Finally Writing

So, I finally wrote some friday flash fiction and put it up on the blog. It’s crap. Let’s be honest, it’s simply not very good. I started with a great randomly generated title, as per Chuck Wendig’s instructions, but what came out feels just...blah. The title is a great title. A Key For Souls. It could be so many things. My mind went wild when I first saw it. But the stories I ran through in my head just didn’t seem...that great? At first, I thought, what about a man who desperately needs a specific key for a specific keyhole and makes a deal with a demon, a key for souls….Didn’t really take me anywhere. Then I thought of a recently purchased ancient mansion, with a big black chest in the basement with a keyhole, the inscription “a key for souls” scrawled across it. (By the way, I love the word ‘scrawl’, it’s just such a fantastic word to say and to hear), the idea being the owner obsessed with getting it open, finally resorting to murder and sacrifice. Then my mind went sci-fi, a key for souls, a key...maybe some kind of code? A code to unlock souls? What? Stupid. Then, as with most sci-fi, my mind went to a homicidal robot, searching for the key to souls. Why though? Then, scientists creating an AI specifically to figure out the answer to souls, blah blah blah, write it in an hour and it shows. How did the robot get out of the lab? How did it get away with murder? Many questions that kind of make the whole piece fall apart.

It’s not great, it’s not even good, but I don’t care. Well, not much, anyway. Know why? Because I finally wrote some goddamn fiction. I finally put words on the screen, created characters and put together conflict, threw it all together and watched what happened. It felt good. I needed this. It takes bad writing to get to okay writing, and on and on to sort-of-decent writing.

So I’m less than impressed with that flash fiction I wrote, but I’m happy to have finally written a story. It’s been too long, as usual, but I’m back, damnit, and that’s what matters.