the long, long process of writing a novel.

Sup? Alright, so I won NanoWrimo last year at just over 50k. Possibly the hardest thing I've ever done in my life - especially when my computer pooped itself, and the first 8k vanished five days into the competition, meaning I had to rewrite it all. So technically, it was like 58k.

I kissed a zombie and I liked it (jk)

Some of the best and worst of supernatural/dystopic YA

So I have a ton of ebooks I haven't got around to reading. One of them is Adam Selzer's I Kissed a Zombie, and I Liked It. Apparently it's supposed to be satire, but because my face looked like D: the whole time, idk if it worked. It's about an 18-year-old chick called Alley (like seedy back alley) who falls in love with a pale, mysterious dude called Doug. Anyway, turns out he's a zombie, who was brought back to life to work in the Megamart store chain, and now keeps himself...er...alive by drinking embalming fluid every four hours. Om nom nom nom

Anyway...er...moving on. I wanted to make a sort of general post on YA at the moment, especially the paranormal and dystopic genres which are hardcore full right now.

sup blogger?

Let's do this~

hello

Hello :3

I doubt many people will ever see this, so I don't see much of a point in a huge introductory post. And that's what the about page is for, I guess. Anyway. Let's get straight into it.

I'll go with what I know best, which is writing. The fictional kind - not so fond of non-fiction at the moment. In my uni course we're trying to learn the APA format, in general and for an upcoming formatting assignment. (It's due in less than two weeks and I haven't started it). It's difficult and fiddly and has all these stupid technicalities, and if you miss a bracket or a comma or something, you'll get owned by having a bunch of marks taken off. That sort of thing bothers me - why can't things be looser? The answer, it's a professional format, and I suppose it would be cool if my assignments were, you know, legible.

In the meantime, I've outlined 18 scenes (and written about 11 of them) on a new novel. Because of my sucky attention span, I can never stay on one story for long; I'll go full steam on it and sort of flounder around for a month, then it's unbearably boring to me and my brain drifts off elsewhere. So in the case of this one - I have no idea what I'm calling it so let's say, er, Candy - close enough - I'm trying to avoid that. I noticed when my computer was unusable and I had to handwrite everything, I worked a lot better when I took notes/outlined stories first.

So I'm taking advantage of this discovery of sorts - scribbling out the scene/chapter outlines for Candy, because for some reason my brain works better like that. I never do this at home for some reason, always in lecture breaks or on the bus. Then I get home, convert it into a spreadsheet on XMind that is pretty cash if I do so myself and actually write the scenes out, adding bits and pieces in when I feel like it. It took a long ass time, but I finally figured out an outlining plan that worked for me, sort of.

I do want to finish something concrete. Maybe I'll start a short story, or a novella, because I haven't really tried my hand at those on a serious level. But I do want something finished. I know the odds are incredibly slim, especially in a country with so very few literary agents (and most not taking submissions, anyway, or disinterested in the young adult genre which is very full right now) - but who cares? Sometimes it's sort of disheartening, if I write a really stupid scene or want to headdesk at my own dimwit characters, but it's always worth it. I don't choose to write; it's just something I do. I'm fairly prolific in terms of word count but how much of that is actually salvageable into a decent draft?

I guess we'll see. I want the outline for Candy finished in the next week, and hopefully the damn first draft done by mid-semester break which is 2-3 weeks away. Insane? Probably. But that's just how I roll.