Flow Status

January 6^th represents a three-month streak of completing a blog post everyday since November. It is always amazing to see how much I can get done if the task is gamified. And making a game of seeing if I can keep my streak seems to be working, at least for this blog.

I used to do this with a landscaping crew I worked with back in the late 90’s. We would compete against each other on the hottest of days to see who could shovel a pile of this or that faster, or who could cut the lawn the quickest. The rule was we had to do quality work while we were competing. It made the work fun and the day went by faster. I miss working with those guys partly for that reason and partly because they were a good bunch.

I am trying the same approach with the 2026 words averaged per day challenge and not quite getting the same results. I am a bit behind on my word count, yet I show up and put my butt in the chair everyday now. That’s something I haven’t done previously.

I have a habit of waiting until the day of the deadline to write a story. After writing over fifty short stories last year, I learned that it is the beginning part of writing something that causes me all sorts of problems.

Throughout that year I also learned that once the opening was completed and the story started to take off, I often got lost in the writing. Some people would call that entering the flow state.

While writing a novel, something I haven’t done yet, I am hoping the writing, the flow state, will arrive sooner. Not having to conjure up a storyline or new characters and settings might make this easier. Short stories take less time to write but they can be taxing if you are creating a new one every day. I’m pretty sure Dan Brown has a handle his character of Robert Langdon. Not that he doesn’t encounter a whole new set of problems like consistency of character voice. And of course, Robert Langdon may be in the star, but there are always a new cast of characters and locations for him to interact with.

But let me live the fantasy that writing a novel might feel like a vacation compared to serial short story writing.

Another way I might help myself is by writing short stories about characters that are reoccurring. Many authors do this. A character that is a part of series is what I am trying to say. I have a few short stories that could be part of a series if I wrote more of them. One is a short story called ‘Dirty Snowballs’ (unpublished) that I plan to write more about in a full novel that will also be named “the ‘Dirty Snowballs” novel series. I may do a few more short stories starring the various team members in their own standalone adventures.

But tonight, I am back to writing a story for a magazine. I wrote the opening last night. My hope is now that the hard part for me is finished I’ll be able to fall into that flow state and get some words out of my fingertips and onto the page.

 That's all for now!