Good news, starting with Monday (who knew a horrible day of the week could actually be a positive messenger?). Regarding the personal, things have been kind.

Regarding the personal writing, there’s another writing contest around the corner and I’m going for it with everything I have. Writer’s Relief offers contests every month, and I’ll do as many as I can. I’ll also be doing NaNoWriMo this year, which I’m quite excited about! I finally have all the free time I could’ve asked for, and now I’m finding deadlines, which I need more than anything. Short story contests are going to help me through to my publishing dream, some way, somehow. 

Fall/Autumn, you are good. You are wonderful. You are kind. I love you, more than any other season. I love you with all my heart! All good things come from Autumn.

I have too many stories I want to tell. As soon as one gets written down, three more crop up in its place.

I had a habit of writing without editing. I just wrote and it didn’t matter what happened, I’d write until I got the idea down. After that, I moved on. This wouldn’t be an issue if I didn’t want to get published.

If I want to be published, I have to stop walking away from pieces once they’re finished. I just want to keep writing these stories down, but in order to progress past the stage of “I can write a book,” I need to return to them.

This is hard because I want to keep writing. I want to get to those other stories.

There aren’t enough hours in a day.

Started my first job this week and I have to say: to Ashley and…well, Ashley, (and all of the other working bloggers who are also following their dreams as they work at their jobs) I’m in awe of your abilities to blog and write and keep going even after the workday is done! I only hope I can be half as productive as the two of you.

It’s now becoming clearer to me why so many people give up their dreams (and have road rage and look pissed off at the end of the day…) - they’re just too damn tired to keep going. It’s not that they don’t want to, it’s that they are emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted.

No matter what, I’m going to keep going. I promise myself that. I won’t give up on my dreams.

in my mind.

In case it wasn’t obvious yet, I just wanted to share with those other posts what I’m saying in this one: I’m really loving my characters right now. I’m loving everything about them. They’re so real to me that I can almost taste their presences, and every time I think about the fact that they’re all just in my head and that I can’t run away with them or hold their hands or be there when they cry or just inhabit their world with them makes me very, very sad.

“Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry. But why on earth should that mean it’s not real?”

I’d like to be with them. Call it psychotic, neurotic, whatever you will, but I’d like to be there and sit among them like God, or the proud mom in ghost form at the end of the movie who checks in on her children and smiles to see how happy they all are. I want to be with them more than anything because even though I’ve given them hell, there’s a method to the madness. I’m finishing my books with a series that’s been in my head for a long time, as I’ve talking about before. It’s going to end on a high note, like the end of a very long, very satisfying series of movies that conclude with the sun shining as the camera pans away. It’s an ending I’m going to cry as I write, but I’m so, so happy for it.

It’s going to be a glorious ending.

I love my characters. I love them so much. This is all going to be worth it for them.

Sorry, I’m rambling. I just love to write. :)

This post might jump around a bit because it’s based off of my thought process, and that is a rather scatter-brained system.

I’ve been doing a few things recently that have brought me to my current line of thought, which is that I need to do something more with my work. There are certain people who entered my life at one time or another and left enough of an impression that I still want to know what they’re doing. None of these people are men—I feel a small duty to my gender to clarify that. A fair few of the women in my past have stuck in my mind for one or two reasons. I admired them, or their style, and want to know so much more about their lives, but because we don’t talk anymore, I can’t find out what I want to know.

One of these women isn’t someone I like at all—I think she’s conceited and selfish, but I suppose this makes sense, given the kind of work she wants to do—but she is networking and she has a lot of friends. She is also pretty, has a wonderful relationship with her family, and seems to be well-off in general. She is extremely opinionated and has connected herself with many different blogs, but she is very similar to a lot of girls I know in that she isn’t her own person. Narcissism fascinates me, though, and that’s why I follow her writing. Also, I have an urge to write a story where someone else gets what she wants and what her reaction to having to work with that other person every day might be.

A few of these women haven’t spoken to me in years, but they used to have blogs and I followed them there. One has since officially severed whatever vestiges of friendship we might have shared over these past few years, and the other has disappeared without a trace. I suppose that that’s what happens when you get a “real life” as opposed to keeping your “internet life.” 

The women in my life who frustrate me the most are the ones whose style I wish to emulate—they’re artists or fashion majors and I love their clothing and I want to know more about them—but who don’t put anything on their websites and I hardly ever see them.

There are also writers—meaning writers who aren’t published, but who are quite famous online for having written certain pieces—across the country whom I want to know about, whose fan fiction I adored and was never finished. I want to know who they are, the things that shape them, where they were when they wrote the stories I loved and what they’re doing now. I like to know about the places they’ve lived and then base my stories in those places. I like to adopt their discarded characters and give them new homes and new lives. 

The point of all of these women is that these are the women I want to write about. These are the lives I want to convey in my writing. Their worlds are the ones that are the most elusive to me and I want to know more. In case I haven’t made it abundantly, if perhaps subtly, clear, I’m nosy. I like knowing things. I like to learn about people and what they do and why they do things. If I can’t get satisfaction from internet searches and information from other friends (or the people in question themselves), then I turn to stories. I’d like to think that that’s what “most bookish children do,” but not all readers are writers. Maybe I should modify that to read “what most writers do.”

I write about the lives I can’t live and the people I’m not. There are some very beautiful people in this world—mostly writers because those are the people I wind up finding, but a whole host of others, too—who don’t know I exist and that I follow their blogs and am extremely interested in their lives.

I want to write about them. I want to write characters like them. The problem is that the copy is never as good as the original. The original will always be better. No matter who they are, the character will not be the same. My characters will be very different from the people I base them off of, simply because I am me and the people I admire are different from me. Therefore, I feel extremely inadequate when I try to write these people into characters and it doesn’t work.

I’ll be honest, I’m not John Green’s biggest fan. I think the things he has written about have been written too many times before and that some of his romances are a bit unbelievable. I would give anything to have half of his talent, though. He has some ability to lure people in with the written word and I admire that.

Something else I’ve thought about recently (although I think about the people I want to base characters off of almost all the time) is self-publishing. It’s not in my immediate future, but it is a possibility. I browse Amazon Kindle’s free and $0.99 books more than I should probably admit, but these books are cheap and I’m penniless. Also, I want to know what’s being offered. At first, it didn’t matter how free the book was—if it wasn’t interesting in the blurb, I didn’t buy it. That has since changed. I want to know what people are doing and how they are self-publishing books at the rate they are.

There really isn’t anything to it, but we’re all aspiring to write the Great American Novel—or any novel, at this point. Like with most things, there is a lot of bad covering a few gems that require a massive amount of searching for, but they all did it. They all wrote books. I’ve written a few things, but I’d like to think I have (and I hesitate to say this) standards, or enough to know what not to publish when something is only at a first or second drafting stage. Still, I’m not published. I haven’t completed a book.

There are so many people I know publishing and networking and gaining success in the form of becoming who they want to be and entering the world as that person. I know we all come into our own at different times, but I see the people I went to school with doing all sorts of things and being amazing and I feel like I’m…not.

I feel like I’m falling behind, living someone else’s life, and/or living vicariously through other people.

no request is too extreme.

notwritenow:

If you don’t, why would anyone else?