I'm just sitting here plotting. Not evil-genius plotting. Not even particularly genius plotting. Just plotting.

Anyways, this blog serves one purpose: it is my online writing journal blog. In other words, here I will be reporting on anything to do with my writing and (hopefully) writing career. But of course, there may be a tangent or two here and there.

So, I've been doing creative writing since I was around five. I've been doing it as a hobby since ten at the latest. I've grown to absolutely adore it and it's beginning to take over my life. Despite the fact that school, getting a job and friends are all fighting to keep it in it's place.

The first major thing I remember writing was a story called Jake North about a man and his brother. He becomes a sailor and the brother a taxi driver and various other not-so-interesting stuff happens. I entered it in the Mary Durak Award for Young Writers in two seperate years. I also entered the same award with different stories two other years.

Since I moved from my old house and could no longer participate in the Mary Durak Award for Young Writers, my writing hasn't really been making it past my own house. And it sort of dwindled as a whole during 05 and 06 apart from entering NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org).

But in the last few days of 2006 I discovered a competition being run by Women's Weekly magazine and Penguin Books publisher. The challenge: write a 3000 to 5000 word story centred around a woman. The prize: the story published in Women's Weekly, $10,000 and Penguin Books would look at a completed novel manuscript to assess it for publishing plus two runners up would win $5,000. The competition closes on the 2nd of February and the winners will be announced later this year.

I quickly set about writing a story to enter. Originally titled Mirrors, my story Relfections is about a lady named Renae Byrd who discovers she is pregnant though it seems that is impossible for her and meets a mysterious woman who knows something about her past. It is just a smidget under 5000 words and my attitude toward it went up and down during the course of its creation. One moment I loved it and thought it was a sure win and the next I hated it and wanted to tear it apart. By the time I'd finished it, I was convinced it was the worst piece of trash ever to come from my mind. But my mum took it and read it and proposed deleting a plotline which she felt was firstly, unnecessary and secondly, not morally good.

At first I was a tad upset but I did what she suggested and deleted it. Almost immediately I began to feel good about the story. And I realized that it wasn't that I thought my writing was bad but rather something inside me was fighting against the iffy theme I'd introduced to the story. Now that I'd taken away that, I felt good about what I'd written on all accounts.

At the moment that story and another I thought could be a contender are being read by a friend and then after that, the story I choose to enter will be ready to send off. I'm very excited about this competition as I feel it may be a part of a promise God made me mid last year and the beginning of me stepping out into the calling I found last year. Perhaps in another post I'll tell you more about it but at the moment I don't feel like going off into a Spiritual tangent.

Until next time...
Lauren means Victory