So, I wrote up my blog entry earlier than usual yesterday and while
trying to get the internet to work through my phone, I saw that I had
an email from the writing competition I had entered which started all
this.
I
hadn't even been short-listed.
In a few days/weeks I'll receive a review as to why and I'm sure there will be good reasons, but of course it came as a bit of a let down. Now I know all writers great and small get rejected for ages and ages. However, like every other beginning writer, I also believed that I was the one exception. A competition, in such a specialised field as unpublished Christian Young Adult works in Australia, and I managed to finish my first story just in time to enter. How was that not a sign?
So I
took the night off last night to think about it all, the time I'm
giving up to the challenge, and the possibility that none of it will
ever lead anywhere. Would I keep on doing it knowing that?
Well,
I might not continue for the whole five years if the first 20 novels
get absolutely nowhere I might rethink giving my every waking moment
to it. But, overall am actually okay with it. Now that I've finished
the other two stories in the series, there are a few things I'd like
to go back and change and I can now do more work on it, etc.
It
does mean, though, that I'm going to be starting the long, painful
process of trying to find a publisher. I've thought about
self-publishing, but for this one I think I'll see if I can find a
traditional publisher first. If it doesn't come together, then I'll
looking into flogging it myself.
As
you can tell from the lack of entry for yesterday, got side tracked
from posting my blog entry by trying to work out the implications for
my writing of not even getting short-listed.
But
for your reading entertainment, I present, Yesterday's Unpublished
Blog Entry! (applause).
First
news for the day: the whole concept of 'wordless time' seriously
works. Took a few days to really kick in, possibly because I was more
than usually worded out. But this morning, sat there staring at a
computer screen for almost two hours (well, got 3,000 words written,
but it was hard). Then, while walking to work suddenly I found I was
following my main characters' dialogue in the next scene. Of course,
the moment I fully realised this I broke the flow and I didn't have
anywhere to write it down, but came back home after work (had to
catch bus as was bucketing down, go Melbourne) and have just sat
down for 45 minutes and I think I've got it all.
Am
now stuck with a bit of a dilemma. Happened to just kill my bad guy
halfway through the book. Knife to the throat, was an exceptionally
good shot, but people can be exceptionally good shots in books, which
is something I like. Writing 'they practised knife throwing every day
until they were a master' is so much easier than actually spending
every day practising knife throwing until becoming a master. It just
glosses over all the days they had a bit of a flu, so didn't really
feel like it, or their mum kept pestering them to do the washing up.
Have often wished I could just write my life. Think there might have
been a few movies based on this premise, a John Candy (?) movie,
Delirious, comes to mind, showing my age. Though they never seem to
do a very good job of it. As much as I love the Inkheart series
(which I do, very much), I feel giving people the power to read
things into creation could have so many more possibilities than they
actually used it for. Like seriously people, you are being attacked
by the bad guys, so instead of writing and then reading 'main bad guy
fell off his horse and broke his neck and everyone else got spooked
and left' you write a giant into existence quite a way off from you,
that takes a while to get there, and then kidnaps a whole lot of them
and kills good people as well as bad accidentally? That is the best
solution you can come up with?
On
the converse side, while writing my Sally Hunt series, I did have to
fight the urge to make her just do everything perfectly all the time.
What did she do after school? She sat down and studied. No she
didn't! No average teenager comes home from school and starts
studying right away. Writing in all the fluff that we do everyday:
she made herself a cup of tea, noticed a catelogue sitting on the
kitchen bench so flipped through deciding which bedspread she would
buy if she were looking for one, then decided she might just brush
out her hair, she then realised that she should put her uniform in
the wash, and got distracted looking up video clips on YouTube, is
actually a lot harder to write than the things which are harder to do
like 'sit down and study'. Weird, huh?
Well,
that's my bit of philosophy for the day, you can make of it what you
will. Point of all that was to say: Wordless time works, but now I
have to figure out how to continue a story with a dead bad guy, and
no it's not the kind of story where I can just bring him back to
life, which is totally cheating by the way. Dead is dead. Otherwise
you just kill off all emotional attachment to death (okay, not great
use of 'kill'). The two options I'm playing with right now: go back
and expand out earlier part of book to make this the end - end, or
then have my main characters come into contact with the agents the
bad guy had been working for, and they become the new even worse bad
guys.
But
don't worry everyone, by the time any of these books actually get
published, I will have changed them all so much that this won't be a
spoiler alert.
Completely
different note, was just reading some more Amanda Quick while eating
my dinner (not recommended, 'she made it come out my nose!') and I
think I have found why I'm not doing so well writing the romance
part. Please read the following exert out aloud, in the most serious
voice you can, it is from Amanda Quick's 'Lie By Moonlight' (I can't
even say the title with a straight face!)
'Breathless
from the reckless flight, Concordia looked back towards the fiery
scene. The light of the moon bathed the landscape in an other-worldly
glow... Concordia felt the stranger's hard body shift slightly behind
her...[she] was intensely conscious of him crowded behind her in what
could only be described as an extremely intimate manner.'
First
of all, a main character called Concordia Glade? Seriously? Second,
she's a school teacher for orphaned young ladies, and has just found
out they are about to be … how shall I put it, taken to London to
be more profitable, and decides she must save them all. While doing
an excellent job of it, the mysterious dark stranger turns up to
rescue them all, without any transport (or plan, apparently) so has
to jump up on the back of her horse. As good rescue attempts go...
And I
don't mean to be rude, but riding away from guys who plan to rape and
sell you into the sex slave trade with a mysterious man AND four
teenage girls, is that really a romantic setting? Have you been near
a man with four teenage students? The giggling itself is enough to
kill any possible mood.
But
the main problem with my romance writing is that I'm writing my story
from the man's point of view, which just happened by accident. So, I
have 'wow, she's really, really beautiful, I want to save her' but
it's interspersed with a lot of 'wow, look at that really cool gun,
is there anything here I can blow up?' Oh well, when first draft is
finished and I'm working on re-doing it, will get some test subjects
to see what they think. If it doesn't make it as a guy's action book,
will go back, take out the guns, add in more moonlight, and see how I
go.
Yours,
Buffy.
