Since finishing NaNo, I haven’t been writing much. Firstly, I lost my diary in this abyss that is my house. For three days I didn’t write anything.
Second, I was writing on 800 Words, but realized that I now have way too many characters to write about (over 30). They all want their stories told, so they’re all being skimmed. I don’t like that. I need to concentrate on one or two.
I end up not playing them well online, either. Firefighter, one of the more recent ones, is a character I want to explore more. He has a past, has past lovers, is older than the teens, is a little skeeved by magic. He considers himself a mutant but he’s more Science than a mutant, since the chemicals he found himself exposed to were what woke up his mutation.
Other characters exist, from Knight and Grim to new ones like Breathe and Heavy Metal. It’s just that…I can’t seem to sit down and write a long piece. I want to write a novel. It gives me a purpose. But I’m not even coming up with short pieces, never mind long ones.
The conscience wants to, but the mind is tired. I can’t come up with things. I need to either read more than writing books, watch more TV than the news. But whenever I do watch TV (fiction), I consider it a waste of time because I’m not actually doing anything. Yet, in Bird by Bird (or one of those books), the author says that when you do that, you are refilling the well. Plowing through the George R. R. Martin books is a bad idea at the moment, because I’m stuck reading that one book, that one author – who’s really good, but not a master. I want to read other books, but I notice I start them and I don’t finish them. The only one I finished recently is Daywalker, and it was horrible. I tried to read Called (note: both book covers look very much the same) but I couldn’t get past the fourth chapter. I wanted to. But it didn’t hold my interest.
Speaking of which, I have my friend, who is not my beta reader, plowing through the first 30 pages or so of Grimaulkin. It might be that many pages; I gave her a handful and told her to read it. Unfortunately, I’ve lost my beta reader due to depression. My friend read the first page as I was in the kitchen, and she said, “Gee. Nothing like starting in the middle.” That’s how books start these days. She likes old fashioned books like some others of her generation, but the people who are buying books – maybe not physical books, but things to read on their Kindle – are younger than me and her. They want to get right in the thick of things.
Because of that, I have to write short. I have to write in front of a green screen, like Gone Girl. The big reason I stopped reading that story is because I was getting really sick of the vitriol of the husband. Chapter after chapter, he talked about how evil his wife was. And chapter after chapter, the wife steps in and talks about how good she is. Both of them are yuppies that are full of themselves, and once their jobs are gone, are lost little piranhas, eating each other alive. In Gone Girl, there is hardly any description.
Is this what people want in their fiction? Why do I have to go by how the New Yorker people write their fiction, especially if I don’t like it myself?