New Novel Madness - Picking a new project

As a writer, there is nothing more awesome than finishing a novel. Recently, I completed the first draft of the last book of The Corpus Chronicles and am currently editing. If you haven't written a series before, take that amazing end-of-book feeling and multiply it by 1000. Seeing the last book printed out on my desk in physical form rather than on my computer screen was the most surreal thing I had ever experienced. My entire indie-author journey up to that point had been The Corpus Chronicles. The series had been my blood, sweat, and tears for the last two years. No matter what I was doing for all that time, the series was always, without fail, at the back of my mind. And then, suddenly, it was over.

Of course, I still have plenty of editing to get through, along with beta reading and cover art, but for the most part, the heavy-lifting is complete. I'm no longer expending the majority of my energy each day into pushing the characters to grow and evolve, in structuring the outlines of subplots and backstories, and putting down one new word in front of the other. In short, I'm no longer building anything new. Instead, all my time is going to marketing The Corpus Chronicles, reviewing new and awesome books from other indie authors, and my very (cough) studious student life.

However, as someone with a deep love for writing, without that building component, something feels horribly off. I've heard from others that this is something many people experience after finishing a major project, but for me it is a first. Before The Corpus Chronicles, the only books I wrote were for fun rather than publication. The stakes were much lower back then, and consequently, so was the mental blowback after finishing a project.

After finishing The Corpus Chronicles, everything in my life was thrown off, from my normal mental state of mulling over plot ideas to my daily schedule. My natural solution was to dive right into a new project. However, it proved to be much more difficult than I had imagined. Usually, my mind is constantly swimming with new plot ideas, and while I was writing The Corpus Chronicles, they came up so frequently that I came to resent the project I had chosen for its length and the consequent time commitment, and I was eager to finish. I wrote down all the brainstorms in a notebook when the ideas came and continued my work on The Corpus Chronicles.

After I finished the last book, I went back to that notebook and leafed through it. I picked one idea, wrote maybe a vague outline or a few pages, and then hopscotched to another, and then another... you get the picture. Nothing was grabbing me, and now that I had the time to write a new book, the new ideas stopped coming. Trying to force them was as agonizing as not doing anything at all. I read through article after article online on writing inspiration. I tried to think back to how I got the idea for The Corpus Chronicles. It was just like everything else I'd written thus far: It had just popped into my head one day and evolved into something feasible with time and patience.

So where was the disconnect? I had plenty of ideas in my notebook, but for some reason, I couldn't get them to grow. I also wasn't getting any new ideas for the first time in my memory, and I believe the two phenomenon were closely related. Maybe it's just a symptom of the postpartum depression us writers get after we finish projects, or maybe the mental block is stemming from somewhere completely different in my life. I don't think I'll end up figuring out what it is exactly. Maybe the only way is to keep working through the last book's editing and wait for that elusive little spark of inspiration to ignite. It certainly can't be forced.

Until next time.
-Your friendly neighborhood coffee zombie

Camp NaNo ending thoughts

This year was my first time doing Camp NaNo. I have done the main NaNoWriMo once, two years ago, and wrote most of a sci-fi book that I haven't worked on since. This time, I was using NaNo to try and finish my first draft of book 2. I already had a big chunk written going into NaNo, so reaching my word count goal should not have been a problem, considering that I already had my entire plot outlined chapter by chapter. But, as a pretty picture of a stack of freshly printed paper hasn't popped along my twitter feed, you can probably guess that I did not. 

When I did NaNo the first time, I reached and surpassed my set word count goal, which was about the same as what I set for book 2. The main difference I felt while writing the two stories was that the first time, when I was writing the sci-fi book, I liked the idea of being a published author some day in the future, but I wasn't writing said manuscript for the purpose of publishing it one day. I loved writing, I had a few friends that were doing NaNo, and I went along for the ride. When I began, I didn't have any sort of outline and made it up as I went (which was all fun and games until I realized that I had fifty pages of useless scenes and got my outlining act together). 

The biggest difference was that when I wrote that book two years ago, I was writing for me instead of focusing on writing for an audience. That was both a good and a bad thing. Yes, I was a lot less insecure about how my words would be received and that allowed for me to explore ideas with a lot less restraint. But that also had a flip side. Because I wasn't concerned about presenting that manuscript to a reader, the story got away from me and chunks of it were not well thought out/just plain sloppy. 

While working on book 2, I didn't have the same problems as I had a clear picture in my head of where the plot was going. However, I had EOA already published. I was receiving both positive and negative feedback on it, and not nearly as many reviews as I had hoped for, despite the endless lists of reviewers I had contacted. I found myself wishing that I had either tried harder to traditionally publish or not published at all. All of my frustrations with marketing EOA translated into fear while writing book 2, specifically the fear of my books vanishing into obscurity, and that fear turned into writer's block.

Camp NaNo helped with that fear a lot, and for the first two weeks, I wrote until my hands fell off. I had awesome cabin mates for encouragement and, when needed, friendly competition, and I more than doubled my starting word count. However, the fear got the better of me during the second two weeks and I fell off the wagon, creeping towards my word goal at a snail's pace. I ended NaNo with a handful of chapters left to write, so hopefully the wait for book 2 will only be a few more months, depending on how the writing goes from here on out. 

Anyways, little Smudge doesn't seem stressed. I shouldn't be either :)

He's practically mastered meditation. I could learn a lot from him.

(Of course, right after I type that he runs outside for an endless barking frenzy...)

-Esha