Update on Challenge Story 5
I thought this story was going to land in literary. But when I made first contact with the story, my muse was going, “Nope, nope, nope.”
It became a fantasy story. I’d bumped my deadline up to Friday to get it done. Tuesday, I was like, wait, if I do a push, I can get this done today!
But it was real commitment because I took that time from working on Book 1, so I had to tell myself that it HAD to be finished.
Coming up with a short story a week has special challenges:
- You have to know how to come up with ideas.
I had to take a class in this to understand how to do it. I had the tendency to think the idea was a story born whole and not just something to get the story started. - You have to have some control of the inner critic.
It’s what’ll make you stall out and fail. And it’s a tough one. It shows up somewhere (mostly on Novel 1 this week). On Story 5, it kept telling me the story still had problems, and I shipped it anyway. - You got to have control of your calendar.
And I don’t mean just the available writing time. You also have to have control of your day job calendar. If you get pelted all day with emergencies, it’s hard to be creative. I had to really work on this (since COVID-19 started) and have really learned a lot about managing my calendar so that I don’t deplete all my mental energy before I break at the end of the day.
Meanwhile, I did a cover for Story 5. It’ll be in submission first, but covers are fun to do for the stories. I also did one for Novel 1.
And Story 6…’
Not a clue, except that it will be spec fiction. This week’s was supposed to be for an anthology call, but I don’t think it quite met the requirements, so this one will be it.
Linda Maye Adams 
Ideas have never been my problem, thankfully. The inner critic, though – that’s a b****. I don’t know that I’ll ever get to the point where she doesn’t bug me, but I’m trying to stop overthinking so many things so much.
Thanks for these story updates! I’m really looking forward to reading them whenever they’re available.
Which brings up a question that’s not intended in any way to put any pressure on you/your Muse/Story, but has been kicking about the back of my brain:
When the stories are available, will you have any way of tagging them (i.e., this is story 5 of the story challenge)? I know that for me, some of your discussions/descriptions of them in these blog posts are piquing my interest, and it would be nice to have an easy way to find those specific ones in the future.
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Yes, definitely! I’ve been marking down which story is which challenge number (maybe I ought to do a list of the titles here). Right now, they’re all in submission, but a possible thing I might do in the future is put them together in a collection with the comments about them.
Inner critic always will bug you. You just learn ways to work around it, or at least when it gets in and starts monkeying around with the story.
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Love the Spooner’s Cove cover.
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Thanks! It’s based on a real place I visited in California when I was growing up. Had a cave and looked like a place for pirates!
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