Hard To Get Started

I finished that last story that I was working on something like eleven or twelve days ago now. My goal and plan was to jump straight into another project, and keep on moving towards the final destination of being a professional writer. After all, if I want to be a writer, I've got to practice writing.

For some reason, however, I've been stalled at the starting line, moving nowhere. I know what story I want to write, I know what it is I need to practice (showing not telling), so I should be able to just jump in and go, right?

Yet here I am more than a week later, and I still haven't started.

Rish and I got together last night to do our normal podcasting routine, and afterward, we always grill each other on how our writing is going. I had to admit, after all my gung-ho, here we go stuff I've been spewing on this blog that I hadn't written for more than a week. I felt like a hypocrite. So first thing this morning, I sat down at the computer, and started planning out the outline for my story. After putting a few minutes in on that, I'm now excited and raring to go on the actual writing. I think it still needs a little more planning before I go all the way, but I'm going to start writing the first scene today.

For years, I've called this story "Megatron," because I wanted to name one of the characters that. I don't think I'll be able to get away with that for real, since I do plan on sending the story out to magazines and so forth when I'm done with it. But on the blog, I'll continue to call it "Megatron". I expect this to be a longer story than anything else I've ever written before, something like 20,000 words. That's just a guess, but I'll use it on the wordcount-o-meter here, so you can all see where I'm at. If you catch me slacking, get on my back. The comments section is open.

Thanks. I'll report on the opening scene tomorrow.