Write writer, write

Hey everybody! I hope you all had fabulous weekends full of great times and a hefty dose of relaxation—because we all need relaxation, and we should always be having fun. I don’t think fun is emphasized enough in any culture, if I’m being totally honest. Gotta have fun.

But straight to the point, shall we? Last week, our focus was on reading. The logical progression then, of course, is for this week to be all about writing.

Rani Writes

Well, I should hope I write. I mean, how else would I have gotten six books on the market? ;-) but really, I do, I write a lot, and as of this past weekend, I’m back into the full swing of things.

Like we talked about last month though, that wasn’t always the case.

See, last year something happened to me, something that had never happened before. I finished writing a book series. Technically, I finished writing two of them. Both Earth-Space and the Druids saw their endings penned last year, in some form or fashion. And to be fair, I did start writing something else almost immediately—it’s just that I didn’t finish it. In fact, it was so much of a mess that I ended up scrapping it near the end of the year. I didn’t really start working on another novel until very recently (though I was editing some of my already written things, so it’s not like I wasn’t doing anything).

I really, honestly, didn’t know what to do with myself when I finished writing those books. How was I supposed to continue from there, to move on from series’ that had meant so much to me for so long?

I mean, Earth-Space isn’t technically done. There’s a spinoff in the works, and it’ll be really fun when I get to it, but I really need to finish editing what I have already written before I start writing the new one. Trust me, it’ll be easier that way. There are a few points in the first book that I had to change partway through the third book, only I never actually made those changes, so—it's just a bit of a mess. We'll leave it at that.

But for the Druids? There was always going to be a definite ending. I knew that from the beginning. It couldn’t go on forever. And when I penned the final words of the sixth and final novel in the Druid Novels, I cried.

I cried for days. I wasn’t myself, for a long time. I didn’t know what to do without that series, without the books I’d been working on for so long.

I still don’t, some days. But I’m getting there. This past weekend, I wrote a few short stories, and I dove back into my new novel. I had to force it sometimes, sure, but I got it done—and I had a lot of fun with it. Looking back at what I wrote, I honestly like it.

The thing is though, it took me a while to get to this place. Collide, the novel I started writing last year, was a mess because I didn’t know what to write. I couldn’t find my voice again. Atlyna, my new novel, isn’t like that. It’s a story I love.

And it’s a story I’ll tell you more about, on Thursday.

[love]

{Rani D.}