Series… Serious Work

Writing a series isn’t an easy thing. I have nothing but respect for those authors who are able to jump in and make a series that grabs a reader by the throat and shakes vigorously. Now, despite what I’m about to say about the following novel, I did enjoy it. I finished it, after all (and we all know I don’t do bad books)… But…

 

Well, we need to have a talk.

The first book? Ripped right through it. And yet this one, well, I circled it for a very, very long time.  The story is still great. It’s just, well… There’s a lot of stuff to get through to get to the story. There’s a lot of historical factoids in this one, which I understand. The heroine is a historian/ buff going back in time and Hey! They never mentioned THIS in any of my research. (From the main character’s  point of view). All the factoids are in character… but…

Well.

I skipped a lot of this book. Maybe a third? But it go me to thinking about working on a series of books,or on any book with a magical system or research involved in it. As writers, we want to put in all this nifty cool stuff. But when we edit, we need to think of the reader. Because I skipped fully a third of a novel and didn’t miss much. Just skimmed through until I got back to the interesting bits.

We spend all this time building a world that we can go play in, and then we want to invite others to come play. The problem mentioned above doesn’t really smack me upside the head too much. I’m more the writer who forgets that you don’t know what I know, and so puts in too little. Kind of why I’m writing shorts right now, but anyways! In my writing, I don’t do a lot of filler.

And it’s kind of leaving me scratching my head because the first novel didn’t have that much filler. Perhaps because it was modern day? I don’t know.

So what do you guys think? If you’re a writer, do you end up cutting and cutting, or like me having to go back and figure out what to add where?

If you’re a reader, do you skip over the filler or do you enjoy it?

 

 

 

Hello, New Year

So, for 2013 I made 3 Resolutions: 2 of which I knew I would fail at and one of which was more like a personal thing.

2013

1. Write a book that Oprah loves. (This is almost impossible, because many of the books she chooses for her book clubs– cant stand. Too depressing!)

2. Write a rock opera using the music of Bon Jovi. (I actually started on this one, a monologue interspersed with music… but had to shelve it. It was based on the worst of times in my marriage, and I was angry all the time while writing it. Angry. All. The. Time. Writing may be therapeutic, but as a mommy— I don’t need that anger hounding me. I still need to let some of it go before I can write this… So it is currently shelved, to be revisited at a later date.)

3. Pray every day for the women of the world who are marginalized. (I took this up when the poor women of India were in the news so often. It expanded into other areas of the world. I can’t do a lot for them, but I can do this. And this one I have kept.)

 

Here’s what really happened, though.

1. Took a fiction class at Writer’s Village University called F2K and one of the subsequent writing assignments was submitted to the WD Short Story competition.

2. Submitted work to an anthology (and was shot down).

3. Wrote 2 new short stories and submitted them (Still waiting to hear on these.)

4. On a lark, submitted a poem to the local paper and became their “Poet of the Week.” Go figure!

Might not seem like much, but it has definitely gotten my feet wet again. So I failed on what my goals were— still made forward progress and am STILL WRITING. WOOHOO! Yay for me!

SO here goes for 2014

NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS

1. Complete and submit 10 short stories.

2. Write more poetry.

3. Finish work on Novella currently working on (Not sure of title yet, might just be the first of the Soul Catcher series).

4. Plot and start a longer piece of work (we’re talking novel here, folks.) (also, might need to challenge one of my friends to this… much better than NanoWriMo for us right now. Nanowrimo is great— but I can’t devote that much time to writing in one month. My son’s head would explode or something)

5. Write on blog more regularly. Both reviews and on writing and life and everything in between.

 

So, if you’re a writer, what kind of goals do you have for yourself this year?