One Little Elephant

I wrote scene #1 of A Zombie Romance in minutes. The only editting required was the deletion of a few extraneous adjectives and adverbs and some punctuation tweaks. That week, I could write anything (or believed I could) brain to paper, and like the result. It was heaven. The following week was very different.

I'm not inclined to believe in muses. At least not when writing is easy. But when it isn't, blaming a muse has appeal.

Getting scene #2 of A Zombie Romance down was a hair pulling experience. I wrote more than 4000 words to get the 500 I ended up with and I'm still not satisfied with those. I ran down one rabbit hole after another, couldn't turn around and was forced to back out. I finally had to just post it and forget it. It's a bit of fun after all and I needed to get back to real work.

Unfortunately last week, my muse, if there be one, was no more interested in real work than she was in a bit of fun. *sigh*

How about you? Do you have a muse? Is she faithful or fickle?


Something that's helping me write today: the courage to fail inspired by this quote from Will Rogers: "If you hit the bull's eye every time, you're standing too close to the target."

This is just a bit of fun. It began in a forum on CritiqueCircle.com as a challenge to write about a subject we knew little about. I know next to nothing about zombie-romance and I have no intention of spending even 10 seconds researching the topic, if such a topic even exists. But just for fun I thought I'd write a short zombie-romance and see where it goes. So here are the first few paragraphs. I'll try to add an additional few each Friday until I either become hopelessly fatigued with it or it ends. Feel free to point out all the zombie-lore I get wrong.

A Zombie Romance
by Regina Ruth Richards

Igor limped down the street. He paused briefly in front of the Romano house, but shook his head and moved on. He was certainly in the mood for Italian tonight, but Rita had mentioned there was a new family in town, the Lees, and she had her heart set on Chinese. She’d be ticked if he arrived already full and he hated it when she got mad at him. That's how he'd lost a good portion of his foot last week. Snapping off body parts was how Rita expressed rage.

He rounded the corner and came to a dead stop. His mouth dropped open and his tongue, if he'd still had one, would have hung out. Sitting on a bus bench just a few yards away was the most wondrous creature he'd ever laid his eye on. She was a vision beyond his wildest nightmares.

Something that's helping me write today: the weather outside is cold and rainy so there's no temptation to be out and about. The winter view out my window pleases me in some contrary way. Perhaps because I get to enjoy its beauty from this side of the pane, in toasty warm comfort.