The Avoidance of Being Trite

Work on my new novel has begun in earnest. I say "new" as if there is an old novel of mine out there and people are breathlessly awaiting my next stunning work.

No.

New just means that this is the first time since high school that I have written more than...3 pages consecutively.

I am now the proud author of seventeen pages! Woot woot!

It's ridiculous I know.

My first novel was completed my junior year of high school. Piece of trash, that. But it was good practice. It kept me out of trouble.

My friend, who is forever debating with me over the Twlight v. Vampire Diaries, heard from my own lips that I am writing again.

"What is it about!" She asked, her eyes lit up as though she were meeting Robert Pattinson himself. (I do appreciate her enthusiasm for my contrived efforts.) "Is it about vampires?"

No. No it is not.

That story has been beaten into the ground to the point of humiliation.

Can teen novelists jump off the vampire band wagon and find a new way to spin a suspenseful romance?

This is my mission.

I didn't intend to begin a mission. It started with the comparison of Twilight and the Vampire Diaries, the love stories that hold them together. Then I got to thinking about Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy and Nate in Elizabeth George Spear's The Witch of Blackbird Pond. What was it about these characters and these love stories that possessed my soul to the point that I mourned when the story drew to a close?

Before I knew it, there were characters walking around in my head, kicking and demanding to be set free.

It has been all the difference.

Ever since high school I have tried to write, to pull the words out and make them come to life for me. I've had fantastic ideas and wonderful plots, but none of them were living and breathing (so to speak).

And now, in my most academically rigorous semester when I am still trying to decide on an internship and a career and film a mini-doc....there are characters breathing inside my thoughts. If too many days go by without giving them air I start to become depressed and impatient and generally unfriendly. Writing them out is like gasping in wonderful, reviving air after being smothered under a pillow of practicality. The characters are even doing things I haven't planned and didn't intend.

And it's all working out wonderfully.

Now let's just see if I can keep it up.

Simply put,

My story is not about vampires.

It is about love.

It is a bit gritty and a bit fru-fru.

The heroine is not Isabella Swan or Elena Gilbert.

And I am so very happy to be back doing that one thing that has always brought me fulfillment ever since I wrote my first poem in kindergarten...my first love: writing.

And may I just say, thank you dear husband of mine, for giving the strangers in my head room to breathe and loving me even as my flakes begin to show.