Things I learned from Marvel...

I have a confession. I love comic books.

When I was younger I would read He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and She-Ra Princess of Power, then Thundercats, and from there I found Power Pack, which was the support strip.

From there, because the strips I was reading had Franklin Richards in them, I found the Fantastic Four, and my love affair with all things Marvel began, backed up on TV by Spider-Man and X-Men. For some reason the DC heroes never caught my attention as much. Superman and Batman just weren't as exciting.

But anyway, this week I figured out two very important things when writing a fanfic about a Marvel character - red headed girls are essential to any good story (Mary Jane/Spider Man, Jean Grey & Mystique/X-Men, Pepper Potts/Iron Man, and my personal favourite Firestar/New Warriors etc.), and you can't go wrong with a name beginning 'St' (Stark, Storm, Stane, Stern, etc.).

Happy new year?!

I am a terrible blogger, I'm sorry... I kept thinking I should write a blog, and then I never seemed to get round to it. Much like my writing so far this year. My OU course kept me busy with the first assignment due in in the second week of January, and I think with all the rushing around getting that done and in I forgot what it was like to write for fun.

I've signed up to WriYe, which is essentially like NaNoWriMo but with a more structured feel and it lasts a year. That has sort of helped get me writing again, but my total words for the year stads just shy of 10,000 at the moment, which is really pathetic when you consider I'd written that much in a week in November.

Of course it's the quality that counts and not the quantity, but even the 10,000 words I've written this month don't necessarily feel that I'm writing good fiction. In fact, the best things I've written were two made up newspaper reports about the same ficticious event written in different styles - one like a women's magazine and the other like a tabloid like The Sun. That sort of kick started my writing again, but I'm still not feeling particularly inspired.

I think I've just discovered the point where writing becomes hard work.