Short story

I sent a little story out into the world to swing for itself the other day – how absolutely terrifying! I am now nervously sitting on my hands. The temptation to read through the story again and again bemoaning why I put that, why I chose those words, why-oh-why – I need to somehow delete this story from my mind. But I cannot! It is so new and shiny. We’re still on honeymoon and I’ve sent it packing.

It almost didn’t come to life at all. I had been playing with a blog post idea for a while, patting it around the computer. As it grew flesh and bones, turning into a story, I wondered whether it was good enough to send away somewhere, like maybe a competition. I am very aware of the fact that I have no fiction credits to my name (yet!) - maybe they are not needed, but I can’t help thinking that they help, that it all helps – especially when you are a bit brand new. So I carried on worrying at the story... but thinking it was turning into the wrong story, more of an essay... and then last week came this flash of inspiration about a completely different idea.

This was a fully fledged little story, no swollen blog post, this. So then I played with that instead for a week and got some paragraphs down, and last Friday night went hell for leather and wrote the whole thing before midnight. Saturday morning I hated it, Saturday afternoon I was okay with it, and then Saturday evening good friend C read it through and liked it. Sunday I picked it over and printed it out to read in the garden. Monday I read it on the train. Tuesday I emailed the revised effort to good friend R (who liked it too, hooray) and yesterday I sat in a coffee shop at lunchtime and went over it with a red pen. I even spoke it aloud over my latte and earned myself a few looks of ‘woah, I see mad woman’. And now I have sent it away. Blimey.

It is for a competition, and I won’t know anything about it at all until October, so now I have to forget about it completely. But I feel so fired up! I don’t particularly like the phrase ‘creative juices’ (as eugh, ick) but me river’s a-flowing. EUGH!