Alright guys, so here's the deal, I'm a bad person. I'm a loser, I'm lazy, I'm a liar apparently, and I'm sure as hell really dramatic. So, naturally, I write to survive.
Firstly, an update on my life. (If you were enjoying the anonymous thing, poo for you because we're dropping that. My pen name is ELI and you're all welcome to call me E. If you want to get more personal, we'll get to that later.) So, I got a sweet new job as a clinical psychologist that takes up 80% of my time. Exciting. Exhausting. Worth it. I have a seven year old son who takes up 90% of my time and remaining energy. Amazing. Exhausting. Worth it. (It's not more than 100% if they overlap, ok relax.) I also still sometimes write. I revamped a story I've been at war with for the better part of eight years (I know, oh God) and it's finally going the way I'd like it to, and that takes up those wee hours at night that I occasionally can spare. However, writing one story, alone, with few people to bounce ideas off of, it ain't easy. So, of course, oftentimes I find myself sitting with my laptop and no less than ten notepad pages open, two notebooks beside me with almost illegibly scrawled one-liners and tidbit ideas, a large mug of coffee, the TV left on on the Netflix homepage, desperately wishing for something to spark my inspiration and start from somewhere, all the meanwhile eyeing Sims and wondering if I should just waste five hours building a virtual house.
That brings us to here. 30minutetales is a secondary blog off of this one that I'm going to be writing online from. This one is dead. This one is the messenger blog for the secondary one. It's a vessel to the new blog's soul, if you will.
In 30minutetales I'm going to accept various prompts. Depending how it progresses, I'll maybe pick and chose which ones to do first or at all, but in the meantime I do need to challenge my creativity to work with anything I'm given. So I accept a prompt, and in 30 minutes I will write as much as I can for that idea. Maybe it'll be the seemings of the beginning of a short story or such or an excerpt from one, I don't know yet. Like I said, we'll see. But I think if I can focus on one idea for half an hour and write as much as comes to me, it'll get easier to work on my own clock (which, as most fellow writers will know, is literally the hardest part of writing).
I don't know how active I'll be, as I mentioned, between my family and my work, but I hope to devote half an hour or an hour each day, or at least a good few hours a week. I mean, the more prompts I get, the more ideas I'll have, the more I'll want to write them, but hey I won't beg.
I will (eventually???) have a page on the new blog outlining what sort of prompts I'm looking for and soon you will probably learn what I'm good at and what I'm shit and and if I'm shit at something, I will absolutely accept constructive criticism for improvement. (And I use "constructive criticism" loosely because I just don't like the term but for lack of a better phrase, whatever.) I will mention this now though, don't expect any fan fiction-y things because I find it really difficult to write as an existing character that somebody else created. I'm not in their head and I don't know all the details that make them act and react the way they do. I can speculate and observe but it never feels right. So if you were going to prompt something like "Sirius Black gets drunk and tries to seduce a teacher" guess what, that's not happening because as much as I love Sirius Black (and God knows I do) I can't write him and feel like I'm staying true to his character. Who, by the way, the fandom decided was a manslut, when in canon, while the ladies did fawn over him, he basically ignored them. According to HP WIKI, anyway. I digress. If you DO request something like that, I'll probably take the idea but I'll change the character's name at the very least, so it doesn't distract or discourage me.
30 Minute Tales will be open for business as soon as I am satisfied with the page and everything, but you guys can send prompts whenever you want. I know I've let you down a lot and I feel really bad, but here's to hoping this time will be better.
