...started writing again.
I've written 3 novels thus far. One, my first, was a monster at over 550,000 words. It's unpublishable without splitting it into around 6 books with HEAVY rewriting to make them stand-alone. No budding author can sell a series as their first novel.
The other is a thriller/fantasy, and horrifying (I had nightmares writing it, which only made it better, IMO) but it's poorly written and the first 50 pages or so are so sloppy it would take a full rewrite. Shorter, around 130k words. Still a bit too long for a "first" novel, by general standards. 100k is usually the limit, but meh.
The last I feel is publishable, but I never sent out queries unlike the first two. The beginning needs some work, but I feel it could go out on shelves. 110k words.
It's been something like 4-6 years since I wrote that book. My wife suddenly said to me, "You need to write." She's said this to me plenty of times before, but it's never clicked. Suddenly, it did. I think it was a mix of me playing the DS game Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Nine Hours, which is a visual novel game, and me reading Gene Wolfe's latest A Borrowed Man, both mysteries. I suddenly wanted to attempt a mystery.
I am hoping to do so with an unreliable narrator. My current idea is interdimensional-- 3 connected dimensional timelines. One world (dimension) is post-apocalyptic, the other two are also the same world but on different timelines. While I plan to write a mystery, I have never been able to write a novel without warfare and the main character is always a strategist of some sort (damn you, ROTK!).
My second novel, When a Phoenix Falls from Flight, was a thriller/fantasy, but somehow the protagonist ended up a soldier and ended up having a small army, with a rather grotesque ending.
Characters write themselves into the novel, and the story kills off characters I intended to keep alive, and vice versa. Generally, the novels write themselves the way that seems most logical for the story, as the characters gain personality. I know a lot of authors find it hard to lose the outline they had planned for their novel and scrap it.... I digress.
Which made me come to realize a few things. We, as we grow older, have a tendency to lose our old passions. I haven't written since before my son was born. Before I was married. As I got married, my dream of teaching the martial arts also went away (slightly because my sensei moved away, and my other sensei passed away). Last year, I got into a new martial art, aikido, and am learning back from square one. But the desire is still there to teach. As I did jujitsu before, I'd like an aiki-jutsu school one day.
Yet, the other passion I gave up on was my writing. It took me years to write my first novel, Enter the Glade. It took me about a month to write When a Phoenix Falls from Flight (I did so entirely in NaNoWriMo), and another year for And the Sun Dims. Somehow, a flame sparked in me again.
What goals have you given up on over the years? Are they still viable? How has life gotten in your way of realizing them?
I'm day 2 on my novel and 10k words. I hope I can keep it up, but I start my work week tomorrow and it will likely slow to a crawl.
I've written 3 novels thus far. One, my first, was a monster at over 550,000 words. It's unpublishable without splitting it into around 6 books with HEAVY rewriting to make them stand-alone. No budding author can sell a series as their first novel.
The other is a thriller/fantasy, and horrifying (I had nightmares writing it, which only made it better, IMO) but it's poorly written and the first 50 pages or so are so sloppy it would take a full rewrite. Shorter, around 130k words. Still a bit too long for a "first" novel, by general standards. 100k is usually the limit, but meh.
The last I feel is publishable, but I never sent out queries unlike the first two. The beginning needs some work, but I feel it could go out on shelves. 110k words.
It's been something like 4-6 years since I wrote that book. My wife suddenly said to me, "You need to write." She's said this to me plenty of times before, but it's never clicked. Suddenly, it did. I think it was a mix of me playing the DS game Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Nine Hours, which is a visual novel game, and me reading Gene Wolfe's latest A Borrowed Man, both mysteries. I suddenly wanted to attempt a mystery.
I am hoping to do so with an unreliable narrator. My current idea is interdimensional-- 3 connected dimensional timelines. One world (dimension) is post-apocalyptic, the other two are also the same world but on different timelines. While I plan to write a mystery, I have never been able to write a novel without warfare and the main character is always a strategist of some sort (damn you, ROTK!).
My second novel, When a Phoenix Falls from Flight, was a thriller/fantasy, but somehow the protagonist ended up a soldier and ended up having a small army, with a rather grotesque ending.
Characters write themselves into the novel, and the story kills off characters I intended to keep alive, and vice versa. Generally, the novels write themselves the way that seems most logical for the story, as the characters gain personality. I know a lot of authors find it hard to lose the outline they had planned for their novel and scrap it.... I digress.
Which made me come to realize a few things. We, as we grow older, have a tendency to lose our old passions. I haven't written since before my son was born. Before I was married. As I got married, my dream of teaching the martial arts also went away (slightly because my sensei moved away, and my other sensei passed away). Last year, I got into a new martial art, aikido, and am learning back from square one. But the desire is still there to teach. As I did jujitsu before, I'd like an aiki-jutsu school one day.
Yet, the other passion I gave up on was my writing. It took me years to write my first novel, Enter the Glade. It took me about a month to write When a Phoenix Falls from Flight (I did so entirely in NaNoWriMo), and another year for And the Sun Dims. Somehow, a flame sparked in me again.
What goals have you given up on over the years? Are they still viable? How has life gotten in your way of realizing them?
I'm day 2 on my novel and 10k words. I hope I can keep it up, but I start my work week tomorrow and it will likely slow to a crawl.
