I hope you have enjoyed the drafts of my story that I have put up so far. I am continuing it but because it's become longer than I intended, I am going to finish it totally before putting up any further content. What started as a "For Funsies" project has become something I'm really enjoying and delving into. I really want to improve my writing. I often get very insecure about my abilities as a writer. I am terrible with grammatical rules and it can be very hard to edit yourself.
I'll have any subsequent posts of this include the full story together with more editing done to it. I am trying to force myself to write everyday or almost every day. I am looking online at tools and trying to get more involved in communities to better my writing, time and practice, I'm hoping to hone those skills. My goals are to get a novel finished and completed and to put myself into creating a clear story. I get very intimidated because I see a lot of great talent out there and don't imagine I could become successful but to finish a novel is really important to me. Having been writing poetry and little stories for years.
It's incredibly cathartic to write things out and to explore more of yourself by writing in various perspectives. This blog has given me a beautiful place to explore so many types of writing having started as a parenting blog. I am not the best at staying to one topic. It's the Hannah Blog so it has all kinds of things.
I do have interesting plans for these characters and the more I flesh them out the more I am excited about them. Especially the villains. I'm almost a bit nervous about that because the plot leads to some vary dark content. I want to be able to describe some of this without relying on the disturbing subject matter too much but more on character emotion in handling the situations. I don't want to tone down what may end up being the most interesting part of the story to happen because I'm afraid about my Mom reading it, but I also don't want to go so far off the deep end it's pointless drama and smut.
While I think Zombie stories, Dystopias, and Wasteland Apocalypse stories are fairly played out in modern writing. This is something new that I am discovering in my writing. A lot of short stories I've written before focused on my emotional process of dealing with love and being wanted. That can be great for passionate emotional scenes in between good characters but it doesn't make or a gripping plot. I started with "Zombies" because it was about the furthest from my comfort zone and style as I could get.
One thing I've found is if you are attempting to write horror, it's one of the hardest genre's to write in. Pacing, tone, and voice become so incredibly important. You want to build the tension for the reader not spill it all out too fast. You want them invested in the characters and on their seats enough because the monsters are really scary. I had to change what I'm working on to more "action" genre flavored than horror because none of my content is very scary. Horror writing should elicit a response from the reader and they should feel tense. I think many people assume that JRR Tolkein and George RR Martin are writing in the most difficult ways. They are high descriptive, intricately plotted masterpieces but they're also hard to read. Horror writing unlike thrillers, still gets you on the edge of your seat but really good horror will have you reading with extra lights on and building that from a book is difficult.
That all said, all writing is difficult and I respect people for getting their novels finished and putting it out there. Not everyone can do and while maybe not everyone should, if you get your book to the world you deserve respect for the effort. I am very amateur at all of this but I'm excited to see where putting more effort into my writing will take me. Perhaps back to college remedial English. Who knows.