My Writing Lifw

The past week has been one of forging a new segment of Confrontations and also of revising the two previous sections. I do love ensemble pieces but this one gives me a lot of people to keep track of. There are 9 viewpoint characters and eight other rather major players plus all the casual characters. Great fun.

Also cleaning up two old manuscripts to be sent out again into the world. Typos and language in one and who knows what's in the other. But that someone wants to look at them again is great. Finding old manuscripts is kind of fun and one wonders if there ever will be time to see what can be done with two others I found plus snippets of others.

Also last week realized our house is 90 years old. No wonder there are so many things to do. Last year a new roof. This year windows and doors.

My Writing Life

I'm back to writing. Actually I've just finished two stories, one a novella and the other a full novel. Getting ready to send them out into the world. The Amber Tower is one of the Amber Chronicle stories done for a Jewels of the Qulll anthology. This one was harder to write than any of the others since the hero and heroine are kept apart. Like Rapunzel he's trapped in a tower for a month and to escape he must choose one of two princesses. The hard part was doing a courtship story when the two were separated. The second child to be sent into the world is the first of an alternate trilogy that in time will be a series of four trilogies not really related except that in each story a character is sent from our world to an ancient alternate world. The entire series is titled In Other Worlds. This one is Egypt but the title should probably be changed since there will be two other stories in that world. I think maybe The Warrior of Bast might be the title.

Another thing that happened in this writing world of mine told me a bit about my writing self or style or something. What I learned is I can't go back. I sent a book where my rights had been returned to another publisher. This short novel had been a fun one to write and was written on a dare, a spicy romance that earned a good bit of money during its stay at the publisher. What I received was a great letter with suggestions for revisions that would make the story a stronger one and one not so top heavy. The suggestions made sense but as I tried to make the changes, ideas came. I found I couldn't go back to something I'd written five or six years before. In my head it was done and not to be revisited. This may seem odd since I'm a Cancer with six planets in that sign. Cancers do love to hold on to old things. Must be Uranus, the planet of change sitting on my Ascendant that gives me the ability to move forward.

This brought up another idea. I have many writer friends and some who would like to be published. I see several things among them. One is sticking to the same old, same old story and not being able to reach for the next idea until they feel they've perfected what they're working on. Another is the lack of persistence. This sounds like a contradiction since they're persistent about the story they're working on. Persistence isn't for short term goals. It belongs to the long term. I'll be thinking about these things more in times to come