It's been a long, long while since I've updated this blog.
As I am now employed full-time as the stay-at-home mom of a two-year-old and an almost-five-month-old, I haven't been able to find much time for writing lately. But I've read some good books over the past couple of weeks, and they've inspired me to get back to doing what I love, even if it's only for a stolen hour or two, snatched during the kids' naps or after they are in bed for the night.
So what am I currently working on? Well, lately, I've been sticking to the genres I love best (and consequently, write best): young adult and sci-fi. I'm about to start tackling my 3rd pass of the novel I completely for NaNoWriMo last year, entitled Alternation. (Although I'm not sold on that title.) I was very pleased with how this novel turned out and thought it was one of my better efforts. However, I just can't seem to get the voice exactly right. It's told from the first-person point-of-view of a teenaged boy named Asher, and since I obviously have no idea what it's like actually to be a teenaged boy, I feel like the voice isn't coming across legit. For my second draft, I experimented with writing in present tense, a technique I've noticed is very popular in YA these days. But ultimately I decided my narrator's still just not convincing, so I'm about to tackle another rewrite, this time in third-person. Hopefully I'll be able to engage the reader just as well but I'll be free to tell the story without having to worry about making sure I'm sounding enough like a dude.
I'm working on another YA sci-fi novel that I just started - randomly came up with the idea late one night. I don't want to give away too much just yet and I'm still barely into the outlining/jotting-down-random-scenes phase, but it's of course going to be futuristic and techy and probably some flavor of dystopian. All the usual YA suspects.
In the meantime, just to get myself writing more, I'm going to start using this blog to review some of the books I read. I read a ton of books (heavy on the YA) and I always think to myself, I should really review this book, but then I never do. But since reading is such a huge part of writing, I think it would be a good exercise for me to start doing some reviews. And I'll probably start by reviewing Angelfall by Susan Ee. I've heard a lot of hype about this book, and had snagged it for my Kindle once upon a time when it was $0.99. I finally gave in and started reading it (I've found that I can read on my Kindle while feeding Ethan a bottle, so I've been read snippets of Angelfall whenever E. gets hungry) and so far I've been pleasantly surprised.
I'm also thinking about writing a memoir of sorts. Not because I'm egotistical, but because I think it might be a nice thing to leave behind for my kids and their kids after I'm gone, so that if they're interested, they can learn about where they came from. I'm thinking of a sort of combo memoir/genealogy with info about grandparents, great-grandparents, basically any info I can round up that I think might be interesting to preserve for posterity. I even thought I could do some cool things with pictures (for example, my Granny who passed away a little over a year ago, was a painter. I have one of her paintings, my sister has another one, and my dad has several. I thought it might be nice to photograph some of her paintings and include that with a portion about her). I am actually very excited about this project because it will be a completely different type of writing than I've tried before, and I think it will be very cool to learn more about my own family background and my husband's as well.
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