La Vie Boheme

Trying again...

Write Club was a good thing last night, for several reasons. I needed a little boost of encouragement, for one, and Write Club is always excellent for that whether or not we actually manage to write. Sunday afternoon I had a brainstorm about "The Girl Behind the Counter", which I've always thought was a good story, no matter how many rejections it got. (Yeah, I'm the same way about "Midsummer".) I realized that my glee at discovering Harper-the-town as a setting when I wrote that story made it full of setting-related stuff that really had nothing to do with the story itself. While you can get away with that in a novel (to some extent), in a story, not so much.

So last night while I was waiting for Julie and Mer to get there, I went through the story with my fabled pink pen of editing (it's less harsh than red!) and cut mercilessly. When I did the cuts on the Word doc, I discovered that I cut about 3000 words from a 7400 word story. I haven't reread it yet, but I have a feeling it's going to be MUCH better, especially in terms of pacing. Plus, since it's about a stumped writer, I think I neatly managed to excise all of the "oh woe is me, an unappreciated writer" stuff--which I didn't consciously put in as my own point of view, but it was definitely coming across that way.

I also have yet another novel idea brewing, which also occurred to me last night. I have a hunch that Sword in the Mound is dead, and The Host, while not precisely dead, may continue in its zombie-like half-life indefinitely, having served its purpose well (got those first novel-writing jitters out of the way). That still leaves The Exile's Daughter, which is alive and growing in leaps and bounds, False Light, which still pokes through my subconscious on a regular basis, the Harper novel, wherein I will expand "Midsummer" and "Girl Behind the Counter" to my heart's content, along with some other ideas I've had for the town, and now this new one.

The new one... dare I say it... isn't genre at all. It's straight, mainstream fiction. The scope of it makes me gasp a little. It takes place over four or five decades, and will track one woman's personal development using US culture and society as both a mirror and a backdrop. I think I might be a little young to write this one yet. I adore the idea though.

For now, I should quit musing over future novels and get back to work writing the current one.