Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Something That's Been On My Mind

It's time to talk about the fear.

It's amazing, really.  I wouldn't have thought that I would actually end up with this clean sounding, ready for some movie speech type of complex.  But I think it's happened.  It's fear.  Fear of rejection of my work has kept me from working as hard as I could.  Because think about it - and here's the clean cut part - if I don't finish it, I can't send it off and get it rejected.  And lets face it, if you've spent any time taking in the stories of those who have broken in to the writing world, you hear about the rejections.  It gets to the point where it feels like you HAVE to be rejected to be normal.  And I realize the reality may be that the majority of writers go through at least some rejection before they get a yes, but does that mean we, the unsubmitted writers, should go into our first submission pretty much accepting failure?  Not exactly great motivation to keep you editing.

But, for better or worse, I must keep going.  I don't know what types of belief systems are represented by everyone who may read this, but I truly believe I have a calling to write this book.  Notice I said write, not get published.  I realize that rejection may just be a pathway to something else.  And if you take away the power the threat of rejection holds, shouldn't that mean the fear goes away?

117/204. Take that, fear of failure.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Can't I Just Pretend That Part Isn't There?

114/205  Look, the page count went up.

Here we are.  It happened.  I stayed away from blogging and editing for I think longer than I have since I began this site.  Sure, there are those instances where I would remember, oh, "I've still got to do that," but yet, it still didn't happen.  Life gets in the way, and in this case, life involved a particularly frustrating passage of my manuscript.

If you read it, you may think it was just another section.  But this section included condensed time and changing points of view.   The kind of thing that I would just look at and wonder how I was going to make it something that would be acceptable to the publishing company I'm dreaming of.  But folding the laundry or glancing warily at my iPad won't make that writing any better.  And, honestly, I don't think working on a piece of writing always makes it better, either.  But in this case, I think it might have.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

That Laundry Looks Good....

112/204

Still working.

The progress is happening, paragraph by paragraph, page by page.  I will say having this blog is helping.  I'm aware of the fact that I should probably keep posting regularly to help keep any readership up, but I don't feel right doing so without being able to come to you with an updated page count.  Not always easy to do, though, as life gets in the way.  Which brings us to today's topic: procrastination.

It's amazing how easy it is.  How one can spend hours doing other tasks all in avoidance of something that may only take 10 or 20 minutes.  "Yeah, I need to work on the book....but that stuff really needs to get picked up over there.  And I need to vacuum over there...." and so on.  What is it about my manuscript that makes putting away laundry look so appealing?

There are probably many reasons.  One of which is facing the "bad" writing.  It's one thing to be in the  drafting/writing phase, where so much time is spent on creating new material.  It's a time where the writer can put his or her story out there like a painter laying out big, broad brush strokes.  And if its bad, so what?  I can fix it later.

Well, my friends, welcome to later.  It's drudgery sometimes.  Having to mentally roll up the your sleeves and face the fact that those sentences need to be reworked or just plain rewritten.  And, lets face it, it's hard to spend your time on this, hoping it will lead to work and not knowing if it will.  But I press on, and, God willing, I will finish.  And the laundry will just have to wait.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

The Genre

Before I really begin, I've realized over the last several days that the way my Pages app on my iPad works (and lets face it, the way I use it) may not be producing completely accurate page counts for my progress ratio.  But if there's a page or so error anywhere, it still shows forward motion in a quantitative way, rather than a bunch of entries starting with "I'm still working on it."  Anyways, all that being said, and allowing any potential margin of error:

109/204

Let me tell you a bit about the genre I'm writing in, as well as some of how I got into writing for it.  The official title of this type of story is "inspiriational romance."  If that term leaves you still wondering about what the book could still be about, let me put it this way - Christian romance.  I don't like to admit it, but I get embarrassed often when I need to tell people the type of book it is.  I guess after so many years of living my faith in a secular world, I expect most people on the street to find my genre laughable, as if its just a bunch of dumb, naive stories.  While I won't go claiming that every work of this nature is intelligenty written and highly literary, I will go on record as saying that the inspirational romance genre can be a great avenue for readers like myself.

Christian romance, at least in the guidelines I'm writing for, is defined as "sweet" romances, where there is both a romantic and faith element present in the story.  Basically, its a romance where one or both of the leads have some sort of issue of faith that they work through in addition to the romance storyline.  The nice thing about these stories (or should I say, one of them) is that people like me can get what they want - the romantic, guy meets girl, couple overcomes obstacles to live happily-ever-after type of stories without any sex scenes that one might find objectionable.

I didn't always know about this subset of the romance genre, and I used to read other mainstream novels, which would often include me having to skip pages at particular sensitive parts, skimming for any dialogue.
"Nope, still doing it." *turns page* "Nope, still doing it." *turns page*

It's great to have a genre of romance where I can read a love story that doesn't have those objectionable parts, and has a Christian message.  This is the genre I hope to break in to.