That’s the main problem a lot of people have. I’m sure that every person has had this problem at one time or another. And all for a number of reasons.
Myself, I have trouble finishing reading books more often than not. Either I slowly lose interest, which can be compared to a slow, agonizing death, or something else comes up that is twice as interesting and I forget the other completely.
I’ll try not to let that happen to “Wuthering Heights” just because its already pretty interesting. But with Twilight hysteria bigger than ever with the arrival of “New Moon,” I’m becoming more interested in not only reading “Twilight” for probably the 7th time, but also going to be picking up “Breaking Dawn” for the first time since the first time I read it.
I had the same problem with “Interview with a Vampire,” but we’re comparing two different kinds of vampires here. A lot of die-hard vamp fans might have me burned at the stake for saying this, but I prefer my kind of vampires. The ones that seem just like regular teenagers, but with supernatural powers. I’ve tried two other series of vampires outside of Twilight & The House of Night, both have left me a bit disappointed so I’m not going to be picking up the sequals anytime soon.
The strangest thing is with some of the books I’ve picked up: they don’t have many pages. I checked recently and found that “Twilight” nearly has 500 pages. The Harry Potter books range from 300-870 pages and I’ve read every single one of them. What is the difference between those and anything else I hadn’t gotten around to finishing?
I’m a sucker for the fantasy genre. There’s no other way about it.
Well, that’s not completely true. I’ve read through “Angels & Demons” and “The DaVinci Code,” both aren’t fantasy, but have some sci-fi elements to them. And I found “The DaVinci Code” incredibly interesting. Unlike anything else I’d read before. It’s 592 pages (just checked) and it wasn’t all that hard to get through.
Last I checked, I have three books now that I have read at least half way through and haven’t bothered to finish. “Memoirs of a Geisha” I’ll now probably have to read from the beginning because I stopped more than halfway through when all other stuff started coming up. “Wuthering Heights” I’ll have to get a move on, but I’ve got a lot more interests right now. When I’m done reading “Twilight” again, I’ll probably start back on “Wuthering Heights” which I’ll bring to work with me. Then I’ll read “Breaking Dawn” after the sun goes down at night 
for some reason, that was a habit I picked up when I read it the first time. But it was more of a concidence. I was so busy with classes during the day that I had no choice but to give it an hour or two every night. And that worked for me pretty well.
“Interview with a Vampire” I’ll have to get through the next 200 pages at some point, but just don’t have the feel for it right now.
All this Twilight hysteria has gotten me more interested in looking over something I wrote while I was getting off the high of reading that series. Bits and pieces are based on the world of Twilight.
The story begins when my heroine’s dad dies in a car accident and she has no other choice but to live with her mom in Alaska. Her parents separated years ago when her mom, being the free-spirit she is, couldn’t stay in the bonds of marriage any longer and spent the past several years living in different parts of the country. This particular move is more permanent.
For years my heroine has harbored something of a grudge towards her mom mostly on behalf of her dad, who never quite got over his first love.
Anyone who doesn’t know Alaska is under the impression that its a desolete wasteland when it is growing more and more accustomed to the modern era. There’s maybe one or two areas in my fictional version of the place where times are changing. The high school and the outdoor shopping center I called Nanook.
At the same time, I’m trying to work out somewhat of a love triangle between the heroine, her jock boyfriend back home (who is starting to remind me of Zoey Redbird’s old boyfriend Heath in the House of Night series) and the somewhat mysterious Inuit youth she meets her first day at Nanook’s resident Starbucks. I gave myself very little time at the end of the book to write the character of her soon-to-be ex Andrew and the break-up was a little too easy. I’m not sure if its even believable. It makes a reference to an Ibsen play, but it sounds almost cliche, an easy way out rather than there being a real conflict. The conflict I only make note of through the book when Hallie talks to Joey about Andrew. How she’s a different person with the two different guys.
What separates this a little from what I did before is that the scenes between Hallie & Joey when they got more involved with one another are getting beyond PG and going into PG-13, maybe slightly beyond that at the very end. I’ll just call it second-base. And I also make a couple Siberian huskies and a wolf secondary characters. They don’t speak, but their expressions are described as if they were human. Ultimately, the wolf is the embodiment of Hallie’s dad’s spirit and shows up throughout the book to either save her life in the harsh Alaskan wilderness or just to help fill void within her that formed from her dad’s death.
Mostly I wanted to read some parts again because another character, Trevor has become Hallie’s “Jacob Black” but the two aren’t involved romantically ever. She considers it briefly, but he ends up with her female friend, Alicia.
In some ways, though, Joey is a mixture of Edward & Jacob. He’s got the mysterious thing going on, but because he’s Inuit, he has strong feelings about his family and his roots. And he wants to stay true to his family’s ways, not very into how times are changing in the world around him. Then in other ways, he’s very close to my character, Jonas, one of my more beloved characters that I’d ever created. They have the mysterious thing going on, but Jonas is probably even more mysterious and a bit of an oddball in comparison. But anyone who’s a reincarnated angel would be an oddball.
I started this entry with the following thing in mind:
I have trouble finishing what I start and it’s not just reading books from start to finish.
Writing novels from start to finish are another thing completely on their own. 80% of the time, I finish one of my stories. The trick comes in the editing phase and I find that to be more difficult than anything else.
It’s odd to say this, but when I write my stuff, it’s like I’m writing about an event that happened to me personally. Something that actually happened to me. It can’t embellish true events, just like I can’t rewrite an old passage as if it happened that same day. I’m a different person now than I was when I wrote whatever it is I’m working on. It’s impossible to write it in the same tone, the same voice as I did back then. And I’m having an even more difficult time trying to explain what that means.
When I write something from start to finish, I believe the story is finished and there’s not much else I can do to it. Editing is something you have to do as a writer, but sometimes there just isn’t anything else I dread more than having to edit something. I’ll have an idea of what I can do, but I rarely follow through with it completely. I feel the need to work on something else and that’s what’s happening now. The only editing I can do with success is adding more dialogue or even writing a chapter completely over from scratch.
I consider “What if’s” and “What could have been’s” a lot. And my story about Jonas has one very big what-if. When I was writing one particular chapter, the power went out and I lost it completely. So when the power came back on, I had to write it all over again from the vision I had in my head. It wasn’t exactly the same as what I had before the power outage. And I think I’d even written it all over again, yet again. The first time I printed it out and had someone read it, I found one chapter in particular to be difficult to understand. So I went back and rewrote it from scratch and it turned out better than I could have imagined.
Now I wonder what would have happened to that chapter if the power hadn’t gone out.
It’s great to have a lot of different things I’ve written. But I find a few problems with that all the time. One I’m starting to find is that a lot of my characters blend together. I write the same types of characters all the time. The male lead is mysterious and the best is brought out in them because of their love interest/girlfriend.
Then when I’m looking over my writing, I know for sure that I have a definite style that I’ve literally bred into myself. It’s something I can’t get rid of and sometimes my repeated phrases annoy the hell out of me because they span across all of the books I’ve written. The one main difference I did with my story in Alaska that I hadn’t done anywhere is is description. In the settings and also in the ways my characters speak and relate to each other.
More than ever, I wish I had someone to talk to about this.
And I’m getting to thinking that there’s no way I alone can edit my own works. Almost if I feel I have to hire someone to read my stories and tell me what works and doesn’t. Someone who knows what they’re doing. I suppose that’s one of the things an agent does, but I’ve had little success with that as well. I think that none of my stories are good enough to publish because there’s a lot of editing to be done. I wrote on my story on Jonas over six years ago and I’ve went through it and edited the whole story on two different occasions. The first time, I was sending it to Vantage Press and got rejected (I got a lucky break with that one because they’d been noted for counts of fraud). The second time, I sent it to publishamerica.com, only to find from prince.org of all places that that place is no good. Clearly I don’t know what I’m looking for.
Then the only other thing I can think to do is shop around for an agent. If they look my story, they’ll put in a good word for me with any of the publishers that are most likely to accept my manuscript. They say that if you want to publish, go with a company that has published stories that are close to yours. The ones that do that all require agents or “solicitied writers”.
Perhaps the biggest problem I have is the fact I’m not writing a series of books. My characters are all independant of each other, with maybe two exceptions that share common destinies. The one thing they all have in common is that they’re young adult fiction with elements of romance and fantasy.
I’d go shop around for an agent now if I had anything finished and that I think is good enough to put in book stores. I always that that my story on Jonas would be my first one, but I don’t know if that’s even ready to be shown around to agents. I’d written a lot of different things since then and I’m not that person anymore. There’s little more I can do to it before it deviates completely from the original story.
The biggest challenge I have is writing a synopsis for it with a word/sentence limit. You’re asking the wrong girl for that job, lol. That’s why Twitter would be a huge mistake for me. I can’t limit myself to 140 characters when I write, just not possible.
It’s great that I have a large catalogue of work already, but the one problem with that is that I have a large catalogue of work. I can compare it to digging my own grave or bottomless pit that I can never climb out of with all the work I have to do. Or, I can be a purpleheaded geek and compare it to Prince’s number of vaults with unreleased music. The way I write my stories can be compared to the songs he writes. He’s in a particular state of mind with some of them and once that mood passes, that’s it. He’s onto the next thing and there’s no such thing as second chances.
Perhaps the worst of it is that nobody has read my work. Ok, almost nobody. Some is published on various websites. Members of my family have seen some of my works. But none of it has reached anyone of substantial standing that can help me do anything with it.
Time I’m finding is my biggest enemy. Because I have a real job, there’s not much time left for my writing. But I’ve mentioned this several times before.
I always have an itch to write something new, but to be realistic, I can’t do that right now when I have so much in front of me. My number one problem for getting started is the money issue. Anything that’s going to help me require I pay for a subscription. Because someone else sees and pays my credit card balance, its out of the question right now. That’s the only downside from living at home with my parents, them providing the basic necessities. Sure, I’m legal and technically an adult, but I still have to follow the rules of the house. And getting such a subscription will only lead to a lecture. My dad seems to be the only person in my life who disapproves of me as a writer, thinking I have better things to do and that writing is just a hobby.
Now I ask: how can you say that writing 100-page stories is a hobby? It’d say that’s something extremely serious and not to be taken lightly. Who writes something of that length in their spare time? Someone serious about writing. My seriousness can be critiqued a bit on the grounds that I’m no closer to being published than I was a year ago.
Nothing is in this world comes for free and that’s a sentiment that nothing in this world sucks anymore than. Just doesn’t. Even shopping for an agent requires a damn subscription fee.
This is starting to feel like being in show biz. You have to know somebody to get where you want to go.
OMG, I’m completely screwed, aren’t I?
[resting head on computer desk with hands over head, groaning]
On a lighter night, I think I may be done with Musicology. The next thing I can do is watch Prince’s performance on the NAACP awards when he received the Vanuguard award. Then it’ll be 3121 for the next couple weeks. Oh boy, can’t wait for that.
The Musings of DreamyPopRoyalty 