Nerved Up

I was over at Jeremy's last night and he and his wife appear to be preparing to take a very serious look at my finished story about Keroen Skathos. That's cool.

...or terrifying.

Eric is my friend and I love him and really appreciate the fact that he read my story before everyone else. He was not very critical though. I believe his synopsis, and I could be remembering this incorrectly, was composed of "Yeah, it was alright." and some questions and clarifications. His efforts were very much appreciated, but I was hoping for something slightly more critical than that. Perhaps with written down notations and things I can look at and go over, and it seems like that is what I'll be getting when Jeremy and his wife look at the thing.

I don't know if I have the stones to withstand that though. The story has a lot of flaws. The plot meanders for the first half of it at least, the punctuation and grammar could use some work, run on sentences, commas, etc. A few of the characters are extremely one-dimensional, and there's a lot of crazy crap the reader gets spammed with in the prologue and the first quarter of the first chapter that could possibly cause terminology overload. There are a lot of nits to pick is what I am saying.

I like the story I told, I like the main characters it was told about. Or at least find the "evil" ones interesting, if not likable. I think that the mechanics of the writing are weak. I did some good descriptions and had quite a few scenes I really really liked, but I don't know how any of it holds up to a critical eye with a background in English.

It was discussed last night that even if it is trash, I am older now, and perhaps a more competent writer. I started portions of the story when I was twenty or twenty-one, and I'm now twenty-seven. I've matured as a writer and a human being I guess. My DnD stuff is certainly pretty good quality compared to what it was at almost a decade ago, ideally my writing would have evolved at a similar rate because a lot of DnD is story writing in addition to that stat work. We discussed the idea that this is in fact still a draft, second draft, so it should not be considered the final version of the story even if I have been working on it (on and off, intermittently) for the past few years. I thought about that for a bit and we went on to discuss that I am "the Cookie Monster of amateur writing" and there is an image and a sound that goes with that description that I cannot convey via text, but it had everyone at the table kind of cracking up.

The point of the Cookie Monster thing: I start my stories and write. I get an idea for a character or a location and I run with it like a spastic child on a sugar high. My fingers type faster than I can properly think and I go on and on for some time. I never start out with a clear picture of where I'm going or what I should be doing as I type my way there, and it would be extremely nice to write the story and know the ending and major contents BEFORE I get over halfway done with it.

So maybe this is just a second draft and after the Pawlak household gets done with it I'll get to work on a third. I think I am ok with that. I guess I just fear a "this is trash" rating on the parts of the story I really like. I still really love that "We are that creature forever!" scene, despite some dialogue that never quite sat right with me. I really like Aubernach's character too, like is probably the wrong word for it, but I like the way he turned out and what happens to him over the course of the book. There are things I would change though. I could pop open the document on my laptop right now and find a few dozen things to change though, so...

Yeah. Done for now I guess.

Music: Camouflage, Camouflage - The Blood Brothers

Music: You're The Dream Unicorn - The Blood Brothers

Music: Spit Shine Your Black Clouds - The Blood Brothers