I've been a busy beaver since school's been out working on two different manuscripts. One I've worked on for so long, I have to leave it alone for awhile. It's kinda like being with relatives too long. You love them so much, but if you're around each other for too long, you start getting on each other's nerves. That's what happens to me with Ellie, Jack and Jaston. I've read, re-read and re-written their dialogue so many times, I get to a point where it all just sounds stupid. Then I hear Diana Gabaldon's voice in my head saying she never gets writer's block because if she gets stuck on something, she starts writing on something else. I decided that's what I needed to do.
She said if she got an idea for a scene, she'd go ahead and write it out and worry about how it would fit in with everything else later. I've been doing that with my new MS. It doesn't have a name right now. I'm sure one will come to me at some point. Right now, I just save my documents as 'Vet/warlock'. The story is still new so there are a lot of questions I still have, but the characters are showing themselves to me a little at a time.
My deal is I have to be patient, so the characters can tell me the story instead of my forcing a story on them. That seems to work much better for me. It also makes the writing process fun for me. I'm not sure what I would do if I had a real deadline to write with. It would probably stress me out.
I haven't abandoned the other MS. It's still near and dear to my heart. My critique partner, Tina, who is a joy to work with and a great writer in her own right, went through my "Never Alone" MS. Now, I'm going back over it and fixing what she thought it needed. I think after that, I'll start the query process. I might ask one or two more people to look at it to see if it has any other errors she or I didn't catch now that I've changed some things.
On a whim, I wrote a short story for @Green_Woman 's blog contest this week too. That was interesting. I'd never written one before. I had to use some pictures as a writing prompt. It turned out to be really fun, but 2,000 words nearly killed me. Having that restriction kept me on my toes for sure. I have another friend on Twitter @AMSupinger that has a writing contest on her blog too. She wanted me to write another 2,000 word short story on 'Haunted Love'. This should be easy since my first MS has a ghost as a main character, but so far, I'm not getting any kind of creative burst for that one. Maybe next week...:)
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