Writing in a hurry

As some of you might know, Blizzard's annual writing contest was running for the last few weeks/months and as the last couple of years, I planned to submit but this time, I actually made a run of it. I had an idea in mind, and I worked out the general arc and characters, and wrote about 2000 words - roughly the first third of it - a couple of weeks ago and kept mulling the rest of it over and over, thinking I had until the end of the month to wrap it up.

Some providence inspired me to check on the date yesterday morning and I realized with a shock that the submission deadline was in fact last night at midnight.

I spent my lunch break at work desperately churning out another 2000 words to get two-thirds of the way and then work and an after-work engagement kept me busy. I got home around nine, logged into game, ran into Halls of Reflection for inspiration and with the music of that dungeon over my headphones, wrote the rest of it (with some encouragement from a couple of guildies) and then gave it a quick draft and posted it off just before midnight.

I'm pretty pleased with the story, and if I might take a segue from Warcraft for a second, it is the first new short story that I've started and finished in some time. Writing has been a hobby of mine for a while and I've had some minor success with it (a couple of short plays I wrote wound up in a tiny off-broadway production, and a couple of short-stories I wrote wound up in some small-time press magazines) but I've been going through some serious writers block for a bit over a year now and this was a very gratifying way to break through that wall.

After submitting the story and getting a confirmation letter back from Blizzard, I sent the story out to a few friends and it seems to be doing well with them, so I have my fingers crossed.

I'm feeling pretty pumped to continue working on some of my own material and if anything should come of this Blizzard submission, well, I certainly wouldn't mind writing for my favorite game, as you might imagine. :-)