Category: writing inspiration

I love winners.  I love underdogs.  I love losers when they don’t give up.  But I don’t love quitters. And that one thing – not wanting to be a quitter, not wanting to feel like a person who throws in the towel, has about wore me out.  It’s been two years since I published my first book.  Since then, I’ve worked on the sequel, written and published a novella and wrote another story.  But it’s that sequel that’s killing me. I think about the characters, how the story should go, what I want to happen.  It all sounds good in my head – and yet, when I sit down to write, I lose interest.

Other characters have popped in, wanting to tell their stories, and I told them to hold on.  It wasn’t their turn.  After a while, they stopped knocking on the door of my imagination.  And that’s sad.  It bothers me that I stubbornly clung to the idea that I had to do a trilogy – because that’s what YA writers do.  Those other stories, those other characters, are like smoke rising in the air.  How do you recapture those ideas?  Because it’s not like I haven’t tried.  I wrote down the ideas – I knew to do that much.  But going back a reading over those thoughts – I’m not finding the magic.

After so many hours working and reworking the sequel, I’ve got to admit it:

I’m a quitter!

Maybe one day, the story will flow.  But now is not that time.  I’m shelving the sequel.  I’m reclaiming the joy I had when I wrote the other stories.  It’s okay for me to put something aside when it becomes a burden.  And that is exactly what the sequel has become.  And it makes me sad to admit it.

But –

I’ve learned something important.

As a writer, I should have stayed true to my first instinct.

If I would have done that, then those other characters – their stories would have been told.

And –

I remembered something important.

Just because other people are jumping off bridges, doesn’t mean I have to.

If I would have worried less about what other writers were doing, I would have been satisfied with a stand-alone book.