How did I get 72% complete on my novel already?
It may look impressive, that nice (as of now) “72% complete” up there for the currently rough draft of my novel, but let me tell you, that was hard work that took me a very long time to get to.
Back in 1998 I sat down at the computer and banged out a novel in 30 days. Yes, that’s right all you NaNoWriMo participants, a full novel in 30 days. I was not part of NaNoWriMo, I had never even heard of such a foolish idea, I simply wanted to write a novel and I did. Not 50,000 words, no… my novel was more in line with just over 80,000 words. The flaw? It read like a narration of a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Sock drawer!
Oh yeah, I loved the novel, the characters were captivating, the plot was wonderful, the whole thing flew from beginning to end. And for a full year I giggled happily as I went over my manuscript and told myself it was gold, pure gold!
Then I started thinking about who would publish such a thing and my heady jubilee seemed to falter. It was not a novel. Well, it was, but not the kind I had wanted to write. It was a novel that anyone who picked it up would say “She played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I did play Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, but was that the lasting impression of my career as a writer I wanted to leave with my new readership?
No.
So, my sock drawer earned the first manuscript that seems, from what I have read, to be as much of a prerequisite to being a writer as rejections and revisions. I now had a novel skeleton in my closet that I prayed my future readers would never discover.
On to my next great novel, this one would be a novel no one would compare to my childhood of playing fantasy role playing games. This one would be a story, a novel that I would be proud to see on a shelf with my name on the cover. (Not that the other one was an embarrassment, but you know what I mean.)
I was doing research into medieval England in preparation for my new novel, and so it was about this time that I was reading about the Princes in the Tower. I wanted so bad to have those boys find some kind of justice. I plotted writing their story, giving them justice in an alternate world, but… I am a fantasy writer, and there has already been novels written on the boys, so I turned my hand, for now, to writing a fantasy novel based on the Princes in the Tower. With this change in direction came a working name for my novel: Heir to Magic.
Heir to Magic was not an easy novel to write, it still is not. I work for a time on it, then the story just seems to stop mid-stream and refuses to move onward. The anchor of that ethereal beast known as writer’s block holding the story fast in the stream. I will wander away, work on other things, then come back and strive to add a little more to my novel. This is not the story I want to tell, this is the story I have to tell.
I think every writer has one of those. A story they *NEED* to get out of them. A story they feel a compulsion to tell. A story that they do not think they could do justice to, but they feel a need to try. This is my story. My baby. The story I *have* to write.
And, that is what has me sitting at 72% complete. I have worked here and there, sometimes scrapping page after page of story because it did not work, sometimes finding the novel went a direction I did not want it to go in. Day after day of thinking about wanting to work on the novel, but not knowing what to write. Days when I could not type fast enough to keep up with the flow of the words. Years of work, years of leaving it lay untouched. This is a novel that can not easily be told, no matter that I know the entire story beginning to end. I know where and how it starts, I know where and how it ends. But the journey… ah, the journey… that is proving as difficult for me as it is for my characters.
And that, my dear readers and fellow writers, is all part of the fun.
