jazzfish | i wrote a thing!

In early May the Wiscon newsletter mentioned a Spontaneous Writing Contest, free to enter but only open to the first eight applicants. I thought for about five minutes and emailed Richard Russell, the guy running the contest, saying "yes i want to do this." He emailed me back with "great! you're number 9, first alternate. show up at 8:30 on Saturday and see who dropped out."

Come yesterday morning I was standing at the registration desk at 8:25, with what looked like eight other potential contestants. Luckily (for me) a few of the first entrants decided to either sleep in or skip Wiscon, so I got to play.

How this worked: Richard gave us a USB stick containing a .rtf file. In that file were the contest rules and suggestions (which we'd already seen, but it's good to have them right there) and a snippet of dialogue. We all had an hour to write a story incorporating that snippet of dialogue. Then they'd be judged by three people whose names escape me, and posted on the wall by the sixth floor elevators.

I am honestly not sure why I decided to do this. It doesn't seem like my kind of thing: no time to edit, just vomiting out words, and the stricture of 'must include this bit.' Partly it's because the 'must include this' is far far easier on me than 'must write about this subject,' which was what made the VP story-in-a-week so stressful. Mostly I think I just didn't think about it, and just thought "hey, writing."

So I read the dialog snippet, and thought "wow, that's kinda restrictive." (A being with strange grammar complaining about how stupid earthling habits are, including their lack of a unified planetary government, and maybe they should fix that?) So I wrote some dialog around the snippet, and found a couple of characters, and brainstormed, and wrote more, and found something that looked a little like a plot and not at all like the plot I thought I was writing, and wrote more, and realised I had no interest in ending the story the way I'd thought I was going to, and wrote some more, and found an "ending," and wrote that plus a beginning so that the ending made sense, and it was 9:28. I slapped a title on it ("WE SERVICE ALL FOREIGN VEHICLES"), saved it to the USB stick, checked twice to make sure it had saved, and ran it downstairs to Richard.

I then proceeded to not think about it for the rest of the day.

... okay, that's a lie. The thing is, I felt pretty good about it. It was a complete story written in an hour, it was not a direction anyone else was likely to go, it was even kind of funny. For a first draft (well, a 0.9th draft) I had no real complaints. I still had this little twinge in my stomach, though. What if it's crap? What if everyone else is a zillion times better? All that. So I mostly didn't think about it, and I went to panels and hung out with

uilos and

blairmacg and

queenoftheskies.

The "ceremony" was that night at ten. The eight of us, plus Richard and a few spectators, crammed into one of the Quiet Rooms. Like I said, I felt pretty good about my story. I thought I had a decent shot at being in the top three at least.

Third place went to Phil, who I'd seen around a few times.

Second place went to Cislyn, who I'd talked to briefly while waiting that morning (she was #10).

My throat started closing up.

"And, first place..." Richard squinted at the envelope, then brought it closer to his eyes. We waited. "... Tucker McKinnon!"

Applause. Exhale, smile.

The eight stories are currently on the wall opposite the elevator. Mine has a blue ribbon taped next to it. I'm told they'll be posted online at some point.

Mine's not bad but it's rough, so very rough. The opening needs to be fleshed out, and most of the middle needs rewriting.

For being written in an hour... I'm still pretty happy with it. It's cute, and it's complete, and there's a solid core there that I could revise substantively and possibly submit somewhere.

That's later. For now? I wrote a thing, and it did not suck.