Tag: 50 words

Sci-fi is difficult to write!

This update is late, I know!

At the beginning of the month I decided to get a draft completed for one of the sci-fi stories that I’m writing for Globe Soup’s latest contest, thinking it would just take me a few days. How wrong I was. Who knew how much research would be required to write a short story related to terraforming? (Probably most people, I imagine 🤣) First I had to decide where was being terraformed, how it was being terraformed, how the characters were surviving pre-terraformation, as well as working out the story within that! Thankfully I do have a draft now but I definitely didn’t enjoy expanding my scientific knowledge and I’m not convinced it’s my strongest idea. Sadly, I also got a ticket for time travel so I’m going to have to get all sciency again before the end of the month 😭

On a more positive note, my story on 50-WordStories was chosen as story of the month, so that gave me a wee mental boost as I waded through Wiki articles on how to extract oxygen for life support systems 😄

My mind has drifted a bit from my focus on George Square due to the contests I’ve been preparing for lately – I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, the contests are helping me to hone my writing skills. On the other, novel writing is much more my preference over short stories and I only have so much time for writing. The problem is that a completed short story gives me a much quicker sense of achievement than trying to type my way through tens of thousands of words!

I know not many of you are reading this, so I’m sure there won’t be a momentous backlash, but I’m thinking that I’m going to skip a month of writing George Square to get my short story commitments completed – then I will hopefully power through the next few chapters. So next month may just be a wee blog post to update you on my activities but I promise normal programming will resume the following month 🙂

Or check out my published short fiction here 🙂

A micro story

And a little update to go with it. I tried my hand at a 50 word dribble and it’s been published by 50 Word Stories – read it here. Many thanks to Tim for accepting it 😊

Submitting fiction is a bit of an exercise in rejection so it’s always a wee boost when someone likes a piece you’ve written 🙂 I have struggled with flash fiction – I find it difficult to wrap my head around how to tell a complete story – beginning, middle and end – in so few words, so my ideas tend to be more ‘moments’ which often aren’t as well received. I definitely prefer having breathing room to build a character or two, but flash is still useful for expanding my writing skills.

As I said in my last post, this month is pretty busy with getting new stories ready for contests. For the latest one that I’m preparing for, I came up with one new idea, got it down and then came up with another I liked better so I now have a completed first draft and half of a second story instead of just being finished one! 🙈 Fingers crossed it means two decent stories and not just that the first idea was a distraction from what I needed to get done 😅

Further update will follow at the beginning of next month!