May Update
This update is long overdue, and I apologize. The end of the school year is a crazy time and I've been super busy with field trips, pizza parties, testing, swim parties, and more testing. I've also been planning our Michigan trip, which appears to be a go. We sent in our money to reserve a place at the big family dinner. Up until today, I really wasn't sure if we'd get to go. I'm also going to be house-sitting this summer, and I've been trying to coordinate the dates for that around our trip. And if that wasn't enough, my internet was out for nearly two days at the beginning of this week. >_<
So I haven't had much time for writing, unfortunately. I have had some time to think, though, and I've decided -- after a lot of thought -- that I'm going to take the summer to rewrite the last few problem chapters of Moonlight. I typically don't like to edit while I'm in the middle of a project, but I think this time, it's necessary. And I have a feeling that most of you will agree with me.
I thought if I could just keep writing, things would fall back into place, but that's the trouble with writing character-driven stories -- the characters are dynamic, they change and are changed by the events of the story, and after all that Izeri had been through, I didn't know who he was, or who he was supposed to be. And it's really hard to write a character-driven story that way.
Another thing that I realized, is that as much as I love hearing everyone's opinions on my stories, I need to trust my gut instincts a little more and try to please everyone a little less, especially with a story that gets so many conflicting opinions about it. What ended up happening is that I strayed from my original outline -- which wasn't perfect, I'll be the first to admit (I'm going to change the shower sex-scene, which was the scene that bothered me the most to begin with) -- and then struggled to balance everything from there out. The main problem is that it made too big of a deal of Izeri keeping his secret from Charias. That was not supposed to be central to the plot. That was supposed to be a footnote, and the story moved on from there, but it turned into this big huge internal struggle that I didn't know how to write, or how to drag on until the time when the problem had to be resolved (because all of this already happened off-screen in Broken Wings, so I do have a time-line I have to stick to for certain events to occur at their proper times.)
So anyway, I've already started outlining what needs to be changed and I'll be working on that this summer, which is going to be busy, so I'm going to have to suspend Moonlight Mondays, WIP Wednesdays, and Free Fiction Fridays until further notice -- possibly just until August, but more likely until September. I will post monthly updates to let you know how things are going, and hopefully they'll go better than I am expecting, and I'll be back sooner. ^_^
Thanks for understanding! ^_^
So I haven't had much time for writing, unfortunately. I have had some time to think, though, and I've decided -- after a lot of thought -- that I'm going to take the summer to rewrite the last few problem chapters of Moonlight. I typically don't like to edit while I'm in the middle of a project, but I think this time, it's necessary. And I have a feeling that most of you will agree with me.
I thought if I could just keep writing, things would fall back into place, but that's the trouble with writing character-driven stories -- the characters are dynamic, they change and are changed by the events of the story, and after all that Izeri had been through, I didn't know who he was, or who he was supposed to be. And it's really hard to write a character-driven story that way.
Another thing that I realized, is that as much as I love hearing everyone's opinions on my stories, I need to trust my gut instincts a little more and try to please everyone a little less, especially with a story that gets so many conflicting opinions about it. What ended up happening is that I strayed from my original outline -- which wasn't perfect, I'll be the first to admit (I'm going to change the shower sex-scene, which was the scene that bothered me the most to begin with) -- and then struggled to balance everything from there out. The main problem is that it made too big of a deal of Izeri keeping his secret from Charias. That was not supposed to be central to the plot. That was supposed to be a footnote, and the story moved on from there, but it turned into this big huge internal struggle that I didn't know how to write, or how to drag on until the time when the problem had to be resolved (because all of this already happened off-screen in Broken Wings, so I do have a time-line I have to stick to for certain events to occur at their proper times.)
So anyway, I've already started outlining what needs to be changed and I'll be working on that this summer, which is going to be busy, so I'm going to have to suspend Moonlight Mondays, WIP Wednesdays, and Free Fiction Fridays until further notice -- possibly just until August, but more likely until September. I will post monthly updates to let you know how things are going, and hopefully they'll go better than I am expecting, and I'll be back sooner. ^_^
Thanks for understanding! ^_^