Praise or spam?

Had an email the other day, the sole content of which (in the subject line) was:

The best erotic story i ever read in my life

Which was nice - I'm just wondering which story it was, or if it's some bizarrely accurate spam.

But if you've read and enjoyed one of my stories, please let me know - and please let others know! Good reviews are for writers what fresh blood is for vampires - the power by which we will take over the world something which powers us and helps us to keep going.

Another day on target

I think I might be getting back into the groove. Managed to hit 1000 words again yesterday, squeezed into a couple of hours in the afternoon when I had some time to write. This is surely tempting fate, but it feels like the writer's block may have slipped away, or maybe it was never there and I just needed to find some interesting characters with an interesting story to tell?

Total at the end of yesterday was 4,346. Weekends are the sort of time I should be able to get on and write more, but they're also a time of many distractions and things getting in the way. So I'm not going to set any targets beyond the 1000 a day, but we'll see where it goes. And that first 1000 is always going to be on LVH, though I've also been having some thoughts about a short story I began last year but didn't finish. It's not going to take too much to finish that off, so if I can get a decent writing session in at some point over the next few days, I might be able to finish that off. Will likely be something for Literotica, just to give people something of mine to read that's new.

As for LVH itself, things are going well and getting interesting. The first (short) blood-drinking scene appeared yesterday, and maybe today I'll finish the introductory section and get into the first flashback section. Let's see where it leads...

Inspiration

I often find inspiration in bed. No, not that way - well, sometimes - but I'm one of those people who can take a while to drift off to sleep, and one of the things that helps me get there is thinking over my stories and where they're going to go next. Losing myself in a storyis a good way of letting my attention drift away from whatever annoyances might be keeping me awake, and before I know it, I'm gone.

There is a problem with this, though. While it's good for helping me work out the direction of the story, I often come up with good lines that I can never remember come the morning - and because I'm drifting off to sleep, I never get the chance to write them down. It's very annoying, and I'm sure there are many great lines that have been lost to my dreams that will now never get written down and seen by anyone else.

Which is my way of saying that I'm sure I had a great line to use in yesterday's writing, but by the time I came to write it, it was long gone. Still proud of what I did write, and am now up to 3,250 words, but that 'what could have been' will nag for a while.

But I was over target for another day, and the story's going well, the characters are coming to life - literally, in one case. I was expecting someone to get killed off, but then he proved himself a bit too clever for me to do that. I wonder when we'll see him again?

Momentum

Decent day of writing yesterday, which finished as I got past 2000 words (2,009 to be exact). Wasn't intending to finish so close to the target, but I'd reached a natural break point for the day, and needed to take a break to choreograph the next scene in my head before writing it.

I'm not often one for meticulously planning out scenes before I write them, usually preferring to go with the flow, but I've found that with action scenes (like the one coming up), I need to have worked out at least a basic plan on who does what and who's where at what point, otherwise I end up getting to the end of it and realising that I've left one character standing there doing nothing throughout the whole thing. Interestingly, that doesn't normally happen to me when writing sex scenes, where the characters tend to be much more forceful in wanting to get involved...

So, on with today's writing, and see you on the other side of 3,000 words!

To work!

I have Scrivener - the writing software I like to use - open, and a document with a few hundred words is sitting in there waiting to be added to. I have a story idea - which I'm currently referring to as Lesbian Vampire Highlander, until a title emerges - that not only works but manges to draw new ideas, characters and scenes into it every time I think about it.

In short, I seem to be writing again. I'm using the idea of doing 100,000 words in 100 days as a motivator, even if I'm not officially signed up to that challenge, and the plan is to do at least 1000 words a day on that story until it's finished, as well as writing other things as well. If things are going well, expect to see more posts here as well - starting the day with a bit of non-fictional writing is good for me to clear out my head and kick-start the creative circuits - and it's a good place to report on my progress.

On that note, I missed target yesterday and only produced 585 words. But as it was New Year's Day and I had a bunch of other commitments to deal with, I wasn't expecting to write anything, so that's almost a bonus.

100,000 words

I have a new idea for a story. More importantly, I have an idea for the character at the heart of that story and can already feel her like a real person in my mind. Stories - especially erotic ones - usually need good characters in them to come alive, and I'm already sparking lots of ideas from this one.

Which is leading me to take the plunge and try something new in 2013. A friend of mine has told me of a challenge for writers based on doing 100,000 words in 100 days. As I mentioed before, I've done NaNoWriMo in previous years - with non-erotic stories - and this is a variant on the same idea, requiring less average daily output, but over a longer period. I've done 1000 words a day for long periods before, so I'm hoping that this, and the new idea, will get me back into gear and writing properly again.

Wish me luck!

Writer's block

There was a time earlier this year when stories and associated creativity were pouring out of me. Everywhere I looked seemed to be giving me ideas for new stories, and I was jotting them down and getting all the pieces of them together in my head.

That's part of the way I write. The kernel of a story comes along, and slowly lots of other parts then agglomerate around it. I can hear the characters talking, see little flashes of their world and how it all fits together, work out the direction of the story, even the ending. It's what Stephen King called 'the hole in the page' in Misery - that glimpse through into another world that you've created and brought to life.

But for some reason, during this year that's stopped happening as much as it did. Characters I thought I knew well are just falling flat on the page, and their worlds just aren't taking shape the way they used to. That's why there haven't been many entries here and my Twitter feed's just been full of plugs for stuff I've already written - there's nothing new appearing right now.

I've been trying to write, but nothing's coming. I've done NaNoWriMo several times and completed it every time until this year, when my inspiration just deserted me and a story that I thought was going to fly merely sputtered and refused to take off. Characters that had been living and thriving in my head not long before turned to ciphers on the page, stuck in a torpor and letting plot happen to them, not doing anything for themselves.

The ideas are still there, and the characters still floating around so hopefully I'll get out of this hole sometime soon and get creating again. I just need to keep writing through this, and at some point, I'll be struggling away and everything will click again, all will spark into life and the hole in the page (or the screen) will open up.

Until then, I hope you're free of blocks and your characters come alive - and the block I've got now doesn't affect the things I've written before!