Writing

So, here's what I have written in the past few years:

• First draft of Love Will Keep Us Together complete, needs significant revisions to plot/character arcs
• First draft of Crash Into Me (not sure about that title) nearly complete, needs revision
• First draft of You Can't Hurry Love about 60% done

These are all contemporary romance novels set in the same world - they are tied together by one or more of the main characters having jobs at a music-related theme park. The first is about an analyst in the marketing department who falls in love with a co-worker. I need to add way more obstacles, and I know what they should be (I think?) but it needs pretty major revision.

The second is about a woman who goes to Las Vegas and gets married on a whim, then has to come home and figure out if she and her new spouse even like each other.

The third is about a woman who gets trapped in her house during a hurricane with the guy she dated in college 20 years earlier.

They are all music focused and, hopefully, a bit funny. I also have a ton of other false starts and miscellaneous unfinished projects that, if nothing else, show years of writing and many lessons learned. Most of them are abandoned for good reason. There's one or two that had a spark of a good idea but would have to be rewritten from scratch. And honestly, when I think about that, I'm not sure the ideas were that good.

I've been working on You Can't Hurry Love since last October, and should be way farther along than only having around 36,000 words. But I've had trouble focusing, and now, with the Stay at Home order and the surrounding stress, the very last thing I want to be doing is writing a novel about a woman trapped in her house with her ex. No, thank you!

Thus my return to this blog. I feel like I need to write, but I don't know what, so here we are.

I know I need to go back and revise the first two novels, but I just can't get motivated to get any work done. I don't know if it's because of pandemic anxiety or depression or what. If I do say so myself, they are worth working on. I really have learned things over the past few years, and while my novels might not be potential Pulitzer winners, they are definitely worth my time. And I kind of miss my characters.

I've also had an idea I'm excited about working on, however I'm having trouble figuring out how it would work. I'm thinking about two characters who work together and waste time in the office by secretly writing fan fiction, using their co-workers as characters. Of course they get caught at some point, and emotions ensue. I weirdly love this idea, even though 1) at least initially it does sound very similar to Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, and 2) I have no idea what kind of fan fiction they could be writing that would not involve massive copyright infringements, and 3) I don't even know where the romance would come in, exactly. Are the two coworkers just friends, or is one of them the love interest? 

The fact that I still love the idea despite these potentially insurmountable problems makes me think I need to spend a little time trying to work it out.  It could just be shiny new thing syndrome, where I'm resisting doing real work on real projects in favor of daydreaming about a project that probably won't even work.

In the meantime, if you haven't, go read Attachments - I love me some Rainbow Rowell, and it's one of her more fun books. Perfect pandemic escapism.