Actually, I have been. If you look at my flash fictions page you will see a weekly entry.  A wonderful and creative friend of mine posts a picture every Friday to one of my online writing groups.  (He also just published a children’s book called One Hungry Werewolf: And Other Monstrous Rhymes; you can find it here, it’s adorable.)  So I log off the day job, take a peek at the pic, and hop to it for 90 minutes. The resulting story is loaded over in my flash fiction section.

I put the 90 minute limit on myself for a couple of reasons.

Several years ago I entered a writing contest at a small science fiction con. We all got a flash drive with the same sentence on it and had to write a whole story around it. I don’t remember how much time we had, an hour or two.  The con was truly horrible. The story was passable. But the attempt was fun and I thought placing the same limitation on myself would likewise be fun. It is fun. Deadlines have a way of focusing you.

The second reason is that hey! It’s a Friday night. We have a tradition in my house that Friday night is date night. The husband-dude and I log off, go out for a glass of wine, good fish, and we talk.  That’s right; we actually talk to each other.  In person. Mano A Mano as it were. We don’t see a lot of each other during the week, so date night is important to our relationship. We laugh, bounce story ideas off of each other, talk about our goals, and we reconnect with that ethereal thing that drew us together all those years ago. I’m always anxious to get away from the desk and celebrate the end of another week.

So 90 minutes is it.  It gets the creative juices flowing into the weekend which is when I do the vast majority of my creative work. They vary in tone and genre, and because of the time limit they are not always perfectly edited.  But I offer you a glimpse into my creative mind, so please enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy creating them.

I hope you are navigating these most difficult of times with faith, love, and good literature.  

Oh, and Jimmie’s book? Please check it out. It’s adorable.