MetaFic

Hmm, I haven't blogged in a several months, so I suppose I should put something here. :-)

Let's see... "Ginny Returns" is now complete. I've had a few typos in it pointed out to me. I'll get to those very soon. Overall, the story had good reviews, which are enjoyable to read. I had a lot of fun writing it.

I'm also on an organization kick at the moment. What that means to my writing is that I'm moving old stuff to archives and cleaning out my hard drive. In doing so, I found and am working on a "Harry only" story that has been sitting around for some months. Because it's not an H/G story, it will only be posted on FF.net, starting in couple of weeks. It should post pretty quickly with only 6 chapters. I'm just waiting on my beta editor to work thru it at the moment.

After that is done, "Lily's Child" will be the only story that I have any real length on, and so I'll be restarting it. My muse for it found her way back home, thankfully. I've done quite a bit of thinking about the story, trying to figure out why it suspended itself. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I can fully say why; the brain can do mysterious things. I'd like to blame it on "the winter blues" (I'm reasonably certain I have a mild form of SAD), but I think a better answer is that I abandoned my normal writing process and that was the price I paid. Currently, I'm in the process of getting with my betas to work out a plan to get me and the story back on track.

So, note to other writers, learn from my mistake: If you have found a writing process that works for you, under no circumstances should you try something different on any story that has more than about 3-4 chapters (so that if the new process fails, your project is not too big to finish anyway). If the new process works on the short multi-chapter story, then try it on a longer story, as now you have an idea that it will actually work.

One last bit of news... I've recently had the interesting experience of being on the other side of the "author advice table". A handful of people have helped me tremendously over the past few years to become a better writer -- a few of them are authors on this site. For reasons that I can not explain (the planets aligned?), I've had several people ask me for advice about writing or improving their stories. While I'm "tickled pink" to help (as the saying goes), it's very different being the helper instead of the helpee. It really makes me appreciate my mentors all the more. To those of you who have helped me and read this -- and you know who you are -- thanks again!

Kevin