awesome possum

I'm just going to go ahead and give myself the green light to actually be excited, on the internet, about one of my projects. My mystery is so exciting, guys--maybe not everybody's cup of tea, but I actually think it's pretty great. And that's amazing. Granted, I am not of the opinion that my writing is bad; the struggle is with most of it just feeling off in some regard. Writing a serial, however, has freed me from the confines of perfection. If I write myself into a corner, editing past chapters will not save me: I am forced to write myself out. Like MacGyver, but with words instead of toothpicks and duct tape and bedframes-turned-slingshots or whatever the heck.

-img from leninimports.com
-quote dictated to me by Dickens' ghost

So challenging! So rewarding! And I have also discovered that I can, occasionally, be hilarious.

I spend most of my time on this blog (and in my head) worrying about "art".* What I don't spend nearly enough time doing is considering the fact that I have written about fifteen thousand words of a single story (that's about a fifth of a novel!**) in the past six months. That's nothing to be ashamed of! Sure, it would be nice if my brain was better at juggling projects and could spare a little bit of extra juice for a short story or two (because I really do need to be submitting more often), but my mystery is totally legit. I need to remind myself of that. Plus, my mystery is very literary. Sure, it has a fairly traditional mysterious plot. Yes, ok, so it takes place in England. But I feel that the story is actually quite character-driven! This story is not just a cast of names and a pre-determined set of twists and red herrings. I like to think Dickens and Doyle would be proud of me, even if I am a bit silly.

If I were less paranoid about plagiarism (I am so paranoid about this, it's not even funny), I'd share some quotes with you. But you guys will just have to wait until it's finished and I can convince someone to publish it.

Now, I certainly haven't given up on writing artful, thoughtful, folk lore-inspired literature about family and spirituality, etc, but why do people have to pick one genre to write in? Doesn't that seem fairly limiting? I want to write in every single genre. All of them.


ALL OF THEM.

That is all.




*I think I just spend a lot of time worrying, in general. And suffering from a perpetual mild panic. I have consternation lines burned into my forehead. ...My body cannot possibly be pleased with me.
**you know, based on the theoretical "average novel size"  (80k-100k) found by doing a two-minute search on Google