Here's the quick bullet points about shootouts, for those who've never heard of one - keeping in mind this is just how the ones I've been in go:
- 2-3 teams of writers, usually no more than 5 to a team
- a prompt is released at the start of the week
- every writer has the whole week to write a story on that prompt
- the following week, each team receives the 5 stories from another team, with the names removed (this is to remove gamesmanship from the thing and focus on the stories)
- stories are reviewed and 'scored' out of 10
- the following week, a new prompt is released
- at the end of 3 rounds, the highest cumulative score from each team goes on to the "finals"
- the final round is also one week, and one new prompt
- stories are usually a minimum of 2,500 - 3,000 words
This last time, which was my fourth shootout, I made it to the final round, which was awesome.
The upshot of all of this is that, in the course of 8 weeks, I did four stories, and about 40-50 pages of material. (My final 'short' story was 21 pages long.) Unfortunately, that was also back in April.
Since then - nothing. I can't seem to get back into it.
There's been some real-life things that have taken up some time, but not all of it. There's been enough moments that I've said to myself, "See, I should be writing right now," that I could've been.
As of now, I'm starting to get a little 'tappy-tappy' back as I think there's only 3 more days left to shape up on of those 4 stories for an anthology I want to submit to, but the allure of passive entertainment is strong right now.
So - my question to you - do you ever go through patches like this, and how do you get going again?
#RantOver