Ha! That Will Teach Them!

It seems that the company you keep can influence the things you chose to do more than I had ever realized until recently.  I'll spare you all another Twitter love fest but the truth is with a few notable exceptions my friends are a direct result of getting to know people there.  And, they happen to be (for the most part) either a knitter or an author/podcaster.  We all know I already knit.  Nothing too surprising there.  

Writing, not so much.  Yes, I have had this blog for four years.  I started it in the hopes that I would be able to force myself to write more.  Force being the operative word.  I really didn't have much luck with that initially.  If you notice, in 2008 I only had 2 posts.  For the whole year!!  Not much of an improvement.  Then I started hanging out at the corner twitter bar where the writers were drinking their scotch, smoking their pipes, and working on the next great american novel (or the podcast version thereof).  And I started writing.  First haiku and senryu.  Then erotic short stories.

A couple of months ago I got an idea for a short story.  I told a close friend who writes beautiful erotica about it and asked him to write it for me.  Sort of an assignment.  It didn't feel like it was something I was ready to write myself.  Then I told a second friend who also writes erotica but with science fiction thrown in too.  Finally I started to tell a friend who writes horror and in thinking about his chosen genre I started playing what-if games with my original premise.  You know, things like what if the main character is a sociopath?  What if this character were a woman instead of a man?  And before long, I had taken the little writing assignment that I didn't think I was ready to write, multiplied it by a factor of at least five in scope and size and suddenly knew I had to write this myself.

So I went back to those same friends asking if they thought I could do this.   I was hoping they would tell me that it is too big a leap.  Hell, it's only been about three months since I wrote those first senryus.  I figured they would pat me on the head, tell me what a silly girl I was being, tell me to give it some time-maybe write a novella before attempting a full-blown novel, or ask how my knitting was coming.  Damn them!  Every last one of them! Every last one of the bastards cheered me on.  I know what it is.  Misery loves company.  They just want me as stressed out about word counts, pacing, and point-of-view as they always are. Well, I see through them.  I'm going to agonize over location, character development, and finding the right writing software instead.  So there!

That will teach them!