It's Been A Slow Month

My workload is atrociously enormous at the moment, so work on chapter 5 has been slow. I've managed a rough average of 500 words per day, a quarter of what's normal for me.

What I usually do now is paste a little extract from the latest chapter, but instead I thought I'd tell you a different kind of story - the story of how I came to be writing horsewords.

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I sat in my little student room, wrapped in almost every article of clothing I owned. It was mid-January in Scotland, which means it's colder than a brass icebox.
This was the second week of the second semester of my second year into a Biology degree. Now that re-freshers had passed, and I'd fitted a month's worth of drinking to excess into one week, I relished the prospect of a quieter and altogether more sober week. Normally I would play some StarCraft, but my hands were too cold, so instead I browsed the videogames board on 4chan.
I don't recall the thread topic, but one post caught my attention due to the high number of replies it received. It was a link to a pastebin, and nothing else. I wondered what could a pastebin contain that would provoke such a reaction out of the good Anon's of the thread, so I checked it out. This is the pastebin in question: http://pastebin.com/u/That_Happy_Guy
So that's what I found. At the time I was aware of the following that MLP had garnered among adults, but didn't think much of it. I still watch Power Rangers and Scooby Doo whenever it happens to be on the television, and I figured it wasn't much different.
I suspect I was extremely bored, because I actually began reading some of the stories in the pastebin. Reading and enjoying them. I surprised myself. I was reading MLP fanfic (bad MLP fanfic at that) and enjoying it. As you can imagine, I was confused.

Let's jump forward a few months. It's now June last year. I'd watched the show itself, I had read everything on that pastebin, and a lot of other greentext-format stories as well. It got to the point where I was actually running out of stuff to read (because I didn't know places like fimfic existed), which was disappointing.
Then I had a crazy idea. If there's nothing left for me read, then why don't I write what I'd like to read? The thought came to me while I was doing my usual summer job at a theme park (not as fun as it sounds, in fact, it's very very boring).
This is how my first steps as a writer began, by writing vague plot elements with a ballpoint pen on cash-register receipts. When I got home, I would get on notepad (I still don't know why I chose notepad), and I would write out the story, using what was on the receipts to jog my memory. And yes, I would do it in greentext-format. This continued for a few months, adding about 300 words to the story whenever I got home from work. I never did a word count, but I suspect it was somewhere in the 25,000 range.

Then the next semester of university began, where I was busy getting shitfaced and eating takeaways. Then the essays and assignments came, and I largely forgot about the story I had been writing.
One day, I was food shopping, and I had a thought that came from literally nowhere. I decided that I didn't read enough. I thought my life would be richer and better if I read things other than reference texts and papers. With that notion in mind, I popped in to Waterstones (a book retailer here in bongland), with the intent of buying a book and actually reading it.
But wait, there was a problem. What do I like to read? I asked myself. I didn't know. Hell, how should I know? I don't read enough to know! So I asked myself, what do I like to watch? I like crime dramas, true crime, stuff like that, so I headed on over to the true crime section.
Pretty much at random, I picked out Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood' (an excellent read).

I then wandered over to the reference section (because it's familiar ground to me) and perused the books, where I spied Stephen King's 'On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft'. That prompted me to think of that story I wrote over the summer that was still sat, collecting dust, inside my laptop. On a whim, I bought On Writing as well, with the intent of reading it and then looking over my story.

Fast-forward a week. I'd read On Writing and I was about to take a look at my story for the first time in about a month. What I found was an abomination of weak dialogue, hamfisted description, paper-thin characters and a horrific premise. I'm not going to tell you anything about this story, other than it should never have been written (it was that bad, just trust me please).
I did what anyone would do. I deleted the whole thing. Months of work, gone in an instant, and I didn't look back.

Let's jump forward to late-October. I now realise that reading is enormous fun. I grew particularly fond of John Connolly's Charlie Parker series (first book in the series is called Every Dead Thing, it's a terrific read), various works by Jefferey Deaver and some Raymond Chandler. It was around this time that I thought I should have another crack at this writing malarky.

What I came up with was the first draft of chapter 1 for The Grey Arbiter. The rest? Well, you know the rest.