Thomas McAuley is a San Antonio fiction writer who broods over weird stories. Bizarro stories. Absurdist stories. Whatever label, they're strange stories about impossible things and written with normal, solid language.

Too often, beginning writers hear is, "Story must have conflict." The later understanding is that the conflict can come in many shapes and sizes. Conflict can be a direct interpretation of the word, like someone being chased by a knife-wielding crazy person, or an argument or a quest like you have in Lord of the Rings. But it can be, and often is, more subtle -- a man with ADD's struggle to appear normal.

Hrm...too close to home, perhaps.

The point is that every effective story has to have some reason to have been written. A story about a man standing, walking across the room, pouring himself a glass of water and sitting down at a table isn't a story at all. It's a description. It might even be written poetically, but to be a story, there needs to be some...conflict. Dammit.

Possible conflicts in this simple scenario:

• The man would need to have some difficulty in moving.
• He has made a bet that he could go a whole day without drinking water, so he knows that drinking the water would mean losing the bet.
• Maybe he's locked in the room and the crazy person who put him there only gave him water laced with drug that will force him to reveal a secret, thus making the decision to alleviate a trade-off.

Fun. This, really, is the part of writing that I tend to like -- the planning and justification of motivation and action.

And THAT'S why I was so shocked that I had totally neglected to do so in a recent story. I had an evil force descend on a situation and do a bunch of cool nasty stuff. The nature nasty stuff was so cool by itself, thought, that I forgot to give a reason why this particular evil person had decided to descent in this particular place and torture this other particular person.

Crap and damn.

Looking back, I realize that not only does the story have to have a conflict, it also has to have a reason for the conflict and a reason for selecting a place, and selecting a victim.

For the same reason that a character's actions must follow a logical stimulus, every element of the story must also have a logic justification for existing in the place and with the other characters in the story. Otherwise, you may as well be rolling dice.

So, I had a great story concept and a couple of great characters (all imho) but I failed to show why they were there and why they were pitted against one another. No concept or characters can overcome such a vacuum.

Moral: Right up front, give every story character specific, uncontrived justifications for his/her presence and deeds. The same can be said of setting, time, and plot.

The break over the holidays can officially be declared a success. For the first time in -- well, ever -- I was disciplined enough to actually step away from work for the full two weeks and dedicate the same number of hours each day to writing. I can say that not since my days painting in the loft studio overlooking 1st Avenue and the Cumberland River (before the Titans statdium, mind you) have I enjoyed, in essense, full days dedicated to art.

In that time, completed a 3500-word story and a 5000-word edit. If you knew anything about my writing struggle over the last few years, you'd know that one of these would have qualified as a huge accomplishment, but to have pulled off both -- unthinkable. Completed a story in less than a month has felt like a turning point. Finishing a satisfying story in fewer than 5000 words also feels like an important event, but I haven't wrapped my head around it yet. The finished edit to the other story, just proved that I still have the discipline to do the thankless part of this craft.

So, as this is a writing blog, I feel obligated to share what made this time successful. I wouldn't have thought much about it had I not been asked about my writing by an author recently moved to San Antonio.

In my response to him, I realized that I can be blind and stupid and slow to manage my emotions.

(In the interest of humor, I should stop there but I won't.)

No...I just related that I had never written a story until '06 when I first decided to begin writing seriously and professionally. I wrote and wrote, sucking every inch of the way, until in '08, I wrote my first good story for a contest, Spirit and Speck. It won honorable mention in the contest I entered it into and the rewrite got published in an online mag.

Enter emotions. Foolishly, but not entirely unexpectedly, I felt that I was unstoppable, that anything I wrote would knock people over. I had just begun. I wanted to show the world how great I was and that meant entering contests.

Not too quickly, after a series of better-than-average but not winning results in 24-hour contests, I learned that I'm not at my best when I write quickly, that my strength comes from my passion and ideas, not my speed. I believe that the contest stage also damaged my writing psyche. Now, instead of thinking entirely about the story, I found myself thinking more than I ever had about people's reactions to my work, as if I had people waiting for my next work. I believe it took finally completing Forever By His Side, the 15k work that took me a year and a half to finish, to bring me back to my right artistic mind. But it wasn't until the two weeks at the end of 2011 that I was able to use that new, smarter energy to some productive end.

For the first time since before Sprit and Speck, I feel like an artist. And that HAS to continue to be what it's all about. It just sucks that it took me so long to get back to this point.