Last week, I had alluded to elaborating on the finer points to my Average American Novel this week. So come join me on a walk down memory lane to that awesome year of 2011, where life was good and I was still in that decade of my 40's, living large and pretending like I have a say in how my household was run.
This was also the time period where I had a lot, and I mean, A LOT, of energy/motivation for writing stories. I think this was also the same time period where I had gotten bit by the short story bug and was still churning out contend for a now closed short story blog of mine. Anyhow, this was when I had decided to start featuring my personal slices of my town/county/state in my writings, and this was the first real story that I had decided to implement that particular strategy {I'll go scorched earth with some of the elements in later posts}.
So, off I went, writing a story that took me an incredibly long time to figure what the central plot was {this was a common theme back in the first half of the decade: unknown plot while writing}, which I'd eventually settled on being: girl A, is a party with man B, who she secretly has the hots for and ultimately has drunken sex with. Man C, her husband finds out and ultimately dumps her on man B making her his responsibility. Girl A eventually rips off man D, who is a big time drug dealer. Thus, havoc/pandemonium/chaos/violence of all types unfolds, and ultimately, death & destruction rue the day.
Yah. Clear as baseball mud. And while I was on a roll, I had an ingenious idea, because I saw this done elsewhere, of writing a secondary plot that ultimately merges to a semi-satisfying conclusion at the end. Brilliant! Right! Right? Right.
Yah, again. Anywho, we came up with the brilliant idea of having the secondary plot take place at the funeral home. So originally, I wrote about one to three paragraphs tacked on tat the end of the of each chapter. But since I'm re-writing everything, I'm giving its own stand-alone chapter. Do you know how hard it is to flesh out a one to three paragraph snippet into some thing meatier?
Anyways, that's about all I have today for the Average American Novel. Tune in next week when we'll explore a few more random tangents about the story.
And now for something completely different. Specifically, exploring my blogging life from 2011!
Since the Average American Novel had its original birth in 2011, I though it would a little cool to go back in time to that year to see what kind schtuff I was blogging about. This particular snippet came from my 1st blog, Cedar's Mountain, which was around from 2008 thru early 2013. This piece of flash fiction is entitled, They See Your Every Move, and it's pulled from the month of January. Enjoy!
I can't imagine turning something that short into a chapter. I have a hard enough time getting a whole book up to word count.
ReplyDeleteIt has not been easy. While the regular chapters have been easy to fill out, as they were originally really devoid of meaty content, these mini chapters have all they need for info to begin with. So it makes it doubly hard to fill them out.
DeleteFun to go back and see what you were blogging about years ago. I'm afraid it would be like reading my teenage journals and being horrified at how I sounded.
ReplyDeleteI do have some stuff that I cringe a little while reading and thing to myself, "What was I thinking about?"
DeleteThanks for stopping by to visit.