It's probably good to keep it intentionally vague about the time period; that gives the story a more timeless feel. That's interesting that the guys all read younger than they were meant to be. It could be because you were also younger when you originally wrote them. I used to worry about that when I was a teenager writing about them in their twenties. I would wonder if their way of thinking seemed too immature. There's a big difference between a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-six-year-old. Now that we're adults too, the age difference doesn't seem to matter as much. I don't feel like I'm that different at thirty-six than I was at twenty-six, not compared to sixteen.
PNecklace as a whole is more vague. I'm trying to be more concrete to my fantasy timeline than to Backstreet time. The beginning and end of PBox is solidly "it's spring of 2005," but the rest of it, I took out hard references to "it's been x years" or "this happened x years ago" just because the timeline doesn't make sense. Mainly a twenty-five year old dating an eighteen-year-old. Maybe that's the real fantasy in the story, lol.
It's easier to be more concrete and less vague in the OF version, which I do like. And it's easier to adjust "reads eighteen Nick" a year or two down. Plus it makes everything slightly less horrible, lol. Like poor twenty-five year old Nick was stuck in that cave for ten to twelve years going slowly insane if the timeline remains accurate. A sixteen-year-old Nick would be like three years. Still horrible, but not as extreme. Realistically fanfic PBox Nick should not be as well adjusted as he is. Who fed him? Was there water? If it was that terrible, why didn't he just leave even if he was scared and thought he deserved it? I have so many questions for seventeen-year-old me, lol. Also, why did seventeen-year-old me want to psychologicall
y torture her beloved Nick in such a gruesome way?
I know when I was younger, "do the Boys read believably older than me?" and "do the Boys read believably as... well boys?" were questions I often asked myself. But I didn't really stress about it. Now when I look back, it's pretty noticeable. At least "don't read older," the jury is still out on "believably as boys," so I guess they read believably as male?
Twenty-six year old me and thirty-three year old me are pretty much the same, though thirty-three year old me has her life together a little better. She's not trying to be involved in love triangles anymore, lol. On the contrary, twenty-three year old me is still pretty different from thirty-three year old me. Not at the core or anything, but definitely confidence in who I am as a person. Twenty-three year old me cared way too much about comparing her life to everyone else and worrying that she was "behind her friends getting married" or "too mature for her friends still acting like college sophomores." On a whole, present me is a lot better about keeping feelings about life centered on myself, and possibly the hubs, lol.
LOL I remember having a similar moment when I was wanting to rewrite Broken as an OF YA novel. Lurlene McDaniel published a new novel about a male high school swimming star who loses his leg to bone cancer, which sounded so similar to my plot of Nick as a high school basketball player. I was like, "Are you serious??" Her books never featured male protagonists before, so I thought at least the fact that my main character was a boy made it somewhat unique in that genre. I bought the book and read it; it wasn't really that similar to Broken or very good. (I realized I had grown out of her books by then.) I guess the lesson there is there's always going to be something similar out there, even in the world of fantasy, but don't let it derail you because no one else writes like you. As long as you're not outright copying someone else, you're fine. I get the point you made earlier about being a sponge, too, and worrying you're going to inadvertently copy if you read too many books in the same genre. That's another reason I'm liking memoirs lately, because drawing on real life experiences isn't the same as copying someone else's made-up ideas.
No, Lurlene! It's like she sensed someone was coming into her niche market on "crying and dying" besides Nicholas Sparks, lol. Do any of his books feature male protagonists being sick either? I can't think of one. I'm bummed you read it and have a more mature view of Lurlene instead of looking back with nostalgia and joy, but it's good you read it just to see how similar they were.
It definitely ruined my joy at seeing books about demons for half a day, lol. I was too focused on whether I would have to change Nick's name. My one non-negotiable outside of, you know, the non-fanfic elements I made up myself, lol.
I think memoirs are great for that, especially because you can take different accounts and weave them together with your own ideas to create a unique experience, like "this seems pretty standard, but these things vary."
Yeah, maybe. Although reading them as a kid is what created that fear LOL. At least as an adult, I can talk myself down from hypochondriac thoughts better than I could as a kid, when I would read a book about a girl who got leukemia and then cry myself to sleep, convinced that I also had leukemia. Now I'm just like, "Eh, I haven't died yet, so it's probably no big deal."
Bridge to Terabitha was my big adult fear book, lol. I think my melt down about it also turned into a meltdown about The Last Unicorn. Such a melodramatic special snowflake as a child, lol. I'm a bit of a hypochondirac myself, but I blame my mother for that. It's more like "leaping to the worst possible conclusion first" for everything, it's just easy to do that with medical things because of Web MD always saying "and I guess it could be cancer."
No.
Hard no, lol. I was joking. It didn't fit what your story sounds like, but I just wanted to ask for fun.
Absolutely. Memoirs are super helpful because you can never really know what something is like unless you've gone through it yourself. Reading the experience of someone who has gone through it in their own words is a good way to understand that perspective. Both of the memoirs I've read or am reading are fairly short, I think, probably under 300 pages, although I have the Kindle versions so it's hard to tell.
It's good that they're short so that the research doesn't detract from writing too much. I'm glad there's resources out there to help get perspective. I wouldn't want anything we all write in our stories to befall any of us in our day-to-day lives just to provide perspective.
Yes, I think writing a pitch sounds like an intimidating part of the publishing process. You have to summarize and pitch your book just right so that it sounds like something that will sell, but also something different enough from what's already out there on the shelves.
Yes! And summarize it to its bare bones instead of getting caught up in the tiny details that are important to you, but not necessary in a summary. I would probably have to rewrite that more than the actual novel, lol.
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Topic: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3) (Read 452763 times)