06 | April | 2016 | Flotsam and Jetsam

This week’s photo prompt is provided by pixabay.com.

The house was like a head, with its crop of scarlet and green ivy hair, rectangular windows for eyes and teal door for a nose, while the walls, its cheeks, were covered in a mass of red leaves producing a bushy beard-like effect. It was like something out of a children’s book and we imagined a Willy Wonka type character living there.

Unfortunately, the man who did live there was morose, laconic and dark; dark in the sense that he wore only black and had a weird heavy energy. We soon lost interest in the house – the exterior brightened up the street somewhat, but we simply couldn’t equate its vibrant appearance with its miserable occupant, and when the woman, his slave emerged from its cellar after years of being locked away, everyone was gobsmacked, yet it kind of made sense. There was no way a man like that could live in a house like that without having something sinister to hide.

This post was written for Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers

Editing for me goes hand in hand with procrastination. It’s always something I struggle to find time to do, and struggle to do when I have the time! When it comes to short stories, I never know when to stop – they’re never quite good enough; there’s always a little more ‘fine tuning’ I can do. Short stories are one thing; novels are another. In November I managed to win ‘NaNoWriMo,’ and wrote 50,000 words in 30 days. Many of them were rubbish words though! I didn’t write chronologically either, so my novel ended up consisting of a mishmash of scenes with huge gaping holes in them. I was, however, so relieved to have produced 50,000 words, that the quality of them didn’t seem so important at the time. I figured I’d leave the story for a while and come back to it later.

‘Later’ has become now. I still have a lot of content to add but I also need to do a massive amount of editing, and that is the tough part. I’ve got into the habit of writing a short piece then moving onto another immediately so I’ve now got a whole bunch of stories (in addition to my novel) that I need to go back to.

One thing I’ve come to realise is that completion is such an important part of the writing process, as important as getting the words down, but at the same time it’s necessary to know when the story is good enough to submit. I’ve got a few weeks off from work soon and I’m determined to edit all my ‘not-quite-ready’ stories as well as complete and sort out my novel. Hopefully Scrivener will help me with that!