Well... now what?

The Irish Novel is packed up and shipped off to beta readers, waiting for their seal of approval (more likely, their long list of notes and things to fix).

And so... here I am... waiting for comments.

I hate this part.

It's very strange, not having anything to do. I don't have a book to read right now. I just finished rereading The Book Thief for the fourth time in preparation for seeing the movie in November (for the record: I still cried at the end. Zusak!!!) I have Cornelia Funke's most recent book on reserve at the library and quite a lot of bookstore gift card money from writing contests last semester, but I just haven't gotten around to getting down there and picking things up. (The one downside of living in the middle of nowhere is that you are in the middle of nowhere.)

And I haven't felt like starting another writing project just yet. Which is, admittedly, terrifying. Just at this moment I don't feel like I have a story I NEED to tell, and since that's kind of the THING that I DO all the time... well, it's a bit concerning that I'm not immediately wanting to jump into the next project. I'm hoping it's just post-editing laziness, and that an idea will come along and need me to write it soon.

I guess that leaves me to catch up with the couple of friends who haven't graduated and just moved back to school, make cookies, and continue working on this whole "being an adult" thing that I'm doing now. I think I'm steadily getting better at that. :)

Tell me, dear blog readers: do you always have another project you jump right into after finishing the last one? Or do you let yourself laze around a little bit first? 

And Another One Done!

... well, for now. :)

So I was convinced that yesterday was Monday, hence this random Wednesday post. But this random Wednesday post brings you the news that I am *finished* with this draft of The Long Road Home!

WOOOO *throws confetti* WOOOO.

So, what happens next?

Well, it has just gone out to beta readers (as of right now, that consists of my roommate extraordinaire Lisa, my mom, and my publishing internship buddy Ari) because they are both nice people who like me and also people who will be very honest with me. I do so hope they'll enjoy it. (And not rip it to shreds TOO much.) After that, there'll be another round of edits, of course. Perhaps more than one more round, depending upon the level of edits suggested to me.

While that's happening, I get to write up a query letter (ugh) and a synopsis (double ugh) so as to prepare for AGENT SUBMISSIONS sometime this fall, hopefully!

And also not listen to Mumford & Sons for about a month at least. This last draft was fueled entirely by Mumford songs (well, that and tea). But I can hardly help it when this song in particular has the title of my novel in the lyrics, can I? (Sssh, don't tell Maire her theme song was written by a bunch of English guys.)

And... start something new, I suppose? We'll see what's next in store!

Till next week, dear readers... when I promise to remember when Tuesday actually is.

Moving is Exhausting

I could, honestly, simply post that title and leave it at that. But I won't, because I'm not that lazy. Well. Barely.

My lovely roommate/best friend Lisa and I moved in to our Actual, Real Adult Person Apartment. And it is AWESOME. Or at least, we are in the process of making it awesome. All of Saturday (the part that wasn't spent driving up from New Jersey) and most of Sunday was spent in cleaning and a bit of organizing and unpacking. And the organizing, unpacking, and purchasing of furniture continues. A little more than half of my stuff is unpacked, since I currently am out of places to put it in or on - I don't, for instance, have a dresser, so my clothes are mostly still in the suitcase (although I totally had a Mr. Collins "shelves in the closet" moment and have since Macgyvered my closet into usable space *dusts off shoulder proudly*), nor do I have anyplace to put most of my shelf things. Like the Carnevale mask I got in Venice or the temari ball my mom made or my zillions of picture frames.

But the kitchen and the bathroom are all shiny and put together!! We have yet to figure out how the dishwasher works (it's on wheels and is not hooked up to anything, and although we have now put water in it and plugged it in and turned it on twice today, the dishes are still not clean, so, we'll be asking our landlady about THAT one) but it's coming along nicely. And it's really exciting to see things start to come together.

It's rather like that moment when you're editing a manuscript and all of a sudden you see the light about what exactly needs to be done in order for everything to fall perfectly into place. Except, this one involves a lot more physical labor and dust, and the manuscript one involves a lot of mental labor, typing, and chocolate fortification.

Speaking of editing... I really need to get on that.

Would you be interested in apartment pictures when all is organized and settled, fair readers? Or am I boring you by gibbering on about my foray into the "real world"?

Getting Somewhere

I'm not going to lie to you: graduating from college kind of sucks.

This summer has been a weird limbo, even though I tried so hard to avoid that very situation. But I stayed in the same place I had been in, even though most of my friends moved on, some to do very exciting and important things like the Peace Corps in Madagascar or teaching English in South Korea.

Whereas I was stuck in Ithaca, in a sublet that was filthy and uncomfortable and felt rather unsafe, with a job that, let's be fair, made me miserable. I had thought that I'd be okay at letting hotel guests vent their frustrations on me, but I wasn't. Ultimately, I left that job, deciding that struggling to get more than four hours' sleep a night was not worth it. That being treated like a failure by at least half the people who came through the hotel was not worth it.

I think that, no matter what you end up doing immediately after you graduate, you're struck with this paralyzing fear that you're doing it wrong. I had a full time job and a place to live and everything, and yet I couldn't help but feel like I'd skipped a step. Like there had to be more to it, even right away - that all the hard work I'd put into school for all those years, culminating in a bachelor's degree with highest honors, couldn't possibly put me into a job where people looked at me like I was an idiot eight hours a day unless I had, in fact, made a mistake.

So enough of that. I'm going to worry that I'm failing no matter what I do, it's just my nature. But I don't need a job to reinforce that worry so very strongly.

But now I have things to look forward to. On Saturday, I'll be moving into the real grown up person apartment my roommate and I found. It's beautiful, and it's going to be clean, and OURS in a way no place other than our flat in London, perhaps, has been yet. I'm starting a new job on Monday, which hopefully will not be quite as soul-crushing as the last one. I'm making progress on editing The Long Road Home. And my school friends, those who haven't graduated yet, will be back in Ithaca in a few weeks' time.

I have things to look forward to again. Things to be excited about. I've got an apartment to decorate the way I want it decorated. I've got a job where I (hopefully) won't have to wear a name tag and get demeaned by everyone who walks in the front door. I've got a manuscript with edits that are beginning to look manageable rather than impossibly daunting.

I'm feeling a little bit more like I can do this whole "adulthood" thing, rather than feeling like I've failed before I've even begun.

And hopefully, it'll only go up from here.

Let the Editing Begin!

I've begun editing the Irish Novel - aka The Long Road Home. The first 150 pages have been printed and read over, red quill pen in hand, and page 151-278 will be printed this afternoon (I don't want the IC library getting too mad at an alum using their printing services).

I like editing on paper - it's easier to see things on a printed page than on screen sometimes, and somewhat therapeutic to strike through lines of stilted prose with my red pen.

This novel needs a lot of work. Quite a lot. There are a lot of strings to pull, and at the moment they're a little bit more gnarled up than they should be. Character arcs that don't quite add up, a lot of worldbuilding that needs to be in place way before it is, and a lot that needs to be established earlier in order to make the conclusion work. Especially when it comes to my secondary villains.

But I'm really hoping that I can pull this off the way it deserves to be pulled off. I really think this one could mean something, if I can just weave all those strings together in the right way, get all these pieces to really resonate the way they should.

So I'll spend the next few weeks making notes in red pen, rearranging and adding and cutting. After that, it'll be off to the beta readers, who hopefully won't hate it. And hopefully, by the end of it, I'll have a finished product that really shines. The plan is to have it ready to submit to agents by November, when NaNoWriMo is in full swing for all those people insane dedicated enough to try and churn out 50k words in a month.

And then - well, I guess I get to figure out how the heck to squeeze this one into a query letter.

The Fun Stuff

Do you guys ever write anything just for the fun of it?

I mean, obviously my full-length novel projects are fun. I enjoy writing them (except when they drive me crazy) - why would I do it otherwise? There's nothing like sitting down to write after a bad day - the soft clack of my keyboard and the constant march of letters across a blank page is soothing. It reminds me that there is, in fact, something that I am meant to be doing with my life, and it's this. It's writing. I've got stories to tell and I'm meant to tell them.

But aside from that - I think there are very few projects I've started just for the sheer fun of it. I've written for myself and I've written for school, and those things have been fun, sometimes - but not in the "ah, why the heck not, let's just see what happens" kind of a way. Those projects, even in their most fun moments, have always had a tinge of SERIOUS BUSINESS to them.

Right now, I'm taking a break on The Long Road Home before diving into some edits, and I'm working on, would you believe it, a one-act play.

Because, well - why the heck not?

And, well, because my actress roommate/best friend is bored and theatre deprived. And because I went to a history convention for Phi Alpha Theta which involved spending two hours-ish in the car with my professors, and after recounting that story to everyone I'd always say "there really should be a sitcom called Road Trips With Professors" and they'd say "yeah, you should write it!"

So I am. And it's been fun - it's going to be the world's most stage-direction-less play, because I'm enjoying just focusing on the dialogue. I am hoping that it's halfway decent, because I am going to show it to Lisa at some point, but for the most part I'm just killing some time, letting myself focus on other things before going in for edits, and simply enjoying myself.

What about you, fair readers? Do you ever write little projects just because it's fun, or are you all-novels-all-the-time?

Kinds of Stories

I've noticed that people - myself included - tend to like the same kinds of stories. And I don't really mean genre - I mean that people often have a fondness for Coming of Age Stories or Road Trip Stories or Love Triangle Stories or Stories With Crazy Plot Twists or Sad Stories or Stories With Very Happy Endings. And sometimes these kinds of stories combine: a person who loves both Road Trip Stories and Sad Stories will be the happiest of campers upon finding a book or a movie or a tv show that incorporates both of these elements.

And these types of stories can be found in every type of genre. I'd argue that a "Road Trip Story" would cover, in a sense, everything from The Lord of the Rings to An Abundance of Katherines. But these types of stories often include the same elements, the same or similar themes, the way variations on the same piece of music contain the same chords. The Lord of the Rings and An Abundance of Katherines have absolutely nothing in common in terms of plot, and yet they both touch on bits and pieces of homesickness, of traveling into the unknown, and of self-discovery.

My favorite type of story is the Fun Yet Poignant Story. A story that is amusing, engaging, and yet meaningful; perhaps the ending is bittersweet, or the characters face extreme difficulty throughout the story and cannot quite overcome all the little bits and pieces put in front of them, or there is simply a Lesson of some kind that is very well crafted into the story (rather than being plopped down and presented as "here, look, a Moral. Learn things"). Stories like Love, Actually, Paper Towns, certain episodes of Doctor Who, The Scorpio Races, etc etc etc. The kind of story that makes you laugh, that is just plain FUN to read or to watch, but that also makes me think. This is my favorite kind of story to read, and it's the kind of story I try hardest to write as well. Entertaining but also truly meaningful.

What about you, fair readers? What is your favorite "type" of story?