I can't believe it's the end of September already! This month has flown by, unlike the 56 weeks it took for Renee to write her 1k a week Wednesday Briefers flash fiction story, Thwarted. Did you read it? Make sure you share your comments below, but first my interview with her! 

Chocolate or Vanilla?

Chocolate

What's your favorite room in your house? Do you plot or write there?

My favorite room in the house is my craft room. I don’t really plot or write there though, partly because that room is honestly disorganized chaos. It definitely needs an in depth cleaning. I do mostly sewing in that room, as well as crafts for my at home craft business.

What is your favorite book?

It’s been so long since I’ve been able to do any reading, that I honestly couldn’t pick a favorite book. And many of the books that I read now are the books that I read to my little man. And while I cherish being able to read to him, I wouldn’t say any of his little books would be my favorite.

What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

My favorite things to do are camping, fishing, just being outdoors. Lately I do a lot of crafting, and playing with my little guy, but for the most part I love to share my love of the outdoors. We haven’t got to do much camping the last couple of years, for various reasons, but hopefully soon our summers and fall will  be back to spending time at the lake or in the mountains. Ironically, camping is always where I seemed to do my best writing.

It’s been a while since you had time to write. What’s the best part of being an author you miss?

Losing myself in the story. I used to be able to sit down and write and everything else just fell away. It let me get whatever I was feeling out, and at the same time allowed me to focus on something other than whatever was going on in life. I tend to bottle things up and for some reason, when I would be really into a story, everything just kind of melted away. I miss the release I got from writing, but I’m still hopeful that I’ll get back to it. The stories are there, I just struggle to get them out since I can’t stay up until all hours of the night, which is when I did most of my writing.

If you could give advice to yourself when you first started writing, what would it be?

The first one would be not to post until something is finished, with the exception of these 1K chapter stories. It puts too much pressure I think and trying to rush it in order to post can affect the story. The other thing is to not worry about it being perfect, just get the story out, as it can always be edited to fix major mistakes.

What is the best part of writing a 1k a week story? The hardest challenge?

The best part is that a 1K chapter is easily doable in a week, so it helps to keep an author writing. In fact, if I ever manage to get back to writing, I may very well start with flash stories just to get back into the groove of it. The hardest part is keeping chapters to the 1K word limit and have smooth transitions. In fact, while I really stuck to the 1K format for the first half or so of the story, in later chapters I have many that are a bit longer.

Did you connect more with Mark or Trey when you wrote the story?

I honestly can’t even remember. But that being said, I will say this. When I write, I have to have a good connection with all the main characters, or the story doesn’t get written. I’ve had stories before that I completely changed one of the characters because they were just not someone I could connect with. That wasn’t the case with Thwarted. I stayed connected with both Mark and Trey throughout and their characters never strayed from who they were to begin with.

It’s been nearly 10 years since you wrote Thwarted. Would you change anything about it now?

I don’t think I’d change anything about the storyline, but I would like to go back into it and smooth things out a bit. Maybe combine chapters and provide better transitions.

Do you have a favorite scene or line from the story?

It’s been so long since I wrote Thwarted that I really can’t remember any specific favorite scenes or lines. But, if pressed I’d have to choose the first prompt line, which was “Count sheep? I’d rather count…” mainly because it was the prompt that started it all, and I really think that scene kind of set the tone for Mark’s relationship with Jackie and Brent.