MY HEART IS DANCING…

My heart is dancing…

I thought you could only feel this way when you were in love… and anytime I was I tried my best to make it last, but it never does.

Lately my heart dances quite frequently, and each time I put my hand to my chest, I feel tears well up in my eyes. I’ve been writing for a few years now, and I don’t think I’ve ever noticed this the way I do now. I think its because at first I was unsure, and nervous and trying to build my skill. Can I do this? Is this for me? Am I kidding myself?

But after almost a few months of not seeing any colours, of being unhappy, of wondering if my heart would ever dance again, I’m amazed to see that it does now, so often that I’m almost always short of breath.

A few months ago I met someone whom I found quite fascinating. My heart started dancing as it does when we have a crush but it didn’t last. Some disappointing events took place, and in a few days I was back to seeing everything in dull colors again. But then I STARTED THIS BOOK.

Everything about it is a combination of my essence. My beliefs, my interests, my heart, my convictions… and it makes me feel so alive. It gives me hope again, it makes me tremble with excitement, and ponder in amazement. I knew when I started writing that I had found something that I loved doing, but as my skill developed, and my confidence increased, this love has blossomed into something increasingly more powerful.

I think it’s contentment. I deeply enjoy this; it keeps me up at night and I don’t mind, it makes my brain sweat and I don’t mind, It makes me confused and I don’t mind, it takes me beyond my limits and I don’t mind.

Im just so grateful because after so many years of searching, I’ve finally found what my heart beats for, what wakes me up, what makes me see colours in this life of ours that could become quite unexciting.

Thank you God… Thank you world…

Now let’s go work harder at making a living out of it… hehe. That’s the part that’s stressing me out, but I’ll get there. Because passion guarantees persistence and creativity. My success is inevitable.

But if it doesn’t come, I take solace in the fact that unlike so many I’ll never regret my days, because I lived everyday with my heart dancing, because I was so in love with what I set my hands to do.

Love, OE.

 

THIS MAKES NO SENSE…

I’ve written and published three books so far, but since they were part of a series, I see them all as one. Anyway, in all that time, I’ve never put names in my chapters. I just go the lazy route and say chapter one, chapter two… and so on.

But this time I’m dragging out my inner genius. In short, I want to make the chapter names when combined together form the theme song of the book. As I write I feel like this could happen because I see a process. The innocence, the dreams, the disappointment, the heartbreak, the death, the hope… It could work.

But for now, I just divided them and wrote down the first thing that came into my mind as I divided the words into chapters yesterday.

I feel like most of these don’t make any sense, and they will all be refined later, but for now and at first thought, I think I did pretty well. They all represent the emotions in each chapter.

I’m quite impressed. I still feel it makes no sense though lol… but it’s all good fun. What do you think????

Love, OE

I’VE MADE MY DECISION…

Yes, I said i wasn’t going to do this but I don’t have a choice… I think.

I said that I was going to start editing and I did start, but I can’t do this. To edit, I need to literally become a hermit. Editing sets the fate of the book for me, and I have so much riding on this. But I can’t do it in between work breaks, and with an exhausted state of mind when I’m back at night. I can write anywhere, like I don’t even need a ritual for that… any spare time i get is my writing time. When cooking, in the bathroom, in a noisy place, it doesn’t matter to me. But editing… that’s an entire beast on its own.

That’s where the magic has to be conjured…it’s where i find myself awake at the dead of the night, without a trace of exhaustion anywhere around me. I’m in the world; I’m sensing the smells I missed when I was writing, the sore, pink cut on the side of the character’s finger because he or she is the most careless person in the world, the missing button from a shirt, the slight smudge of lipstick. These little things that turn it from just a story into reality.

You can’t do this in a crowded room, or in between work breaks. AT LEAST I DON’T WANT TO.

So I’ve decided to keep on writing. Within three weeks or so I’ll get to another 50,000 words, and then I will start editing. That scares me because how can you EDIT 100K words at a stretch but right now that seems like the only option I have. Here’s where I currently am.

I’ll keep on going… SIGHS!!! but YAY!!!. I know that I’ll regret this later.

Love, OE.

I AM TERRIFIED

 

Hello everyone, its me again…and I AM TERRIFIED. Of course this might be me just being overly dramatic but this fear feels valid to me. I’m working on a new book which I absolutely feel that I’m not qualified enough to write, but so far its been going greater than I ever dreamed so I’m starting to believe that I have supernatural powers that have been laying dormant the past 22 years i’ve been alive.

Anyway, the book has a small intro before the main story and this intro usual takes about 5% of the entire book or a few chapters. It’s like the prepping of the oven before you ever even start mixing the ingredients. But fellow humans, I’ve been writing this for the last month and as at yesterday, I still had a lot of strings to tidy up. The entire thing just went out of my hands, and the funny thing is that there are no details in it yet, none. Just conversations between characters enough to make me know what the story is about. (That’s how I write by the way.)

Right now this supposed to be tiny part of the book is at 50,000 words, when i expected it to be about 15K. Now you might think that that’s not a big deal but all the books I’written so far and published, have never exceeded 85,000 words…I hope you’re beginning to see my problem here. I don’t like long books and I wanted to try and conclude this story in one book. FAT CHANCE!!!

THE SOUL OF A STORY

I haven’t posted here in forever, and ‘I have felt oh so guilty’.. But I didn’t know what to write. I used to write about personal thoughts and feelings but I’ve been feeling very reluctant to share. I’m back now because I am finding out and teaching myself a bunch of things about writing, and I know it will be helpful to other writers out there.

Today, I want to talk about the SOUL of a story. I don’t know if SOUL is the right word but that is what comes to mind. One thing I’ve learnt so far is that one of the most important elements that great stories have, is the element of reality. No matter how crazy the idea of the story seems, if it doesn’t feel real, the reader will have an eyebrow raised throughout their time with your book.

When it feels real however, it becomes their reality for the time they’re with your book. They become nervous when your characters are nervous, scared when they’re scared, and sad when they’re sad.  Your characters become their friends, their sisters… their family.

I’m working on a new book and I’m being very very careful because what I want to say through it means the world to me. So with every direction I take with the plot, I ask myself these questions: Is this real? or is this me trying to make drama happen?