It’s not procrastination as much as fear.

I thought I knew what I was going to write about today, until I began to think about myself instead. See my friend as recently began sending query letters to agents and the like and besides all the strange emotions that arouses in me, I find myself feeling oddly hollow.  I know I should be happy for her but… she’s the slow writer. She’s the one who takes forever writing almost anything. I’m the fast one. In a way, I should be doing this first.

I’m the one who has had a book to send out for a while.

And this started me thinking. Why do I do this to myself? Why do I get to a point and stop?

I do this a lot in my life. I need to get a job but all I do is say that I’m applying for jobs A, B, C, D, and E, and then maybe I’ll apply for B and E. Nor do I get any of the jobs. I need to buy something and first I use the excuse that I don’t know where to find it. Then, I just don’t do it. I need to get work study so I go to the person in charge of work study and say that I need it. I get the locations and I do nothing. (Well, I talked to one, was turned down, and that was all.)  I say that I need to e-mail someone about tutoring a class and I never get around to it.

I wrote a novel and I just let it sit on my computer, doing nothing.

The problem is I don’t know what to do, and then I get so scared that I don’t do anything. It’s not that I don’t want a job, and I don’t want to buy the thing for my computer and I don’t want to be published. It’s that I use my lack of knowledge as a crutch for fear.

So, I’m trying not to be so scared of things. I’m going on vacation next week (will mention later.) and I’m hoping that I can work maybe on my query for Shad.  And work on my new novel. And finish with editing When Darkness Swallows, which I haven’t gotten back to yet. And maybe, if I work very hard, I can get over this little issue I’m having of not doing anything and actually get further ahead in my life.

About vacation. I’m going on vacation start next Monday. I do not foresee any serious reduction in posts, since I already have most of them written. However, I will not be able to answer comments as much as normal, since my internet will be limited. (That doesn’t mean don’t comment. i like comments. :) ) I’ll be back in the beginning of August.

when characters refuse to talk

I finished my second draft of “Miles’ Love” last night. Unfortunately, although I like the story, it isn’t coming out as well as I would like.

I don’t know if I can say why for certain. IN some ways, I think that it is just a collection of many things which can be summarized into two things: The characters don’t really react to their environment and the problems are solved too easily.

It’s not that I don’t understand the characters, because I have enough of an idea about them. It’s more that they just aren’t clicking for me. Sure, I know Miles, I know what his goals are suppose to be, but I don’t understand or see any logic behind his overwhelming desire to go back. Sure, I understand Rachel some, but she’s so quiet and the story is in Miles’ POV that I can’t express much of what she feels.

Then, as far as the environment goes, well, Miles isn’t one to wait around and do nothing. So of course he’s going to take action. I just couldn’t put into the story anything negative resulting from that said action.

The problem is that I don’t know how to fix it. I know what the problems are–I can sea them very easily–but I have no clue about how to go about fixing these said problems. It’s not like with Dragon Slayers that all I needed to do was interview the characters. It’s more of a functional part of the art of writing.

That’s all I can really say. I was hoping to start a paper edit today, which I didn’t expect to take terribly long, but I might very well be too sick to do so.

About starting to post Miles’ Love on Sunday, not going to happen. There are two reasons behind this however, One is that I don’t know if I can get it done in time. I might be able to and if not, it’ll probably happen early next week. However, I have finals in a little more than a week, so I really think I would like to save it and post that as my only post that week of finals. (My brain, thanks to the almost end of the semester, is getting fried and I’m having a hard enough time coming up with blog topics without the pressure of finals.)

Again, a reminder: Question of the Week due by tomorrow night. (US central time, which I think is -6 GMT or so.)