I’ve been quite lack at writing on this blog and for various reasons. One, is I started a new project way back in August. At first I didn’t know where it was going, but as the months went by, and I continued to write, I discovered that the story was much larger and much more contemporary then anything I had ever written before. Five months later, just before Christmas, I finished it.
It is a romance story, about a young girl who finds a fragment of a poem in an old book and goes off looking for the entire thing. This story is in the editing process now, and I hope to have that done in the next month or two.
Aside from finishing “When Roses Turn to Stone” I also took a writing course at Sheridan College from September to December. The class was Crafting a Novel part one, and the whole point of it was to develop the writing process from start to finish. The creative process was quite regimented, deciding the goals and motivation for your main characters, discovering what the character arc / plot was, and then writing out character sketches. They were all very valuable tools to learn, and I actually quite like the “Wants – Because – But – So” method of plotting (what does the character want, why do they want it, what is standing in their way and what do they do) but because the creative process that the course had us go through was so alien to me, I find myself unwilling to finish the contemporary romance that I worked on in that class. Will I finish it one day? Perhaps. I do like the story, it’s just getting it written which will be difficult.
Speaking of difficult… in addition to writing Roses, and taking the writing class, I also took on National Novel Writing Month with a third contemp. romance story with a magical twist. Of the actual novel I wrote about 30k, but because I was working on the two other projects, I added their word counts to my total to reach 50k. I really do like the notion of the NaNo plot, but it was very slow moving, and would need a complete overhaul (I think) to be completed.
So what does this mean for my writing? Well I thought that it meant that I was burnt out, but as always the muses are spinning and I have new ideas popping up. Will they turn into anything? Who knows. But I’m certainly going to continue writing ^_^
The Writer's Journey 