10 June, 2011

No longer sick!

Yay!  I feel better!  Woot!

I also have been working hard on a manuscript I am seriously considering sending to a literary agent.

Duh, duh, duh!

Yeah.  I am scared.  That's a huge huge step in the whole becoming a novelist thing.  I think it will be similar to having a piece of music I have written performed.

I am a classical musician and nothing is more nerve wracking. Not a big solo, not standing alone on stage before a crowd of ten thousand (did that once-yikes!).  But standing backstage while someone else performs a piece that you have created...I had to sit with my head between my knees the first time it happened, or else I think I might have fainted.  And I am not a 'fainting' sort of person.

It has been said that a writer or musician or any other sort of creative person, reveals themselves in their work.  I suppose that's true in the obvious sense.  Since it is my book, my characters will do what I want, or what I would do, in a given situation.

And when I look back at my own short stories, written when I was little and terrible, teenage and angsty, and now adult attempts (and very mature, of course), they do have threads in common.

I like writing from a male perspective.  I like using soldiers as characters, whether modern or ancient.  Princes/kings play a big role.  Maybe I'm just reliving my Disney-centered childhood all over again as a writer?

There are princesses, too, though.  Usually tough-minded independent women who plant their feet and boss people around.  Is this a reflection of who I am?  Or who I want to be?  Only my family and friends could say.  And I'm sure they are laughing hysterically at this very moment.

I like catastrophe.  Invading aliens.  Plagues.  Zombies.  End of the world stuff.  I even have a story half written about wormholes destroying the earth and sending people to alternate dimensions.  Not much character-only driven drama.  Or reflective prose.

I think, after my long and illustrious career, I should write an auto-biography based solely on my love of world-ending plots.  It would go like this:

Elisabeth Treble, a pseudonym for XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX, was a novelist in the early part of the twenty-first century.  She is known best for her - Holy Crap!  The moon just exploded!  And there are dragons erupting from the earth, ridden by mutants!  Quick!  Send in the National Guard!  And that new super hero that just crash landed in Oklahoma from a parallel dimension!  Run for your lives!

The end.

E. T.

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