I love to write.
That shouldn't come as a surpise to anyone who knows me well or has been following either of my blogs. Politics, over analyzing swimming, triathlons, philosophy, theology, morality, I like writing it all. My passion, however, is in writing fiction. More specifically, writing fantasy and sci fi. I've been an extremely voracious reader ever since I was in kindergarten. Heck, I read Les Miserables when I was 8. At this point, I've read thousands of books, spanning the genres of horror, sci fi, fantasy, thrillers, crime, Westerns, drama, historical fiction, and pretty much every other genre of fiction you can think of. Yep, even tried reading a romance novel about 5 years ago. Only made it about 20 pages in, but still, I did try reading it.
The writing bug bit me when I was 10, after I'd devoured pretty much every book my parents had in our house (and with the four of us kids having pretty big reading appetites, we had a LOT of books) and many of the books at the local library. It was an unwittingly hilariously bad short Western called Mueller's Folly. I mean, it was downright awful. More in a Plan 9 From Outer Space way than a Gigli way, but awful nonetheless. Over the next ten years, story ideas started percolating in my head in glorious Technicolor and full surround sound. In my head, civilizations rose and fell, space empires thrived and collapsed into dust, men fought against fuzzy giants, a race of leopard-people aliens appeared in NYC, ancient Druids fought the Romans, men walked among and fought alongside the gods, and a single teenager began a dynasty that stretched over four thousand years and thirty planets. None of 'em survived the transition from brain to paper. By my count, over those ten years, I tried to write nine novels and two short stories, all failures. I just didn't have the life experience to write, much less the writing experience. What I was able to write was either laughably childish, had logical holes large enough to drive a dump truck through, or just flat out didn't work at all.
In early 2007, I finally finished another story, a short story set in space. It was marginally sub par at best. Not so bad that it was good like Mueller's Folly, just pretty bad. Bad plot, cruddy characters, and too much time spent on the setting of the story rather than the story itself. Still, it marked the first time I'd finished something in ten years. However, I was pretty disheartened by the cruddy finished product, so I swore off writing for a while.
That break lasted until last summer. Over the rest of 2007-2009, I started writing more and more in school (I was a triple major, all liberal arts, so I had a LOT of writing to do for school) and greatly improved my general writing ability. The highest praise I received was the fall semester of my senior year, in the senior capstone history course--my thesis was an analysis of a pivotal WWII battle in the Pacific, and the professor (my mentor, and I'd had him for 9 classes at that point) told the entire class, and wrote it on my paper, that "this guy can WRITE!!" That's when I discovered that while my ideas had been waaaaay ahead of my writing ability earlier in life, I might have finally evened out the race. Still, I waited another two years before trying to write again. Over the last year, year and a half, I've had a bunch of story ideas swirling around in my head and revisited some of my failed story ideas. Most of the old ideas don't hold any interest for me anymore, but I've currently got seven stories (each either a standalone novel or the start of a series) simmering in the cauldron that is my brain, including a revisitation of the 4000 year epic I mentioned earlier, which was my very first full story idea from 15 years ago. Last summer, I decided to start putting one down on paper.
I wrote a rough draft of the prologue for the story, but wasn't super happy with the direction of the story itself. Since then, I've played around with the story idea and have revised it significantly. I haven't rewritten the prologue or started on the main story yet, but I'm pretty happy with the overall story idea. Provided I actually make it though this first novel, the story is tentatively planned to be a trilogy, although it might be better suited to a quadrilogy--I'll just have to see how it goes, as I have a definite start and end point and most of the major in-between points mapped out, but prefer to let the rest of the details write themselves. I'm planning on picking it up again in September. About a month or so ago, I got the idea for a series of short stories...from a dream. Seriously, 95% of the material in the first short story in the series is verbatim from a dream I had. Yep, I have some really wackadoo dreams. I've got almost the entire first story mapped out, just haven't put it down on paper yet. I figure once I actually do that, since I've already seen (dreamed) the IMAX version of the story and have it on my mental DVR, I can pound it out in a couple of days. I'm planning to write the first draft of it in the next few weeks before I revisit the novel.
That puts me working on one open ended series of short stories (I have the ideas for four additonal short stories percolating and see no upper limit on them, although I do have the end point of the series mapped out) and one full length trilogy/quadrilogy. For future works, I've got that 4000 year epic I mentioned earlier waiting in the wings--I'm actually surprised by it, since it was the very first full length story idea I had when I was 10, after I wrote Mueller's Folly, but wasn't able to flesh out the idea, much less even come close to being able to actually write it, till now. It's a pretty open ended series, and could go anywhere from a trilogy to 25+ books, depending on where my writing takes me...provided I get around to actually writing this beast. I've got one other firm series idea floating around and one potential series--haven't thought about the latter one enough to determine if it's viable enough to write. On top of those three future possibilities, I've got a handful of other ephemeral ideas that will need plenty more thinking before I can determine if they're suitable to write or not. All my story ideas right now are in the sci fi and fantasy genres, though the four millenia epic includes a fair dose of historical fiction, too (starts in the 1500s and goes on from there).
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So, with all the writing I'm hoping to do in the forseeable future starting in a few weeks, anyone want to be a beta reader? A beta's job is to read my drafts and final edits of chapters and completed stories and critique them. That covers everything from grammatical issues to plot holes to inconsistencies, and everything in between. I asked on facebook a few weeks ago and got two volunteers, but I'd love more, since having multiple people looking at my stuff will only make the finished product better!
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