.png)
What a week. I tried, I really did. There’s something about Games Time that is all-consuming and I forget that life exists outside the interns, participants, planning, feedback, and all those thousands of emails. I didn’t even get to do Adam’s workshop this week. Last weekend, I had a blast with the WriteHive convention. I learned a lot about character types, agents, and the mechanics of writing. I watched some of the videos a second time through because the information is great. Sunday through Friday, I averaged 10-hour days on Games and a little on the rest of WW. I wish I could tell everyone how many people registered but in our experience, the real number tends to discourage writers because they feel they’re not good enough (a lie) and quit before they try. Just know that it’s a lot so when I talk about tasks, some took all day: I created every single feedback document by hand, wrote the Welcome Email and started scheduling that release process for two weeks from now. I updated our Parental Consent page and sent the consent forms to all the parents whose kids registered, searched every single registered email address to add Gamer badges to those who setup their WW site membership, and I worked with the interns on their Scoring and Critiques training. Then, because the back-end calculations spreadsheets are too bulky to load without crashing, I redesigned a few of the Achievement Tracker pages. We’ll start beta testing that tomorrow. My entire brain is numb. I’ve had an idea for a short story in my head for… since August. How many months is that? It’s one I’ve held so close I never even wrote the notes down but it’s still rattling around in there, squished between “how to setup your justification document” and “strange things found on the Titanic passenger manifest”.
The point is, I tried. I set aside three whole hours yesterday and I wrote one pen dry. It was so bad that I crossed most of it out with the next pen I picked up and then I did the unthinkable: I switched to first person. First person. That’s not my writing style at all but apparently, the narrator is insistent. This story is doomed.
Update during our blog reorganization, Sept 2022: I still haven't finished that story. First person narrative doesn't last long in my brain because I am not that person, experiencing those things. After the ~200 words, I stopped and set it aside for a future reconfiguration that, two years later, still has not happened. If I'm ever able to finish it, it's called Tethered about it's about shark research.
Fiction projects: 1 Fiction words this week: 400 250
About the author: Theresa Green is the co-founder of The Writer's Workout and a crime fiction writer.