Woo hoo! My story based on the prompt fantasy/wating room/lobster won 3rd place in Round 1.5 of the NYC Midnight 2009 Creative Flash Fiction Writing Championship. I guess the judges weren't turned off by a single-minded farting dwarf. This bodes well for my future in the competition.

In unconfusing terms, Round 1 is comprised of two stories. We wrote the first in June and the second in July. We earn points depending upon our placement in our 15-person groups. I received 22 points for the first story so I'm sitting on 20 points. That means I'm leading my group!

All but the bottom five writers in each of the 16 groups move on to Round 2, writing the 3rd story, tonight. We'll have until one minute before midnight tonight until one minute before midnight on Sunday, 2 days to write a 1000-word short story. It's a challenge to be sure.

Since I'm someone who needs to think of data in all sorts of ways to understand it I came up with the following:

I'm going into the 2nd round in 23rd place out of a starting group of approximately 240. Percentage-wise that puts me in the top 9-10%, an A minus. With only the top 10 in each group moving on, we'll be down to 160 writers. My 23rd place drops me from an A minus to a middle B. Voila! There's my motivation. I'm not even doing anything and I have to study harder to keep up. This is the sort of thing I respond to: deadlines and dynamic odds.

Cross your fingers for me. I'm hoping for a good genre, setting and object (our prompt). Regardless, I'll take my long meditative walk and let the rhythm of my steps bring a story idea to me.