I will finish this novel if it kills me. At the rate things are going, it just might.<\/p>\n
Things are kind of tough for me right now.\u00a0 I desperately need a new job–the one I’ve got is slowly sucking away my soul without even paying enough to get by–and job rejections are way worse than rejections from publishers (I’ve been getting a lot of both, by the way.\u00a0 Not that I’m looking for pity, but yeah.).<\/p>\n
As if that weren’t bad enough, my current novel, Worlds Away from Home<\/em>, is turning out to be a train wreck.\u00a0 There are all sorts of problems with character motivations, improper foreshadowing and plot set up, etc etc.\u00a0 That makes it REALLY hard to get motivated to write each day.\u00a0 Yesterday, I wrote only 245 words (youch).\u00a0 Today, I did about 2.2k, but that’s still way less than I need to be doing.<\/p>\n The thing that worries me the most is the thought that the audience for this particular story may be slim to nonexistent.\u00a0 It’s solid space opera, but with a romantic element that challenges a lot of the mores of our modern, sex-saturated society, as well as many of the conventions of romance within science fiction.<\/p>\n The main female protagonist is something of a pushover–but she has to be, in order for her growth arc to have any umph.\u00a0 The main male protagonist is an orphan on a quest to discover his own origins, kind of like a cross between Mogli and Pip.\u00a0 His quest, combined with her parents’ manipulative attempts to get them physically intimate too soon, are the main things keeping them apart.<\/p>\n But in a genre where physical intimacy usually marks the romantic climax, how do you make it out to be the obstacle against that climax?\u00a0 Will science fiction readers go for that, or will they hurl my book across the room because of it?<\/p>\n Well, if they hurled my current draft, I wouldn’t blame them one single bit.\u00a0 So many plot holes and awkwardly written scenes–ugh.\u00a0 I’ve got to seriously rethink so much about this story.\u00a0 But a later draft?\u00a0 I don’t know–maybe it would work.\u00a0 It would probably need other hooks to keep them engaged, such as cool world building elements, but I think I could make those work.<\/p>\n Anyway, I suppose it’s nothing unusual.\u00a0 For every book I’ve written, I’ve come to a point in the rough draft where I thought the story was completely unworkable and should be scrapped.\u00a0 It’s a tortuous, masochistic process, but I suppose it’s normal.\u00a0 That’s some comfort, at least.<\/p>\n My goal is to finish this abomination by August 15th, then move on to polish Mercenary Savior<\/em> and make it really shine.<\/p>\n Another goal is to get a decently paying job (at least $8\/hr at +25 hours per week) in order to afford to go to DragonCon in September.\u00a0 Another goal is to reteach myself algebra and calculus through the math books my dad (who is a geometry teacher) is letting me borrow.\u00a0 Another goal is to actually get a social life.\u00a0 BLARG.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"