Meanwhile…

As you can see to the right, I’ve added a new column, within which you can see daily nuggets of fiction. I’m not totally satisfied with it, as I’m using Twitter to create the feed, and from time to time the character limit is a beast to deal with. But it will do for the moment. I’ll be posting material from my daily hint fiction exercise I did last year and mixing in something new as often as possible.

If you have Twitter, you can follow the feed directly here.

Last Friday I decided to bring my little daily hint fiction exercise to an end. It was great to keep me writing during these past overtime-laden months, but it’s starting to become a chore. I need to get back to my regular writing. There are 73 little nano-stories over there. If I’d realized the number I might have churned out a couple more just to hit that nice round 75. A handful of them are actually good.

Oh, and I forgot to mention it before, but the talented Rumjhum Biswas wrote a nice article over on the Flash Fiction Chronicles that complements my “Make it Fun!” article.

I’ll be at the Texas Blood Bath Film Festival this weekend. A friend was DP on Brain Dead, which is being featured on Saturday. Should be fun! If you’re in the Waco area you should check it out.

I’ll be taking my laptop along, in the hopes of getting a little writing done, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope. It appears that the work load at my day job is finally lightening somewhat, so maybe I’ll have a chance to get writing again soon. Of course they just laid another person off, so that could go either way I suppose.

Speaking of despair, a Twitter account is getting its own television series. In other news, I give up.

As I mentioned yesterday, on a whim I have decided to undertake a little twitter story exercise. Each day (weekends? not sure yet, though I feel like I should) around noon (US Central time) I’ll be posting a new piece of fiction on my Twitter account. We’ll see how it goes! I actually wish I had done this before the Hint Fiction contest, as I think the two items I’ve posted already are better than what I turned in for the contest (even with the embarrassing typos in the first entry).

Anyway, I’ve taken the step of favoriting the stories, to separate them from the rest of the chaff of my twittering. So you should be able to just go straight to my Favorites page and see only the stories. You don’t have to create an account of your own or sift through my tweets about fighting bees or my pop culture commentary. I’ll see if there’s some way I can integrate that feed into the site here. I think some fun stuff can be had with this.

If anyone wants to join in, let me know and I’ll make sure to follow and shamelessly plug you.

It’s been a while since I posted any writing exercises. To be fair, I’ve been just as remiss in actually writing any writing exercises. Hurm.

So here’s a few I just came up with for the writing group. Feel free to use them! And let me know what you come up with!

• Begin your story as something horrible is crawling toward your protagonist!
• Put a twist on one of the clichés listed here. You can just change a word (I dunno, write about a Lifetrap, or the Bad Old Days) or put whatever other kind of twist you want.
• Feature a character who loves something you hate.
• Set your story in a cramped place, like a train, airplane, or locked room.

And speaking of exercises, I’m thinking of trying my hand at posting super-short Twitter fiction each day. I just posted my first clumsy attempt. Feel free to follow me and watch me stumble and fail!

And of course it would not be a true Burns story without a glaring typo. Or two.