My fantasy story had a marmalade cat, so this image shows a marmalade cat's paw held up to show the jellybeans, against a gray background
Talk to the paw

Image © copyright by TheKoRp

This was a rough week, writing-wise.  But normal for this time of the year.  The weather in Washington DC always gets bad in February.  We often experience our coldest weather this month.

Last weekend, the temperature was 18 with the windchill.  We got three days of snow.

Then the sun came out mid-week, the temperature went as high as 57.  The snow melted.  My sinuses went haywire.

Today, I woke up to cold rain, and by mid-morning, it was snowing enough to stick to the grass.  By afternoon, the snow was entirely melted.

And the air has been incredibly dry.

So writing was difficult simply because I didn’t feel good.  It was hard to concentrate, and easy to get distracted.

Last weekend, I discovered some story starts in a folder, so I dumped them into Evernote so I could use them.  I grabbed one that I’d started for an inspiration anthology call and never finished—it was right about the time COVID-19 was warming up, so I must have picked up on bad vibes.

The first scene looked okay, so I whittled at the rest of it, really just a few hundred words at a time until I got it done.  It’s a fantasy, called “Catspiration,” weighing in at 3,200 words.

I also did Flash Fiction #4, weighing in at 250 words.  That’s for a themed call.  The story is science fiction, on the subject of writing, and called “Idea, Input, Check.”  It was inspired by a conversation we had at a work meeting on artificial intelligence.