I'm sorry to have to announce that I am putting my story Phoenix Rising on the shelf until further notice. This was a really tough decision for me, because I'd put a lot of time and effort into these characters and their world and their stories, but something went wrong. Their voices got congested, and I could only understand every other word and no amount of decongestant medicine would work.
My critique partner made me feel a lot better about this decision because sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. I'd realized that I was writing to "The Standard" of YA Paranormal Romance and I was starting to dislike my own story and writing, not in the perfectionist way, but just that gut feeling of indifference.
I had a discussion with my dad (more like I was ranting and working myself into a state and he was trying to coax the hurricane into a bottle) and he told me that (a) it's more important that I just write, no matter what the genre or story and (b) I need to write the story I would want to read. Forget classifying my story into how it would fit on the shelf amongst the other books and focus on just writing the story I'd want to read.
Well, his name is Eli, he's eleven-years-old and nothing like anything I've ever attempted to write before.
My critique partner made me feel a lot better about this decision because sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. I'd realized that I was writing to "The Standard" of YA Paranormal Romance and I was starting to dislike my own story and writing, not in the perfectionist way, but just that gut feeling of indifference.
I had a discussion with my dad (more like I was ranting and working myself into a state and he was trying to coax the hurricane into a bottle) and he told me that (a) it's more important that I just write, no matter what the genre or story and (b) I need to write the story I would want to read. Forget classifying my story into how it would fit on the shelf amongst the other books and focus on just writing the story I'd want to read.
Well, his name is Eli, he's eleven-years-old and nothing like anything I've ever attempted to write before.
