Monks

As you may have noticed, I’m not having much luck getting my days organized lately, which also means I’m not getting a whole lot of writing/editing done either. I have all these ideas and good intentions and plans in my head, but something goes seriously awry between the thinking stage and the execution stage.

It’s kind of like learning tai chi. It looks so easy when I watch others do it, one movement flows into another in a graceful ballet, but when I try it myself . . . my feet and my hands don’t like working independently of each other and if I focus on one I lose track of the other.

The stories I’ve been editing were written quickly, with little attention to detail, the focus being on the story itself. Most of them are 1,000 words which makes for good flash fiction but I’m not sure if it makes for a complete story.

So I’m facing a bit of a crisis of conscience with them. Should I add more detail to flesh them out, or would that just be padding them to make them longer? Should I just leave them alone?

No, seriously, I’m asking you – I don’t have the answers.

The more I practice tai chi the easier it gets, just like I’m sure the decisions I’m making on the stories for the anthology will get easier. The routine, however, keeps eluding me as I try and find the perfect spot to work. I’ve been moving from the living room, to my office, to the dining room to work. All of them have their benefits, but none of them are perfect. The living room is the most comfortable, the office is most professional, the dining room allows me to spread my stuff out.

The real problem is my lap top. It has a sucky battery life, which means I need to plug it in wherever I go. At night the lap top is plugged into the powerbar in the living room, which means I have to crawl over the cuddle chair to get to it. It’s a big enough pain in the butt that I tend to stay in the living room even when I know I’m not being as productive (because when I get too comfortable I tend to play a lot of games).

It seems pretty obvious to me that I need to pick a place to work and stick to it. And admit to myself that I get more editing done on a hard copy than an electronic copy of a story. And stop playing so many games. And if I can’t see a way to improve a story I should just leave it alone.

All things to work on this week.

And what has that to do with the monks in the picture? Well, nothing really I guess. I was looking some old writing files for something wondrous to post here and found the picture in a folder. I really wish I’d labelled it with some kind of detail because it’s made me curious. Where was this taken? Are the monks carved from the remnants of trees or from stone? Who were they? So many questions!

This week’s prompt is the picture above. See if you can find some of the answers for next Saturday. :-)