If you’re not subscribed to my newsletter, than you probably haven’t read about my past month, but I’m just going to be frank with you guys, take the fact that I cancelled a preorder and am rescheduling it for this month as a sign of how bad it was.
See, in life I tend to believe that bad things happen in threes.
Well, those threes happened in threes last month, and I’m still a little shaken.
I think that’s part of growing up; people die, you end up making sacrifices you didn’t think you would ever have to, the world keeps turning, and the passage of time mocks us all.
But that’s not going to stop me from writing a book, and neither are the ungodly awful fake meat bacon strips I ate today that continue to haunt me in my dreams.
I’m down to two plot premises that were pulled out of the back of my notebooks, and I’m leaning towards one with a strong need to decide soon, because I’m ordering new covers for Ivy and Ash and just want to get both covers done at the same time for branding reasons and also because I get anxious talking to people.
Anyway, seeing how bad my last month went and the fact that I am still mourning the last vestiges of my former happiness, I have decided to probably go with the idea that makes me the happiest. But first, I will list both ideas and you must use your critical reading skills to guess which one I’ll do.
- A one shot love story staring the Gancanagh from the Chronicles of Whynne and his milkmaid from one of my extremely popular blog posts about fae lore that everyone keeps mistaking for me being an actual professor in faeology. (I am not.) Because of lore reasons, I would have to recon the reason why he is evil. (Boooooo)
- A super self indulgent book that I could easily make into a series of standalones and bank on for future nanos that involves women getting to kiss and hook up with gods. Who are also hot. (Yayyy) Will they be fae gods or greek gods or something else all together? Who knows, we’re going to do a lore building post and talk about how to plot books later.
Part of my stress and sadness lately has been feeling like something was inherently wrong with my manuscripts, but not being able to understand it at first glance. After some in-depth reading and self reflection, however, I realized that a lot of what was going wrong and stopping me from being able to write was that I was letting the setting control the narrative in a genre and subcategory that primarily character led. This was disappointing to me, and I knew that I needed to personally pull myself together and remember what drove me to write and what my initial mission statement as an author was.
I wanted to give escapism to others.
And in order to do that, you really have to give them a character to root for, one that is actually capable of changing the environment around them and also giving readers some satisfaction rather than moral lessons.
I don’t read books because I like to know about the advanced architectural structures of kingdoms that never existed– that’s not what I’m there for as a reader, so why would I be there for it as a writer?
I’m there to find out what it’s like to kiss a seven foot tall, fuzzy blue alien. Or a prince who has somehow become stranded in a small town. Or a man who I was assigned to kill, but might keep alive as a pet because he is pretty and sometimes makes me laugh.
Ask yourself why you read books and you too might find the heart of your books.
And if that fails and you continue to struggle to pull yourself out of a writer’s block and depression, then I suggest you indulge yourself and do the one thing that always helps me
Watch cinematic masterpiece and modern day monument to filmmaking as a whole, Mammamia 2, Here We Go Again.
B. A. Lovejoy 