I did spend a few hours beforehand wandering around the mall with a friend before, but I don't think that wore me down that much :).
Part of my regular weekend schedule is going to my bi-weekly writer's group on Sunday afternoons. I might've mentioned them before, but we first met doing NaNoWriMo a few years ago, and someone decided to keep it up. It was initially just monthly, and we've expanded in the last year or so to twice a month. It's been a great way for me to keep up on my writing, and I have to admit that some months, the only time I do any writing at all is during those three hour sessions.
I'm currently working on a short story challenge for a contest. I've got until the end of June to finish it. The way this challenge works is there's about a dozen art pieces (paintings and photos), and you pick one to write a story of 2000-5000 words inspired by the artwork. Sounds fairly simple (I've done the same thing, for poetry, in a writing class), until I looked at the artwork and realized that all the pieces are modern, real-world, non-quirky images.
I don't write reality; it's not really my thing. I gave it a go with a couple of different pictures, but finally decided that I'm a fantasy writer (and abstract-y), I'd write fantasy. So the story ended up being a mix of fantasy and reality, with the main character losing the ability to tell the difference between the two. It's only a couple of sentences from being fully written (I haven't decided if I want the ending to be 'strange' or 'horror'), and then I'll have quite a bit of work to do for re-writing and editing it. It kind of reads like I threw up on the page, at the moment (apologies for the visual :). But really, it does!). It's all a bit out of order, I think I'm leaving out certain important details, and there's very little dialogue. Not necessarily a bad thing, I think, but it's something for me to consider.
I realized recently that a lot of my writing style is based off the older books I read growing up, like random philosophers (Plato, Alexis de Tocqueville), long lists of fairy tales and mythology, Frankenstein, Dracula, etcetera. Books with very little dialogue. I suppose the fairy tales saved me from habitually using paragraph-long sentences. At any rate, it wasn't until I wrote a scene some years ago with five people talking in the same conversation that I actually learned how to write dialogue. My first story - in it's current incarnation as Nightmare (one of the short stories in my book) - is an example of how I wrote before I figured out dialogue.
