The First Post

Well, hello! Welcome to my writing blog, which will be updated whenever the heck I feel like it, with topics related to writing. I think it will help me stay focused. It also may distract me, so I'm taking a bit of a risk. Ultimately, though, I think it will motivate me to work more. And I like blogs.

I actually do have a name, but I'm not going to reveal it (for various reasons) until I'm fairly certain I will be published, or I am comfortable with it (whichever comes first). The title "Pen Name Pending" was created for my Doctor Who blog, which I ended up starting earlier than I expected and so never got to come up with a cool pen name. Actually, I found that I liked the status so much that a pen name would not live up to it.

Anyway, what am I planning to do? I'm not sure. Mostly muse about writing-related things, I suppose. Writing, editing, ideas, habits...all that jazz. I have a few ideas to start with, and I'll just post when I feel like it.

What do I write? Well, my main project is something I've been working on for, oh, about 4 years now. Once I started really writing it, I finished it in a year. And it's at least 350 pages. Originally, I wanted to be a young author. I edited, but I didn't make major edits. I wrote about half of the sequel within the following year and a half (and I haven't gone back to that in a while...). It's a planned trilogy, by the way, but the second book is from another character's point of view and the third will alternate between several as they are split up, and I think since they'll all be well established that I can get away with that. Anyway, maybe a little less than two years ago I thought about submitting it to an agent, but I realized I could revise the first 10 pages or so that I had to submit. I continued on to maybe 2/3 of the book--some major prose tweaks, some minor. Then, last year, I thought about how much more I liked the sequel because the new characters were more interesting and it was darker. I had matured so much, not only in my writing but emotionally, and my first novel just seemed so amateur. I was afraid to really get to the heart of things in some places. So, I began more rigorously editing, with a focus on characters, emotions, mood, logic, and some symbolism. The thing is, I get distracted. A lot.

What kind of book is it, anyway? Well - and I'm sure I'll blog about this sometime in the future - it's on that weird divide between "children's" and "young adult". The series matures as it goes along. In fact, one of the things I'm working on is making the whole thing about the journey of growing up. Genre-wise, it's fantasy. It takes place in a whole other world with some crazy stuff, and I'm getting better at building it as I go along. (Originally, it was much too simple.) I also have lots of other ideas. This blog is going to be more about writing, rather than what I am actually writing about, though.

Well, until next time,
[Resists urge to electronically sign real name.]