Realizing goals feels good.

I have recently discovered that realizing your personal and familial goals feels pretty darn good. With Bill making more than twice what he was making in Michigan, and Samuel growing up to be a darling, decent little boy, my life has been cozy--to put it mildly!

I've had time to train for my first marathon, which will be in October 2008. And I've had time to write. In the past few months, I have written an entire book. Well, I have a few pages left to write at the beginning and the end, but the middle is complete. It is amazing what you can get done in just one day when motivated and disciplined... and blessed. Let's not forget the blessings of a loving Father in Heaven who gives me purpose and realization of my worthy goals. He is glorious and--well, Divine!

With daily prayers for inspiration, I've been able to average ten pages in my story each day. The catch is that I have to write forward. I discovered that going back to revise the previous day's work only serves to stall the process and inhibit my imagination. So, I'm going to revise the book through a series of re-readings once it is complete. I have reached page 250 and passed it, so my new goal is simply to write out the rest of my outline in story form. That should only take a remaining 10-15 pages. After that, I had planned to revise and revise and revise with a paper copy of my work with a good old fashioned red pen.

But then I had an epiphany. Well, I remembered that my genre of novel likes to see a series, and so I pondered it, and mulled it over, and decided that, yes, I would write a trilogy. Why not? It's been done by so many! Surely, I can do it, too! Well, I certainly hope I can because the goal is on paper now and there's no stopping it from reaching fruition. I will complete this project and I will do it before the end of this year!

Having done with the middle part of the story, I have a prequel and a sequel to write. The prequel is practically written, since I began this story six years ago with events predating the middle portion. I've found some of those portions on an old livejournal. I'm so satisfied that the internet didn't eat them up. Sometimes one wonders about the things we send into cyberspace.
So the biggest challenge will be writing the last installment of the series. That is the episode that will require the most raw imagination. The outline isn't written yet--not really. Oh, but it will be soon. I find that the keys to my continual writing include a dash of self-deception. For one thing, I can't very well admit to myself how terrible I think that last paragraph sounds. I have to keep moving forward, as Disney says, and hope to revise it later. This requires ignoring a lot of my book's faults, but only temporarily. The depressing period of revision will be the time for picking at every pimple and sore. Painful as it will be, I will do it. Just not now. Now, I have goals to meet and two more books of a series to write, mesh, and coordinate together.

I read a book recently about how to read like a writer. In fact, I think that's what it was called: Read Like a Writer by a lady named Prose.

She made some helpful points, including the point that we should be reading our favorite authors carefully to learn from them the nuances of good writing. So I picked up my anthology of Emily Dickinson today and perused a few of her thousands of poems. Then I picked up the first Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling and began that for the umpteenth time, admiring the way she structures her sentences to keep me interested, even though I know how the story goes. Do you know that she has another book out? Tales of Beedle the Bard, or something. I can't wait to read it.

When I first picked up Harry Potter at the recommendation of my 13-year-old sister, I read a few lines in the middle and gave this verdict: "There's nothing remarkable about this writing." That was one of my life lessons. It turned out over the course of actually reading the books, there was something remarkable about her writing! It was in the way she used simple words and phrases in creative ways to tell an ingenious story with important moral principles. It was in the humor of her scenes and in her characters' voices, or the fright you can almost feel when Harry battles a foe. They were meant for children, published by Scholastic, no less. Yet, they reached a much more vast audience. There was definitely something remarkable about that author's writing. I can only hope to be a quarter as successful as she was, or half as good a writer.
Then there is Jane Austen, who is, of course, in a class by herself. Nobody can hold a candle to her. J.K. Rowling is fabulous, of course, but it is a different kind of writing. She is like J.R.R. Tolkein himself, or C. S. Lewis--in her skillfull story-telling. Jane Austen did more than tell a story with a moral. She gave us elegant insight into the minds of real people--not just made-up characters. Oh, she was fantastic. If only I could write with her narrator's authority and eloquence. If only my characters could be as aloof and emotionally-charged as hers.
I may be relegated to the status of blog-writer forever. Would that be a travesty? My only claim on writing is that I love it so well, and that it soothes me, and that my mother always loved my poetry. No greater than any other man's claim on the sport. But I do love it.

I hope that novel-writing is like essay-writing. The first essay I ever wrote was horrible, unremarkable, and disorganized. But as I learned the rules of good essay-writing, and practiced, and received criticism well, I began to get A's and then gold medals in Academic Decathlon's essay category, and finally published in the school journal. If I sat down to write an essay, even now, it would not be as good as my essays then were. It's about learning the rules and practicing consistently, right? So, in theory, I should be able to learn the art of novel-writing in the same manner. With this in mind, I believe strongly that my method of moving forward and writing and writing and writing and finishing my rough draft before I revise will work. When I have finished that, I will go back and apply the new rules I have learned through practice, and the revised copy will be glorious. Or at least better. I hope.

Wish me luck in my attempts at writing. For I have been working on the same novel for six years, and that is too long for failure. I must finish this story, because at least three others that I have thought of since beginning now beg to be told. My work is never done.

The Guardian Covenant is on a roll

So, after a long time of avoiding my word processor, Guardian Covenant is back up on the screen and I am making progress. What happened was that I began the novel again whilst I was pregnant with my first child and simultaneously joined an online writing group that critiqued my work.

Due to many, many critiques, I then felt that my work was a complete disaster and began starting over. Starting over when you're in the middle of the work is a BAD idea! I ended up with 130 pages, 60 of which were the new story and the remainder of which were part of the old story, and had the arduous task of--not writing--but melding and meshing the two stories together somehow. This involved a long series of flashbacks, fudging, and overall bad writing. Well, I have finally meshed all the parts of the story that are still relevant with one another and it has taken a LONG time! As I'm writing this, my son is 17 1/2 months old. So, the moral of the story is: writing groups are great and can be helpful once your work is completed. But don't seek their advice in the middle of your story. You end up with a million sub-authors that get into your head and stifle the writing process. At least, that's the way it was for me. I knew that eager-to-please aspect of my personality would get me into troubled someday.

So now, all these months later, I am finally in a spot with my current novel that I like. It still has some shady flashbacks that I could probably work out if I tried. But my new process is to just write in a forward motion and I will revise when the work is completed. I take notes in a little notebook along the way of things I want to change, and later I will be able to go back and revise to my heart's content. But for now, I am making progress with the all-important story-line. THE PLOT! And that's where I've been stuck for the longest time.

What is the story about? you may ask. It's about spies and family ethics. Strange concepts to put together, I know, but it satisfies my desires both to write about action, intrigue, and secrets AND to write about family, priorities, and the meaning of life.

The story is about Angus Chase and his goddaughter Mirielle Benedict. Early in the story, Angus mysteriously disappears in the wake of his house exploding. Mirielle, then only 16 years old, has to deal with the emotional turmoil this inflicts on her while trying to decide what to do with her life after high school and whether or not to believe her godfather is still alive and that she ought to go searching for him. There is romance, family, humor, and fighting. Whether or not it is skillfully put together, I'll have to bow to my readers for confirmation. But I'm finally happy with where the story is going and how it is coming together.

I've been praying for the inspiration to write this story so that it's meaningful. Why write if it's not meaningful? I just hope I fit the bill.