NaNoWriMo has Begun!

For the FIRST TIME EVER, I am pushing myself to finish a writing project (school projects don't count, and besides, it's been 20 years since I was in school.)

I'm discovering that this novel is going in places I didn't expect, simply because I'm just going with the flow, changing things here and there if I don't like the general direction, but not really editing. Dang, that is hard. I know you aren't supposed to attempt to produce a perfect manuscript the first time out, but I do. The perfectionist in me is VERY VOCAL sometimes, and this is the first time I am not listening!!!!

I'll blog as I go, but not too much...I only have so much writing energy in a day.

4108 words and counting!

Liberation

I've always been a reader. I don't remember a time when I did not devour books on a regular basis, whether following a new series I'd just discovered, or reading old favorites over and over.

As I've matured, I realized that I have stories of my own to share, but I've never been able to finish one longer than a picture book. I've outlined, tried to write just scenes that came to me, just sat down and tried to slug it out, chapter by chapter. None of them worked.

The other day though, I read a blog post by Mette Ivie Harrison. She was saying that she likes to discover the story chapter by chapter, like a reader, at least for the first draft. In her case, she'd done that with a current work in progress, but that she was stuck on the ending.

For me it was a revelation. All the advice I'd ever heard was of the two extremes: Outline or Full on Chapters with no map at all. As I read her post, I realized that I could blend the two together to create a chapter by chapter synopsis. I could follow the thoughts in my head to follow the story to the end, without getting bogged down by the details of the actual writing. I can go back and flesh it out later, and still know where the story is going.

Liberation!

Dark vs. Light

So I am trying to write a series of bedtime stories for a new magazine, knowonder!. They publish 30(!) stories every month, with the idea that you read one a day as a bedtime story. (They're also brand, brand new and desperate for content, so for all you writers out there, send in your stuff!)

Anyway, I've been struggling with something. Years ago, when I first started writing seriously, I couldn't write anything beyond happiness and light. Nothing really scary, or any real problems, just silly stuff that the reader couldn't relate to.

Then I had children. And darkness flowed out like I was the depths of space, including a black hole and a sneaky super nova that explodes when the kids are particularly aggravating.

Now my stories are full of darkness. I can't even tell a simple bedtime story to my 5 year old without scaring the bejeebers out of her.

I know that conflict, true emotions evoked by relatable characters, and an honest resolution arising from natural action are all critical elements to a story, but I can't seem to do it without being over the top, at least when it comes to bedtime stories.

So here's The Question: Where is the line for you? How scary is too scary? What types of things do you find disturbing for different ages?

The Muse Returns!!

Okay, so it only took a 2 month vacation from helping me out, and I eventually found her sipping appletinis in the Caribbean, hanging out with the other writers who can sit around and sip appletinis (who are they, anyway?). After a polite conversation (which ended with me drugging her and hopping a quick plane with a comatose Muse), she decided that she might possibly be willing to help me move forward. Maybe.

Muse on Life Support....

The weird thing is this nasty cycle I have...if I am reading for inspiration, I am unable to write. I can write, or I can read. I can't do both. And I've been on such a reading jag lately. Sooooo....my poor muse has been left alone so long, starving for attention, that MPS (Muse Protection Services) came and got her and took her to hospice, where she is gasping for life with the beep, beep, beep of all the machines they have her hooked up to lulling her into oblivion.

Sigh.

I'm going to have to jump through some major hoops to get her released back into my custody and nursed back to health. Maybe after school starts....yeah, right.

Where is the Motivation?

So the past few weeks have been very full of summer activities, and I've found my motivation to write slipping away. It doesn't help that I've hit some road blocks in some of the stories I'm working on. I'm not sure where to poke at them to get the ideas to burst out. I wonder, too, if by not working on them everyday, I'm not giving myself the opportunities to discover what is really missing so I can fix it. Grrr....

Best Description of the Writing Process

Mette Ivie Harrison is an amazing person (not that I know her personally), both as a normal human and as a writer. Besides having written Mira, Mirror, The Princess and the Hound, and The Princess and the Bear, all fabulously crafted, she has her third in the Princess series, The Princess and the Snowbird coming out in 2010. She also writes a column for Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show about writing and the writing process. I've found her to be very articulate in her articles, and this month's is amazing, Fifty Miles of Writing. She describes the process of novel writing as if she were in my head. (I don't know if I'm comforted or appalled.) Read it yourself and see if it isn't completely accurate. Just thought I'd share.