Frustration Level: High

Writing is just like anything else: it looks easy until you try it.

I used to think the hardest part was getting the story out. Then I became entrenched in the world of edits.

I mentioned in my previous entry that I don't have a real process. I just write and think of my next steps as I go. I have run into problems doing that, namely when I get stuck, I can't jump ahead to another part in the story and then go back to where I was stuck. If, for example, I get stuck in Chapter Six, I can't jump ahead to Chapter Eight because I don't always know what Chapter Eight is going to be, you know?

So when I get stuck, I have to plow through it until I get unstuck, all the while thinking, "Oh, I can go back and fix it later."

You know what's harder than I realized? Fixing it later.

Part of my problem is I'm attempting a voice I've only written in once or twice before. I managed it in a Supernatural fanfic I wrote a couple years ago called "Corpse Fire" and I remember it being relatively effortless back then. Not so much now.

For some reason, the first draft of The Witch of November is ... not really verbose, but written in a more adult voice than I really want. And trying to change the voice I've already written is freakin' hard.

So, I want it to read roughly like this:

“I’ll be right back,” Allie muttered, more to herself than to Charlie. She could do this, right? Because really, it wouldn’t take more than a minute to find the ball and run back through the fence. She could totally handle sixty little seconds. Besides, the longer she stood there, the more nervous she’d be. This kind of rescue mission needed to be done quickly and without thinking. Kind of like ripping off a Band-Aid.

But paragraphs like that are kind of hard to come by.

Most of it is like this:
 
Of course, what should be was never what usually happened. Allie stared at the sheets of paper with a frown on her face for a few minutes. Nothing jumped out at her; the spells or rituals all seemed to have different ingredients and different methods. Some were what Allie thought of as white magic: candles, herbs, blessings. Others were classic examples of dark magic; nothing called for eye of newt or any other cliché ingredients, but most of them called for drops of blood, wilted flowers, and other things that called up images of Halloween and the macabre.
 
Which is ... okay, but it lacks both the punch and the humor I want. It also doesn't sound like an eleven-year-old.

(And people thought I was kidding when I said the first draft was terrible! Ha!)
 
So what do I do now? Try to figure out whatever I was doing when I wrote that first paragraph up there, hee.