No blogging, but I am writing!

Well, I've fallen off the blogging wagon for a bit, but the good news it that I've still been writing. I wrote some shitty fiction in half an hour on Sunday and I wrote in my journal—with an actual pen—last night. I never plan to publish my journal in any form, but it was good to get some thoughts out and get back into that again.

The fiction went better than I thought it would, especially considering that I still haven't set up a writing space yet and had a million distractions around me at the time. Having a half hour time limit was good, but I am hoping to expand it when I'm on a roll. It does help keep the presssure off, knowing I only need to write for half an hour. And, yes, I produced the literary equivalent of a pile of crap, but at least I got something on the page and the more I do it, the easier it will get. Well, that's kind of a lie, because writing is hard, but if it becomes a habit, it'll be harder to just give up and let it slide.

The short-short story I wrote started off with a detail from a recent walk I went on, and then veered off in a crazy direction. It was fun to write like I did when I was a kid, and just take the story anywhere I wanted as long as it was as entertaining as possible. That's the feeling I want to get back to with my writing, while still writing something good and not ridiculous. At least not ridiculous in a bad way. I haven't re-read what I wrote, and am a little afraid to. It might fall under the "delete" category, but maybe it's not as bad as I think it is, or maybe a bit of it can be saved.

Most fiction I've written, I end up editing and/or rewriting extensively before even getting close to a finished story. Anything I write for my job usually doesn't need too much editing, because with non-fiction you don't have the pressure of having to make things up and make things believeable, you just write what is, and I have a general structure that I use for all my articles which makes it easier to just throw them together. Plus, I usually don't have the time to endlessly rewrite the articles I do for work. I'm not sure that necessarily makes them worse than my fiction though. I wonder if using the structure I use for my work articles for my fiction writing would make for a fun experiment. If it gets me writing, that's all that matters. If you have something to work with, you can always edit and rewrite to make something better out of it, no matter how shitty it is to start with.

On the reading side of things, I finished The Glass Hotel and loved it, though the ending left me both heartbroken and satisfied. I'll write a separate post on that though, as I have a lot of thoughts about it that I want to organize. I like books that make me think and it's definitely done that.