mike[space] dot net

A few weeks back I received an email from the lovely lara suggesting that I enter a 24 hour writing competition. A quarterly competition run by writer's weekly it sounded like a fun way of getting the juices going, so I signed up. As followers of my twitter account will know, the competition was this weekend, and I thought it might be interesting to reflect on it whilst it was still fresh in my head.

The topic was "The small wood stove kept the tiny chapel warm and their snowy footprints had already melted by the door. The dim light from the candle nubs played on the faces of the minister and his wife, and made the bride and groom's shadows dance on the empty pews.

All four turned abruptly when they heard a cough by the door..."

I was really lucky, and found this gave me plenty of ideas to work with. I spent an hour or so with a pad of paper scribbling out a bunch of different ideas. A couple of things I dismissed fairly quickly was either (a) having this topic appear at the end, as it might feel tacked on, and (b) avoiding a joke about it not really being an interruption, as that might wind up a little lame. I had to rein myself in a little as my ideas starting getting overly complex - there's only so many reveals you can squeeze into as short a piece as that. I also have a couple of notes about criminals, hostage taking and the like which weren't really leaping out at me something I could carry off in the space and time allowed.

In the end, I wound up going with one of the first ideas that I thought of. I think that my subconscious must've been thinking about it even as I jotted other thoughts down. So I started tapping away, writing in bursts and knocking out the first draft by about 10pm. Amazingly, I looked down at the word count as I was typing the final few words, and the last sentence brought me to 949 ... couldn't believe it.

Over the next couple of hours (Claire was visiting family so I had the evening to myself) I went through a couple more drafts, trying to round out the shape of the story, and get more of a feel for the characters into it. Satisfied I was in a good spot, I left it around 12:30, and watched a bit of telly.

Then I made a terrible mistake, and re-read it around 3am, and felt the desperate urge for another draft. The conversations were confusing, and the ending not clear enough. So around 4:30 I finally went to bed, and then stayed up even later reading my book, trying to chill out.

Come the morning, I went through a bit more cleaning and tidying, building up to going for lunch with Claire and friends around 2pm. At about 12:45, I was happy with a final draft, and started preparing to submit. There are some fairly strict (but quite simple) rules to follow, and after all the effort, I didn't want to cock it up. They specify quite clearly that they use MS Word for the wordcount, so I thought I had better quickly double check my count. I'd been using scrivener (an awesome bit of writing software), so did a quick copy and paste into open office to check the count. It was different. And higher.

Panic ensues. I used wc on the command line, and got another different answer. I found a tool online, and got another different answer. What the hell was going on?!!?

It then transpired that my quotes and ellipses and all been turned into codes, which were clearly counting as words in slightly different ways. So I shifted into using vim, and got to work cleaning up. Having cleaned house, I was down to 956, and it was quarter to two. Claire was not happy, and I was stressed.

But the final culling of the offending six words was pretty simple, and I was done, ready to submit. The planned walk to lunch became a drive, sadly, and for the first 15 minutes I was glued to my iPhone waiting to receive the submission receipt. But otherwise, happiness and tranquility returned, and I could look back on the work I had done with some satisfaction.

Whether or not I will measure up against my fellow competitors or not, remains to be seen. But to be honest, I am pretty happy with the story (although I am sure that this will change over time, as it so often does with things that you write). I was sorry to hear that Lara blocked, it must've been very frustrating (sorry Lara, but thank you for a fun weekend!!).

Edit: it's been pointing out that publishing the story before the results are released might lead to me being disqualified from the comp. Whilst my readership is pretty small, I'd rather not chance it, so I've decided to withdraw it for now ... *ahem*