Saturday Shares a Secret

Or: What I Haven't Told You Guys

I don't know if you've noticed this, but I pretty much write strictly young adult paranormal fiction (usually paranormal romance) and some young adult urban fantasy depending on your definition of urban fantasy. With romance. Young adult romantic urban fantasy? Romantic young adult urban fantasy? TOO MANY WORDS. There be smooching in these here books.

Anyways, I haven't written contemporary in... um... let me check. Okay, this document says February 2010, and this one says August 2010. So the story behind that is, in February 2010 I started this story about a girl with a heart defect. It was contemporary and about eleven hundred words and holy heck it sucked. Then I fooled around with trying to write it again. 700 words that time and they still sucked. So that got trunked (and I don't really count it as a book.)

Do you remember that post I did about the magic in books where I explained why I write what I write? Well, I left something out.

I'm writing a contemporary book.

*listens for thuds of fainting bodies*

No, honestly, it's okay to be surprised. I was surprised myself. But I was listening to this song and I kept thinking, "This could totally be a book," and then I was looking at pictures on We Heart It (do you guys know We Heart It? It's awesome. This is me on there.) because I needed something mindless to do to unwind at night because the holidays stress me out and there were so many pictures of amazing Christmas stuff and I had SO MANY IDEAS.

So. Yeah. This THING happened. It's contemporary and it's 10k long right now. I don't know how long it'll get. It might just be 20 or 30k long. It feels shorter in my head and I don't think I'll hit 50k. So I don't know what I'll ever do with it, but that really shouldn't stop you from writing something you like, you know? Never, ever, don't write something for that reason, okay, people?

Anyways, I won't ever say that my paranormal/urban fantasy books are EASY (get me to tell you the Berserk story sometime if you want an example of a book that broke me a little) but the Christmas book (nickname, not title) is difficult in different ways. For one thing, nobody's trying to kill anyone. That *cough* happens a lot in my books. There's danger and drama and heightened emotion and it's AWESOME.

But unless my main character snaps and murders her annoying sister, that isn't happening in this book. There isn't a ton of emotional drama (this main character is relatively unscarred compared to my others), there's no paranormal stuff, and there is romance, but it's... not bad or anything, it's just a bit slow and sweet and a little less intense than in my other books. So I'm trying to write a book with a decent plot (always a problem for me) but no one is in life-threatening danger, there's a lot of people (I told you about my secondary characters problems last week), and the romance is less of a big deal (usually the smooching scenes are the easiest for me to write XD).

Oh, and there's no cursing.

So it isn't easy to write, but I think it'll be worth it in the end and sometimes I feel like, as a writer, I need to challenge myself. Maybe it won't always work, but I think I like the challenge. Is that masochistic? Eh, I don't think I care if it is. ;)

Tell me what you guys are working on now in the comments. What's your current project? Drafting, revising, rewriting, editing, querying? Leave it in the comments.

Peace and cookies,
Laina