So, last night I
tried to talk to someone about Mom, and the whole situation this past year, and I swear, I
couldn’t get a coherent thought out. My brain just refuses to work in a linear
fashion right now.
And the anger.
I feel so fragile, so brittle, like the merest blow will shatter me.
I’m constantly having to rein the anger back in, over every stupid little
thing.
Writing ... oh,
yeah, I said I’d get to that. Over the past year, I’ve put proposals in for
three different novella collections but nothing was chosen. Probably a good
thing, because with everything else going on with Mom, I honestly didn’t have
time for a contract.
In October,
though, once we had Mom settled into rehab care, I thought I’d be able to
settle in and focus on my writing. On doing something productive.
The suggestion
was made by my agent that I come up with another historical romance, something
aimed at a certain popular category romance publisher. With no little
grumbling, I found my thoughts going back to a particular story idea I’d first
written out as a novella proposal, a story that started seriously coming to
life while I was staying in Missouri in May, training to do Mom’s dialysis, but
then was turned down as a novella.
The ideas
started percolating again. From October through December I made modest
progress, first on a fantasy saga that I’ve pretty much been working on since I
was 15, then on the new historical. In late December, I found myself writing a
short stretch of story that suddenly upped the stakes for all the characters
and changed the game as I knew it.
On January 2,
Mom flew away home to Jesus.
Now, I’m stuck.
I’m distracted. I don’t know how to get the characters out of the mess they’ve
created, not even sure I believe they can grow enough for a decent character
arc, or so their winding up together wouldn’t just be a setup for disaster. (I
did mention this is romance, right?)
In the middle
of being flat irritated at the characters (and even Joss Whedon commented that
characters aren’t any good unless they have a will of their own) I find
myself in the position of needing to work up a proposal for this story. That
means not only polishing up the first three chapters (I have not quite four
written so far), but figuring out where the rest of the story is going,
including high points and black moments and the oh-so-important climax, and
coming up with a one-sentence summary (the “pitch line”), the theme, stakes,
scriptural basis, etc. etc. etc.
I whined a lot,
but I managed it. And in the process, I have a better grip on the story itself,
and might actually be a little less irritated at the characters.
So what is this
story? Here’s my pitch line ...
How can she tell if God is calling her to
stay ... or if she’s simply afraid to really live?
Oh, and if I
haven’t mentioned this so far, my heroine is the granddaughter of Micah and
Truth, from Defending Truth.
More later. :-)
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