Tuesday, August 23, 2011

A good dilemma to have, I suppose

Good morning, all!

I have been trying to relax lately - I needed to recharge my brain and just spend some quality time reading other people's awesome writing. But now I'm too fired up to relax. I'm ready to charge ahead. Every time I think about the revisions on the horizon, I get a rush of nervousness and excitement. What new directions will I get to take the MS in? Do I have the talent to pull it off? Can I measure up to this agent's other clients?

It doesn't help that there aren't a lot of places to channel that energy. Work has been a lot of the same lately. I usually would compensate for that by working on another MS, but I don't want to start anything new when I know I'm going to revisit THE HUNGRY GROUND so soon. I like to keep a steady momentum going with my WIPs. Once I start a project, I really throw myself into it.

But I have a confession to make. Even before, when I was querying, I was having a lot of trouble starting a new project. Not because I didn't have any ideas. Because I have too freaking many.

There are a total of five projects I can tackle, all YA. Three are new - one is urban fantasy, one is horror, and one is straight-up fantasy with dark fairy tale undertones - and the other two are reboots of older fantasy projects. No one project really has an edge on the other, because there are things that draw me to each one, and there are parts of each one that I still need to figure out. And this is, of course, assuming that a new project doesn't suddenly appear and sweep me off my feet. Sigh. 

Since my revisions have not quite started in earnest yet, I want to take this time to fill in some of the gaps. I have some exercises I can do, but I'm curious: what would you all advise? Questionnaires? Flow-charts? Some kind of cage-match between all the protagonists? I'm welcome to all suggestions!

3 comments:

  1. I'm on for the cage match. Let 'em duke it out!

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  2. Yes! Cage match, all the way. :) I just wrote about where all these ideas come from. It's amazing how once you become a writer the story ideas just don't stop.

    Good luck! I suggest you just do writing exercises, like writing a scene for each potential WIP from the villain's POV to get a better idea about the main conflict. And take two cookies and call me in the morning. *tips nurse hat*

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  3. Haha, cage match seems to be winning! That villain POV exercise is a fabulous idea, though. I'm definitely going to try that at some point!

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