Wednesday, December 14, 2011

The difficulties of writing and working full time

Hello all!
As you have probably guessed from the title, the main reason you haven't seen a lot of updates to either my website or my blog recently is due to a lack of time. The clock keeps ticking, no matter how much you wish it would stop, at least for a little while.
But yes, to the topic at hand.
Writing while working is a difficult beast. I currently work at a bookstore. It is a fantastic place that spurs me to want to write more. I get ideas. Lots and lots and lots of them. They crowd my head, spill onto the floor, and then sit up and stare at me, all saying, "Write me, write me!"
For anyone who has known me for a while, I tend to come up with way more stories than I could ever write in any period of time. I have stacks of notebooks, tons of simple story ideas, and yet, only one really completed draft. A draft that is not the book I want to finish.
Because, yes, I went back to working on Resonance. Why, you ask, when you finally decided to go with the Triskai Project? Why go back to Resonance, the novel you've fought with for the last three years?
Because, dear reader, it called me back. Honestly, I opened up my old web document when I was in the middle of a tough part of Vicious Sun, and started to get inspired. You know that feeling, the one that tells you to get off your butt and go do something? Bake a cake, read a book, fly a kite, that kind of stuff. Stuff you can't do every day.
And it hit me. I suddenly knew where I wanted the story to go. Because, as most of you don't know, I hit a couple of huge plot issues. I made the story too complicated. It was getting worse and worse, like a wound bleeding out and I couldn't manage to find a decent heal spell. I ran away for a while to play with Vicious Sun. I won NaNoWriMo with 55,555 words this year, beating last year's score by over 5,000. And I felt that bite of inspiration. I could do it.
And I can do it. I just hit 23 pages on the tenth *gulp* draft of the first section of Resonance. The story is divided into four parts, which means I have just about fifty pages in double space terms. That is enough for me to start sending out snippets to agents. Before then, I do have a pool of readers to tell me if I did write anything horrible, or type things backwards (yep, I have a habit of doing that), along with planning to send it into critters.org, a site where you can critique and get critiques on your stories.
Fortunately, I do get an hour long lunch where I work, which is about enough time for me to write a page or two on my tenth draft, which is a bonus I didn't have before. I also have insurance now that I'm full time, which is really good considering my ability to randomly injure myself/get pneumonia/bronchitis and stuff.
In other news, still trying to figure out a budget for a computer. Mine can no longer handle music and video without frying. Which means no art programs for more than an hour at a stretch. Tis sad, but at least I can still work on MS Word.
Trying to stay warm, and keeping fingers crossed for no snow,
Tania

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