Why I Love Fantasy

My love of fantasy wasn't always as strong as it is today. I think I've always liked it, but it wasn't until I was in middle school that I really fell in love with the genre. Still, even as a little kid I loved the magical elements of fantasy.

One of the first fantasy books I remember reading was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. It remains one of my all time favorite books and I count it as one of the main influences on my writing today. I think it's the first book that really introduced me to what fantasy could be. Other worlds and great adventures, magic and sword fights, great evil and greater good. So many of the big things that I love about fantasy. I don't know how many times I read and reread that book. So many that I almost had it memorized. I actually still have bits and pieces of it burned into my brain. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

There's something so incredible about fantasy. I'm not sure I can even describe why I love it so much. Maybe it's because when you write fantasy there so much creation involved. You're not just making up the characters and the story line. You're making up entire worlds with their own rules and ways of doing things. And all of those things influence how your story turns out. Every aspect of a fantasy world interacts and influences every other aspect. You get to decide how cultures interact with each other, what those cultures are, and how that influences that way your characters think. That in turn influences why your characters do the things they do and even what they can and can't do. You make up all those rules and so many more.
And that's not even counting magic (if your fantasy world has it) and how that impacts everything else in the world. It's so amazing and I love every part of it.

I'm not saying there's not a lot of creation that goes into other types of stories. There absolutely is. I don't think any one genre is better or more complicated than another. It takes an incredible amount of time and dedication to create any story world, whether you're basing it here in our world or creating and completely new one for it.

But for me, the most interesting and exciting genre is fantasy. I just love it, all those possibilities. The ability to rewrite the rules any way you want. The joy of creating everything from the ground up. It's amazing and I'm not sure I'll ever get enough of it.

So do you like fantasy? If so, why? Or are you more drawn to another genre? What other genre do you prefer and why?

Difficult Drafts

My current WIP is being difficult. Again. I don't know what it is, but something about this story just feels off. It feels unnatural and I can't seem to escape it. I'm still writing it, I'm determined to finish this draft, but I just feel like it's crap.

I know that all first drafts suck. I get that. But maybe I don't. See, I have this problem, that maybe I shouldn't admit in a public forum like a blog. But here goes anyway: I've only ever completed a draft of one novel. Now that I think about it, I may have admitted that before, but here it is again. Seriously. One.I realized a while ago that, as a writer, this is a VERY BAD THING.

It's not that I don't have more ideas. I have LOTS of ideas. There are at least six more fantasy worlds that I have stories started in and at least two contemporary stories that I've started. But I've never finished any of those.

Now, with the realization a while ago that I was, in fact, a character-first writer, I might have struck upon why I've never finished another novel length project. I'm not so great in the plot department. I get these great characters and these great worlds, but they don't seem to have plots to match them. It's frustrating, but I'm hoping to fix that in the near future.

Anyway, back to my current problem-child. I really want to finish this story, but there's something about it that feels all disconnected, like the pieces of the world don't quite fit together. Like every time I get to thinking about the way the magic in the world works, or the ins and outs of why my antagonist did the things he did and how my characters figure it out, I get frustrated because the pieces just don't quite fit right. I feel like one of my other stories would work SO much easier. I blame the difficulties I'm having on this being one of my "newest" ideas, telling myself that I haven't spent enough time stewing over the world, but I'm not sure that's true.

Still, I'm writing it. Maybe I'll really love it when I'm done. I hope so. Cause the idea's pretty nifty. I just need the nitty gritty bits to work together.

Progress update: so far I've finished 27 of my 51ish scenes. So I'm over half-way finished with the scenes. Yea!

Why I write what I write

So I really am attempting to get better at this whole blog thing. Granted it’s been two months since I last posted, but hey, at least it hasn’t been three.

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out what to focus on in this blog. I’m having trouble with that. I figure it should be about my writing, but what about it? I’m still writing my book, so what should I tell you about that? Well, now I’m just going to tell you everything. On days that I don’t have much to say about the actual drafts or (when I get to that point) the querying, rejections, and (hopefully) requests for partials or fulls, I’m going to tell about why I write, what I write, and maybe a little about my life outside writing (yes I have one of those, and unfortunately, it often takes over). I’m going to try and start out each post with an update on where the latest draft is. Perhaps this will motivate me to write more, just so I can tell people about it. So here goes.

Draft Status: I have made it to the fifth chapter in my sixth draft. At the moment I’m adding details, something I actually find a little hard to do. My perfectionism gets in the way a lot because I constantly have to stop and figure out the exact right word to describe a color or a saddle or a dress. I keep getting bogged down, but I’m trying to get through it.

So in the another post I wrote (yeah that one two months ago. I know it was a long time, but bear with me) I talked about why I write. I think I’m going to talk about what I write now, and how I wound up choosing that, or rather how it chose me.

I write fantasy. Not just any fantasy though, I write fantasy for young adults. What on earth possessed me to do this? Did I see the market was good and just decided to jump on board? Nope. Actually, when I started writing my WIP I had no clue that the YA market was going to explode about four years later. I just knew I wanted to read a story like what I was writing.

See I read voraciously. I am almost never without a book (it’s closer to never, but the rare occasion has struck when I do lack a book. Not often, but it does). And when I was a kid I discovered this amazing little tome by a pretty famous author. I opened it and started reading and couldn’t stop. I reread that book so many times I had it memorized almost word for word. Actually I still remember most of the lines of that book, all these years later because I read it so often. It opened this incredible world to me, a world created by someone else, separate from our own. Something about that captured me and my imagination.

I spent the majority of my childhood and even some of my teen years making up my own worlds with my brother. We would weave many stories into and out of these stories. We made new cultures and races, new magics and power, places and societies, all before we were 15.

And while we did this, I kept reading. I discovered more made up worlds so different from our own. This world building and people building utterly ensnared me. But one thing always seemed to be lacking. There were no girls. All the classic books I read, and many of the science fiction and fantasy books I was allowed to read (I say allowed because there were many rules about appropriate reading material in my parents’ house) focused on boys, always boys. And I wanted to read about girls like me. So when my first story ideas (well not first, but the ones I actually began writing down) started going onto the page, I think it was only natural that I wrote fantasy, created my own worlds and made them about strong girls, like me.

I started writing when I was a teenager. It’s actually when I started my WIP. But it wasn’t until much later (third year in college) that I realized that writing and world-making were where my true passions lay.

So that’s what I write (and kind of why too). My goal is to write about adventurous girls who aren’t afraid to do hard things. Or if they are, they learn how not to be.