Living the Fictional Dream

I’m sure that question has been plaguing all my loyal readers. Assuming I have any left!

Between holiday house guests, crazy vacation schedules, too many big work projects, and one of those colds that burrows into your lungs and refuses to leave, writing has not been high on my to-do list lately. I think my muse went to Aruba for the winter, and took all my good ideas with her!

However, at today’s Writer’s Ink meeting, I signed up to submit a story for critique at the next meeting, so hopefully that will spur something remotely resembling fiction out of me. Our annual collection theme this year is “Genre Collision,” so we all have to write a story this year that combines or somehow smooshes at least two genres — or as many genres as we want, really.

I have a story I’ve been tinkering with for a while. It’s set in my sci-fi universe where there are five self-sustaining human colonies on the moon. I tried to write this story back when the “Return to Luna” anthology was soliciting, but I couldn’t get the plot to turn out right. I tried two different moon colony stories, and while I really liked the world that I built, I had issues with the plot in both stories. However, I hope that I have reached a turning point with one of them. And if not, heck, I’ll send it into my writing group any way — they are great at helping ferret out a problem with a story and brainstorming ideas on how to fix it!

As far as colliding genres go, I hope that this story will end up as a space western. We’ll see. Thus far, the western elements are a lot lighter than the sci-fi elements, but there’s a wandering stranger, a woman who seems helpless, a dog, a farm… I see a bit of western in all that.

Hopefully, now that the holiday obligations are over and the walking crud is slowly but surely releasing its death grip on my lungs, I’ll be able to resume my more regular posting schedule. I actually have a few topics in mind that I’ve wanted to write about lately, which is a step in the right direction! I got a thought-provoking rejection letter the other day, and I’m interested to know what other people think of it. Maybe that will be my next post!

I hope all of y’all out there in blog land are doing well. I will try to resume my normal blog reading soon, too. If I could comment on Blogger blogs from the office, I would even start that today. Sadly, I’ll have to wait on that until I get home.

Oh, and something else to leave you with — my flash piece, “The Care and Feeding of Your Sleeping Knight,” will be up on Every Day Fiction later this week. I’ll post here when it’s live! I’m looking forward to that.