Bad Mother of Ideas!

Writing is such an odd activity compared to some of the other things I do for fun. First of all, unlike the other stuff, the process is not as much fun whilst I do it, as it is to file away a story - and knowing that an entire universe just sits there, right inside a folder. Finishing is the ultimate reward to writing.

Unfortunately, the finishing line is not always in sight. While I noticed that something always gets my writing started, the commitment to completion part is much harder. It happens, that as I write down an idea, another one pops into my head and as it sits there, making waves, I'm beginning to wonder if the new one wouldn't be much more inviting. Why bother carrying on with a mediocre idea when there's a better one out there? However, I learned from NaNoWriMo that the purpose of writing is not only the idea, but the sticking it out part, and that's why the yearly writing challenge is such an essential experience.

As I'm looking through my archives, there are tons of orphaned beginnings, some of them only one sentence long. It's fun to look at these fragments from time to time and think about what they could have become, if I hadn't so callously abandoned them..

This is me in the front yard! one of them begins (and it ends right there as well).

And I still have no idea which direction this would have gone. Yard - then what? Kitchen? Probably nowhere.

Mother never was particularly versatile in her ways to torture me... another one goes.

I like to believe that there is a story to be told, second nature to my first.

I usually hate re-reading these kinds of self-important notes. 90 percent of the time I am convinced I can barely compose a full sentence, let alone swoop anyone away with the cut of my quill. Writer's baggage!


Anyways, there is more.

Ryku, I’m yelling, Ryyyykuuu, but she doesn’t look up from the thing she made out of mud. That’s the thing with kids. I approach her and she finally looks up at me. There you are! she says, and I detect rebuke. Typical, I think, that she’d twist it like that; as if she had been waiting for me, not the other way around. 

A cute children's story I was working on for a bit. Well five sentences long to be exact. 

The quickest way to hell is taking in a visitor. I titled this one Purgatorial Suspense.

Barlo was a vile man, a boy who grew up to bring nightmares. He had outgrown his father by the age of ten...