Book writing is definitely on my mind recently. Did you know that I am (or at least I claim to be) an aspiring novelist? Yes, indeed! In hopes of making it easier on me to one day reach the level of Actual Novelist, my husband recently found a great deal and bought me a netbook. Now I can write from wherever I happen to be! The beautiful little computer that I have named Eeeny-Weeeny, since it is, after all, an Eee PC, is just the right size for my hands. Ooooh I can’t wait for NaNoWriMo this year!

Thus Far

Second grade was the first time I got to write complete stories, as far as I remember. My teacher had this bright idea of stapling together a few sheets of unlined paper to make books, and we got to fill in as many as we wanted with stories and illustrations. My stories were all about the Pretty Pretty Princess(es), but I had a lot of them.

I stopped writing for some time after that, perhaps in part due to the dreaded Writing Wednesdays in fourth grade. That was tough. Ugh – writing prompts. My hands would get so sore – my fingers actually developed these hard, raised bumps from holding my pencil all day, and man, I hated Writing Wednesdays. Now, give me a computer and tell me to write all day, and I’d be happy to do my best to comply. But I think doing that in fourth grade was actually a bit of a hindrance to me.

A few years later, I participated in the Young Author competition and wrote/illustrated a story that won some sort of award. A year or two later, I wrote/illustrated another children’s story for school. I still have both of those, in laminated form.

But now writing has become more difficult. It’s not enough for my stories to be 10 pages long with a simple plot. As I’ve aged, I’ve become increasingly critical of my own work. That’s when I started that bad habit of writing a few lines or a few pages of a story, and then putting it aside. I would get stuck, and I couldn’t think of a satisfactory way to continue the story, so I just stopped working on it until the next half-baked idea came along. I guess I just never had the follow-through to finish them on my own.

NaNoWriMo has gotten me over that hump, in a way. I now have two complete drafts to work on.

What’s Coming

The first draft has no working title at all. It’s simply NaNoWriMo 2007. The basic plot and the characters I created are good, but the story itself needs so much work that rather than editing the novel, I’m actually in the process of re-writing it. It’s a fantasy “escapism” novel set in a world of my own creation.

The second draft is on the back-burner, still. When I look at it again I’ll be able to see it with fresh eyes – or so I hope. Its sad working title is Pickles From Space. It has nothing to do with either space or pickles, but there you have it. It is, in a way, kind of science-fictiony, only.. It’s really not science fiction at all. It takes place right here on Earth with regular-old humans.

This year for NaNoWriMo, I plan to write a military-related story, since my Hubby will be deployed, and I’m sure the military will be on my mind a lot. And I also have other ideas in mind for the future. Sequels to the fantasy story, possibly, and some more present-day ideas. I can barely wait to get started!

Unfortunately, thinking of ideas is much easier than sitting down and completing a novel. I just hope that, one day, I can actually call myself a published novelist, rather than just aspiring to be one.

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