Tag: <span>short story</span>

Day One Story

So, this is the first of my Story A Day posts.  I just wrote it a few minutes ago and, unlike what I said in my original post, I’m not going to be editing any of the stories before I post them on the blog.  Scary, I know!  But I think it’s good to just get the raw version out there because this is an exercise to get me writing, not to get me editing and I know I’ll just be bogged down with it if I start.  So as such, please forgive any typos, spelling errors, bad grammar and the like.

Story one is sort of a snippet of something that could be turned into a bigger story some day.  It just came to me this evening, so that’s what I wrote 🙂

 

Untitled.

“Name.” The doorman barked the word at me, not as a question.

I smiled. His eyes stayed glued to his tablet for a few moments longer before he looked up, eyes meeting mine directly and never straying to my curves.

Damn.

I smiled wider and flicked my hair. If sexy seductress wouldn’t work then maybe ditzy playgirl would.

“Name,” he said again. Same tone, same facial expression.

Think, think, think. I rocked to my other foot, just in case this all went south, and tried the only other thing I could think of.

“Roxy Monahan.” The truth.

His face hardened. A feat I had thought impossible. His hand with the tablet lowered and his other reached into his jacket, presumably to draw a gun. My right foot hit him hard in the chest, I started to turn, ready to follow up with a few punches but saw something from the corner of my eye. Too late I realised it was the damn tablet and it smacked into the side of my head.

I staggered to the side then righted myself, kicking off my heels as the giant boulder of a doorman jabbed with his right. I dodged and punched his side. He let out a small, almost inaudible, breath from the impact. At this rate we’d be here all year before I even got him to say “ouch”.

A cough sounded behind me and I dropped, spinning to see the second opponant. Only it wasn’t an opponant. It was worse.

“I hope my date isn’t causing too much trouble Nick.” His voice was deep, silky, made you think of sex or really good chocolate.

“Not at all sir,” the boulder replied. He straightened his jacket and stood behind me. A looming presence I was all too aware of.

“May I?” A masculine hand appeared in front me of, which I rejected and stood without help.

“Your date?” I whispered, raising an eyebrow.

“My brother may not like you Miss Monahan but we only look alike, not think alike.”

I smiled and rested my hand on the arm he offered me as I put my heels back on. My dress had seen better days but after a quick trip to the ladies room it wouldn’t stand out too badly. Or at least wouldn’t look like a crumpled mess.

“Shall we?”

I linked my arm through his, ignoring the look from the boulder, and secretly did a happy dance that I’d found my way in. Although perhaps that dance was preemptive, considering I’d just become the date of the brother of the most dangerous man in New York.

 

May 30, 2012
Story A Day
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Story A Day

My blog has been pretty neglected lately and I’m sorry for vanishing off the blog-planet.  With a new puppy my time for being online had been cut down dramatically – and my energy with it!  Thankfully now he’s getting older and better at being house trained, I can finally get some brain power back and focus on writing.  Good, right?

Well, you’d think.  But my brain seems to have shut off for a while.  Not for inspiration, that’s still there and ideas are constantly flowing, but my motivation to actually sit and write has just vanished into thin air!  That is until today when I was reading the April issue of Writing Magazine (catching up on my reading too, as the puppy seemed to stop that happening as well!).  In it was a few paragraphs by a subscriber, Stephanie Mark, who talks about how she – due to a 10p bet with a friend – has been writing a story a day and will continue to do so for 365 days.  Wow!  That’s a lot of writing.  Yet when you think about it, that’s what writers do.  They sit, every day, and write.  Not normally a new story each day, but they still sit and write and create their soon-to-be-finished novel.

Stephanie’s story has inspired me to do something similar, to get my brain back into writing mode.  Starting next week I will write something every day, then give it a quick edit the next day and post it on my blog before starting that day’s piece of writing.  I’m not going to commit to a whole year as I do want to focus on my WiP again sometime soon!  But that’s what this is all about so I’ll tentatively say for 7 days, perhaps making it longer if I still feel a lack of motivation tugging at my brain.

Time to put some of these ideas to use!

May 25, 2012
Story A Day
2 Comments

He said, she said

All those years ago in school I remember that every story I wrote, and every piece of creative writing for school work, was written in third person.  I used to hear people talking about first person writing and think to myself “But that’s crazy!  Only one perspective?  I could never write like that!”.

Yet after leaving school, and college, I started reading a series of books that was written in first person and that series is actually what spurred me on to actually focus on a writing career.  I decided to try out this crazy first person malarkey…and haven’t looked back since!  I find it so much easier to write and realised very early on that it definitely doesn’t limit the “sides” of the story that you can convey.

So now, I’m sitting here working on a short story for a competition and feel like I’m back in school because it has to be written in third person.  They give you the first line of the story and you carry it on, to wherever you feel like taking it.  But try as I might, you can’t do anything with that first line other than write in third person.

It’s strange to me that something I used to do so often, and for so long, is now like a foreign concept and I’m finding it really difficult to write from an outside view.  I keep asking myself “Why is this?” and maybe it’s just because I haven’t done so for so long.  But I feel it’s more than that – writers choose to write in first or third person and tend to stick with one or the other throughout all of their books.  Personal preference and all that.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just like stretching a muscle you haven’t used for a while.  Or maybe I should just stop pondering these things and get back to, you know, the actual writing part!  Procrastination, oh how I missed thee.

July 11, 2011
Writing
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