a to z challenge: because / by Katherine Hajer

Peer pressure can be a terrible thing.

I've had a few writing plans for a while. One of them is to keep revising the novella a posted here as a serial a few years back. It keeps getting delayed, mostly because I keep alternating between being unwell and being overwhelmed at how much book-writing there is to do. I save all my energy for the all-important day job, and there just isn't much left for anything else.

Still and all, it's got to the point where the stress of not writing is worse than the stress of trying to write all the time. I've decided to give Camp NaNoWriMo a go, and commit to revising an hour a day. That will probably make me a bit crispy, based on past experience, but I'm hoping I can gear down without stopping completely in May.

In the meantime, because there's always something else, I've decided to take part in the A to Z Challenge for blogs. Most bloggers I read who have done this choose non-fiction topics, but I've decided to write fiction. Yeah. Don't say it.

The A to Z fiction is an idea I've had around for ages, and already posted three entries for previously for Friday Flash:

I made up my alphabetical list of topics last night, some letters with alternatives in case the first choice leaves me with writer's block. I figure I can write the six days of stories for the week on Sunday, and then just schedule them to publish throughout the week. A to Z posts every day but Sundays. To make it all the way to Z I'll have to post the last story on the last Sunday of the month, the 30th, but that's all right.

By the end of it, I'll have about as many scraps and snippets as I did when I started the novella I'm revising now.

Who knows? It might even work.