I’m not writing enough.

There, I said it. Admitting that you aren’t writing enough when you’d like to honestly be able to call yourself “a writer” is a bit embarrassing for as my friend Sal once told me “It doesn’t matter if you get paid. Writers write. Period.” I try not to argue with Sal when she explicitly vocalizes punctuation. I like having all my fingers and toes.

Point is, I’ve been trying to find ways to write more, to take Julia Cameron’s advice and not make writing such a big deal. It’s a hard thing to do when you function well (OK, when you function highly efficiently…could someone please throw some hand grenades at me for the rest of my life? Thanks.) under deadline pressure. It’s one of the reasons why I find the structure of NaNoWriMo so comforting: there’s a schedule and a deadline and it’s clear and measurable.

And since my problem is finding time – this is what happens when you get involved in community politics – and since Cameron’s advice is to fit the writing in where it fits, I’ve started with a book called Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction In Five Minutes.

If I can’t find five minutes a day to write I figure I’m not a writer.

What appears in the Fast Fiction category are the results of those five minute stints (mostly) unedited. Some of them are better than others, and they are all rough. But hey, they’re writing.

I’ve created this new blog for my fiction because it just didn’t seem right to me to mix fiction with my regular blog. Perhaps that was a mistake. Time will tell.

Other categories and entries will appear here as I get the chance to back fill the stories that are currently living other places on the web.