Fried Brain.

Time Spent: 4 hours

Found another good site from the WD 101 best web sites article:
WritingOnTheRun.com
The description that WD gives the site says that it has a mom and pop feel, and it really does, but it's another great site. Articles galore, ranging from query letters to simple writing tips to get authors inspired to pound the keyboard.

Also looked at the Writer's Market online. It's a subscription site, but it has 1500 more listings than the hard copy I would buy at the bookstore. I know it would have more information than I would know what to do with, but I still need to think about it because of the cost. Of course, there is a month to month subscription which might convince me... At any rate, I did sign up for a couple of newsletters from WM that will give some good tips and information, I'm sure.

I also searched out more hard copy journals to see if any of them might be good places to submit some stories. The great thing about some of these print journals is that if they accept work, they pay, many as much as $50 minimum for a story as short as 500 words, which just sounds amazing to me. This might sounds silly or simplistic, but my mind is starting to think of stories in word count instead of pages. I'm so used to including word counts in my stories that it's almost like doing math formulas in the conversions of it all. And really, just think about it. A page seems so big. A word is just a little thing. But write enough of them and they take up a lot of space. Trying to write a three page story can sometimes seem very intimidating. But writing a 750 word story? Hey - that's nothing at all.

Which leads me into writing, which I did today. I decided I couldn't face a blank slate, so I picked up a story I started probably six months ago. This is a story that has been in my mind for years, and I had actually been planing on making a book of it. Then I started writing flash based on Bible stories, and I thought maybe this would work better in a book as part of a collection instead of a stand alone novel. So that's how it started. Having written about 400 more words on it today, with some research on the timeline of Christ's trial and crucifixion thrown in for really good measure, I'm starting to think again about the book idea.

So what did I learn today? Writers write, and should write every day. Check! Oh, and three hours in one day? Not usually a problem. But four? Fried Brain, anyone?