I just spent about a half hour playing around with the colors and themes of this blog, and yet there have been no changes. Sometimes I wish I had a good eye for color and could just - poof! Make it happen in two seconds. I swear, one day I'll find something I like and make up my mind.
But this post isn't about colors or themes! No way! This is about what I promised on Wednesday: a massively long blog about the future of my writing! How exciting! How thrilling! What a lot of exclamation marks in these few sentences!
So, on Wednesday, I gushed about Penryn and the End of Days, you know, the book that made me think of nothing but Amory and her friends. I said that it gave me ideas. Boy, did it ever.
Let's start this with a flashback: the main idea for Amory came when my boyfriend and I were at a Coheed and Cambria concert way back in 2008 (if you don't know who they are, LOOK THEM UP. I'll wait). One of the lines in the songs gave me such a vivid image of a fallen angel getting her wings burned off that I knew I had to form it into some kind of coherent thought. What started as one thought turned into many, and before I knew it, I was spending most of my time at work writing scenes or backstory or just getting to know my characters (honestly, thank god I had a do nothing job). I had an image of what I wanted the story to be, and then it grew, so I planned a second book, but then that grew, and soon enough I had three books. I had them planned out perfectly, down to the very last word.
Between then and now, changes have been made. Some of them for the better, some of them not. As I galloped closer to publishing, I began having self doubts and started changing my words into something that I thought others would like because I had probably read them half a dozen times before in another books. Pretty soon, I had something that I was proud of, but that only vaguely resembled what I had started out to write.
It was rather discouraging.
Over the last year or so, I've read over the first book to prepare myself for the second. It's been a lot of back and forth, reading and rereading, matching up characters and their settings. The more I read, the more I realized that while my words and story were good, they weren't what I truly wanted. A lot of the characters had been introduced at the last minute, as if I thought my main three weren't good enough. Some of the settings were confusing because I wasn't really writing what I knew. That's one of the main reasons why I've been lagging on the second book. It wasn't going where I wanted it to go and it was depressing me.
When I read Penryn, it hit me that the simple story was exactly what I had wanted. There is this one girl, her mom, sister, and a fallen angel. Sure, there's other minor characters, but at the core of the story, there were just these four. Somewhere along my line, my world became too populated with characters and settings, and I had lost the original meaning of the novel I wanted to write.
For the last two weeks or so, I've gone back to Amory. I went through it and matched it up with what I had envisioned back in 2008. It meant cutting out a lot of characters and rearranging a few things, but when I finally finished planning things out, I was happy. Light. Carefree. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
So I made the rather tough decision to pull my book from Amazon.
That doesn't mean that I'm done with it. No way. The weight has been lifted and that only means I have more room to write. I'm not going to start today or tomorrow, or even next month. I'm taking my time with this one, but that doesn't mean it'll take five years like the last one. Now I know where I'm going and I'm taking the advice of countless authors before me: write what you would want to read. And I am. I'm actually excited about getting back to Amory, because I'm going to be able to unleash the woman in my head onto the world.
Yes, I'm working a little backward here, but, to be honest, it's not like many people bought my book off Amazon (more on that way later in the future). Camp NaNo starts next week and I'm doing it just to get writing every day. I slacked off on that for far too long, and I know that's a main problem for Amory right now. I haven't been that excited about writing because I keep getting stuck at certain places, and I'm hoping to ram that wall down. I'm shooting for a June/July start, and then I can work on it for the summer, and hopefully start editing and rewrites at the end of the summer.
That means I get to keep you all updated on the writing process and how this one is panning out. I have a feeling that it's going to be a lot better than the last one, and I can't even describe how my heart is bursting to get going. But, as an old friend constantly reminded me, patience is a virtue, and I never really understood that until I started writing.
Here's to the new year, getting started a bit late. Have a fabulous weekend, everyone.
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