Author: JamieKate
•5:42 PM

Yes, Book Graveyard. No, not The Graveyard Book (although that is also an interesting topic). Book Graveyard. Have you witnessed this anomaly lately? I have. And it is not pretty. In fact, it made me want to cry.

Do you know what the Book Graveyard is? The Used Book Store. Stop'N'Swap Book Nook. Bert and Ernie's Book Emporium (BEBE). Buks 4 Cheap.

I went to one two weeks ago to purchase some gifts for Christmas (actually, my family went and I came along because I'm complacent) and the image of the torn, smelly, stained piles upon piles of sad, lonely books made my heart swell. I wanted to take them all home and make friends with them and tell them they're loved. If you're not a bibliophile, imagine the feeling one acquires upon entering an animal shelter (although, that also happens to me in the animal shelter...poor aminals). Those poor things! They hadn't been good enough for someone to keep. And what few books people were buying were not the sad ones. The one-time author books with the frayed spines and rippling pages. Those were the ones I melted for.

Yes, I'm weird.

The Used Book Store has turned up in my thoughts again and again, especially as I revise my book and look towards the future. I will be published one day. There is no other option. I am a writer. I will become an author. My problem will be not letting my poor baby/babies end up in the Book Graveyard. And though that place was a terrible, awful place (although I have no argument with the establishment itself - I just can't personally force myself to enter it), it has incited my particular resolve to make my book as good as possible. I want my book to be somebody's favorite - the one they read over and over again until the pages are dog-eared to extinction and there are food stains in every chapter (depending on the cleanliness of my readers, of course). I cannot let mine be the lonely one. It will not be abandoned and alone, buried beneath stacks of others. I will rescue it. I will increase the tension in each scene. I will improve my chapter breaks. I will eliminate useless words. I will prevail.

In closing: I am way too dramatic for my own good.
Author: JamieKate
•12:38 PM
I know. It's been a while, Loyal Readership of Sad Numbers. But life, as you must know through your empathic telepathy which spans across cyberspace, has been both tough and busy. School, life, school, sleep, life. You know the drill.

The word of the day, I have decided, is stagnant. I cannot resume writing the ending of my bloody, stagnant book. I have tried. I have eked my way through about a thousand words of that infernal epilogue, but each time I do it screams at me about how inadequate and talentless I am and I have to run away. I'm sure you also empathize with this problem, even if you are at the crest of a creative wave. Which I am not. I am definitely being dragged across the seaweed-ridden sandy bottom of my creative ocean. And the worst of it is: I have the premise for a new novel, but it's been done! Well, not the exact premise. But I feel like my stories have all too much in common. A girl marries and finds out that her husband is not what she initially thought. Big whoop. Who cares. No matter the variations.

I should hire a personal assistant who tells me a) that I'm always right, b) what to do at any point of indecision or hopeless inadequacy, and c) not to eat the fudge.
Author: JamieKate
•5:25 PM
Alright, alright, alright. So I've been a blog slacker lately. Can you tell? Blog. Slacker. But no one's reading as of right now anyway, and I'm the only one who needs to forgive me. Except I have drastic problems with forgiving myself a lot of the time. But that's another story.

ANYWAY. I've plowed through that awful scene that took so many weeks, and I'm now onto the final scene which has taken one week so far and is now suspended in midair thanks to a general lack of motivation and wanting to finish the baby I've been working on for months. I don't know what the last scene needs to say, and I'm way too indecisive to decide. I know the themes of my book. I know what I want the scene to look like. I suppose I just have to force myself to write it at some point. Blech.

In other news, I've thought up a new story idea, and I'm very excited with its inherent possibilities. The only problems are:

  •  Time sequencing (I have a ton of ideas, but I have no idea in which order to put them in) 
  •  The story's completely out of my normal box of historical fiction. It's so contemporary that I might have to start paying attention to the news again. But it's amazing! Or I think it is. Le sigh.
  • I'm indecisive (again) and I can't make definitive choices about the cause of the protagonist's magical powers. Random mutations, like X-men? But is that cheating/cliche? Government-run experimentation, Orwell style? Just plain inexplicable magical gifts? 
I feel like I need someone to talk all this stuff over with, even if I come to the same conclusions or problems I still had before, I will have reinforced my ideas by debating over them with someone. But people I know are either not creative, creative in the wrong respects (and I don't mean that offensively), or way too busy to talk to.

Problems, problems, everywhere, but not a solution to drink. I just mauled Coleridge.