Living the Fictional Dream

I am totally inspired by the results of the SED contest. The group did so well. Four of us actually completed a story every day for 14 days, which is totally amazing. My congrats go out to my fellows at the finish line — Stephanie, Sandra, and Donna. I won the tie breaker, as I had the highest word count, which was exciting. Finally, my tendency toward wordiness came in handy!

But I think the real winner is the group itself, especially everyone who participated in the contest. Alex wrote 12 stories, and Janel, Brittany, and Virginia all wrote at least one. All totalled, in two weeks the group wrote well over 80,000 words. Yay, Writer’s Ink! Well done!

I’m fairly amazed by all the work we did, and now that we’ve done all this work, there are stories for critting and/or submitting. What fun! I fully expect to hear good results from my fellow writers soon. I suppose the next challenge is not to let the stories sit around, but to do something with them.

Of course, for me, all the stories weren’t submission-ready, or even submission-worthy for that matter. But there are defintely a handful that are worth pursuing. And that is more than I had before, so yay!

When looking over my new crop of stories, I notice that the stories that turned out the best are the ones that I had no intention of writing. Isn’t that strange? The ones I intended to write, such as the story about human colonies on the moon, all turned out poorly, but the ones that started with no apparent rhyme or reason became keepers.

I wonder why that is. Perhaps my muse is only captured by pure randomness? Or perhaps she is just perverse? Or is that the way of it for most writers — that their best tales come when they are least expecting it? What do y’all think?