Brain hijacking

Saturday night, disaster at work: I finished the book I was reading when I was only halfway through my shift! Noooooo!! I had no back-up book, and no cross-stitch project to work on. Four agonizingly slow hours with nothing to occupy my time. What to do, what to do....

I've been playing at fiction writing for years now. I say "playing" because I possess absolutely nothing that even remotely resembles anything like ambition. I make up character sheets, I research locations and various subjects, I write out a full-fledged outline, I get a few chapters in, and then... I drift off to something else and leave it all unfinished. Sure, my characters get pissed off and yell at me in my head for a while, but I've gotten good at tuning them out over the years. They generally subside after a while and go off to some dark corner of my brain to sulk, leaving me to my other pursuits. Some like to sneak up on me in the shower and whisper dialogue, or make themselves their own playlist in my iTunes library (because it sure as hell wasn't ME who downloaded three Dragonforce albums), but they've been fairly low-key overall.

But one particularly insistent protagonist seized the opportunity my idle mind presented and decided it was time I did some more work on her story. Because I don't, you know, have enough to do, what with the working 7 days a week and training two dogs for competition. She very cannily pointed out that I've got loads of down time at my security job, though, and Gee! Isn't it handy that she's been a security consultant these last three years that I've kept her languishing in my work-in-progress file? (Not that that's her real job, but anyway...)

So it looks like I've got a new project to work on at work when I'm not, um, working. If anyone likes to nag, I hereby grant permission to nag me about how many words I've written per weekend, as doG knows it generally takes nothing short of cannon-fire to overcome the static co-efficient of friction and get me moving on a project. If anyone is interested once I get stuff to the point where it's suitable for eyes other than mine, let me know. Feedback is good, especially the constructive kind. This WIP sits firmly in the contemporary fantasy sub-genre, if that's anyone's cuppa tea.