Changing Gears and #writemotivation update

I almost called this post "Grind 'em till ya find 'em and call me toothless". Not only is that an insanely long title, but I also wondered what kind of perverted freaks would find my blog through it. You never know. The internet is full of crazy people. I should know, I'm one of them.

Anyway...were was I? Oh yeah, changing gears.

*GRIND* *GRIND* *THUNK*

I said, "CLUTCH! THE SMALL PEDAL ON THE LEFT! USE IT!"

Ok, much better.

For those of you who are crazy enough to follow me, you probably heard that I finished my first draft of my first WIP. It is now sitting quietly waiting for a couple people to finish reading it before I go and tear it to pieces. I'm looking forward to it. I have some awesome ideas and if I pull them off right, it won't suck. Big "if" there. :D

Being a writer means that you have lots of words in your head waiting to come out. Just because you "finish" a draft, doesn't mean you can stop. However, there is some down time where you have to let it sit before you go back and do evil things to the words on the page (and not to mention the characters contained therein).

So, I put the thing down and promptly stopped sleeping for two days. It may have been the 5,000 words I pushed out last Sunday, it may have been too much caffeine. I think it is because my brain need to get words out and I wasn't.

A couple days later, I was talking to one of my tweeps, Adrien-Luc Sanders (he's the managing senior editor at Entangled Publishing he has some very interesting writing, editing, and publishing tips that he tweets about). He was talking about a melodramatic 17-year old. It was a funny post. I had to comment. Anyway, we ended up talking about being angsty teenagers and then a character started talking...really loudly in my head.

Yes, writers are schizophrenic...It's worse if you are a librarian...scary, I know.

So, this character was talking loudly enough that I couldn't ignore him. So, I'm now working on his story. It isn't mine, it's his. I tried to tell him off. He cussed me out, flipped me the bird, and kept talking. Yeah, he's that kind of character. I tweeted several times about him being an a-hole...because he is. It's not going to be a pretty story to write. It's going to have a lot of emotion in it. It will also not have robots, monsters, vampires, magic, swords, or spaceships. It will be a human story about a trouble teenager who has to deal with some pretty heavy things. I'm actually looking forward to writing it...provided I don't punch him first!

Now on to the #writemotivation update

1. Finish draft of WIP: DONE! YAY! HAPPY DANCE!
2. Figure out what I'm writing next: YUP! I also wrote down nine other story ideas that I want to write at some point
3. Do character sketching/world building for new WIP: In process. I have about 5 characters developed. Still need a location and a few more characters before I can start writing.
4. Blog once a week: So far so good!
5. Cheer everyone else on: Yes! Although I could do some more cheering (IMHO).

'Till next time!