The Suspense Builds...

"It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City itself is a detective story."

-Agatha Christie

I'm still waiting on the results of the Sparknotes Musical Fiction Contest. I don't feel as good about winning  this one, since I haven't seen as many people mention my story this time around. I didn't win last time either, but "Lunch is Served" got an honorable mention and had many fans.

A lot of finalists were picked and I feel mine was really different. There wasn't a pressing plot or action. I guess it was more writerly, but that's how the song "Honey, Honey" was. I love the song because it's a slow building, heartbreakingly beautiful melody that makes the listener slowly piece together what's happening in the story.

In the end, I don't care what place it gets, but it's nice to get some positive feedback and gratification for the work you do:)

Contests are just good in general for making me buckle down and get some writing done, which I haven't been doing lately over these lazy summer days. Actually, scratch that, I have done some writing, but it's been spread so thinly over three different stories.

I had to put on the brakes on my NaNo story because I realized there was something wrong with it that needed to be changed. I know you're not supposed to revise the first draft. You're supposed to just write straight through a crappy first draft and don't look back. This is very very hard for me to do as a perfectionist. I have to know where things are going for the most part so I don't get bored, confused and veer off. At the same time, I also don't like outlining and planning too much, then I get too caught up in that and use missing plot points or weakly defined character as an excuse to stop writing. NaNo helped because I only had an idea and several characters at the beginning following the rules of no writing before November 1st. And whaddaya know, I wrote a good 130 pages by the end of the month.  (That's still only like a third of a novel.)

I've decided to cut out one of the characters that I thought was important but I realized how the story was split into two ideas and it couldn't survive like that. I've also come up with two novel ideas: 1) two American Muslim teens who are best friends and how boys have affected their relationship and 2) a mystery novel with Muslim girl detective. Both are stories that I'm really excited to write about and have been mulling around in my head for just as long as my NaNo novel. The funny thing is all these plots once tried to be in one book together and I have characters moving from different stories and exchanging names, family members and background characteristics. Everything just has to fit nicely for the story to get going and I feel happier about the progress.

Now my problem is just focusing on one story now that I feel they are each on the right track. I think I favor the detective story but I just need to figure out the crime and victim. Who dies and why? It's kind of annoying how as a writer, I have to also figure out what happened but think from both points of view from the detective and criminal and understand both of their motivations. I have a really good book to help me through the whole mystery novel process though, so I better get to reading and follow the clues.