Happy Birthday Blog!
Three years ago today, I wrote the first post of this blog.
Well, technically, I wrote the first three posts.
Yeah, yeah, I know... back then I had so much to say it was multiple posts a day, and now I'm proud of myself if I come up with enough words to post once a month. It's sad.
Three years ago I was hip-deep in a draft of my young adult dystopian novel, which, back then, was called "Four Kisses for the End of the World." Harper Voyager was opening submissions for unrepresented young adult novels, for one 24-hour period in October. I had 60,000 words, a full course load at college, a part-time job, and a burning determination to submit a finished draft.
And I did. I succeeded. I got a draft in. I felt accomplished. I felt confident. I felt exhausted.
And then nothing happened.
It was naive, in retrospect, to think my hastily-hammered-out, largely un-edited first draft was going to catch anybody's eye. It was barely better than somebody expecting their first draft NaNoWriMo novel to get published.
I was crushed when I got that form rejection email a couple of months later. Still, I printed it out and taped it to the wall above my desk. See, back then, I believed in failing. I believed in getting rejected. Because if you're failing, it means you're trying. If you're getting rejected, it means you're putting something out there.
Cut to the present day, when I'm still re-tooling that same young adult dystopian novel. I spent most of the past year working on it under the name "Meltdown," trying to make it flashier and smoother and more action-packed. Now I'm rejiggering the whole thing again, trying to dial it down and make it more personal, less about one girl taking down an entire government, and more about the effects of a collapsing society on the individuals within that society. I've finished college, I'm currently unemployed, and I have no demands on my time besides looking for a job and doing enough housework to let me feel like I'm maintaining my position of barely not a leech.
But I'm not writing.
I've imagined countless explanations for this drought of words in the desert of my mind. Maybe I'm watching too much TV. Maybe I have too much free time. Maybe I don't have the energy. Maybe my brain is less elastic than it used to be. Maybe my car is slowly killing me with a carbon monoxide leak and my brain's creativity centers have died. Maybe this is just what happens to dreams when you hit your mid-twenties: you realize you're really not cut out for what you wanted to do when you were twelve, and so you go and get a day job instead.
Maybe I just got tired of being disappointed. Trying so hard to get a story right, to tell it the way it needed to be told, to get to the end of it, and failing, over and over.
I don't know why writing has gotten harder. But I do know I'm not giving up. So happy birthday, blog. Happy birthday, insane pursuit of an irrational passion. Happy birthday failure. I love you all.
In other news, I'm going to be starting a new project this week. In a stroke of brilliance, my sister and friend and excellent writer Sarah has created Book Club, a project where groups of friends each commit to writing books one chapter at a time and posting a chapter a week. So look out for the first chapter of that project, as well as links to the other participants' chapters, in the next week.
In the meantime, check out my first real post on this blog, from three years ago! It was about dialogue tags.
Well, technically, I wrote the first three posts.
Yeah, yeah, I know... back then I had so much to say it was multiple posts a day, and now I'm proud of myself if I come up with enough words to post once a month. It's sad.
Three years ago I was hip-deep in a draft of my young adult dystopian novel, which, back then, was called "Four Kisses for the End of the World." Harper Voyager was opening submissions for unrepresented young adult novels, for one 24-hour period in October. I had 60,000 words, a full course load at college, a part-time job, and a burning determination to submit a finished draft.
And I did. I succeeded. I got a draft in. I felt accomplished. I felt confident. I felt exhausted.
And then nothing happened.
It was naive, in retrospect, to think my hastily-hammered-out, largely un-edited first draft was going to catch anybody's eye. It was barely better than somebody expecting their first draft NaNoWriMo novel to get published.
I was crushed when I got that form rejection email a couple of months later. Still, I printed it out and taped it to the wall above my desk. See, back then, I believed in failing. I believed in getting rejected. Because if you're failing, it means you're trying. If you're getting rejected, it means you're putting something out there.
Cut to the present day, when I'm still re-tooling that same young adult dystopian novel. I spent most of the past year working on it under the name "Meltdown," trying to make it flashier and smoother and more action-packed. Now I'm rejiggering the whole thing again, trying to dial it down and make it more personal, less about one girl taking down an entire government, and more about the effects of a collapsing society on the individuals within that society. I've finished college, I'm currently unemployed, and I have no demands on my time besides looking for a job and doing enough housework to let me feel like I'm maintaining my position of barely not a leech.
But I'm not writing.
I've imagined countless explanations for this drought of words in the desert of my mind. Maybe I'm watching too much TV. Maybe I have too much free time. Maybe I don't have the energy. Maybe my brain is less elastic than it used to be. Maybe my car is slowly killing me with a carbon monoxide leak and my brain's creativity centers have died. Maybe this is just what happens to dreams when you hit your mid-twenties: you realize you're really not cut out for what you wanted to do when you were twelve, and so you go and get a day job instead.
Maybe I just got tired of being disappointed. Trying so hard to get a story right, to tell it the way it needed to be told, to get to the end of it, and failing, over and over.
I don't know why writing has gotten harder. But I do know I'm not giving up. So happy birthday, blog. Happy birthday, insane pursuit of an irrational passion. Happy birthday failure. I love you all.
In other news, I'm going to be starting a new project this week. In a stroke of brilliance, my sister and friend and excellent writer Sarah has created Book Club, a project where groups of friends each commit to writing books one chapter at a time and posting a chapter a week. So look out for the first chapter of that project, as well as links to the other participants' chapters, in the next week.
In the meantime, check out my first real post on this blog, from three years ago! It was about dialogue tags.
this is a test
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