I did something pretty awesome today, and I kind of don’t care how conceited that sounds.

I used to regularly contribute to a blog that I helped run with one friend and one now-really-ex-friend. Maybe it was “fluff” writing; but it was so much fun, and I was writing at least two short pieces every week. I was always flipping ideas over in my brain, whether I was driving, or at work, or falling asleep at night. It was a super-creative time, and sometimes, I really miss it…especially over the last year or so.

My creative muse is a fickle little thing, and I fall victim to long, long bouts of writer’s block. Not a traditional writer’s block, might I add. I’ll come up with plenty of ideas, vivid scenes, cool character backstories, and then…I can’t bring it to fruition. I get it on the page and then, “What do I do with this now?”

I never want to admit when it happens, so I try to write, anyway. Sometimes, I’m successful. Sometimes, I have a fluke and I bang out a short story in three hours. Or I participate in National Novel Writing Month for three or four years straight and I wind up having two or three 100+ page manuscripts that I’m afraid I’ll never finish. I think that’s part of the reason why I can’t make up my mind about whether I’m actually going to do NaNoWriMo this year. I know – I probably should have made that decision by now, but the one year I won, I didn’t start until November 8th. So I still have time, damnit.

Okay, anyway, back to the reason for the update. As you’ve likely noticed, I haven’t blogged in awhile. I’ve had ideas, just none that I could really bring to fruition, as described before, so I neglected this place a little. But I have been writing.

I finished writing a short story today. It took me nearly five months to complete, which is probably the longest I’ve ever taken to write one. Not only that, but I decided to write about and from the point of view of someone who might actually scare me. It was an experiment, of sorts, and I had a really, really enlightening and experiential time playing with ideas, and language, and the way certain metaphors could be transformed and how they could relate to others.

This is the first short story I’ve finished since I wrote “Beneath No Shade,” which was probably about four years ago. I got the idea from a dream – I love when that happens. I knew its title before I even wrote one word. And I knew how it would end before I finished the first scene.

These are all kinds of anomalies. I guess I had to experience a bevy of them before I could get back to my roots. But I think I’m about there. After so many afternoons of just looking at the unfinished words like that Kuzco “70% of editing is staring at the screen making this face” meme. Scrolling back to see if this idea would work. Re-reading and re-reading and thinking, around the three-month mark, that I was never going to finish it and that maybe it was too creepy to finish. That maybe I was out of my league with this genre, and that I was too far away from my comfort zone.

I think this is one of the biggest personal accomplishments I’ve had in awhile, and it makes me excited for new ideas and new words. And I also thought about this: If I’m not sure I can commit to a novel idea for the month of November, maybe I can use the month to write some short stories. See what flops about and winds up on paper.

NaShoStoWriMo?

We’ll see. Anyway, I’ve also decided to take a really big leap and post my new short story here. I feel like it needs to come with a couple of forewarnings. It’s longer than I expected it would be ((nearly 6,000 words)) and the content is both profanity-laced and disturbing.

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Welcome to The Highway.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mc9sdedpw81wg8e/The.Highway.docx?dl=0