It feels like forever since I last posted. A month in blog time seems to be quite a bit longer than normal time, in my opinion.

First, I’ll share some updates about the projects I’ve been working on. I’m sure it’s been obvious that I’ve not had the time to write as much. I know it’s been a few weeks since I’ve updated the progress bars. However, this has not been an entirely accurate representation of what has happened. My short story “Night Watch” went through another critique with my advanced fiction class last Wednesday. The feedback was good, but there were a few issues that everyone felt needed some work. I know that with the 5,000 word count limit I won’t be able to please everyone. The first step in my plan is to finish two separate rewrites since there were a lot of conflicting comments. I would like to have both rewrites done two weeks before Halloween, giving me a week to choose which one to submit a week before the deadline. Wish me luck!

My working title for my novel has changed, and will change again before it’s published. For the sake of this post, I won’t go into the details as to why I felt that was a better working title. Now, I’m calling it The Lost Colony. After plotting out our books in the novel writing course this semester, we’ve had to write and submit five pages a week to small critique groups of three to four class members. While I was writing the rough draft during the summer, I just wanted to get the words on the page. Having peers read my story has made me far less comfortable with that. Now, I either rewrite the rough draft or write a much more polished first draft. Currently there is an odd mix of polishing old content and adding new content that’s difficult to calculate into a number to add to the progress bar. It feels like I’m working on the rough draft and the first draft at the same time.

Another change to this project is my goal page/word count. As I’ve plotted The Lost Colony, I realized that trying to force this story into a five hundred page novel might not be best for the plot lines and the characters. Taking everything into account led me to make the decision to cut the novel by sixty thousand words. I know that it sounds like a lot of words, and it is, but I feel that this is a much healthier goal for the story.

In a future post I’ll tell you about the new plotting style I learned in my novel writing course and why I believe it was the best one for The Lost Colony.

Those updates were a lot longer than I initially thought they would be. But I still want to share a thought I’ve had as I’ve been writing and critiquing this past semester.

From my experiences and experiences others have shared with me, writers commonly suffer from doubt about their ideas and ability to write. Even published authors struggle with these feelings. Over the past few weeks I’ve had my fair share of wanting to be a good writer, but believing that my work is subpar to everything else being submitted in my classes. It was during a particular bad writer day when a classmate pulled me aside in the hall and told me how much he’d enjoyed “Night Watch.” He didn’t stop at telling me that he liked it, but he went on and gave me specific examples of moments that he reacted to the monsters I described or places where a character stood out. The story isn’t perfect by any means, but having another writer take time outside of class to compliment and discuss my story with me was a game changing experience. My writer confidence got a major boost. I felt that I could actually do this! (By the way, the peer who talked to me is a fantastic writer who I have the highest respect for personally and craft wise! I know that he’ll go far in the writing world).

Building each other up as writers is a positive practice that I don’t believe gets enough emphasis in the community. I know that in workshops we’re told to be positive, but there was a genuineness in that moment after class that couldn’t be duplicated during a workshop. Sometimes I feel that writers are afraid to like each other’s work because that might mean it’s just as good or better than their own. Not only is this false, but it’s potentially hurtful to the person miserly holding on to their compliments. A little less competition and a little more camaraderie will go a long way to helping writers improve and succeed in this wonderful craft.

Thanks for stopping by! Keep an eye out for an October post!