Amalthia's recs and fan works

Okay not a lot is actually happening. For the first time in weeks I actually feel like I got enough sleep, watched Lost and another episode of House while crocheting a hat for my grandmother.

I don't write much in this LJ like I used to mostly because of work and I'm trying to spend less time on the computer on the weekends because on a computer 8 hours a day, 5 days a week..

Anyway, for the friends that don't know this, I've started writing again, the last time I wrote a story was about 5 or 6 months ago and I feel way out of practice. However, I figured it doesn't hurt to get back into writing before November rolls around. I'm writing a prequel to White Sands (started it for the phone challenge, realized halfway through I should have started a week sooner because the phone challenge is now done and I just now got the story back from my beta, my fault not hers, two weeks is not enough time for these challenges if you want to revise your story)

So I got my white sands prequel story back from my beta reader and am trying not to feel overwhelmed. My husband says start from the top and work my way down. :) which actually is not bad advice at all. I always feel like this when I get revisions back and on this story, to be fair, I wrote it all in one week and the ending was rushed so I already knew sending it off that it would need some major re-writing. But I wonder if other writers feel like this?

I just realized I spend more time revising as a I write and maybe if I did some work before I started the story then writing it may not be as hard as it always has been for me, and then the revisions wouldn't be more like minor touch ups? When I say work I mean getting some sort of outline, figuring out who the characters are , and get some facts on paper so I don't contradict myself in the story.

I'm also starting to realize good stories take some amount of work, I think maybe some people understand how to write characters out of instinct, but if you don't have the instinct then it just takes practice and more practice. Me I need to practice. I signed up for NaNoWriMo and if it took me 7 days to write 5k words...I'm not going to make the 50k word deadline.

I'm 26 years old going to be 27 in February and at this point I'm tired of feeling like a crappy writer and I think I'm getting to the point where I'm finally understanding the only way I'm going to become a better writer is to keep on writing and not take a 6 month break every time I write a short story. Either that or just give up all together and focus my attention solely on making music videos...however that still does not address the problem that I want to read the stories I have running in my head all the time and I'm not like that crazy woman in Misery. My conclusion is I have to write what I want to read because no one is going to do it for me. Though I feel like some authors know exactly what I want to read because they keep supplying the crack. :)

I have a greater appreciation of good writing these last few years, I mean I always enjoyed a good story, but for the longest time I just assumed it was natural talent for people to be that good at writing. A very silly notion, though I do not doubt some people have a certain knack for dialogue, or imagery, or complex plots but I now know this kind of talent does not just appear overnight and that my favorite writers are the ones that write often and they try different things out and their stories generally improve with time.

conclusion, I need to get off my lazy ass, stop feeling sorry for myself for not having any "natural talent" and do what all my other favorite writers do and write!