When the Muse Strikes

This post is not to be confused with Muse the band.  They suck.  Period.  What it is about is my writing this past week.  I've struck a vein of gold in my brain, and am spewing forth story like a fire hose set on flood.(Wouldn't it be cool if fire hoses actually had settings, like shower heads, or hand-held massage contraptions?  "Take that, fire!  See how you like it on soft drip.")

I started a YA fantasy, set in a secondary world.  I've never sat down to write a YA, but I have sketched out some ideas on a few and written a couple of chapters.  This time it's for real, however.  I am writing YA, and I'm having a blast doing it.  There are a couple of reasons for my switch in audience age groups.  I think that I will be writing YA for the foreseeable future.

The reasons are completely rational, I swear.  I've decided YA is a good fit for me right now because I can write a much shorter novel if it's YA.  I can really focus on adventure, and humor, and uplifting ideas.  I was finding it hard to do those things in my adult fantasy.  Also, it goes along with my last post--about Game of Thrones.  I very much enjoy reading darker stories, but truth is, I'm lousy at writing them.  I refuse to include extreme content, and so feel that my books were suffering because of it.  I want to be honest to my stories, and I feel that I can better accomplish this in YA.

Another reason is that I tend to focus on huge plots, spanning multiple view-points in my adult fiction.  Again, I read the type of stories that do this.  The problem is, I hate outlining.  For me, outlining is the death of creativity.  (That's not to say I don't spend time planning what I'll write.  I do, but mostly cognitively, rather than mapping out an entire novel on paper.)  I'm finding, though, that as I'm writing these huge books (roughly 120,000-150,000 words, so not technically huge.  To give you some perspective, The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson, and The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss--both extremely popular writers in adult fantasy--are around 400,000 words.  That is huge.  More like holy-shit insane.) I'm losing my way.  Yeah, I know how they'll end.  But the middle is bogging me down.  It's literally crippling my writing to try and work through these stories right now.  I just don't have the time.  I made it to 125,000 on my first untitled book.  Gunlord only made it to 80,000.  I intend to finish Gunlord in the future, but it needs to sit a while and simmer.  I'm not ready to write it the way I want to.

All the pros say it's better for a new writer to finish what they are writing before working on something else.  I really tried to take this advice to heart these last four months.  I just couldn't finish.  Every time I went to write Gunlord my fingers hovered above the keyboard.  I rewrote the beginning from a new perspective; I played with doing it in first-person.  Nothing was working.  I love the characters, my writing group seems to love the characters, but it isn't good to be a writer and not be writing.  For me, moving on to something new--that I'm very excited about--has made my life so much happier.  I kept telling my wife I was down, that I didn't know how to crawl out of the slump I was in.  I found my out.  It's in YA fantasy, and I'm going to run with it for as long as I can.  

So, I'm shooting for 75,000 words for this new book.  Want to know the title?  Course you do.  Just know that I'll kill you if you try and steal it.  It's titled: Merchant God Conspiracy, or The Merchant God Conspiracy.  Haven't decided which one flows off the tongue better.  I have one view-point character.  I have a very exciting, fast-paced plot.  There are gods, flint-lock pistols, and zombies (sort of).  I'm loving it.  I've written 8,000 words on it in four days.  That's twice my normal speed.

Anyway, I had to share my excitement.  So there you go.