Short one, I think.
Dawn has accidentally burned her face, and we’re out of fresh aloe or any aloe-based creams that aren’t past their sell-by date.
I am looking forlornly at the two chapters of PASSAGE TO BUJAH: Departure, and wishing I were feeling a little more spunky, so I could push through and get them reread and edited or replaced. It’s only 9K words so far. I could rewrite that in half a day, if I pushed. My record is something like 17K. But I feel crummy and I ache in lots of places, so I’m having trouble knuckling down. After I write this blog, I’m going to put earphones in and force myself to read. I may start rewriting in about an hour or two, if called for.
I have this idea that, though what I wrote was pretty good, it lacks something, and part of that is direction. It needs to be more immediate, more personal. I tried that with a writing trick (short ‘two-line’ paragraphs; about fifty words long), which kind of helped, but it’s curtailing my ability to let the prose breathe. I can’t let a technique hurt the story, even if the challenge helped produce some fairly nice, economical lines.
Of course, the big problem, as mentioned yesterday or the day before, is that I had a problem getting over the slightly transsexual content, even though it’s a Sci-Fi story and calls for some weird science. The problem is, I’ve been thinking of it as YA Sci-Fi, and what I’m forgetting is, YA has become what regular Sci-Fi was when I was in my late teens and early twenties. It’s all angst and adventure and a little bit of sexiness, and all the really creative genre writers are making it broader and smarter than it once was, and all really because of Harry Potter.
So what I decided was to stop being afraid of the strangeness of my idea, and just go wild with it until it seems mundane. Today, I have to see if there’s any way to put that into practice.
With any luck, the audience will respond to it not because it’s too weird but because, despite the seeming weirdness, it’s actually really exactly what outcasts feel like, regardless of their age. If there’s one thing I know, it’s being an outcast.
Okay, I said I’d keep it short, so I’ll stop now. Thank you for reading.
Lee.
