WiP Wednesdays 8/26

Holy carp where did the month go?

It's the last Wednesday in August?! And I'm not moved off to a new apartment and/or a new school. First time since I started kindergarten that I am not a currently enrolled student somewhere. It's a little weird.

Maybe that's why I feel like such a failure all around, but especially in the writing. I mean, I had days this last week where I didn't write a single word! Not one!

And it was those days I felt most like a failure. Because I didn't do anything important that took time away from being able to write. (Actually I just wasted a lot of time. Sigh.)

But I did get writing done. And I'm happy to report that I'm close to halfway through the novel, at least chapterwise. My current outline has Oracle's Promise at 19 chapters plus an epilogue and a prologue. I have the prologue and 8 chapters written. So that's nearly halfway. Right? Sigh again.

It's all bollocks though and will ultimately be scrapped.

But the chapter I just finished writing on Monday has always been the hardest for me to write. This is the second time I've written it. But it doesn't make me cry like it did the first time I wrote it. Maybe it will when I come back to re-reading it months from now. I don't know.

One more chapter and I'm in uncharted territory. None of the rest of the novel has ever been written in its entirety before. There are two chapters that I wrote but scrapped before completion when going through the writing process the last time. I predict things will slow down considerably once I reach that point.

My biggest struggle right now? The one that's making me have thoughts of abandoning writing fiction all-together and returning to poetry, which is not really my first love, though I do enjoy it?

Getting my stupid characters to speak real and sound different from one another. They all sound alike and it's total suckage. Sucktacular to borrow from a friend. My one story that I wrote, I really felt like the characters each had their own way of speaking and it was easy to write their dialogue in unique ways. I still felt the need for the occasional dialogue tag, but not so much in large groups. Unlike in Oracle's Promise where I really have to put those in or risk my reader getting lost with who is talking.

Gah!

Oh, other news:

Book 2 in the Sunstone Trilogy is tentatively, and I mean tentatively, titled Oracle's Veil.

Subject to change of course.


As for all my other WiPs, like my poetry collections that I have going:

I haven't really been working on them. They're all back-burner at the moment. "...Futile" is the most complete of the poetry WiPs. I only need a handful of poems more before draft 1 is complete. Then I can move in to revisions. But I always struggle to revise my own poetry. I need to find a crit group for that. Triple sigh.