The Story Match Challenge—Day 4: July 10, 2015

One of the things I’ve noticed since doing this challenge is that my hourly wordage has increased. At the beginning of the month, it was sitting around 595 words/hour—and that was with revisions of pre-written words as opposed to pure new words. This month, my average has so far climbed to 538 words/hour of pure, new words. I have written every day, as opposed to having many days off, and I’m happier. I’m also enjoying my writing, and I am discovering what Dean Wesley Smith terms the ‘power of the challenge’.

In other news, I have decided to experiment with universes in a separate short story challenge, because it’s something I really want to try. Even though I got a bit of a taste of that yesterday, I want to take it further. I’m really looking forward to that challenge.

So, back to this challenge. Yesterday, I had a nap, and it proved both much-needed and disastrous. Much needed because I didn’t get enough sleep the night before – all my own fault; I do tend to push things. But it meant that at 10:20 at night, I only had 500 words of the 4,550 world goal done, and I had to accept that maybe I wasn’t going to get that story done on time.

Needing a bit of a break, and being aware of the time difference, I took a peek at Dean’s blog, to see if he had the story results up yet… and he did. Only this time, he’d done two stories, both fairly short, but still two. The word length minimums for today are 1,250 and 2,950 words. Cool.

Again, I went to bed a bit past midnight, and I was up at 6 a.m. and straight into it. I had two stories to write, three pieces of flash and three poems… and I had to create two spreadsheets, one to track my short work, and one to act as a random poetry generating spark, but those are for a later blog.

I also had to collate what I’d written on the different worlds, but that could wait until I started working a world set in one of them. I double-checked the word count damage, and got to work… right after I’d rigged a quick title generator. I rolled my percentiles and got 59-Welcome to the and 17-Ruins, and away I went. I tried to ignore the story demand for a first-person perspective, but it just refused to work, so I caved and the story came a lot easier. About 300 words in, I realised this was a Miss Delight story, and that made me very happy. About 3,000 words in, I realised this story had a ways to go. It went to 6,030 words before it was done and demanded a title change, so it was goodbye Welcome to the Ruins and hello Miss Delight’s Mistake.

The second piece ended up being a short piece of urban fantasy titled Tischa’s Rescue. It rounded out at 2,078 words at a quarter to one in the morning.

Challenge Hits and Misses:

Today I didn’t get any poetry or flash fiction done, but I did get two short stories finished, one of which was 6,000 words long. Both were written from scratch and I had no idea what they were about when I started typing, so I’m pretty pleased with that. I also learned the value of typing to music. It helps me focus and get lost in the story. I wish I’d thought of it earlier in the day.

• Story Match #1: Completed – Tischa’s Rescue (urban fantasy-2,078 words)
• Story Match #2: Completed – Miss Delight’s Mistake (science fiction-6,030 words)
• Blog entry: 622 words
• Total words: 8,730 words
• Music to type to: 2Cellos