i finally started one

I finally started a short story yesterday. I've been telling myself for the past several days that I want to try doing short stories for a while. It's amazing how much a change can set you on edge and make you want to procrastinate. Yesterday, I chose to sit down and write a while first thing. That tends to work well for me when I am letting writer's block kick me around. If I don't conquer the writing, I don't get to get to the other stuff on my to-do list that I want to do. I am essentially bribing my inner child - if you write a while, then you can do the other stuff you had plotted today. And it's not that I don't want to to write so much as I get myself worked up about it and how I want to do it perfectly. I forget that I have to get a draft down before I can fiddle with it and revise it into what I want it to be. So I sat down and brainstormed a while first - throwing down some ideas and toying with them until one struck me. Then I scribbled about that one for a while, and wrote out a rough draft longhand. When I finished it, I typed it up and brought it to the writer's club meeting at the local library. There were good suggestions about ways to improve it, but also a lot of compliments. That was reassuring. I think I want to keep going with writing short stories, maybe write a collection of them or something like that. I don't know. If nothing else, I feel like I am exercising my writing muscles by practicing more planning and structure as I write. That will help me when I do feel like it is time to go back to the novel. This kind of feels like I am making my writing rather like the patchwork afghan I am making. I am knitting eighty squares that are ten by twelve inches, then I am going to crochet them together into a queen-sized afghan. I work on it little by little when i have the time. It isn't as intimidating to knit a square as it is to knit a whole blanket, and it fits better in the time I have available. So I am going to practice my writing skills in smaller blocks for now and see what I can come up with. After I finish writing this post, I am going to go back and do the revisions I decided on in the writer's club meeting yesterday, and maybe I will start planning and plotting out another short story. It will be fun! =)