charles barrow's writing

Here is the first drabble I wrote. I think I might have mentioned, in an earlier post, that I wrote it to send to a website that was calling for competition entries. They set the gene as SciFi, and the theme as Inventions . I spent a lot of time on this, a new writing form for me, honing and editing until I was happy. I had a lot of fun with it, and when it was finished I emailed it off, meeting the given deadline, and was very pleased with myself for having had the discipline to complete the given task. Listen, I know some people can knock out a great drabble in five minutes flat, but that's not how I work. I write, I edit, I leave well alone for a few days, I return to write, I re-edit, then ignore for a week, then return etc etc. I'd still be working on it now if the deadline hadn't forced me to send it out. Anyway, there was no happy ending to this story. I logged on, on the day following the competition deadline, only to find that the website hadn't changed, the la...

I struggle with similes, and metaphors. I mean I struggle to invent them. Whenever I'm writing a sentence, and I'm on a collision course with one or the other, when I know I'm going to need to invent one in the next 5 seconds, then I start to sweat. When I reach the point of no return, I usually drop a couple of question marks as place holders, in lieu of the magic metaphor, and then move on with the rest of the sentence, fully intending to return once I've given the problem some thought. So, no, they don't come naturally. It might take me hours, sometimes days, to think of one that I'm happy with. Often I never come up with anything, and then I'll go back and restructure a sentence so as to avoid the need. Occasionally, though, one will just pop into my head, like the simile in the header here, that I really like, and that I think is a cut above my usual standard. Unfortunately, this one occurred when I wasn't writing anything. So this is an orphan simi...