Setbacks

It has been awfully quiet around here. For good reason though. I have been on a holiday, during which I tried to explain to the boyfriend how important this little project is for me. I am in the middle of moving from one place to the next and I work 34 hours a week nowadays.

On top of that I have had a bit of a setback. I decided it might be a good idea to organize some of the stuff I have already written and found out that I have been working on an outdated version. Also - but I already knew I had to fix this from the start - I made a mistake when numbering my chapters, which practically gives a hole of 4 chapters. This, I can all live with and fix.

The big bummer actually came from the boyfriend. I tried to explain to him that I HAVE to get published and I am very scared to get rejected. He didn't understand. At all. He was like 'yeah, well you just have to stop thinking that your life depends on getting published or not. It's not a big deal if it fails'. I couldn't believe he was being so cruel. Had I not made it clear to him that this is something I really wanted? And yes, of course, my life doesn't depend on it, but if I do get published I could die a happy writer! Of all people I would have expected him to be supportive of me. In fact, he is one of the only people who actually know I am trying to get published. I don't tell people because they judge me for it. The fact that he would do so too made me angry.

I didn't tell him, of course but when I got home from the holiday I was so frustrated by the situation that I wasn't able to produce anything at all. I wasn't sure whether I still wanted to get published and the deadline I had set myself seemed impossible and horrible now too. Don't get me wrong, I still want to make it, but the words of my boyfriend clung to me. I will probably fail. I probably won't get published, at least, not at the first try. I will probably need to keep trying for the coming few months with many different publishers before I find one (if I ever do).

It's all good now though. I had a couple of days to think of it all and now I am fresh and ready to keep going on. I might not make the deadline. I might not even get published but this is something I have been busy - on and off - for about 8 years now. It is time I wrap it up, not for anybody else but me.

Chapter 3: Pre-thoughts

I finished chapter 2. It has been a hassle but I wanted it to be near perfect. My first chapter opens with a blast and immediately drags you into the story. The second chapter sort of lets the reader settle in (at least, that is what I hoped to achieve). I still had to make sure it was interesting enough to let the reader read on. Having said that I think I might have actually achieved that. I know that there are going to be far more crucial chapters (such as the one with the big reveal) but for me the beginning is also very valuable. It’s the first few pages, the first few lines that makes the reader decide whether they want to read on or not. The great thing is, now that I got that out of the way I can focus on the story more (which is what chapter 3 is all about).

I came across a slight problem though. In chapter 1, I introduce 3 characters, then in chapter 2 I introduce 4 more. 3 of them don’t reappear after that chapter but it means that I have already hurled 7 different characters at my reader. It doesn’t have to be a problem but then there are also four countries with weird names and four castles with hard to remember names. As I started with chapter 3 I realized I introduced yet another character in the beginning of the chapter. And then another, and two others. Then, the fourth chapter, 3 others. Most of them make an appearance later on and actually become quite valuable for the rest of the book but I am just afraid the number of names will confuse my reader.

I guess the challenge with chapter 3 won’t be so much as repairing the cracks in the storyline or fixing the language here and there but to decide whether I should remove certain characters, or introduce them at a later stage. For instance, one of my characters receives a flute from her father with which she can call a ‘creature’. Let’s just call it a creature, because I don’t want to spoil too much of the story here ;-) This gift becomes important later on in the story but I am not certain if introducing this character already in chapter 3 is a good idea.

Another idea is to remove a certain part of chapter 3. The relevance to the story is minimal, it is basically used to show more of the personality of two of the characters. Since one of the two is a new character which won’t make his reappearance for another four chapters it might not be a bad idea. It would kill me if I have to do this for the next few chapters but at this point I feel like the story will be suffering if I bring in more characters and don’t actually get anywhere with the story. I remember when reading Lord of the Rings for the first time that I thought Arwen and Eowyn were the same person. It was only at the end of the second book that I realized they were different characters. All through the second book I had thought of Eowyn as a stupid and selfish woman when in fact I should have admired her bravery. I’d rather not let that happen to any of my readers!

Oh, the troubles of being a writer :-)

Chapter 2 revisited

It has been a few days since I have started editing chapter 2. For the first few pages there were little difficulties but after three pages or so I stumbled upon one. On that page I start 'telling'. As a writer you always have to make a choice between showing and telling. If you pick showing that means that you will depict a scene, conversation or action which will 'show' things. In this action you can encrypt information. You can do the same with telling but you would basically tell the reader about it (for instance; 'for five years a war had been raging over the continent'). Both ways are effective on its own but in some cases it can be really ineffective too. That is the problem I am facing right now.

Chapter 1 and the first part of chapter 2 have been 'showing' for the most part. Then, on the third page of chapter 2 I start telling. A lot. Telling can be an effective way to speed up the story a bit but in this case it is just plain annoying. I could try to twist the telling around a bit to make it more effective but in the end I decided that the best way was to continue on with showing for a little more and just involve more information in the showing. So I decided to let two characters talk to each other about the situation they are in to let the reader know what is going on.

But that takes ages and if I have to do this more than once it is going to take even longer! Yesterday I went to grab a coffee at the mall near my home and sat down to write. I decided that, since I have never done that before, it might be a good time to write down what personalities each of my characters has. It's not that I have never thought about it, but I have never taken the time to write it down. As I am now doing a final checkup it also means that some characters need to have some more depth. In some cases it was very easy to write down the characteristics but there were too many characters which were still kind of blunt and only had a space to fill, so to speak. They didn't have anything that would make them stand out from the rest, and that is exactly what they needed.

Pfff. I wish things would go a bit easier. With the weather being this hot and so little things on my mind (hurray summer!) it gets hard to force myself to focus on the book. It's not that I don't want to, but it something I need to be very focused about. Especially now that it is not going as fast as I would want it to it's becoming more of a burden than something else.

Drinking coffee elsewhere did seem to work though. I might have to do that again, maybe that will get me working!

Chapter 2

Sometime when I was 14 I decided to write a book. It's been 8 years and the book still isn't finished. It has a beginning and an end, sure. There is even a quite impressive storyline, if I might say so myself. But it's not done. It might sound that way, and if you are not a writer you wouldn't understand how things can sound so finished but yet they're not. It has flaws here and there, some ugly parts as well, but somehow I have never found the time or the courage to completely finish it. Because the day I will stop writing on that book it means I will have to find a publisher.

The reason I once started writing was simply because I could never finish anything. I hated it about myself, that I could start with a thousand new things but never finish one. I would start a story and stop midway. I would start a drawing and thorw it away because the eyes weren't working out the way I wanted to. I would suddenly be interested in making jewellry but then give it all up because I didn't have the patience for it. I still suffer from that small personality flaw, even though the exercise of writing a book did undo most of it.

I had promised myself that I would send in the manuscript (because technically, that's what it is since it has never been published) before my 21st birthday but then I went to the University and started studying Law. Bye bye free time. Bye bye discipline to read and write during the weeks. As I've said, it has been eight years since I have started writing this little booklet and about three versions of each chapter. All I need to do now is check for any inconsistencies and correct them.

In order to prevent myself from once again not finishing I have set myself a date. I will send in my manuscript the 5th of September, a day before the academic year starts once again. This means that I will have nine weeks (minus work and holiday) to edit 30 chapters. That comes down to 129 pages of removing inconsistencies, small mistakes, and rewriting certain parts.

There is one little advantage, on the 13th of March I visited a small café with my laptop. I ordered a coffee and edited chapter 1. That means that for today, chapter 2 is on the menu.

And I am so ready to take a bite!