Ready for Round Two

It's been a while my friends, but I am back. For months there I was inundated with work, life and everything that goes with it went by the wayside. But now I have a new job and a new work-life balance that is much healthier. Yay!

One thing this means? That I get to write again--well, I get to force myself to write again LOL In fact, I've been thinking about writing so much that with the help of some friends' encouragement I signed up for a writing class at Gotham Writer's Workshop here in NYC *gasp!*

So, starting the week of January 17th, I'll be taking a 10-week long, once weekly 3-hour workshop on children's book writing, getting a jumpstart on the YA novel I began when I was 16 years old. With 88 typed pages written it feels like a waste not to finish it, even if it bites. My super-strong "writer's block," however, has been a bit of a deterrent for me and my silly book for years--why should now be any different?

This is a question I've asked myself for a long time, trying to figure out what would get me motivated, attempting to understand what's so massively missing from the old draft that I can't overcome it. I was clueless for the past, umm, decade *blush* but it finally hit me.

I'd started with an idea at 16 that I ran with for a couple months. Then, some time later,I came up with a new twist to the idea and went back and added in a parallel storyline for a couple months. Then, I put it down again, only looking at it every once and a while, ready to type but unable to get over the immaturity of my work, unable to determine where the story was even going. (The end goal is, of course, still up for grabs--I haven't a clue what's going to happen at the close of the story.) But that initial change in the story--the birth of a new storyline to be interwoven--is what got me stuck.

At the time, I was obsessed with writing in the third person, so that's what I did. Storyline 1 is in first person, storyline 2 is in third. But a third person POV isn't the easiest thing to use in a YA novel where you need to get inside your character's head. It seems so simple, so miniscule, but when I realized that this was holding me back, it was like a firecracker went off in my head. I have to rewrite the entire storyline in first person. Then I'll be able to move forward.

So, with that realization in mind, I'm not going on a bit of a journey to get back in touch with my story and its characters, to reinvent the book from page one. My friend Allison has given me until my class starts to rework what I want to rework, and then I'm supposed to go full-steam-ahead.

It's off to a good start though, or a start of some kind at least! Last night, I wrote 650 words. Not a lot to many of you, I'm sure, but to someone who hasn't written a word of anything in months, it's pretty damn good. The work itself isn't great, but hey, I'm doin' it!

Now here's hoping the POV is actually the issue LOL