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The best kind of twins.

My most recent bout of  Writer’s Block lasted more than three months. It’s nothing compared to my five-year Block, but it was still frustrating. I felt stuck and didn’t know how to move forwards or backwards from a specific point in Penny for Your Dreams. For the first time since forever, I was actually editing  and rewriting before completing my first draft. I rewrote one particular scene five or six times in hopes of striking an appropriate chord with my novel. Ultimately the solution turned out to be rather simple.

I was incorporating what I’d hopped would be Weasley twins incarnates into my novel. I liked them. I wanted to give them a lot of spotlight. I really wanted other people to like them. However, I ended up realising I could never produce characters that measure up to the Weasley twins.  Not only that, I can’t even write twins without making them sound cliché or cheesy. So I did the next best thing and got rid of them. Well… more or less.

What’s your genre?

This is a sort of a defining question, isn’t it? Much like a nosy person asking another about their type. Do you like them hot and sizzling like a summer Romance? Or do you like them dark and broody like a sinister Mystery? Or maybe you prefer the thrilling company of an Adventure, or the wit of a Comedy, or even the fun derived from a good old-fashioned Chick Lit.

Your choice in genre indirectly affects the way you appear to others. There are many people who tend to draw assumptions from the kind of genre you read or write. If you write fantasy, you must be out of sync with reality. If you write horror novels, you must have a mean streak. If you write erotica, you must be a perverted human being. If you write sci-fi, you must be a nerd… and so on. But what if someone wrote for more than one genre? Does that make them unstable?

Oh dear. I wrote like that?

Now that I’ve finished writing The Muse Bunny, I’m faced with something considerably less pleasant than the completion of a novel that has ailed me for quite some time… the dreadful editing process. Or more specifically, the reading-my-novel-and-realising-what-an-awful-writer-I-am process.

Since the writing of this novel spanned more than four years, I’m quite concerned about the differences in style. The way I wrote four years ago differs from the way I write now. Some of my sentence structures are different, I don’t used “pretty” and “seemed to” as often, I pay attention to how many times a word is repeated in a paragraph or a page, I’m a better judge of what is necessary and what constitutes an info dump, I know better not to go crazy with speech tags and I know that too many adverbs can be a bad thing. I also know that too many one-liners on a page can now cause me to twitch.

I did it! I conquered my novel!

I’ve alluded several times to a novel that I’ve been working on for more than four years, a novel about a muse in the shape of an invisible bunny who goes out of his way to destroy writers and other artists. I have often struggled with this novel because I did not know how to end it, but now I can proudly say that,  I have finally managed to type “The End” at the bottom of the document.

I finally finished it! Writing the last few paragraphs was excruciating, and I’m pretty sure they’re terrible, haha, but that doesn’t matter because The Muse Bunny is now COMPLETE at 84,352 words, and I can’t tell you how absolutely happy I am about it!

Oh those seductive plot bunnies!

Plot bunnies can be quite tempting. You would be sitting there, working on your WIP when suddenly, “Ding! Ding! Ding! You’ve got a new plot!” Try as you might, you will not be able to ignore that call. It will keep bothering you and dancing around your head until you throw up your arms in frustration and admit defeat. You will scramble around for a scrap of paper or a pencil and frantically jot down anything you can remember.

I’ve been struggling with that lately. I know I have to learn to be monogamous with my plots just as I am monogamous with the books I read, but it’s so difficult! Plot bunnies have been invading my mind all the time, at a time when I’m desperately trying to finish a novel that’s – ironically – about an evil bunny who sucks the life from any artist he latches himself onto.

So much to do, so little time.

I think this is the longest I’ve gone without updating this blog. It feels kinda weird. The truth is, work is keeping me so busy I barely have time to do anything else. I’m so tired I’ve gone delusional. This morning I was feeling incredibly dizzy so I sent a text to one of my coworkers telling her I won’t be coming in. Or I thought I did. Apparently, it was all in my head. I had imagined that I sent her the text, just as I had imagined that she had replied and told me to get better. It was a little bit embarrassing when they called to check on me and I insisted that I had notified them of my absence.

An Update of Sorts.

To begin with, I’m having a new giveaway on Goodreads! The winner gets one free copy of Puppet Parade, and the giveaway is international (with just a few exceptions), but I think most of you would be able to enter. Just go here and make an entry! The giveaway is open till the 9th of August. Good luck!

Next, I’ve received three blog awards, and some of them have been long overdue! Thank you, byamadaleigh, for the One Lovely Blog Award; NMNPHX for the One Illuminating Blog Award; and Tiffany N. York for the Kreativ Blogger Award! I appreciate it! And eventually I will figure out how to put the banners in my sidebar, haha.

   

Back up, back up, back up! Oh, and yeah, back up.

Today may have very well been a disastrous start to this weekend. I returned home from an exhausting day at work, freshened up and had my lunch and everything, then I turned on my laptop. Or at least tried to turn it on.

Windows was starting to load, then suddenly the screen turns black and I get a message telling me that Windows has failed to start-up and I should let Windows try to fix the damage. My first thought was, “Well, laptop, we’ve had a good run. But please try to fix yourself, okay?”

I watch it expectantly, the panic has yet to settle. Then a thought occurs to me: “Did… did I back up?”

Dear Brain, Please Shut up. Sincerely, One with too little time.

Not too long ago, I remember worrying that at one point I’m going to run out of ideas and I’ll run around like a chicken with its head cut off in an attempt to figure out something to write. At that time I was working on just two novels (one that was on hiatus until I could figure out what to do with the main characters, and the other I was struggling to hold it at the seams), and I thought, “Oh god, is this it? After I finish writing these two stories, will I have nothing to write?”

Thankfully I didn’t have to worry about that for long. In fact, I started worrying about having too many ideas.