It’s funny to me that I’ve suddenly started writing again in the last few years. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I was always writing something when I was younger: poetry, fiction, screenplays, comic strips. But then it all stopped for a long time. I’m not sure why. Life changed; a story I submitted was rejected; I dropped out of college, met R, and moved from Maryland to California. It could have been any or all of that. Who knows.
What got me started again is easier to figure out. Joss Whedon did. I was a member of a community on LiveJournal called whedonland for a while, which got me into writing little pieces of fan fiction and making fanvids. It was a lot of fun. Even before that, though, one of my friends challenged me to write a fanfic where Spike takes on Edward from Twilight.
Should I have mentioned I’m a Whedon geek before this?
Anyway, the fic was well received by my friends who read it (Drusilla thinking Edward smelled like circus peanuts amused folks, and well, Spike and Dru won, of course), and then whedonland held a 100-drabble challenge that I accepted.
One hundred drabbles on Buffy’s love life.
Due in a little over 2 months.
Now, those of you who have completed NaNoWriMo or any other relatively long piece of fiction are probably thinking “Yeah, so?”
Well, 10,000 words in that amount of time seemed like a huge commitment then. But I did it! I set myself a goal and wrote. Even if I thought what I was writing was lousy, I put words on paper. And after I finished, I wanted to keep writing about my own characters and my own ideas. Fan fiction has a bad reputation, but it helped me unlock a part of my brain that I hadn’t visited in a long time.
So, I picked up an idea for a novel that had been floating around in my head for a while and started putting those words down.
That was 2 years ago. Now my head’s full of ideas demanding their turn.
What might those be, you ask? At least, I hope you’d ask…
Accepted stories: two of these so far! When the anthologies these have been accepted for go public about it, I’ll go into more boisterous detail about who’s publishing and editing and all that jazz. I can talk about the stories a bit, though.
The first one is a space noir mystery, the first in what I hope will turn into a series. A detective travels to a mining planet to solve a number of murder-robberies. She’s newly married and wants to solve this case and get home to her wife, but she meets a woman who wants to change her mind. It has its moments.
The second story is an alternate history that takes place on Earth in the 15th century. A Portuguese spy is hired to travel with Columbus and sabotage his voyage. History is changed when our hero takes matters into his own hands. For a while the working title for this story was “Manly Men on Sailing Ships,” but there’s a lot more to it than that.
Hope to Submit: I’m really curious about this call for stories by Crossed Genres, a speculative fiction press in Somerville, MA, and have thoughts. They involve my detective mentioned above and woodworking. We’ll see what happens with that. The deadline’s May 31, and I’ve promised myself that I’m going to finish chapter 25 of 2082 before I start on another story.
2082: This is the novel that is nowhere near finished. Over 143,000 words (in 2 years) and barely half way through the story (trapped in chapter 25, to be honest). It’s a future-Earth dystopian tale. Corporations have completed their takeover of the world; climate change is in full swing; chaos and totalitarianism fight for supremacy. Sounds light and cheery, huh? But some folks are still fighting back, and I’ve created some characters who make me smile. I’m curious how it’s all going to end and hope other folks will be, too.
Untitled horror novel: This one is hardly begun. I have a basic plot involving what appears to be a serial killer who only goes after other killers, but a survivor of one of the attacks sees something different. Another female detective here, but this one’s on Earth, and the setting is contemporary to whenever the hell I actually get around to writing it.
There’s also an inkling of an idea that could turn into either a story or a novel at this point. It all starts the night a teenage boy locks his little sister in the basement of their house when he’s supposed to be babysitting her. Is there a monster down there? I’m guessing yes.
Hm, I was thinking of posting a pic of Joss, in honor of his inspiration (and my friend who made me write the Spike kills Edward fan fiction probably won’t let me post his), but the WordPress magic suggestion box threw out a photo that I’m going with instead. I don’t know why this one made it on the list (with all the Whedon stuff), but I like the randomicity of it.
M. Fenn 