Category Archives: my writing

Q: How long does it take you to write 600 words? (That’s the equivalent of two double-spaced typed pages.)

A: Three hours. Two hours and forty-five minutes of procrastination (say:  a cup of coffee, a book, a bath, a sandwich, and some wandering around the house worrying about the clutter, and all this on a GOOD day) and fifteen minutes of writing.

Q: Fifteen minutes, huh? That’s fast. You must write a lot.

A: I taught myself to type in high school and then worked as a secretary for several summers. Letters can indeed come out of my fingers at the rate of 600 words in 15 minutes, which is 40 words per minute. But most of those words suck, to be honest. They’re probably going to be rewritten ten times over.

Q: Why not just go slower and write it correctly the first time?

A: HAHAHAHAHAHA

Q (defensively): What?

A: I have only the haziest idea of what I am going to write until I have written it. It’s sort of like driving a car on a foggy night with no road and your eyes closed.

Q: Well, good luck with that.

A: Thanks.

This summer’s project is to get my short story collection out the door. All the stories are written, and I’m halfway through the introduction. On August 15th, I’m sending it to editor Deb Taber, and by the end of the month the text will be done. Here’s the table of contents:

Misfits from the Beehive State

by Kristin King

Contents

Introduction (My Cat Can Eat a Whole Watermelon)
The Wings
Into the  Box
Confession
Keeping House
Swallow the Clock
Feed the Monster
Grandmother Henrietta’s Curse
Out of the Box
Scarlet Ribbons

With some luck and hard work, this should be ready to go by the end of September. It will mark the end of a really long and frustrating journey . . . and the beginning of the next writing project!

Whew. I finished a draft of a story today. It was exceptionally difficult to finish. It’s a fanfiction, for one thing, and I feel pretty embarrassed about that. What’s weird is that I have been writing fanfictions, and feeling embarrassed about it, since I was in seventh grade. Back then my fanfictions were based on Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. I felt bad because I couldn’t seem to think up my own characters, and I also felt bad because my writing wasn’t as good as Enid Blyton’s. I started a ton of stories but didn’t finish any of them. If I could go back to that seventh grader I would just tell her to go for it, for heaven’s sake! I would tell her not to worry about quality because it’s the writing practice that matters. Stick with it and sooner or later, you are bound to come up with something fabulous.

I struggled again when I finished college. I was reading novelizations of the Doctor Who series and had learned that fans could write them and send them in for possible publication. In hindsight, that was an essentially impossible goal. But I had to set the goal so I wouldn’t feel like I was writing something with no purpose.

I didn’t finish the novelization – not even close. I went on to writing stories that people around me would respect. One day I would like to finish it properly and make it into a story.

This particular fanfiction that I just finished is something I started around 2008 or so. When the character River Song first showed up in the Doctor Who TV series, I was hugely impressed. She knew him, but being a time traveler, he hadn’t met her. So I wrote an adventure in which he knows her but she doesn’t know him. I had the whole thing planned out and laid out and it just sat there, half-finished. Now it’s a draft.

What will I do with it? Two possible options: post it on whofic.com or de-Doctor-Who-ize it, changing the character names and so forth, and try to get it published that way.

Either way, though, it was a huge accomplishment for me to finish a fanfiction. Thirty years after I first tried! Time to go celebrate.