I've always toyed around with the idea, and back as early as seventh grade I'd start writing my best seller and, after about 10 pages, get bored and stop. I was good friends with one teacher who I would always show my stories to, and he'd get mad every time I'd switch to a new one. Years later I would see him and he'd harass me about whether I'd written any more on the very first one I showed him. Not only that, but he could quote to me exactly what it was about, too, which was both flattering and embarrassing as he remembered more than I did. I got into art and eventually went in that direction, leaving my writing behind until recently when I decided that writing and drawing comics (other than HOLLOW, which I'm still very much working on!) simply took way too much time. Writing just comes faster, easier, and more naturally to me. I've always liked telling stories, from my more recent days as a playwright to comics and now this. I'm an artist, yes, but I'm a storyteller first and foremost.
Which brings me to the present, and the book I finally started writing. It's my ZOEY story that I originally was going to do as a comic, but couldn't settle on an art style that I was happy with. I have tons of stories already in my head the for the character, so it's going to be a series if all goes according to plan. I'm going to follow in the footsteps of one of my favorite writers, Scott Sigler, and start out podcasting the story as an audio book once I've finished writing it, giving it away for free in a serial format in order to get attention, draw readers/listeners, and build up a fan base. I'll either then E-publish it through Kindle and Smashwords, or look for an agent and try to go with an actual publisher, but the way that publishing is heading a lot of writers are finding it more profitable to go on their own. There are even examples of writers they are making so much by putting out E-books that even the biggest publishing companies couldn't offer them a contract that would be worth leaving the world of self publishing digitally. They're making too much off the far more generous royalty split that places like Amazon give. It takes a lot of hard work and self promotion, but self promotion is something I've always done well with an I'm willing to put in the work.
I have the first ten chapters done in my first draft, and have a 10 page outline of the entire first book which I estimate will be around 350 pages. For each chapter, I've broken down everything that I need to have happen, covered or mentioned to move things forward, and I've given myself a rough guess on how many pages I think I'll need to accomplish it. My first chapter, for example, I ended up going two pages longer than I thought I would, and I hit my target for the second chapter. I tend to write shorter chapters, from six to ten pages on average, and have mapped out around 40 chapters in my outline. Some of them are going to be quite a bit longer, and some of them considerably shorter, but that's looking like the average.
I had over 50 pages of this written previously, then decided to scrap it because I wasn't happy with very much of it and decided to switch from first person to third person with POV characters. I also learned a lot more about actually structuring a novel, where the beats come, how to work the transitions, things that I already knew about playwriting but needed to learn for writing novels. It's helped me clean things up a lot, write my outline, fill in a lot of the blanks that I was going to run into down the line, and so on. Rather than just sitting down and writing, which is what I was doing, I actually went out and researched and educated myself so that I knew what I was doing going forward. Still, I don't see that 50 plus pages as wasted, as there's quite a bit in there that I can use, which is nice. Now I just know where to actually put it and how to execute it.
As I don't have a writing circle in person or online to bounce ideas off of or get feedback from, I'm hoping that a few of my friends here might help me out with my writing project. I am, of course, quite willing to return the favor and share my own thoughts and ideas on the writing of others. I'm finding the hardest part of writing a novel to be working in a vacuum, with little to no outside feedback along the way. When I was writing plays, I would have my actor friends read new scenes as I finished them, and I found it both helpful from a feedback standpoint as well as encouragement to keep going.
I looked around a little bit online and found that most writing communities are subscription based, or at the very least require donations or subscriptions to access anything but the most basic features, and I really don't have the funds to do so.
At any rate, my current project is my first attempt at a novel, a suspense/horror story with a dark comedic twist about a young biracial woman and honor student that happens to be a budding serial killer. I think the best way to sum it up is with the first few paragraphs of the opening chapter:
Seventy-two days before she started college, Zoey Aarons killed someone. It was her first kill.
It wouldn’t be her last.
It had always been there, a darkness deep within her from her earliest childhood memories. No one could tell just by looking at her, as she never killed animals or mutilated her dolls. In fact, she had never been in a fight in her life, or even badmouthed another person. She was a quiet, studious child, always polite and well behaved. Nothing happened to her, no traumatic event, no history of abuse, nothing at all that would change a happy, well adjusted young girl into a monster. As far as the world around her knew, she was the all American, honor student girl next door.
If one knew what to look for, however, there were signs. As a child, she coached her little friends on how to die properly when they played Cowboys and Indians, or acted out her own elaborate death scenes. By the age of twelve she buried her nose in books about serial killers, and she reenacted their killing sprees in her daydreams and fantasies. If crimes committed in the mind could be counted as real, Zoey would’ve known much earlier what it would instead take her nearly two decades of life to figure out, and more importantly, truly come to understand about herself.
Zoey was born to be a serial killer.
Anyway, I feel like I'm really accomplishing something, and I'm writing about an average of 4000 words a day, which is my target for the first draft, and I'm finally really happy with how it's going. I just thought I would gush. Thanks for listening!