Stuck In The Middle

As the sorry state of this blog can tell you, I’ve been neglecting my writing something fierce. Don’t worry, this isn’t a pity blog. I’ve just chosen to go in different directions for a while.

Direction One: Cuteness

I had a baby! She’s pretty fantastic.

Direction Two: School! 

I’m back in college. It makes me feel old (which is pretty sad when I’m only 27). That doesn’t matter, because this time around I’m going to get that certificate.

Those things mean that I’m not spending a lot of time on writing. I miss writing like crazy but it’s going in my opportunity cost folder.

The hardest time that I’m having with it is that my story ideas aren’t moving forward. I’ve been in the middle of the same draft for two years or more, and I’ve been workshopping another for a year. That’s a lot of time to spend frozen in the middle of a single project. Like many writers, I struggle with losing interest. I’m torn- do I abandon these projects and find something smaller (and more exciting) to work on, or do I keep plugging away? On the first project I’m about 70% through, so I’m planning on sticking that one out. On the second- well, we’ll see. I start school soon, and if it’s another year before I get to it that idea may end up in the ‘wish  I could of’ heap. 

Hiatus

I’ve been doing some math recently and it hasn’t been pretty. Over the last few months blogging time has been beating out writing time by roughly three to one. That is not good. I love blogging a lot more then I thought I would, but that doesn’t stop it from being time consuming. I think it might be time to reevaluate.

It’s not that I’m quitting forever. Obviously that wouldn’t help me much! It’s just that a combination of bad health, limited time, and boredom (from the blog posts) have meant that these four posts a takes me a week or two to write. I keep hoping the next month will be different but it never is. It’s killing me to admit that I can’t do it all. Even as I write this post I’m rethinking posting it. After all, blogs are vital to a hopeful writer like me. But so is free writing time.

I’ll probably still pop in every now and again with ideas that catch my fancy, but it won’t be anything regular like it has been. Hopefully in a few months I’ll be able to bring my focus back here in a way that doesn’t cause problems with the things I started this blog to promote- my books.

Changing Directions

Do you want to know how to kill a genre for yourself? Read three hundred books in it. I kid you not, I clocked in at over three hundred books this year and most of them were YA. Sure, I can blame health problems for having way too much time on my hands. But the truth is that I love a good book and I’m more than happy to read one. Which is why when I decided to get serious about getting published I started reading YA like crazy. They’re fast, they’re fun, and they matched what I was trying to write. Over the course of three years I averaged 16 a month. That’s a lot of books.



I learned a lot about YA in specific and books in general. My writing got a thousand times better. But there is no way I could have read that many books in the same genre and not see the problems. More then that, there’s no way I could read that many books in the same genre and not seen how my style just doesn’t fit.



I looked like I belonged in YA because the three books I’d finished had all been written in my teens. My sensibilities and style were young because I was young. It wasn’t a preference but a default. While I still think YA is awesome, I’ve come to recognize it’s just not the place for me right now. The book I’m working on right now is adult. This doesn’t mean I’m planning on leaving YA forever. I just don’t think it’s right for me now.



This wasn’t an easy transition. Even though I’ve known for a while that YA wasn’t working for me I couldn’t give it up. Part of it was that I’ve spent so much time working on it. Another part was stubbornness. I want to believe that I can do anything I set my mind too. If that means squeezing my style into a genre that it doesn’t really fit then I was going to do it. Except that means working three times as hard for the same thing. Lastly I've built an online community for myself centered around how awesome YA is and I really don't want to leave it.



Even I can get a clue. I’m no longer volunteering with teens like I used to in my real life. Other things have meant that I needed to grow up a lot. So it looks like that for both real life and fictional life I’ll be making some changes.

Survivor: The Book Edition

I’ve wanted to get published since forever. The one thing holding me up is that I haven’t written the right book yet. Each time I start a first draft I believe that this is The One. What’s funny is I’m starting to realize that The One might not be the book I love the most. It might be the only book that survives the learning process.



Cases in point from previous The Ones:



Products of Power: I loved this book. This is the book that started me as a writer. I spent four years writing the first draft as a teen. Sadly I didn’t have the skills to make it better. It and its sequel are languishing forever because my editing attempts were just that- attempts.



Not Quite A Superhero- This is the first novel I wrote that I really tried to edit. Sadly, since I didn’t know what I was doing I butchered my poor little novel. Somehow I lost all the charm and added a lot of crap. I still think of this book nostalgically- while crying a little.



Stone Prince- After nearly a year long drought I wrote this book for Nanowrimo last year. I loved it. It had a great hook and it was a breeze to write. Then when I opened it again this summer to begin edits it felt like opening a Tupperware container that’s been in the fridge too long. Stone Prince was a disaster with the only possible fix being to throw it all away an start over. Since I have no idea what I would change-besides everything- I’ve abandoned it. (Mind you, I’m still artistically tragic about this book too).



So this leads me to Chaos Rules. Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a writer who had become overly fixated. She picked and picked at the books she’d written years ago, making things neither better nor worse. Then she realized (or was talked into realizing by an amazing husband) that she needed to let go of her beloved old stories and create some new ones. I can’t tell you why she picked the one that she did. It wasn’t particularly special, although it taught her a lot that she needed to know. She didn’t love it like she did her others. She wrote it in frustration and that should have been how it ended up.



As you might have guess from my overwrought prose, that writer was me. I ended up with a dystopian- a genre I don’t like- that I had no idea what to do with. When I realized that my nonexistent editing abilities had already destroyed at least one book I picked my most unloved book to be my editing guinea pig. And it worked.



Maybe it was because I was less attached. Maybe it was because Chaos Rules has more structure then my other books. I don’t know. All I know is that when I sat down to edit Chaos Rules I felt like I knew things to do that could make it better. I’m about to sit down to a third round of edits with it. I have a clear vision of where I’m going and so far every time I work on it I make it a little bit better.



I’m not sure if Chaos Rules is The One. The only thing I know is that as of right now, it’s the last book standing.