Musings of a Hopeful Author

I think I must enjoy making my self-assigned tasks as hard as possible.  Writing, for instance, is not the easiest of things to do, at least not well.  Why then do I decide to set nearly all of my stories in other time periods?  Sometimes I feel as if I hardly know anything about the time I am living in, but even that amount of knowledge is considerably more that the times in which I set my stories.  Completely ridiculous.  Not only that, but I tend to also like to set the stories in other locations, not just outside of my hometown, but in places I have never visited.  So, a time period I am unfamiliar with in a place I have never seen.  Nothing to to that... right?  Then tying in plots, characters, etc. is just a lot of work. Granted, I enjoy learning the answers to the questions that arise through the research that becomes necessary, but it can be a bit hard.  I think it might be easier if I still had access to online journals, etc. like I had when I was in college.  They were s

So, apparently the story has to take place in the location reference, the story can't simply mention the location at some point in the story... I found that out Sunday morning, so a new story was written Sunday afternoon and ultimately submitted.  I guess I should read the instructions ahead of time in future competitions, but where's the fun in that?! If you're interested in reading the ill-fated short story that I initially wrote, but couldn't submit, please refer to the short story section of this blog and look at "In the Glare of the Hotel Roxy." If you read it and have any feedback, please comment on this post.

So, in view of my lack of progress on the writing front, I have decided to try my hand at another writing contest.  It's a "flash fiction" challenge that gives you 2 days to write a story in 1,000 words based off of the prompts they've assigned.  My first assignment is: Genre: Suspense Location: A Dark Alley Object: Chocolate Milk I don't know about you, but that's a rather odd assortment.  And as was the case with the previous contest, I am not much of a fan of the assigned genre.  Needless to say, that makes the whole thing a but more challenging.  Add to that you have to build a chocolate milk laden suspense story in 1,000 words, and you have quite the test. So far so good in that I at least have an idea for a story.  I had three right off the bat, in fact.  Two of them were about men going into the alley.  One man went because he heard someone screaming in fear and he wanted to help them.  The other man went because he was running from men trying t