Hello everyone,

General:
I hope that you've all had an excellent Christmas and New Year holiday period, and that you're all thirsting to get back to more challenges, though reading all the emails, it seems we all enjoy the informal interchanges. I know I do.

My special Christmas challenge was successfully attacked by five of you. All five of you will get a bonus point for the overall challenge total. This was a new venture - I've not seen it done anywhere else, but there are clearly strategies which can be adopted. For instance there are few words which end in a double letter other than L or S, and for surnames, there are few other than L. E is the most common letter, and although a quotation is a small sample of words, it will often be the most frequent. If there are any other single letters, you should have 4 out of the 5 vowels, which is a good start.

Anyway, I'm pleased that you enjoyed it: if we do go for another year, I've got a new one for next Christmas!

Regular Challenges:
Challenge 5 should now have been completed and sent to John. I hope you like the sort of way we spend money on the West Somerset District Council!

Challenge 4 should now have been completed and sent to Ann.

See the Challenges page for details of Challenge 6, and the results of Challenge 4.

We've now had 3 challenges through to completion, and the winners have been: Catherine, Christine and Zena, with a lot of other names in the runners-up positions. We should know about Challenge 4 shortly, so as soon as I do, I'll circulate the top merit list so far.

So for Challenges 7-10, I'm asking the following to be collators:

Challenge 7 - January 25th - Sally
Challenge 8 - February 15th - Di
Challenge 9 - March 8th - Geoff
Challenge 10 - March 29th - Zena

If any of you are unable to do this, let me know - there are still several others who are next in line!

Group Novel:
Click here for more details of the group novel, and of another idea from Chris for a group writing project.

Discussion:
We didn't have a discussion theme last time - we've had a gap, but I'd like to hear about how long it takes you to write a short story to a given theme, - and how you go about it.

I'll give you my approach for a story of 1,600 words i.e. a Writers News Short Story. the last one featured a Park Keeper as the theme character.

I thought about writing this as we went to Cornwall on Boxing Day, and that's when I'm likely to have free time, and I take my laptop. I looked up the topic that had to be in at the beginning of January just before I left home. I decided on the general theme during the Journey, but for various family reasons, I wasn't able to start writing it until December 28th. By then the idea had firmed up somewhat, and I wrote about 1,000 words in just over an hour and a half. On December 29th, I used up another couple of hours, and wrote the rest of the story: I was now quite happy with the plot, but I had a 2,250-plus story.

Now I always exceed the number of words in my stories, usually by 25%. Thus on this length of story, getting rid of 3-400 words by judicious pruning isn't too problematic, and the last 50 come by tightening up the writing and grammar. Getting rid of the 600 words by pruning was difficult, and I needed two sessions of more than an hour each to do that. I always print out the story to do the tightening up and fine tuning of words, because I'm always casting my eye over it at any odd ten minutes or so. Eventually, when I'm satisfied, I print the final copy for sending it off.

The whole time spent was about 3-4 hours writing the original story, 2-3 hours to do the pruning, and probably a total of 2 hours on the tightening up and fine tuning. So about 8-9 hours to produce the final story.

How does that compare with anyone else's experience? Some of you, I'm sure, write a much better first attempt than I do, where my main intention is to get it down as quickly as possible.

I've got another topic in the wings for next Alpha Day, but if anyone wants to suggest a theme, please do so.

Best wishes to you all

- Olaf