WD-40

"Wait, what style of sticking place are we talking? WD-40 gets ANYTHING unstuck."
-Whittaker

Wow, what a response on that last post. I'm entertained at how often booze was mentioned. Well, I guess it worked for Hemingway... All the same, I don't quite think it's the thing. I do like Deb's bracket idea: "You could do the bracket thing with [then stuff happens] and write the ending that you have in your head. Let it sit and see what you need to have happen to connect the first bit to the last bit." It seems there are many practical and entertaining uses for the things.

Of course, there's a simple answer for how to get me going. Deadlines. Lots of writers are procrastinators and people who like working with a pending deadline. It gets our butts in gear and in some ways does the same thing as genre jumping. Having a time limit frees us from a certain degree of responsibility because, after all, I couldn't have spent any more time fixing it, could I? That was the beauty of workshop classes with David, because I had to make a brand new story from scratch and have it ready in a week, or sometimes two days, or sometimes the next day.

Right now I'm working on a letter to send off to Camii (who's been my wonderful pen-pal for many years now) and since I both want to send the letter by tomorrow, and send a copy of Albatross with it, this means I have to finish the story right away. This also helps me meet my goal of having done with it by Sunday. So, last night, after signing the end of the letter to Camii, I left the TV on for background noise, sat myself down in front of the computer, and got to writing.

Jay Leno came on, then Conan, then Ryan Seacrest and at that point I called it a night. 'Cause really, Ryan Seacrest? Ugh. Over a little more than two hours, I got from point A to point B-and-a-half and added about a thousand words to the story. Not bad. Makes me wonder just how long this story is going to end up though, as I've already hit eight pages. Granted, a "short" story can be rather longer still, but it's longer than I tend to write. I wonder if it's some of the mindset from writing a novel that's rubbing off. Hard to say, but as long as it works, it works.