Umm, I have an even better idea...

So, I'm merrily writing along.  I've got about 40,000 words now.  Half way done.  Yes!  I just finished my masterpiece of a scene, the one I've been thinking about and wanting to get just right.  It's a really dark scene involving torture, interrogations, starvation, and other cheerful subjects.  I go back and reread it.  It gives me chills.  Yeah…I'm good.

It's still horrible stuff really, but I'm writing and getting my thoughts out.  I can always go back and edit later.  Everyone has to start somewhere ,right?  This is my first "real" attempt at writing anything longer than a few paragraphs in years.

Even though I am applauding my bravery, I reflect back and realize how naïve I was.  At the time, I thought my writing was artistic and interesting.  In reality, it was boring.  Nothing happens until page 70 for crying out loud!  And I hadn't even gotten to do the alternate universe world building part yet.  This was all about the MC's boring existence in the plain old ordinary world. 

What kind of fantasy novel drones on about the MC's personal life, or lack thereof, for pages and pages *cough* Twilight *cough*.  Yeah, Bestseller's list here I come!  (Please note that I really am a huge Twilight fan, but you have to admit that nothing really happens in the beginning.)

However, at that point, I was all proud of myself.  Life was still good.  I was still writing the next masterpiece, sure it was going to be a trilogy at least, picturing them next to Tolkien and Meyers in the book stores.

That's when a little, annoying thought started niggling in the back of my head.

I was still reading vampire stories, because heaven knows there's enough of them out there.  I had resolved myself to the fact that vampire plots have been beaten to death with a baseball bat and then the bat broken up into splinters, stomped on and burned to ash.  Coming up with a new idea or unique twist was nearly impossible for a newbie like me.

I guess when I said I had resolved myself against coming up with a new idea, I really meant, I took it as a challenge.  I couldn't let it go.  Even though I was knee deep in my other "work of art", there was a small compartment in my brain that kept chugging along searching for a new twist on the old vampire theme.

An idea flitted across the conscious part of my brain.  What if…

That's all it took.  I was off and running on a new idea.  It was all still in my head.  Vampires, werewolves, witches, pixies, they'd all been done before.  But making them all misfits, throwing them together to fight off the "real" bad guys, well, that had been done before too.

Who is the MC?  Ah, that would be Kat.  She's a misfit too, but because she's an average girl who grew up in a house of witches.  She meets this other group of misfits and "accidentally" becomes their leader.  Her insight is snarky and sarcastic (something I'm well versed in).

My head is busting with ideas at this point.  There's so many ways to go, so many paths.  The words start writing themselves in my head and it's all I can do to find a piece of paper or a computer to write them down.

I get the first chapter done in a matter of a couple hours.  I reread the lines and realize, this is a much better idea than the other novel I have half written.

Printing the pages, I thrust them in front of my wary husband.  He'd been ducking my pleas to critique my work for weeks now.  Realizing he had no escape, he took a deep breath and actually read the first page.

He laughed in all the right places.  He asked WTF in all the right spots.  For someone who had also read/seen a lot of vampire stories, I'd shocked him with my take on the theme. 

He read through the pages, 10 in all.  Setting them down he looked over at me and asked when the next chapter would be done.  I'm sure I blinked at him in disbelief.  This was the same guy that I couldn't get to read one page of my first novel.  I hooked him.  I actually hooked him to the story.

A little shocked at my own ability, I went to work on the next chapter.

So what's the point of this post?  Sometimes when an idea strikes, you just have to go with it.  The second novel is leaps and bounds better.  The idea is better.  The plot is better.  More importantly, the writing is better.

I still have that first half novel sitting in a file on my computer.  It was extremely helpful because it taught me that I can write and I do have a story to tell, enough to fill a book.  I also learned how to play with words and sentences.  I learned that I could box myself in with my own plot lines and other such interesting things.

I fully intend on pulling out that poor forgotten novel and working on it again.  However, out of the 40,000 words, I will probably only keep 10,000 and rewrite the rest.

For now, I'm going where the story takes me.

Okay, so I'm sitting at my computer with a blank page

I had made the decision that I was going to write. Not only was I going to write, but I was going to write a whole book. My first fiction novel. I'm a great story teller, surely I could come up with enough content to fill several books, let alone one little novel. How hard could it be?

So, I sat at my computer, stewing. And stewing.

I wanted to be original, unique. Every idea I came up with had been done before, some had been done several times. If I did come up with something somewhat original, it was never on a topic that inspired me. For my first book, I definitely needed an inspiring topic.

Having recently been on a reading binge, I asked myself what kinds of books had I been reading? Those topics had interested me enough that I read several books. If I focused on a particular genre, that would at least narrow things down.

I went through a mental list of the books I'd read and zeroed in on Paranormal/Urban Fiction. In other words, vampires. Not only had I just read the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer, I read the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris and the Anita Blake series by Laurell Hamilton. It was vampire after vampire with a dash of werewolf. To be honest, I was burnt out on vampires. Not only that, but vampires and werewolves have been done and redone in every conceivable way. I would need an extra special twist if I were to write a vampire story. For my first attempt, I really didn't feel confident about that.

So I found a genre, but I was utterly sick to death of it. I needed something that was still paranormal/fantasy in nature, but had no vampires or werewolves. Dwarves, elves and the like had all been done to death as well. I was truly hard pressed to come up with an idea. In the meantime, I was still staring at that blank page on my screen.

Okay, something that's not vampire or werewolf and not a Lord of the Rings knock off. Faeries are also starting to get a lot of play these days. My mind buzzed for several days, pondering what to do.

Eventually, I made myself narrow my plot even further. What did I want it to ultimately be about? How about a woman? Well, that was a start, but what about this woman? Let's have her be introverted and somehow she gets dragged into some sort of fantasy world. In the end, she sheds her shy side and finds out who she really is. (Because that plot hasn't been done before...yeah right!)

Once I got that much, the rest started to flow. I started to make notes. I wasn't writing just yet, but the page was no longer empty. It was filling with ideas.

In the end, I decided to write about this woman and how she stumbles across a world of elves. These aren't your typical, arrow chucking, tree hugging, pointy eared elves. No, these were a separate race of beings whose ancestors were the same as ours. The book would explain how the separation of our races happened and why elves appear in our folklore as they do.

There would be trolls, dimensional portals, and, of course, a love story. Who else to help her out of her shell than some handsome elven prince?

Then, the writing began. I wrote and wrote and wrote. Then I wrote some more. Once I started, it was hard to stop. It was horrible stuff really. Not the slightest bit interesting to anyone but myself. But that's not the point.

The point is, sometimes you have to force yourself to just pick something and start writing to get the juices flowing. The idea I had in itself was a good one. It was the writing that stunk. Looking back, I've got about 30,000 words out of 50,000 that I'm probably going to junk and completely rewrite.

That's okay. I wouldn't have traded the experience for anything. I learned and grew so much from just sitting in front of my computer, merrily typing away. Proper grammar and sentence structure will come later. For now, getting the story out of my head and onto paper is a huge step in the right direction.

On a personal note, or also known as: Who the hell am I?

This post is a little more personal and a lot less focused than most of the other posts I'll be making. I figure getting who I am and what brought me to this point is a good springboard for what's to come. It also gets all the personal stuff out of the way in one fell swoop.

I loved writing stories (and a bit of sappy poetry) ever since I was just a little itty-bitty thing. Going through school I realized very quickly that grammar was not my strong suit. I got math awards left and right, but seemed to have a mental block when it came to diagramming a simple sentence. Not phased, I made the decision to work extra hard and learn all those rules and their crazy names.

That's about the time I switched schools. Turns out, the school I transferred to was done explaining rules and expected all the students to apply them expertly. According to my English teachers, I should have learned all that years ago and if I didn't know it by now, I never would learn.

Hiding my lack of knowledge in shame, I struggled and resorted to playing it by ear. If it "sounded" right, I wrote it, then prayed it was correct. Getting graded papers back was always an extremely painful and embarrassing process. I'd get them back riddled with red pen marks telling me about the numerous errors I made, but not why it was incorrect or how to fix it.

I would pour over each mark, trying to figure out what rule I'd broken. After years of this torture, I finally gave up. Then it was just a matter of pretending and going by the "sound."

Since then, I've gotten a lot better. I'm now a successful business professional who relies on her communication and writing skills on a daily basis. Entering the business world had helped me with spelling and punctuation. I had gleaned a few more grammatical rules as time went on, but I was still terrified of doing what I wanted to do. Write fiction. After all, writing a business letter is entirely different than writing a novel. Different rules apply in several cases. What's acceptable, and expected, in the business world is often frowned upon in fiction circles.

I had always been a good story teller. A bit long winded (as this post can attest), but my stories made sense and usually made people laugh. A few months ago, I decided that the only way to do what I really wanted was to bite the bullet and face my fears. Facing down years of traumatic experiences with schools and teachers, I gathered my courage and started scouring the internet.

I came up with a few ideas and just started writing. Yeah, what I wrote sucked, but I enjoyed every second of it. The more I wrote, the more I learned. My writing got better, still not great, but better. I went back and edited my story, improving it each time I re-read it. Eventually, I got to a point where I needed more. I needed outside help.

I stumbled across a very supportive group (http://www.critiquecircle.com) and forced myself to submit one of the stories I'd been working on. I knew I needed a lot of help in several areas, but there's no way of improving those areas unless I went for it.

The responses I got were amazing. Even though they shredded my story to pieces, they told me what rules I'd broken and how to fix it. They gave me examples and suggestions. Suddenly some of those elusive rules started to make sense. There was no judging or condescension. I noticed a drastic improvement in my writing almost immediately.

Since then, I've been pouring through forums and discussions, absorbing everything I can. Honestly, a lot of the conversations go so far over my head, I don't even see a smoke trail. But hidden between all the intellectual discussions are questions from other people who struggle just as much as I do. Some got answers and some didn't.

It was then that I realized that I'm not alone. There are others out there that were never taught or weren't able to learn correct writing rules and techniques for whatever reasons. I'm not the only one that didn't know what a split infinitive was or that there are so many possible points of view when writing a novel/story that there are whole books written on the subject.

So that's where I am and who I am. I'm a 37 year old wife and professional who is hoping to add "writer" to the list of things in that statement. If I can help someone else by explaining what I learned in terms that someone like me can relate to and understand, then that's even better.