This #NewYear, Visit Old #Fiction To Renew Your #Writing Life.

For all the jokes out there about stories being a writer’s children there rings a subtle truth: we want every story to be its best. Like a sniffly child on timeout, they whine, “I want to be nice!” Then show you are nice, we say. “I don’t know how!” they wail.

And while my kids sure as Hades do know that kicking one another in the face does not qualify as “nice,” some stories are genuinely stumped. Is it the voice, the setting, the age of the characters, the villain? All it takes is one off-element to throw the entire body out of whack.

Such was the case with one particular WIP of mine. I first drafted it during NaNoWriMo the year of my daughter’s birth. It helped me break from my postpartum, but it also stumped me as a writer. Something always felt off: not enough gravitas. Too much gravitas. Too many points of view. Too narrow a perspective. Not enough action. Not enough quiet time. With every draft, the story grew as I created and destroyed characters. I pulled dark bones from my past and formed the heroine round them, re-defining her psyche and voice. Could be done for my hero? Let’s try…

But all of this has taken years of coming and going, always needing time to re-settle my writing eye and ear with the heroine, remember what the heck I was thinking. When I started this site two years ago I hoped to see this WIP through its last editing stage and meet the printed page somehow, but then, well, more motherhood came, and other WIPs captured what little attention I had. Before I knew it, two years passed without a glance.

Then, shortly after Thanksgiving, in a fit of what assuredly was Shooting for the moon (heck, for Alpha Centauri B), I submitted a portion of a New Adult fantasy to Aionios Books, an independent publishing house in California.

They accepted.

I’m still tingling.

Fallen Princeborn: Stolen, my first WIP, one that’s experienced countless growing pains, will be shared with readers–READERS! (Insert mad giggles and hopping in coffee-stained sweats here) But I also know that 2018 is going to be one of the hardest years of my life. Not only am I writing here, with you and for you, and teaching, and parenting, but I must now also answer to editors and see the story from their perspective as professional readers.

Is there a lot of work to do? Hell, yes.

Thanks to a two-year hiatus, I can tell that the voice wants to be first person present for the intimate immediacy, but I kept writing in third for eventual shifts to another character’s point of view. And I wrote in past tense for…reasons? Thanks to a long, long break, I can argue with Past Me and see there’s just no justification for such writing choices.

Of course my new fear is that I cannot find the hidden path between my hero and heroine’s voices: the path of the narrator’s voice. It’s there, but hidden under superfluous phrases and awkward description. Time to clean up the deadwood and find new footing in the old haunt.

What WIPs lay buried in your hard drive and desk drawers? Now that time has passed, pull them out. Take a look with New You’s eyes. The story still breathes. Stirs.

Wake it up.