limited the damage I could do on the page.

I wrote. I avoided talking animals by morphing a dog into a minor Norse goddess. There's a wise old man who's lost his power and a young boy setting out to claim his birthright. There's a magic hammer. There are dwarves. I was well outside of my comfort zone.

The one thing it didn't have before I hit "send"? An ending. I'm assured by other writers in the competition that this is not the biggest fault a story can have. One of my fellow writers, when asked the premise of his story, answered with,"Four words: squirrel with a shotgun." You kind of get the picture of what the quality might be for some of the submissions.

No offense meant to the guy with the squirrel. I kinda want to read that one.

Now we all wait. The next round isn't until April, at which point, those of us who advance to that round will be assigned a new combination of genre/topic and will get something like 48 hours to write our next masterpiece. Should be interesting. I'd like to have the novel mostly done by then and I'm thinking about doing ScriptFrenzy (screenwriting along the lines of NaNoWriMo) in April, too.

I did about 800 words on the novel yesterday and spent today with a new pile of library books and haven't opened a Word file all day. Woke up thinking I need to get the idea for the Other Book sketched out, but I don't want my writing to wind up like my knitting: lots of stuff on needles, but no scarves to wear when it's cold out.