Getting involved.

Today, I realized that I get very involved in my characters lives. I'm like a nagging mother or something. I don't stop until I find out absolutely everything about them, their lives, their favorite food, the shoes they wear normally, and what they were doing last night, young lady. I also discovered that I can't really help it, they interest me. I've also somehow convinced myself that if I figure out more about my characters, I'll write them better. This might very well be true, but it's mostly caused me to fill my notebook with random notes here and there, interspersed with my school notes: "Luc Tuymans painted his first painting in ...I bet Ari would wear flat black leather boots."

A very good example of this idea came to life today in Ikea. Having just moved into a new apartment, my girlfriend and I have been looking for furniture. We were looking at our new chairs, and realizing that since they're plain wood, we could paint or stain them. My immediate thought, then, was "Oh, what was painted on the chairs of my characters' kitchen?"

On the bright side, one exercise I had myself do was to write vignettes about my characters lives when they were younger, prior to the book. These have been working out so well, I might be able to publish those instead. We'll have to see.

WARNING: LOST SPOILER ALERT! (if you don't want to know, don't read this next paragraph): Now, on a slightly unrelated note: the ending of Lost was so disappointing. I actually almost cried from disappointment. It seem like such a cop out ending, which I never would have gotten published had I proposed it. I did like to see everyone reunited, that was cool. But the everyone being dead thing? Just seems like cheating.

Getting back to the point. Am I the only one who gets so deeply involved in my characters lives? Do you prefer to get involved, or just write 'em and leave 'em?

I propose a new genre of fiction!

Now that I'm posting, I'm on a roll, and I'm creating my third post in the last half hour. Or ten minutes. Whatever.

I'm struggling with The Age Problem(™). Basically, one of the novels I'm currently working on is about college students. The problem with this, is that it's the particularly nasty age where the characters I'm writing about are older than teenagers, but since readers (particularly teenagers) generally read up, my readers would probably be in their late teens. The question, really, is do I try and publish as Young Adult, or Adult Fiction? It's a tough call, really. I think that my characters, still being fairly young, are easily related to by teenagers. The problem is that they aren't teenagers.

Why can't they just have a "College Age Fiction" genre?

What the crap and other nonsense

As long as I'm writing here, I'll get right down to business. That business is swearing. The novel I'm writing involves realistic young adult characters, and therefore has swearing in it. Naturally, I did this without thinking about it, given that my own vocabulary consists of a countless amount of swear words (particularly when I find myself in a difficult work situation, i.e. having to carry a 30 pound CRT monitor across campus, going on a particularly long trek to replace a computer only to find that the door's locked and I have no key, etc). Upon rereading the drafts of my work, and, more importantly, having other people workshop my work, I began wondering if I should include swearing at all. This post and this post on kidlit made me realize that I'm not alone, but didn't make me feel any better about the prospects of getting my work published.

While I was reading through the posts, however, I noticed a link to Gayle Forman's blog post, which was definitely my saving grace in this area. If you haven't read it, you should. It's brilliant, particularly if you're a young adult author struggling with this issue. Knowing that a published and popular author such as herself has characters swear made me feel that my prospects of getting published were not dashed away with every four-letter word (just dashed away by potentially bad writing). Her post made me feel better, and now the characters that should swear in my book are swearing. Because, after all, as Gayle Forman says:

"As a writer, it just feels wrong to sub a crap for a shit when shit is the word that sounds right. Or a darn for a damn. I mean, really, darn? What 18-year-old says darn? I am not writing about the Amish."

Damn straight.

Every story needs a beginning, I suppose

I've been planning, for ages, on making a writing blog, but never actually got around to it. I created this blog about a year ago, and got so busy with school and everything else, I never wrote in it. I feel now, however, that since I'm in the process of getting really serious about my writing (I'm working on what I hope will be a first novel, though I've written countless short stories at this point) I should get on posting. I'm an aspiring young adult novelist (like so many others), attending college and hoping to get into Grad School within the next year or so. I'm 20, unpublished, owe money in school loans, and just moved into an apartment. So, basically, I'm like any other aspiring 20 year old.

Now that we've gotten the introductions out of the way, down to blogging business. Or, if you have any other questions about me, feel free to ask!