What Am I Working on Write Now?
A Life Lost might be just that.
Okay, that was overly dramatic. I am still holding out hope for this fantasy novel that has frustrated me for 4-5 years. But I'm suspending work on it because it has so. Many. Problems. If I'm going to turn it into a publishable draft, I will need to MAJORLY rework the story. And at the moment, I'm too attached to my original concept to switch over to something different. So A Life Lost is in limbo for the time being.
For a while, my lack of motivation to work on A Life Lost turned into a lack of motivation to write at all. I toyed around with writing a new poetry book-- the third in the trilogy, if you will. But I can only write poetry when I'm inspired, and inspiration has been lacking for that project. It's in limbo now, too. I think maybe I need some recovery from writing and publishing something as personal as Drifter Sister before I start working on more poetry.
So instead, I'm turning to fiction once again. I have two projects going at the moment, and I'm very excited about both of them!
First of all, I'm actually cowriting a novel with my friend Brynna Williamson, author of Over the River and through the Woods. It's a historical romance set in California in 1963, with the working title Where You Once Belonged. So far, it's been a blast to write. Working on something so different from my usual genre, and having someone to collaborate with, has been incredibly helpful for my writer's block.
And finally, I have a novel of my own that I'm working on. It's a fantasy, but with a much smaller cast and more intimate story than A Life Lost. The culture of the world is inspired by Eastern Coastal Africa-- think Kenya, Ethiopia, and a bit of Sudan. I'm in the beginning stages of planning this novel; at the moment, I'm mostly focused on getting the characters figured out. But I'm excited to see where it goes.
There you have it. College is making writing time distressingly hard to come by, but writing continues to be a natural form of expression for me and an inherent form of my life. It's just part of how I understand the world, along with being an excellent use for my crazy imagination.
