January 14, 2012 –
I haven’t posted a blog all this week – I hate to get off to a bad start so soon into the new year, but I’ve been really tired and haven’t felt very well all week. I haven’t done much besides work and rest. And I haven’t worked much on any of my writing projects since the new year started.
But this morning, I got a jolt of motivation. I saw an online SCBWI announcement about a local writing event in March that I’ve been looking forward to – a “first page” conference, where writers will have a chance to get the opening page of their book project read and critiqued by an editor or an agent. And registration has begun.
I printed out the information and registration form, so I can mail it in the next couple of days. And all day at work, I thought about what first page to include. My writing has been pretty much on hold since the beginning of the busy retail holiday season in November. But I made a writing goal on New Year’s Day – to commit to at least one writing project and to finish at least a first draft of it this year.
The story that’s been in the forefront of my mind since then is my time-travel novel, in which the main character meets up with her twenty-years-younger self and then inadvertently changes places with her. But its themes are of missed opportunities, regret, and second chances – it’s not for young readers.
I do have a couple of teen time-travel novel ideas, but I’m in the early, note-taking and character-building stages of them – I haven’t really thought much of how to start those stories yet.
But I also have a story that’s already been started – I actually got about halfway through the first draft of it before back-burnering it a couple of years ago. It’s What Luck, a novel I wrote for tweens (pre-teen and early teen readers) about a girl whose superstitious great-grandmother influences her to become obsessed with following rituals in an attempt to have some control over her increasingly overwhelming life. I’ve had the first fifteen pages of the manuscript critiqued over the past few years, by an editor, an author, and an agent, to mixed reviews. (The editor and author gave it favorable feedback; the agent wasn’t as helpful.) I even outlined the ending, with help from my author friend Kim Sabatini, when we were at the SCBWI conference in New York City two winters ago.
And last week, when I had lunch with Kim, I mentioned that I was thinking of revisiting What Luck. She thought it was a good idea – she said that I’ve already put a lot of work into it, and if I can get back into writing it and commit to the story, I could probably finish a first draft in less than a year. I told her I’m considering it.
So, tonight I went into my desktop What Luck file, and read through the first chapter. It’s actually not too bad – I think that if I have enough incentive, and give it the attention it deserves, I might be able to make it into a viable manuscript.
I tweaked the first page a bit, and, even though I think that just one page can’t really do justice to the overall plot of the book, I do think the opening is pretty good and hopefully will be interesting enough for a reader to want to know more about the story and what happens next.
So I’m going to send in the first page of What Luck along with my registration for the conference. And then I’ll get all of my notes and files and written pages together, and read through it all. And once I’ve revisited my story, hopefully I’ll have a better idea of how to further develop its characters and plot, and move it along to its end. At the least, it will be a project that should keep me busy through the upcoming long months until spring!
And, hopefully, when it’s finished, I’ll have some good luck with What Luck.
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