Apparently, Writing is like Dieting

As in, once you fall off the wagon, it's hard as hell to climb back on.

It's been a long dry spell since the end of NanoWrimo, broken only by a one-night flurry of writing that produced the first draft of "Fire," the story I'm going to read at the next Hoover Library Flash Fiction Night.

Excuse #1: My day job has become a joyless, draining, soul-sucking slog.

So What #1: Tolkien worked on his Book of Lost Tales in the Allied trenches while fighting in WWI. Man up, Jared!

Excuse #2: Sitting on my writing to-do list are the N^∞th rewrites of "The Orbit of Mercury" and The Blood Prayer, both of which make my eyes bleed when I look at them.

So What #2: Get a wet wipe. The Work Must Be Done!

So here's the plan: I think I need to work on something new, so something new it is. I've been holding on to the characters from my aborted 2009 Nano in case a story came along that I could throw them into. Well, one has. I'm not sure where it's going, and I'm not sure how it's going to end. I've never done seat-of-the-pants writing before, but this time I'm just going to wing this bastard and see how it comes out.

The ingredients: Space travel documentarians. An impending supernova. An order of monks who won't evacuate. A liquid life form. Stalagmites of "glass coral." Rivers that run upstream. Shooting the rapids uphill by means of magnetic induction. 1,000 words per day. Death before dishonor.

Here we go.