Writing Again

I was enjoying a week without writing after the effort I raced through to get the out-of-genre title finished. Originally I was planning to take more time before getting back to writing again, but I found myself unable to stop thinking about some of my stories and where they would be heading. I couldn’t stop visualising some of the scenes yet to be written (and some of the ones that had already been written and which needed writing again), so I sat down this weekend and started writing again. I was thinking that this weekend would just be a lazy long weekend, away from work, study, and writing, but obviously my muse had other ideas for me. At least there’s the third day of the weekend to make use of tomorrow to get some good writing done. I finally finished reading a book that I’d been stuck on for a couple of months, so there were small successes.

Now that I am writing for myself (and my readers) again, I can relax and take the time to properly build the scenes and characters without feeling rushed as I was at the end of last week. The deadline was good -- it forced me to actually finish the story, but I think that the book I sent off was lacking in some areas. I didn’t plan on doing so, but I went back and read through the book again, and felt the same emotional responses as I did when I first read it after writing. The funny thing is that I didn’t actually feel that sort of emotion while writing it but, even though I know what I wrote and have since read it multiple times, it still tears a fresh set of emotions out of me.

I think that the last couple of books, including the unreleased one, have unlocked something in me. The mysterious 40,000 word limit in a book has been passed without any real issue, and I can feel the next 10-20,000 words after that calling to me. The Deferred Honeymoon cheats a little, as it builds off an earlier starting point, but my unreleased book was written from scratch to be 40,000+ words, and I can feel that there’s a range of my works in progress which will be heading past that level without any real difficulty. This is a good thing, as I had previously been struggling to work out what I was going to do with them up to the 20,000 word level, struggling to find a way to even get to it.

Of course, books aren’t written specifically to reach a pre-ordained word count, but as long as I can tell the story that I can see in my mind, then I’m happy. The recent experiences have shown that I can keep those longer stories held together without making things feel forced, or at least too forced.