Who the heck was that?
Thursday, June 23, 2005
So yesterday, I posted about not feeling creative and wishing I could get back into it, thinking I'd wait it out for the next few weeks, go away and come back and get back cracking at it in August. Only, last night, I got my recent order from Amazon. I bought Kathleen O'Reilly's The Diva's Guide to Selling Your Soul, because I read an excerpt and it looked really, really good. We'll see. (fingers crossed.) (I also bought the third LKH Merry Gentry book, and a software game that should let me put in my house measurements and redecorate it on screen. Hope that works.)
Anyway, on the back cover there's a small flash about a nationwide author search. Seems Downtown Press is having a contest for a 7,500 word novella and the winner will get lotsa books and be published in an upcoming anthology. (and $500! US!) Cool. 7,500 words, that's only like 30 pages. That's potentially doable in a month (the deadline is July 31st.) I always do this... I see a cool contest and think, I'm gonna enter that, and then I never really do anything about it. Like Harlequin's Blaze contest and Torrid's Twisted Tales, which is an erotic take on the Fairy Tale.
But last night, as return of the migraine loomed, I turned everything off, went to bed early and thought about what I'd write in a 30-page chick lit (or chick-ella). And a song came into my head... The Rolling Stones' you can't always get what you want. By this morning, during my over-an-hour-long drive, I thought about how I could work that song into a story. And in the over-an-hour, I plotted out the whole story, and wrote in my head a good chunk of a scene.
Now this isn't unusual, I always have odd scenes running through my head (tho sometimes it's a scene from Spaceballs) but I don't usually remember it. Today, I got into work, and plopped it all onto my computer. By the time I'd fleshed out the story line and just wrote the dialogue from the one scene, I had close to 6 pages. Then I wrote a buncha paragraphs, and it was 8 pages. 8 pages. In one day! Yay me! I haven't written 8 pages in a day in, well, it's been a long time.
Here's hoping I can keep up the momentum. It's my first go at a first person and at a chick lit.
