My efforts to write more creatively are putting me in a perplexing place. While I’m racing to finish one of my many incomplete stories, I’m finding that I can not organically come up with plot lines that are clean, crisp, new and out of the box. It’s gotten to the point where I’m actually on the verge of scraping some of my unfinished works and just working on what I already have. But in the back of my mind, I know that I started something and thus must finish it. That is the order of things, now isn’t it? You start something, and you must finish it. That’s our nature as human beings, to start life and then to finish it, even if it ends in such a way that you otherwise did not intend.

Anyhow, I can say that I’ve added on a couple pages to a chapter in my fantasy novel. And I’m working (in my brain, of course) of two more chapters to add on, with mostly background material. My greatest problem in that is putting it down in a voice that is cohesive with the way everything else is written. I am proud of myself for adding on something, but if I’m to achieve my goals of being published in 2012, I just have to keep going. Was it ever this hard for Austen or Hemmingway? Argh! If only I had my own group of writing intellectuals to bounce ideas off of…

w/love,

-Alja