Lottery Tickets

My writing class ended for a term on Monday. Seven or eight of us stuggled in at the end of a day's work, through a bitter wind. Some of the class had cried off with colds or flu. Some had work commitments. Some class members had dropped out altogether. The teacher herself had struggled in with an illness. So we sat around, reading and discussing our work, trying to be as jolly as we could. But there was an underlying sombreness. I've enroled for next term, but I don't know who else has.
I hope the class can continue. This particular class, with that particular teacher, has done wonders for my writing. I'd been blocked for a couple of decades when I first joined it, getting on for five years ago. I'd been to writers' classes and writers' workshops before, some really good, but somehow I could never break through the block, and so in the end I stopped bothering.
Other things helped too, of course. Reading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones and Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Discovering horror fiction (although again, it was this teacher at this class giving us an assignment to write a story about a vampire which prompted me to give horror fiction a go).
I'm still looking around for ideas for a contemporary, non-genre novel. Not because I'm ashamed of writing horror stories, but because I've wanted to write another novel ever since I finished my first one (I never did anything with that one, it's still under my bed). This week, I picked up Stan Barstow's A Kind Of Loving, one of my favourite novels, and began rereading it. I also read two fantastic short stories, William Trevor's Sitting With The Dead (from A Bit On The Side) and Roddy Doyle's Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (from The Deportees). They knocked me out, both of them, and reminded me what you could get from contemporary fiction. William Trevor's was heartbreaking. I've read some of his stuff before, and loved it, especially Access To The Children.
It could be a change- a good change. A change of gears. Lately, I feel I've been churning out stuff, and I haven't always been bothered about characterization. I've wanted to keep writing something, and it so happens that I can get ideas for horror stories relatively easily. I'm scared of letting my pen stay idle, so every so often, I give up trying to find ideas for mainstream stories, I tell myself I'll write whatever comes up, and what comes up is an idea for a horror story.
I've entered five entries for short story competitions this week. Five! I went mad. Four of the stories were lying there doing nothing, one I cobbled together at top speed. One went to Writers' Forum:

http://www.writers-forum.com/comps.html

one to the Erewash Writers' Group:

http://erewashwriterscompetition.weebly.com/competitions-2013.html

and three were submitted to a very worthwhile competition run by St Francis Hospice, Berkhamsted:

http://www.stfrancis.org.uk/i-want-to-help/event-pages/berkhamsted-writing-competition

I don't know what my chances of winning are, I simply felt like I was buying lottery tickets.
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I've just discovered another great blog written by a fellow Microhorror writer, Chad Case:

http://chadcase.blogspot.co.uk/

Check out his online stories.