I have good news for my readers: I’ve cleaned my house.

Wait, wait, don’t throw a fit yet. I know that doesn’t effect you, but it does effect my writing. The laundry’s put up, dishes done, the kids’s rooms are clean, the living room and kitchen are clean. Now I just need to organize my desk, put my books back on the bookshelf, and then I can relax.

So now, since I don’t have this awful dryspell anymore (not that I’ve written anything yet today, but I feel like my water’s flowing again–I’m not feeling guilty for not getting the housework done anymore), I got a great story in mind. Came about in the oddest way.

I take part in a writer’s site known as The Writer’s Cafe. There I can post stories (which doesn’t count as a form of publishing so it doesn’t hurt my stories’ sale value) and get reviews and commentary from other writers to help me improve them. It’s like Myspace for writers; really, with groups, forums, blogs, etc. In one group I’m in, they held a contest last month for “Every Night At Midnight…” where participants write a story about something that happens every night at midnight. Well, I couldn’t think of anything that really got my fires burning (or let’s stick with the water analogy–my waters flowing) so I passed on it.

Yesterday I was listening to an old classic, “Thriller” by Michael Jackson, and there’s a part in the song where the narrative voice says “The midnight hour approaches” or something, I think. (My husband totally ruined my concentration a second ago when he got home.) And I thought to myself, “What if Michael Jackson jumped out of your closet every night at midnight?”

Laughable, isn’t it? A lot of my stories start out laughable and end up scary. So we’ll see. Perhaps I’ll post it in a section I’m planning on building, called the “Free Library”. I’ll use it as encouragement to build up my repetoire of stories, some for here for free, others for sale.

And on to the final touches on cleaning.