Focus Please!

You know, I started writing this post about being focused, and on how easy it was to lose that focus. But then I switched to how single-minded you can get when writing and waxing nostalgic, and I got up to ferret out a couple of stories I had stored on a USB key to check their length and on my way to doing that I went into the kitchen for another cup of coffee, had a text conversation with my daughter, and started to cook something to take for my lunch today. Then I sat back down in my chair – without the USB keys.

Got up and got my bag of keys, sorted through them until I found the one marked “everything” and stuck it in my lap top. But then there were all these folders to peruse. Some of the stuff was really old, I’d copied it off of a stack of floppy disks, and I couldn’t resist opening a couple of documents to check them out. One of them turned out to be a story I didn’t recognize as mine – it was a little rough but it had potential (sort of) – so I emailed it to the daughter, who also didn’t recognize it. Then I had to check on how my lunch was doing.

See how easy it is for me to lose my focus? I’ve been working on this post since 8 a.m. My mind keeps wandering off on tangents and I’m starting to feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. But when I started this blog 5 years ago I did promise to be honest.

When I first started writing, back in high school, I was very single minded. I’d do the assignments for my English classes (yes, I was one of those geeks who took 2 different English classes, one year I even took 3) – essays, poetry, whatever – but when it came to my own writing I stuck to short stories. I was going to be a writer of science fiction short stories.

And for it to be a legitimate short story, it had to be (in my mind) at least 4,000 words, but no more than about 6,000. If it ran longer than that, I abandoned it. I have at least three, maybe more of these longer stories stored away to finish one of these days.

The Moonstone Chronicles was one of these stories. The original story, Shades of Errol Flynn, made it all the way to Jessica waking up on the beach in the magical realm and meeting Prince Ewan, who was not, at the time, a dastardly prince. At that point, there were two ways the story could have gone and I had no idea which way to take it. So there it lay, abandoned, until I got the urge to turn it into a serial on a now defunct blog.

You may be wondering what the point of all this is. I have a confession. Me too. I know when I started this post I had a point in mind, but it got lost somewhere in the shuffle of social media, email, texting, and other assorted distractions. I’m sure it’ll come to me later.

But that’ll be a post for another day. :-D

Prompts of the Week

Prompt One
You were involved in a terrible car accident and have been in a coma for the past three months. What your family and the doctors don’t know is that you can hear everything that they say. Write the scene.

Prompt Two
A fortune teller at the local county fair tells you two things. She tells you something good that will happen, and something awful that will happen. What are these events or incidents?

Remember, don’t be like me and spend a lot of time on these, they’re just meant for fun. Take 5 minutes to think about it, then write for 10 or 15 minutes. And if it turns out you like what you’ve written, then by all means turn your exercise into an actual story. You can find these prompts, and others like them, at Writer's Digest .