Last year, I attempted the whole NaNoWriMo thing and fell short.  Which is to say that I ran out of steam and quit.  I mean, I did have a job and a seven-month old.  So I didn’t feel badly about it.  Mrs. P suggested we enter the writing contest (fiction) at our local alternative weekly paper this month.  Good motivation to write.

I hadn’t thought about fiction since last year, and I read a short story I thought of working on for this endeavor.  It was written in pencil in a book.  Turns out that it’s way too dirty.  Also, well, I only got through about 5,000 words of it before I realized I could never cut it down to the contest’s 2,500 word limit.  That one might have to get submitted to Playboy or something.  Damn.

So I popped out 1,000 words of a new short story tonight in a half hour on a cup of tea with milk and honey.  (My throat hurts.)  Parts of it made me laugh out loud.  I mean, I sometimes laugh hard at things that aren’t funny.  But maybe this is funny.  I don’t know.  I have to finish it tomorrow or early on Friday and find out.

But it feels damned good to be writing again.  And then I found a pen I’d been looking for.