Full Steam Ahead (?)

Ok, so I got this cherry thing dropped in my lap which basically meant I would have had to sacrifice my writing life.

I prayed about it a lot, and while it looked like a done deal, it fell through. There is a part of me that is relieved.

Then again, there is a part of me that is pure disappointment. Or at least, was…

Thing is, Commoner Days is something I’ve been writing forever, but it’s my 2nd attempt at a novel. (My first attempt was when I was young & stupid, and far more concerned with living and visiting cool places, and didn’t have a computer, and didn’t know that you could spend WEEKS on end editing one page and hold up your novel.)

Commoner Days was conceived during my first pregnancy and written over a year later in a NANOWRIMO 2003 (yes, you heard me).  I dropped it like a hot potato when I was done because I was terrified.

Do you hear me? Terrified.  Of what? The usual.  Failure. Success. Commitment.   Putting myself on the written page for the world to see.  You get the picture.

It kept growing as a story in my mind, blossoming, taking on politics during those awful Bush years, and religion during my awful God-struggles, mother-daughter issues as I lost my mom and gained 2 daughters.  I picked it up, edited a bit, put it down.

Then in November, 2008, I got serious. I picked up Create A Culture Clinic, by Holly Lisle and set to world-building. Mind you, I was terrified of this task, but Holly’s book was a great help. After that, I needed to get serious about editing, not the junky stuff I had done in the intervening 5 years (which was barely anything).  First, I read both How To Write Page-Turning Scenes and the very awesome The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, then I printed out all 264 pages and got to work editing by hand.  I tried to make page deadlines (as in, 5 per day), but that was just discouraging.

I’m down to the next edit and it’s getting better. But let me tell you that as I was shaping up those first 50 pages for submission to the contest I mentioned, I realized how much it lacked.  The religion and politics of the backstory got a hell of a lot more interesting, but it just wasn’t in the story.  I’ve grown in a year of editing and writing/not writing, blogging - personally and professionally. I’ve been reading a lot, with an internal eye on what works and what fails (stunningly and frequently, even on popular books).  Perfect books exist, but they are few and far apart. My God, so much can go wrong (see “First 5 pages”), without the author even realizing.

So I was ready to throw in the towel. Why couldn’t I want to do something easy with my life, like civil engineering  or become an abstract mathematical theoreticist?  (Yea, I’d do that last one. Stopped reading P&W when they wrote an article about a guy who’s both that AND a prolific literary novelist. Sheesh.)

But writing a novel is all kinds of difficult. It’s easy, for me, to keep the balls that you need to juggle in the air for a short story (in terms of being literary, economical and profound), but over the long haul of a novel it is damn hard.

I needed advice and direction. Maybe I should dump this kind of writing and focus on a different format, or plunge deeply truly into web design, maybe with the right kind of job.

Enter a 2nd cousin on Facebook, who said all kinds of wonderful glowing things about my blog.  And while that is a different format of writing, it gave me the encouragement to continue.  After all, if I can blog (and I quote) with a  “writing/style …like a box of really good popcorn…you just can’t put it down until its finished”, then why the hell can’t I write fiction like that?

The answer is, I can with a lot of hard work. Somewhere along the way I got it that my gift would come easy. And some of it does, but not all of it.  I was reading something recently (again), ok, actually a few things I was reading, and I realized I was already better than these published folks.  I’ve got my ready-made audience too, but I do really have to blood-sweat-and-tears this. This is how great artists are made. And make no mistake, that is what I desire from my writing, not just entertainment, but great art. The writers I love are great artists: Jane Austen, Iris Murdoch, Harper Lee, Connie Willis, Barbara Kingsolver (gee, and they’re all women, look at that!)

As a result, I’ve decided at this point in time to lay “Commoner Days” to rest.  I’ve completed it through a number of edits and have submitted it to a contest and a critique.  I’ll make my bones there, because I already know how brutal the critique will (and should) be.  More or less, I have seen the project through as I’d like to, and I’m probably 100 or 200 thousand words on my way to one million.  (You know that saying, right? It takes a million words to get prolific as a writer?)

I have a few things I need to decided between: fic or non-fic, and if it’s fic, then the period-historical-literary romance or the time travel romance?  A survey may help. How do I decide? Good question, answers welcome!