Writing Competition

This last week was a little distracting for me - I had a person I thought was a friend of mine really lie and then tried to minimize it and make it out to be my fault. It's over and I have moved on, it's still hard (who likes being manipulated like that)and being a person who thinks he is a pretty good judge of character, it really threw me off. Oh well, somehow I will be able to apply it to my writing at some point.

Yesterday, I did a final edit on my short story, It Was A Dark And Stormy Night. I really am pretty proud of this story. I wrote it basically one afternoon when I was at this terrible seminar for work. It started out as one of those fun pieces - you know - you write a sentence and pass it on to the next person, but I never passed it on. I turned it into a writing activity for myself. I had been critiqued at my group as someone who often writes in the first person (and I do), so I took that as a challenge. Hindsight, I don't think she meant it as something I needed to change, as much as a way to identify my writing. I have since learned from others in my writing group, that they wish they had that ability and see it as a strength. For me, it's often that I become the character in my writing, it's the one my tools. So I actually enjoyed working on this piece because it took me out of my element.

I started with the 3rd person omission, and then I played with some simple 3rd person as well. One of the things I love about this writing group, is that I have really learned to pay attention to some of these things. I will write, edit and present and even though I think I have caught every opportunity for someone to go 'how does he know this, who's perspective are we in,' but they find them. I even find it in my writing published works now and think, how did this get published. (Then reality kicks in and I realize that they are published and overall I am not.)

Anyhow, I missed the initial deadline for submitting this story to the Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition, so I had to get it done to be able to enter it yesterday. It is now entered and I am not even looking at the story because I am sure I will find things and go, 'oh, how did I miss that.' I did find a whole lot of 'had's' in the story, and didn't realize how much I write and talk that way. I will continue to work on it.

This morning, I started writing another story, looks to be fun. I still have stuff to edit before reading tomorrow on one of my novels, but sometimes the muse just takes over, doesn't she.