1000 Hours of Writing: Hours: 40 - 60
The ultimate dream would be to manage 20 hours of writing in a week. Technically it should be possible. People work for 40 hours a week, that's not even two days. So squeezing in 20 hours of something that I enjoy and love should be easy! And yet, when I managed 20 hours in ten days (17 - 22nd September) I could not believe it. I thought I had mucked it up. I had miscounted, filled a box too many, or got the dates all wrong. Maybe it wasn't 2016 but 2017! That seemed more likely, right?
Here I had my hours but no obvious evidence on hand that I had done anything. There were a few blog posts in my drafts. Those don't take 20 hours! There must be something else, so I put on my detective hat and went on the search of those mysterious lost hours!
Since I had written more blog posts than usual in the last few weeks, I thought that I could use a break from those. Yes, it would slow my 1000 hours down, but when I start to have a simple conversation and somewhere in the middle my brain goes hang on we can make something out of that or I would stand under the shower and curse myself for not being brave enough to crave my idea into my flesh because I had neither pen nor paper with me, it's time for a day of nothing ...
However, on that day my brain decided to shift to something I had written half a year ago. It was a Military AU. I love the thing, I had dreamed up their whole past, made little CVs, back stories, I have everything planned out. Past, present, future. But I never did anything with it. Suddenly I knew how I could make future - retired military men - work. A moment later the document was open and words started to flow from my fingers:
"J nodded, he looked around the room. It was their bedroom. Quite sparen, still. They wanted to decorate it with a simple pastel and flower design. It was their house, their new house. He couldn’t even tell how he had gotten there. A moment ago he could have sworn that he could feel the fists beating down on him, throwing him in a corner, the smell of urine and shit and then …. he woke up here."I know it's a niche within a niche, and mostly why I hadn't written more about my Military AU was because hardly anyone reads it. But I want to finish this, because the prior ideas where too little to expand on, they're hints that I could drop here and there.
Furthermore, I have hardly written anything fictional in the last 40 hours. That kills me. When I write a blog my brain is always here, thinking, when I write a story my brain is floating in some space that I simply do not want to move out of. It's relaxing beyond belief.
That was my break from writing: I wrote. It is also where my 20 hours come from This is the evidence that I needed. It is right there. And yet, it isn't. The story is not finished yet, and when I come back to the next 20 hours I am afraid it still won't be.
Writing stories is a lengthy process, and then you need to edit it, send it off to your beta, correct it, edit it again, and then it's finished. This is followed by the most awful task: trying to come up with a summary.
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