Hi, my name’s Christine and I’m a blogaholic. My global dashboard in Wordpress is looking pretty scary right now. I started a brand new blog called Ten Step Stories [link defunct], and it’s fiction.

This is quite a big deal, although I don’t know why.

The basic premise is a story, told in ten separate parts, and at the end of each, you get to decide what happens next via the medium of an embedded poll. I’m two parts into the first story, which is about motorsports (they do say you should write about what you know), and already the voting has been great fun! I went to sleep on the first day with one option in the lead, and woke up to find the second choice had not only overtaken, but galloped away into the distance.

I haven’t written fiction for a long time, probably not since Sidepodcast began and way before. I used to publish stories, but in traditional writer fashion, they were never finished. I have written a couple of things I’m proud of, but I’ve locked them away for now. I don’t know why I suddenly wanted to start writing again, and I really don’t know why it was so hard to actually do it.

I wrote the first part of Life in the Fast Lane, and then I sat on it for hours. I finally got up the courage to drop some hints that I’d written something in the Sidepodcast comments, and the response was good so I hit publish. So far the feedback has been very encouraging, so I am still confused why it was so hard to get started.

Fabulous writer Alex posted some interesting thoughts, which I hope he doesn’t mind me reproducing here:

1. My guess is that the first time you ever wrote anything online that was yours it was scary but it was a long time ago so you may have forgotten

2. Because you are the famous “Christine off the internet” you know people will read this whereas before you got good at regular writing you probably didn’t know if anyone would look

3. There is no way of actually being right with fiction. Should he climb the mountain or sit in the pub which is right? It’s up to you. Whereas with the other kind of writing it is much more about, did this happen the way you said it happened?

The only way round this is to practice live out in the open :)

I just wanted to separate this out for posterity.

I don’t know what twists and turns are coming in the first story, or what I’m going to do once that one is finished. Alex always says “START” so I started, and we’ll see what happens.