On Glass House
This is a fractured fairy tale. Fairy tales and middle grade fantasy are my happy place both in reading and writing. This is just one of several I’ve started. It is the only one I’ve decided to share openly for now. I’m going to publish it serially on my blog. And, it may be a bit of a bumpy road because it’s not done yet. I’m still figuring things out. Important things.
This may actually be a very bad idea. I think it was Neil Gaiman who said, “The great thing about rough drafts is that you can change everything. If you get to the end and realize your main character is a 40 year old man but needs to be a 12 year old girl, you can fix it. No one will ever know.” Okay, that was less of a quote, more of a paraphrase. But, the problem with this is, I wont be able to do that… not in secret. Anyone who reads my blog will know. So, this is a total experiment.
Why am I doing it? Currently, I’m sitting on 3 or 4 unfinished novels and a half dozen or so short stories. I write ALL THE TIME. I just don’t finish things. It’s incredibly frustrating. In an effort to fix this problem, last November (2022) I swept all the other partially completed things off the table (metaphorically speaking) and dove into something new. It sounds stupid. It’s really just another thing added to the pile. But, I needed to work on something that wasn’t “precious,” something I hadn’t already taken into over-edit /over-paint mode.
I started writing Glass House for National Novel Writing Month. *side note - November is the WORST POSSIBLE month for a novel writing challenge.* I’m crazy, so I did it anyway - sort of. It’s supposed to be a 50,000 word challenge. And, I think you’re supposed to finish it. I modified it to a 30,000 word challenge and got, basically, through act one. It was a victory for me, though! I did it. I wrote every day! The best part? I didn’t have time to edit AT ALL! It was so relieving. Get 1000 words a day no matter what! Who cares, if they are sensible or not? When I accidentally said the same thing twice, I just kept going. It added to my word count! I was brazen and careless and free. Most of my writing is just an effort to capture the things that pop into my imagination, anyway. I honestly have no idea where half of it comes from. It’s hard to get into the “crafting” of story till I have a good amount of it down. This challenge freed me up to do that. Just get it down. You can figure out how to make it work later.
Surprisingly, I actually fell in love with the story in the process. I love the little town of Glenaig and the people in it. I love the house and Hazel and her dad. I started out purposely not caring, but now I do. I want to finish it. I want accountability to finish it. To do that, it needs to become a cohesive thing. That’s where I’m at. I’m figuring out character and story arcs, researching 16th century houses… I don’t want to get bogged down here, though. I want to find my way to “The End”.
There is another story I began writing for my kids years and years ago. It was awful when I started, but its gotten better, I think. The kids know about it, so now I’m on the hook to finish it. I don’t want it to be terrible. Glass House is my training program for that marathon. I am thinking I’ll do NaNoWriMo again this year. Maybe, I’ll get the rest of the story, or at least a good chunk of it. It will be messy and imperfect. It won’t be posted on a consistent schedule if I know myself at all. But, you are very welcome stick around and see where it goes. It should be interesting at least.