Writer Musings

I am slowly but surely working my way through the proof copy for Corizen Rising, but it is taking me longer than I had hoped. I'm up to chapter 25 (out of 36) so I'm making progress, but let's face it, my brain is not quite so detail-oriented at the moment as good checking requires. Hence the snail-like pace.

But there's something kind of odd about re-reading your own story like this. Quite frequently I find myself impressed at the stuff I came up with. I know, that either sounds like I'm bragging or that I'm being silly, but it's true. It's not because it's such an astonishing story, but rather because I know the process that I took to write it, which was quite haphazard. It still amazes me that it all came together.

Over the years I've read a lot of stuff by published writers on the "how-to" of writing novels, and most of them seem to plan things out really well in advance with elaborate plot outlines and such. (I guess you have to have such things if you are going to sell a book in advance to a publisher.) Then usually the actual writing takes them in directions that they didn't plan to go, but still they have a plan.

I never have a plan, other than a very vague mental idea of where I'm going.

With Corizen, I had my brother-in-law read chapters as I completed them, and so he was reading it before I'd even finished the book. He would ask me questions about how I was going to tie up certain loose ends and I would be baffled. It just hadn't occurred to me yet! (More than once, Terence asked me if I couldn't just tell him how it was going to end, and I had to shrug and say, "I have no idea!") Well, now I know, and the story reads like I knew what I was doing all along. Thank goodness for that!

On a related note, recently I had a friend from high school and his wife read Legend and give me updates along the way. The funny (and mortifying) thing was that this friend seemed to find himself in the story in a way that had never occurred to me. Yikes!! Yes, there is no doubt that certain things I've experienced make their way into what I write.

But . . . I never fell in love with any of my guy friends in high school. None of my characters are drawn from people in my life. Sometimes they do have some characteristics or some shared experiences with my friends or family members, but Casey was not based on anyone I knew in real life, and I put as much of myself into his personality as I did into Andie's.

Gosh, I wonder who else read my book and thought I was writing about them???