Oh the irony of posting an article on web serials and then me taking mine down. That’s not to say to stop reading them. Please don’t but I just couldn’t take mine anymore.
It’s not that the time constraints were getting to me, not really. It was the work itself. I hated it. Loved the idea, still do but I’ll be damned if I let something that sub par represent my writing. The worst of it? The voice. I addressed this concern earlier here and I was hoping I’d be able to work through it and I sort of lied to myself and rationalized and hoped that I was just being a little over-critical of my work when deep down, I knew it was as bad as I thought it was. When a review confirmed my suspicions, I said screw it, it’s not worth it.
To write in general is certainly worth it but to continually put effort into something I just don’t like purely for the sake of time management is simply a waste of my time, especially when I put my WIP on hold every other week on order to write and edit the next chapter in this series. I want to write something that I know has an inkling of a chance to make it to the end and pretty much everything except that serial has that chance in spades. With my WIP, from the little snippets of descriptions I’ve given and the sample pieces that I’ve had critiqued, it’s generated a bit of a buzz and gotten people interested already. Yay! Granted the stories morphed significantly from those initial writing pieces (which I will post here eventually) but the concept, the idea and where I’m taking it has got people intrigued by it. But most importantly, I’m happy with the story I’m creating and the words that I’m writing even though they’re crap.
Not really crap but yes, crap. It’s a first draft. No one’s eyes will see this version except my own and I’m purposely just pumping the story out in order to just get it out. It’s sub par but that’s what edits are for, as well as rewrites. But the fact is I’m excited about the crap. I’ll probably pee a little with the finished product at this rate.
With Dawn, I was burdened with the final edited piece and essentially dreaded it. The love wasn’t there, not for the written word. The love is there for the idea but it needs to sit and, hopefully, morph into a story that doesn’t send people running away screaming. Right now, all I know is it’s getting shelved for an undetermined amount of time. I was thinking of taking it back out and try and rehash it for NaNo but at the same time I had other plans for that November write-athon.
I’ve since began planning for two more books on top of the two that I’m working on here and I think they’re freakin’ great ideas (notice the excitement? Dawn was lacking that, for sure)! Both are YA fantasy although I’m not sure just what kind of fantasy one of them is going to be. Definitely a series (at this point anyway) but I don’t know if it’s going to be vampires or the fairy type, or both. The ideas are brewing through. But I have an order, or I do at the moment. Diamond Crier first, Coney second and then the last two written in that order simply because I’m all sorts of OCD and that kind of organization makes me happy. So I’ll see how I’m feeling when NaNo time actually comes around.
The important thing is, though, that I want to be excited by writing, not burdened and apprehensive about it. Editing is a different beast; I’m just talking about the writing. If I’m disgruntled with the story, the voice, whatever else and I can’t seem to get it to work after how many tries, I just can’t keep working on it, not then. It needs to get shelved and something more productive done. It’s the only way to be, well, productive.
There’s a difference between doing what I’m doing with the serial and “writer’s block.” I’m not blocked in the story. I know where I want it to go, I know plot points that it needs to hit but the voice sucks and I’m not about to waste my time on something whose only end is a blog and have it suck the energy out of the other works whose end is potential mass market publication. It’s backwards. I’ll manage my time some other, more productive way. This just wasn’t working and it needed to stop before it really cramped my style.
