Writing Again

Hello world! Well, hello site, actually. I haven’t posted on my Squarespace blog in a very long time, and I also haven’t written in THIS site in a very long time. I’m hoping to get out of that post-paralysis and just… write. (As I’ve been telling my good friend Isabelle Knight to.) I haven’t been writing in my blog recently because I’ve been putting far too much pressure on myself. I’ve been thinking, “If this blog post can’t be perfect, I simply won’t write it at all.” Which is rather silly, to be quite honest, because how can I even know whether or not it would be perfect if I never get around to writing it? For some reason, though, posting on Wix intimidates me less. ???? I don’t understand this, either.

On a pleasant note, I’ve been working on my novel The Secret of Moonflower Valley quite a bit recently. I’m on the fifth draft, for those of you who have forgotten about me. (Don’t worry, I’d have forgotten too. I haven’t shown my face in so long… gah!) In the past week I’ve made more progress than I have all summer. I’m working on plotting out each individual chapter, picking which scenes from Draft 4 I can keep, and which ones have to be completely scrapped. For reference, my Deleted Scenes tab is 84 pages long. The reason for this is not because my writing was terrible, I promise. It’s because there have been some recent and major changes in the story, including but not limited to:

My three main characters, Clementine, Flynne, and Citrine became royalty.

I added a fourth main character! (Willow)

Clementine actually has a personality now.

I realized that I have a good (I mean bad) amount of info dumping in the first four chapters, so THAT has to go.

I’m tweaking my writing style so that character voices are slightly more formal and old English. Not too intensely, because my old English vocabulary is not nearly as broad as my modern English vocabulary.

And so much more that I can’t tell you without keeping you here for hours.

Despite it all, though, there are a few characters who are staying pretty much the same, and scenes that I’m able to salvage and tweak minimally. (This means that only the best of Draft 4 will make it in, which is rather nice, isn’t it?)

On another note, I am starting high school in a week. (Yikes!!) I know. Crazy. I’m kind of… old? But also… young? What? I’ll be facing some old classmates that I didn’t necessarily agree with, but I will do the thing I do best: smile, be nice, and carry on with my own life. So… yeah. Oh, and I wanted to say, I went to a new student orientation on the 13th and WOW that school is big. And super winding. And I’m 100% getting lost in there my first week.

(And maybe my second week. And third. I’m not too confident in my sense of direction.)

Now I’d like to talk about high school… so I guess I’ll do that.

Am I excited for the school year? Yes. Why? I like to learn new things, but I’m most excited about joining different clubs and such. For example: the creative writing club! Obviously!! I’m always looking for new young writer friends, but I usually meet them through the interwebs. This means that joining that club could be great news for me socially and writer…ly. Idk. Oh, and a volunteer club! And an astronomy club, and choir… Lots of clubs, I guess! I’m also excited for school to begin because I want to try to be more… social. You know? I feel like us writers especially have just the teensiest bit of trouble talking to non-fictional characters. Especially in a non-fictional environment. My strategy, though, is to just… be nice to everyone. Also be myself. Also—

is cut off before Miss Larkspur can go on a tangent of self-assurance

Right. Uh…. Right.

—Leah Larkspur