Second Thoughts Part One:
NaNoWriMo update: I changed novels. Yeah. Whoops. That's why more word count has suddenly dipped from over 7,000 to just under 4,000. However those 4,000 words came much easier than the previous 7,000. And I'm hoping to break through 6,000 words tonight. This notion, while it does not yet have a plot, has several very likable characters and a cute back cover blurb / story pitch. (See the blog run by Bookends Literary Agents for more on pitch.)
Ginny Marie Holtzinger thought the job description sounded normal enough. WANTED: honest, hard worker able to deal with the day to day of hospitality industry and many curve balls. After the past year, Ginny thought she could deal with anything so long as it meant a job. Little did she know that ‘curve balls’ was meant in a more metaphysical than metaphorical sense.
A girl desperate for employment and needing to make a clean start of it for reasons she won’t share wouldn’t endear most people to an employer, but Daphne Ambrosia knows an honest soul when he sees one and hires Ginny on the spot to help run the ------ Inn.
Employment and housing secure Ginny just starts to relax when everything begins going wrong. Daphne promptly leaves for an indefinite amount of time leaving Ginny in charge of a hotel she’s barely even taken a tour of, with no help except for the gardener/handyman/resident pain in the ass and a cat who dispenses nothing but sarcasm and cryptic advice – a week prior and Ginny would have thought a talking cat was the weird part, but that was before she met the guests and life started getting stranger than fiction.
Suggestions for the name of an Inn (metaphysical, mythological or every day) are greatly appreciated.
Second Thoughts Part Two:
jolie's comment to Tuesday's post got me thinking.
I think I suffer from a Joyce Carol Oates + J.D. Salinger complex. Their short stories tend toward the depressing. I don't covet depressing story matter, but the notion that it's "serious" and not trite.
Then again I have many issues that revolve around me wanting "to be taken seriously" which I thought I had escaped by leaving law school.
I used to write funny stories. Or at least very sarcastic stories which people found funny depending on their sense of humor. At one point I was even able to write very humorous stories where very bad things had happened to the narrator and perhaps that meant that her sarcasm was part of her coping mechanism. ... But I think I thought those stories were too ... me?
Stupid, right?
If the voice sounds authentic in my own head, or at least authentic in that it sounds like the voice in my head then it should be ... well ... authentic, right?
But for some reason I discredit things that sound too much like how I think. I can get fairly articulate at dumping my stream of consciousness and crafting it into a story ... but since it doesn't feel like the sophisticated stories that I read i wonder if it's just child's play.
And since I doubt, I write comic (sarcastic) fantasy set in a hotel with a snippy young female narrator and a talking cat because, well, that's easy. It's fluff. It's the fun stuff I do to get away from the "work" I should be doing. Doh. Damn interfering dichotomy. I keep repeating my father's idiom: find something you love to do and you'll never have to work a day in your life. And yet I don't believe it. I somehow believe that work should feel like work. It should weigh on you because most of my jobs have, because most people's jobs do. Teaching doesn't even feel like work!
Woah. That last statement should really be my wake up call. If teaching doesn't feel like work -- and it is at the moment my only gainful employment -- then I really need to snap the hell out of this if writing is fun then it's not serious and you should be doing serious work mindset. I just wish that realization as easy to accept and internalize as it is to verbalize.
