I create small challenges as well as large ones in my life to keep me writing. The biggest one right now is The Great Challenge, which has a cash equivalent prize attached to it. It’s at the top of my priority order. In other words, I’ll ditch any of the ones below to ensure that my short story of the week has been sent to Dean.

My secondary challenge is a complete novel this year, ready to send to an editor. NaNoWriMo is part of that.

Below those I make small craft challenges for myself. These come and go. Currently my challenge is to use every one of Dean’s optional prompts to start a story. This week, though, I dislike Dean’s prompt. If it prevents me from the primary challenge, I’ll dump it and that dumping will happen as soon as noon today. Either the prompt brings something from my brain that I can use or out it goes.

Hopefully my subconscious will come up with something.

Yesterday was a good day for writing with lots of friends along the way, in the physical write-in, the virtual sprints, and later on with Max.

One mistake, though, we let politics invade our writing conversation at the write-in and from that point on the only thing we produced were hurt feelings. Even worse, I was one of the main troublemakers. Not going to do that again. Politics is bad for writing productivity, whether on Twitter or in person.

I am slightly behind from where I should be right now, but if I write 2,700 words today I’ll be caught up.

18,988 words