I feel like I can't come up with the initial idea. Or I have enough ideas to start, but it sputters out so that I get perplexed by WHAT COMES NEXT. Or I get paralyzed by the notion that the idea I have is boring.
Interestingly enough, it took a lot of handholding from Pat Wrede, my mentor, to come up with the plot for my first book. I stole the plot of my second book from Hans Christian Andersen. I'm just not that confident with plots.
Since finishing The Wild Swans I have started a prequel to Emerald House Rising but it ran out of gas after about seventy manuscript pages. I couldn't see my way out of a plot point to get out of a scene alive. Then I started a collaboration with Kij Johnson, an epistolary novel. We were playing the Letter Game, as Pat Wrede and Caroline Stevemer did in Sorcery and Cecelia or Emma Bull and Steve Brust did in Freedom and Necessity. I really like what we've done so far, but Kij sold a two-book contract to Tor, and so we had to set it aside while she works on that.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
What it's like
Date: 2002-05-23 04:48 am (UTC)Interestingly enough, it took a lot of handholding from Pat Wrede, my mentor, to come up with the plot for my first book. I stole the plot of my second book from Hans Christian Andersen. I'm just not that confident with plots.
Since finishing The Wild Swans I have started a prequel to Emerald House Rising but it ran out of gas after about seventy manuscript pages. I couldn't see my way out of a plot point to get out of a scene alive. Then I started a collaboration with Kij Johnson, an epistolary novel. We were playing the Letter Game, as Pat Wrede and Caroline Stevemer did in Sorcery and Cecelia or Emma Bull and Steve Brust did in Freedom and Necessity. I really like what we've done so far, but Kij sold a two-book contract to Tor, and so we had to set it aside while she works on that.
Other than that, I've written one short story.
In four years.
Aargh.