[reposted from the Great mySQL Disaster of 2006)

HRH went out gaming tonight. I sat down at the computer once he was gone and I’d tidied up a bit: handled email, checked news, did a bit of research, and wished I could be working on Swan Sister, but I wasn’t in the mood to slog through the warmup only to be ready for bed when I reached the point where things flowed. Nor was I particularly keen on opening one of the other novels to work on one of those, because I wanted to do something finite.

So I pulled out the story postcards I had. Alas, I’d used all of them: they all have big orange checkmarks on them.

But I remembered one that I hadn’t used, one that’s somewhere in a manila envelope or a file of stuff that was on my bulletin board by my desk in the last apartment. Longtime readers will remember the story postcard Neil Gaiman sent me with a phrase about a never-ending line of people written on it with a fountain pen filled with green ink. I made rather a fuss about it at the time.

So I opened a new Word file and wrote a 1,143 word short story beginning with that image of a long line of people snaking off into the distance.

It doesn’t have a title yet. At the moment the file is called “Gaiman postcard”.

Whether I like it or not tomorrow is immaterial. I like it now, both for what I did with it (plain, simple) and how I wrote it (I just did it, in a single hour).

And HRH has just come home with ice cream, since I’d indicated a desire to have some earlier only to discover that he’d finished it last night.

No, wait, I think I have a title: Next. Oh, yes; that’s perfect. That makes it 1,144 words, thank you very much.

Now: ice cream, and bed.

~ Originally posted by Autumn at February 9, 2006 11:27 PM

Full of awesome!
Posted by: Maia AP at February 11, 2006 02:35 AM