First:
WIP update – new WIP is going well. I’m hitting about 1000 plus words when I write even though I should be hitting the 2600 plus words a day if I want to finish it in 25 days. I won’t complain though. I’m writing daily and wanting to write daily. The muse is here and we’re working together perfectly.
Second:
I have recently realized that maybe the writer I wanted to be is not the writer I am becoming. I wanted to write about vampires, werewolves, beasts of the night, and so on. I wanted to write about immortal fighters and ask kicking fairies. What I’ve written about is love and relationships.
A writer writes what a writer knows. **insert me laughing loudly**
I don’t know squat about being in love and relationships. I haven’t been in a relationship in forever. It’s been so long, I’ve lost count. I’m not in love with anyone and there is no special man I’m rushing off to see when I leave work. My only relationships are the ones I have with my family and my great friends. I’m happy with that.
So where is all this love and relationship writing coming from? I HAVE NO CLUE
All I know is that THE DUMBING DOWN OF LOVE and BARFLY are both stories that involve love and relationships. They don’t involve any vampires of the blood drinking kind (maybe an emotional vampire) and they don’t have anyone shooting silver bullets at anyone during a full moon.
Right now, my gut tells me that I meant to write women’s fiction. Right now, I’m actually okay with that. (If anyone had asked me in the middle of last year, I’d laugh.) Right now, I want to give anyone who’s reading anything I write, a little bit of hope and reality.
My friend Krissie was the first to read Barfly’s rough, rough, draft and she said this to me, “I’m a HUGE Nicholas Sparks fan (I know, I know, but the man has mastered the “how-to–give-a-single-girl-unrealistic-expectations-of-love love story), and this is so much better and so much more real than anything he’s written. I think maybe it’s because there’s a lot of you in it, lot of real feeling and emotion behind it (whether you want to admit it or not!).” Being compared to or contrasted against Nicholas Sparks, is something I’ll take any day with a smile. Yes, Krissie could be being nice and just saying that, but I know her and knows she’s an honest NJ native who’s not going to lie to you.
So I write women’s fiction. I write it from my perspective. A thirty something year old female, single, living a grand life.
I may not know about being in love and in relationships, but I do know what it’s like to want to be in love and in relationship. I don’t hold back in writing anymore. If I feel it, my characters feel it. I don’t look over my shoulder and make sure that no one is there when I write a sex scene (I do often find myself giggling though, but that’s just the girl in me. Seriously, throbbing is a term that should only be used to describe a headache or a heart not any part of a man’s sexual organs.)
Listening to “All Ways, Always” by Lostprophet
