So - I'm a closet writer. For a long part of my formative years, I wrote thousands of words on a daily basis for the sake of online roleplays - where essentially a bunch of people work on a collaborative story - each participating as a character or two in an overreaching plot. It's a ton of fun, and some of my best friends from my younger years were made doing this.
But as the roleplay craze died down and moved to (really lame) different subjects, I slowly stopped writing. By the time I was getting ready for University, I had absolutely no time to write, and for about five years, pushed it completely out of my life.
And then came Nanowrimo this past November. If you've been living under a rock for the past decade, Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) is when a bunch of people collectively get together to write 50 000 words or more in a novel of their choosing, in the span of a single month (November).
I'd toyed with the idea of participating a few times in and out of my rocky writing career, but I had never gotten as far as updating my word count. This past year was different. I was determined to do it.
And every day, I sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote, reaching (if barely) my daily targets (1,667 words per day). I followed the advice and silenced my inner editor, and just wrote. Ninety percent of my story is absolute garbage, but in the span of a month, I managed to eke out a salvagable story. Something I hadn't manged to do. Ever.
And I realized that I absolutely LOVE writing. Writing is something I can do - considering you're reading this blog post. I've always harbored a secret desire to be a published author. To see a book of mine on the shelves of a bookstore. But for some reason I've always discounted it. I'm an artist, not a writer.
I've decided to scrap that whole attitude, and just write. Using the outline of the novel I created during Nanowrimo, I plan on writing a long-running fantasy series involving eight different characters, based loosely off of the Tarot card system. Each can control a certain form of magic, and there are people who really, really want that power. Eventually I want all of them to band together and kick some ass - but with eight characters, that's a long way off.
For now, I'm turning my attention to the characters who really jumped out at me writing the inital draft - the two siblings who control various aspects of water. They hail from an island swept up in a destructive matriarchal cult obsessed with blood. Charming, I know. There's love triangles, there's fighting. There's badass fighting girls and sanguine boys. There's volcanoes and strange oceans.
I have another book idea waiting in the wings if this book seems to flounder a bit. As a gemini, I have to work with my short attention span by taking projects and turning them in to carrots - and then switching them once I grab for them. So I'll detail that idea another time, when I'm sick of writing about this one.
Over the next little while, I'll share developments, musings and pieces of what I'm writing, and document my process as we go along. Because writing is a process I firmly believe shouldn't be done alone. And I like to document this kind of thing.
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