Sunday word count four – I’m not on The Wall of Shame huzzah!
This week’s word total is…
12382
And possibly more as I have written approximately six pages of stuff by hand and haven’t typed them up on the computer yet!
It is good but I have written nothing at all for three of the days this week and my only excuse for that is I was exhausted and had gastric flu. Yes, sorry for the TMI (too much information).
The days break up as this;
11th August – nothing and that’s because our internet is still tetchy, in fact it has been tetchy again today too.
12th August – 1584 words, which is usually considered a low average for me.
13th August – 7483 words, that is amazing and I wish most days were like this! Especially as it is still the school summer holiday!
14th August – 637 words, quite low and not at all good in my opinion!
15th August – nothing, because I was busy with other things, mostly reading and calming Henry down and having what seems to be gastric flu.
16th August – nothing again because of the gastric flu!
17th August – 2678 words, which is my good average amount for daily writing. It is something I would do usually when Henry is at school; it is still the summer holidays so it is amazing I did my average word count for the day whilst he was home!
The writing I have done this week has been mostly notes towards my leprechaun fantasy, including a title change and rewriting certain weak characters to make them have more of a part in the plot of the story, because there was a lot of weak characters, some of which I will be deleting entirely once this fourth or fifth draft is complete.
I have not included the words towards new story ideas I have had this week, there has been three new novel ideas I have had, but I can’t start work on them until all this other work is finished. I am not bragging or anything but I really do have a huge backlog of ideas piled up in a corner of this room and it is getting ridiculous because I know that more than half will never ever be started, let alone finished as there is just too many! I think I must be the only writer in the history of the world who has her own slush pile for what ideas might work and what are weak!
I am also weighing up something in my mind a lot recently. I love reading and writing fantasy, horror, sci-fi and dystopian stories – I especially love and am addicted to my vampire stories, my saga I am doing. But I am reading a lot about how a writer shouldn’t really have too many genres under their belt and this is disheartening to me because I love them all. I can’t release my vampires or my fantasy in particular and there are at least four dystopian stories I really want to write; it seems to me that there are only really two horrors I have planned, so I can release the horror I guess? Though I have been told by so many people that horror is more of my strength than other types of fiction I write.
I thought I could just write anything and be appreciated just as much, but the more I research the more I am finding that this isn’t the case, I could be found unprofessional and disloyal to my original fan base. Even to have just the three genres could be too many. I don’t really know what genre vampires can be put into, because I have found them in so many different sections at the bookstore and in the libraries that they have confused me – they are put into the dark romance, dark fantasy, horror, gothic and erotica sections – so which is it? Dystopian novels can be put into science fiction, horror or thriller sections too. Fantasy also has about three sections, dark fantasy, adult fantasy, family fantasy.
I am struggling to decide which ones to say goodbye to. My fantasies tend to be comedy family fantasies and some of them are dark, very dark and borderline horror again sometimes with small interjections of dark comedy.
My Dystopian stories have links with science fiction ideas, new fictional type sciences and leans towards some religious or mythological ideologies or prophecies.
My vampires are more complexed as the sagas cross into so many genres, science-fiction, horror, romance and fantasy as even my vampires mingle with fairies and so forth.
It is apparently great to be different, but not so different that you can’t define your genre.
If I can’t define my genre right now, how can any of my future agents and publishers?
It is both a depressing and eye opening reality of being a writer.
It makes me feel so caged.
I really love and adore my vampire novels so much and they are a huge part of who I am, but I am not ready to kiss goodbye my leprechauns, mermaids, giants and dragons either. Nor am I willing to kiss goodbye my ripped up worlds full of warlords and surviving citizens and their struggle for salvation and freedom.
So who is going to take me seriously when I post out my stories to agents in a year or two?
Do you think I worry too much? Please post what you think in comments below.
Thank you for reading.
Writing style and narratives
Many new writers write in a first person narrative; this is very limiting and produces problems if they want to include other characters opinions and viewpoints. The main character of a story isn’t psychic, so wouldn’t know the real reasons behind their nemesis or co-inhabitants reactions to various events.
When I first started writing my vampire dark fantasy series, I was also to blame for writing in a first person narrative; this made it very complicated for me to introduce new characters with their personalities effectively. My aim was to write the series as a series of biographies of individual characters from the same story, but this wouldn’t work well as it had already more or less been done by Anne Rice and I wanted to be different. I found it much easier moving onto the third person narrative, which is what’s happening in my rewrites.
Writing in a third person narrative gives me more flexibility for my story’s direction. I can skip viewpoints and characters at will, I can write about how everyone feels simultaneously and without too much effort. Since writing in this style I have been able to write more words to my story daily, much more than before, alongside another technique I will tell you about shortly.
As a writer you must see yourself as a god, you are creating a world and these are your people; you’ve made them, you control them, you control events; you should be as dedicated to your creations as you are to your own god, you should be motivated by the sheer fact that your characters are waiting in limbo for how you are going to progress their lives. But gods have two sides to them, good and bad, cruel and kind and so you should not feel too emotional about wrecking their lives, otherwise you’ll have a happy, clappy, crappy story.
Thinking about how I structure my novels, I am not the usual can of beans; I’ll share with you why; It seems to me that most writers write a book from beginning to end, I’ve noticed I can’t dedicated myself to surprises.
I write down my ideas in my ideas book, then I put up bullet point of events on my computer that I’d like to see happen in my story; then as scenes come to mind I write them, whilst trying to write from beginning to end, then I sew it altogether and sometimes I revise but mostly I don’t – in fact, everything that’s posted on this blog is never revised, I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I don’t have faith that what I write up here is my best work?
I do have massive flaws grammatically, punctuation wise and possibly prattle on too much needlessly, this is mainly down to the fact that I’ve had limited formal education. My mother home educated me mostly and had a problem with me studying in college and university so I was put under pressure to become a drop out on seven occasions.
I must remind you too, that my main tutor at home was my mother who is dyslexic; yet I still managed to do a distance learning course when I was nineteen and got my only qualification in the world of a B grade GCSE for English Literature.
So, if I am not fine-tuned or polished, those are my excuses and I learn through tenderness. This is why I beg for criticism and comments; I need help fine tuning my art of writing.
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