So I’ve been gone a while.

A long while.

A really long while.

Ok, I haven’t put anything new up in like 6 months.

I’m a bad, bad blogger. Even the last things I published were kinda phoned in. The Christmas Carol post didn’t have a title image. I didn’t even notice that until last night.

My NANOWRIMO outing? Pretty pathetic. See that counter over there in the sidebar? The one that barely reads 3,000 words? Yup, that was my actual word count.

I’ve had a heckuva time the last 6 months. Long story short, life sucks sometimes. We can deal or we can curl up in the corner wallowing in pity. Actually, I might’ve done that a bit…

Anyway, here I are. Back at the keyboard. Trying to build some semblance of my writing routine, pathetic as it was.

That counter? I’m leaving that up there. Call it a reminder. Call it a wakeup. Call it a failure. Hell, I don’t care. All I know is I’m not ashamed to have completely whiffed NANOWRIMO.

I’m not ashamed I’ve been absent the last 6 months.

I’m not ashamed. What I am is back.

The proof?

Flash fiction.

See, I think one of the reasons I haven’t been able to produce any writing I’m able to publish (even here) is that I’m overwhelmed. A novel is 100,000+ words. Even a decent short story runs out around 10,000. That’s a lot of words for someone that hasn’t actually written any fiction in more than a decade.

Enter Chuck Wendig. Seriously, if you want to write and you’re not reading his blog you should be. Really. You should be there instead of here right now.

On his blog Chuck posts Flash Fiction challenges every week. Quick and dirty writing prompts meant to get get a writer outside her comfort zone and put words to page.

This week is the first time I’ve taken the challenge. The week’s challenge is The Subgenre Boogie. The task is simple, select any two genres at random from a list of common genres. The story has to mash up the two genres and come it at under 1500 words.

You can catch the whole list at Chuck’s site.

Me? I used my goto random number generator at Random.org and drew a 13 and a 19. Superhero and Time Travel. You know, because those two have never been done before…

But something happened. You know that counter, the one that showed me completely blowing the NANOWRIMO challenge? Thing is, I DID research a novel. I completed all of my world building before I started that 3,000 words. And it HAPPENED to be a superhero story.

A weird thing happened when I got thinking about Superhero Time Travel: a wicked back story for one of my characters popped into my head.

So I wrote it. I kept it under 1,500 words. Actually 1,484 according to Scrivener. Then I edited, edited again, and polished. And I REALLY like it.

So I’m going to publish. Not on Amazon or Kobo. But here. Just for the hell of it. Because, for the first time EVER, I like a story enough to let other people read it.

I like it so much that I may make this a regular thing, Chuck’s flash fiction challenges. I figure it’s a good, quick way to get my feet wet with putting my fiction out there.

So, check in Thursday morning. Peregrine’s Folly goes live on this blog at 11 am.

Thanks for reading.