| Katharine Coldiron | ||
| News - Story Tracker - Samples - Memoir - Work-in-Progress - About Me - Email | ||
| You are here: Work-in-Progress -> Juvie* Project | ||
| No samples of this project are available yet, as it is too crappy. |
| December 31 | Finally, finally, I've finished typing the
damn thing into the computer. I could have procrastinated less about it, but
nevertheless I am now done. And wow, the second half of the thing sucks.
Like, really.
I decided I'll have to revamp the story dramatically in order to make something out of it. There'll have to be a long opening section wherein Ellen is popular, going out with Seth, etc. to make the impact of the plot more deeply felt. This is OK, but it means more work; outlining and thinking up new plotlines and rewriting and rewriting again. So I'm going to put it off for the immediate future (at least until I am done with a draft of The Weight of Ice), unless I am hit by a bolt of lightning that helps me to write the thing. If anything new happens, this page will be the first to know. ----------- |
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October 16 |
When I was in high school, I wrote a piece
of fiction that I considered extremely long (I think it's about 20K, ha ha) and
extremely good. It was about a young woman with several different subplot
threads flying off her story in all directions. The main line was about an
evil, ghostly version of her which took over her life and left her trapped
inside a mirror. Its theme was popularity and what an awful, many-headed
monster it is.
Recently I discovered my old files, and I ran across this piece. I read and reread it when I wrote it, convinced that I had written something really extraordinary. So I remembered it pretty well when I skimmed over it as an adult, but (of course) it was not remotely as good as I had thought it was. Yet there was something there--a talent that hadn't yet gathered a "toolbox", as Stephen King puts it. And hell, it really was a good story, with some good points to be made about popularity. Also, it had an authenticity about high school life that I certainly couldn't recapture now. So I decided to reexamine and rewrite it as a juvenile-fiction novel. Unfortunately, the first step was rereading it carefully. I can definitely see that there's a burgeoning talent in there somewhere--a turn of phrase that will remind me of work I did later, a characterization that's unique or fun. But for the most part...CRINGE. I only have a hard copy, so I have to turn it into a soft copy by typing it, and that way I get to go over every precious word. I'm not making changes as I type, because it needs major replanning before I even get to the prose work, so I cringe 15 or 16 times a page when I run into stuff that I have to repeat into my computer. My progress on revamping this work is sure to be amusing. I'll keep you posted. ----------- |
*Juvie = Juvenile fiction