Progress Update: Is it Drafty in here?

I'm on my 4th draft
That isn't a boast, and it isn't strictly true. It is kind of my 3rd draft, because my second draft was boring. I mean, painfully boring. I had somehow managed to strip my story of everything that made it interesting. Imagine that. Hahaha.....
Seriously. The 3rd draft became 2.2 as soon as a read 2.1. It wasn't pretty.
So, 3rdish draft is about being a stickler. I'm stripping everything out that I find weak and annoying. It looks like that might include the first two chapters!
Two...
...entire...
...chapters.

My Notebook and my Treacherous Brain

Do you carry a notebook? Something to jot down ideas in, even if it is just a name that pops to mind, or a simple phrase that arises in your head that you can imagine one of your characters saying. It certainly is one of the things that people are advised to do; have a notebook on you at all times.
I have a notebook. I bought it for myself as a little treat. It's a pocket moleskin book, with squared pages, just in case something needs to be sketched, rather than written. In the first two weeks, it never left my pocket. I would scratch down ideas, mispronunciations of words (in case I wanted to have a character to whom English was a second language), small ideas that popped into my head. Tiny observations of the oddest things.

Suddenly, it all dried up. I had gone for more than a month with nothing to add to the notebook. I put it down to my perception. My force of attention was obviously being directed elsewhere. I had other concerns (family issues and university tasks). I had not used the ideas I had already recorded. My brain wasn't on form, but it would probably come back.
After two months, I stopped carrying the notebook with me. I didn't see the point.
And the ideas started coming back!
This has perplexed me my entire life. How can I be so full of ideas when I have no way to record them, yet when I have a notebook, smartphone, sketchbook to hand, my brain falls silent?
A concept struck me that I think answers the question: My notebook had become a reminder of a responsibility. The more I attempt to write, the more I feel the duty of output. This made the notebook no longer a tool to aid in my collection of ideas, but a task master, demanding ideas to feed it. This has never been a good place for my brain to be.
How do I escape this panic? I have to listen to my own advice. The muse is not inspirational of itself. Inspiration comes from being the muse. I write something in the notebook every day, even if I end up scribbling it out the following day. That way, inspiration will come, if only intermittently. When I have one good idea, it sets me up for the next good idea. If I can connect enough good ideas together, then I have a story.

Where art thou, Muse

Inspiration is easy.
I'm not kidding. Honestly. I walk around with my little notebook, hearing snippets of songs, snatched segments of conversations, or being dumbstruck by a view or image I encounter. All of these go into the book.
Then all I have to do is write!

Yeah, cause that's easy.
Thats where all of the ideas, inspiration, moments, and observations come unstuck. Transferring the things you've collected onto the page without simply recording something verbatim is hard. How does this astounding sunset become part of the story? How can I transfer the awe I felt as I watched the clouds explode with light into a story about a woman who has just been shot? Why do I never find anything that fits with what I'm trying to write?
Well, I probably do, but I need to put the language into context. I need to get the reigns on it and make it do what I want it to do. I need to be the writer.

An Incredibly Short Story

A long, long time ago, I posted about incredibly short stories. I was about to enter a competition that required a 10 word story in the vein of Hemingway's "Baby Shoes" story. I tried, and I didn't win. This is my story. Please comment below. Let me know what you think.

I love that you're into me, but I'm a bot.

In Praise of Katniss Everdeen

It was without doubt that The Hunger Games trilogy is full of many of the tropes that pervade YA fiction. Present and correct is the tyrany of the elders. Those in power have redesigned society for their own protection. Having been subject to a revolution, which they resisted at great cost (District 13). Once the revolution was suppressed, the ruling classes put in place a punishment to remind the Districts who was in charge, taking two children from each of 12 Districts, one male, one female, and putting them in an arena in a fight to the death.
President Snow is an unforgiving, totemic villain. He was, presumably, a child when the revolution happened, if he was even alive when it happened. Although his title is President, was he elected? He certainly seems to behave like a dictator.

Brevity is the soul of Wit

I'm trying to enter competitions. It is a challenge I'm setting myself that if I want to be successful as a writer I need to write. Many competitions out there aren't really competitions, but serve other useful purposes.
For example, competitions that offer a critique of your work if you pay a larger entrance fee are not really competitions. Although there is a prize, and at least having a chance to recoup the loss is probably worth the risk, these competitions are almost certainly a way for writing consultants and agents to drum up business.
So, what do I do instead?

Unbelievable

[Spoilers for Catcher in the Rye, Life of Pi and Atonement. Potential spoilers for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Fight Club]

So, do we then depend on a narrator that we know is untrustworthy for the sake of having secrets? H.P. Lovecraft had narrators in his stories who were as much adrift in the worlds in which they found themselves as we, the readers. They could only report on their own thoughts and the activities they observed around them. They were assumed to be trustworthy until such a time as they were lost in the mystery as it unfolded. We are as weak as they are, thus we empathise, particularly in the face of such spectacular power. Almost inevitably, such narrators become unreliable, even if this isn't obvious from the start.