I’m so happy about how much work I’ve been getting done recently in writing. It has been a very rough few months, personally, with a very drastic moving and preparing for the end of my college career. Things have been very up in the air monetarily and so all of these things are not conducive to me being very productive writing-wise. Instead of letting it get me down, however, the Muse has come down and started tapping me on the head. In fact, I’m pretty sure she’s set up a nice time-share here and is making me industrious.
I’ve been working on several projects and finished one the other day that I’m particularly proud of, all of which I will summarize below, but first I just wanted to say this: sometimes writing is hard. Sometimes, it comes effortlessly. And sometimes, you get into a writing fever that has you so caught up that your heart pounds and you actually feel the burn. This last one happened when I produced a short story recently and honestly, I thought I was some kind of nut until I realized… this happens to creative people. We get into the zone and we put everything into producing our piece of art. I actually sat there, eyes closed, typing as fast as my fingers would go, until I finally realized it was 3AM and I had to go to bed. This is the kid of fugue that I want to tap into more often because the writing I do is stellar. Anyway, on to the breakdown:
What I am Working On:
1) I recently got inspired by reading over a series of pre-teen/children’s books called Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which is being turned into a movie series very shortly. I suppose Hollywood realized that Harry Potter was going to be gone soon and they wanted another cash cow but this series is particularly well-done and I wanted to see what it was like. I bit through the entire series in a week and became very inspired on working on a kid’s concept myself. I think it might be a little age-confused (as in I can’t get the language to match the age market I’m looking to go for) but I really like it. It’s a super-hero genre story for pre-teens and its still in development.
2) The second piece of work which I started and finished within a week was a short story that evolved into a forty-page (single spaced) novella inspired by.. well, lots of things. It really came out of nowhere and became more than I could ever imagine it was going to be. This was the story that I ended up sweating over, as I mentioned above, and when it was finished I felt a sense of accomplishment that I never felt with my other stories. Not only is it a complete story but it creates a world around the characters and brings in elements of different kind of narrative that I love. It integrates the journal of a town sheriff whose town is being overrun by an evil and the journal is found by some vagrants years after, when the town is abandoned and empty and the sheriff long dead. I think its some of the best work I’ve done and very different than anything else I’ve ever put together before.
3) As soon as I finished with that story, the muse apparently wanted to whap me on the brain again because I started up a short story about vampires. I know, I know, everyone is doing vampires lately. Everyone and their brother thinks that because its hot and sexy, we should write more about vampires. The fact is, I wanted to see if I could do it too and do it in a different way than your typical ‘sexified’ vampire stories or, God forbid, sparkle sparkle vampires. I was very inspired by the short story collection that just came out called By Blood We Live, edited by John Joseph Adams. I have read his other collections (The Living Dead about, duh, zombies, and Wastelands, about post-apocalyptic worlds) and his choices in stories have always impressed me, so I’ve put it on my goals to get myself published in one of his collections one of these days. But first, I’m going to focus on getting published at all.
That reminds me, the next goal on my list. I’ve now got two stories, the one I just completed and another one from last semester, that I feel actually could be published. I think I need to get an editor in there to really get the fixing done up on both of them but once they’re finished, I feel that they can both be published and I want to start submitting. So now, the question is submitting where and getting up the damn courage to put my work out into the market. If I don’t, then why the hell am I producing in the first place? And producing, it seems, I am. Short stories are the order of the day, but that doesn’t mean that my major projects, including The Big-Ass Intimidating Project of My Life and a new one which I have nicknamed Big Pete for lack of a better name are on the shelf. Nor does that mean I’m going to throw away my ideas for novels. I just feel short stories are a medium I enjoy and want to focus on that.
That said, novels soon too yes. More work there. I’ve already got seventy pages in Big Pete and I got some inspiration for The Big-Ass Intimidating Project. Even the kids book is sitting on my desktop, just waiting for movement. Now it’s time to get some.
The Muse, she can live here whenever she wants. I’ll keep the place dusted and all cooshy for her.