Battles

For many many months I had crippling writer’s block. Couldn’t even come up with a single sentence, let alone work on a story. Toward the end I didn’t even bother trying anymore and became sullen and disappointed in myself as a writer.

Then a couple weeks ago, inspiration hit me, all at once: “ShortShortStories”; basically, a daily writing exercise of single-paragraph stories posted to my Facebook status. Without the pressure to flesh out characters and details, the block was broken and I haven’t had trouble sticking to the habit. There was an obstacle almost as soon as I started, however, when a capacitor on my motherboard blew up, leaving me without a computer for almost two weeks while I waited for a replacement. I was able to write a couple ShortShortStories on my phone and parents’ computer, but I fell waaaay behind, leaving me frustrated in a very happy way… I went from angry that I couldn’t write anything, to angry that I couldn’t write anything! Once everything got fixed, I started posting two or three ShortShortStories a day until I was finally caught up.

The next step was the decision to put them up on a blog, which I could then link to from my Twitter, so more people would have access to them, and it would be easier to read all of them as a collection, even though there isn’t any link from one story to the next. When I started posting them here, I saw a place for titles and decided to give them titles, but partly because I had already written 16 ShortShortStories and partly because I’m a geek, I chose not to come up with original titles, but rather take titles from other sources.

So far I haven’t started on any new short stories, I’m enjoying the pace and variety of this, and I don’t have any plans to elaborate on any of these stories, but I’m really glad when friends have asked that, because it means they really liked the ShortShort version.

Feel free to comment and ask questions or whatever. And if you somehow stumbled upon this without knowing who the hell I am, well, maybe my next non-story blog post will be more about me.

-schmaniel