Getting Back on Track

The writing has continued in dribs and drabs. In the fall of 2011, I received a review from a seasoned editor and accomplished writer through the Humber College, School of Writers network. I don't know who it is but I feel it may be a man who is very focused on what it takes for a novel to be considered literary fiction; and that's okay, except, that's not what I'm after. I've taken into advisement most of what 'he' has suggested and rejected other aspects only because I feel the need to stay true to myself. That is most important for me.
In the meantime, I'm at Chapter 14 in my revision and word count is hovering at just over 70,000.
It would be great to get it published this year.

bobbie wrote...picking up where I left off...

Signing on from Bracebridge, Ontario in the Muskoka region. Cottage country 2hours+ north of Toronto (GTA). Writing from my laptop on a small table in an upstairs room with a partly slanted ceiling -- yes, like a garret. The window is like a live landscape painting of a snowy climb with wintered trees and the potential for deer to wander by and look back in.

It's been almost a month since I last worked on any of my novels -- yes, there is more than one that I started writing in 2009:

1. Hung Out to Dry -- 25,000 words drafted in September during the 3-day novel writing contest held during Labour Day weekend. It's about a young Newfoundland women in the '40s who gets pregnant against her will and ends up whisked away from her community to bear her child in secret, only to find the price she has to pay for her solution might be more than she can bear.
2. Protection -- 30,000 words drafted in November during National Novel Writing Month held every November. It's about a young Ottawa woman who disappears on a roadtrip to Montreal and how her friends try to discover her fate with no clues to follow.

I'm letting Hung Out to Dry 'compost' for a bit as I've sent the first 15 pages into the Humber College Creative Writing Program (Fiction) and got accepted. Since I'll be reviewing it in detail over the first 30 weeks of 2010 with a mentor, I thought it best to wait for the program to begin January 4th.

I thought tonight I would pick up where I left off a month ago with Protection, but I'm struggling to remember what was going to happen next. I think that's because I hadn't quite figured that out yet. Now that I'm back on it and can incubate about the storyline and get to know the characters all over again, I may figure out how it's supposed to go over the next 15o pages.

It'll come. I just have to have faith that it will come.

Digging In The Compost Pile

In the back of my desk at home, I have a hard-copy folder with every thing from ideas on slips of paper to full 35-pg drafts of creative writing. These snippets and booklets go back to about 2002 mostly and continue on to 2005-ish. In the book, Page After Page, by Heather Sellers, a creative writing teacher based in Orlando, she writes that your real-life experience is good compost material and that a folder of ideas and crap can be like your actual compost pile.

Two nights ago, I decided to dig through my compost pile and found a few surprises. In fact, one of the drafts I didn't recognize at first. I thought for sure it was some self-help write-up to get me writing. It turns out, I wrote it! So I've got about two decent start-ups, one 35-page draft that has potential and the re-write of my already-(self)-published novel: Sing, Girls, Sing!.

This means there is hope for me yet. One, because I can find a great story idea in my draft pile years later! And, two, because I can look at something I published and realize THAT's the piece of crap.