The quicksand book is done. At least the first draft of it is. And thank God because I thought I’d never claw my way out of it. Why do first drafts suck so badly??? Anyway, my plan now is to let it sit and fester and while it’s brewing away I’ll start another book aimed at someplace else. This is going to be hard. Firstly because I hate beginnings and secondly because this book/novella is not going to be strictly category.

I’ve been writing category style books for a few years now and I actually find the parameters of category comforting. They give you a nice framework within which to work and because I like to twist things, they give you some great conventions to twist. However the end of last year I decided I needed a break from category  and wrote a novella that was category in length and in the focus just on the hero and heroine, but really wasn’t in terms of subject matter or language. Hehe. It ended up being quite dark and gritty and angsty and I just loved writing it.

Now I’m looking at writing another one and I’m kind of scared. Because the first one was different to what I write normally, I’m not sure I’ll be able to replicate it. I just chucked everything I liked into that first story and it just took off but…Well, this time round it’s different. I can’t write that first story again so I’ll have to chose different characters. Different setting. Different conflict. What if I don’t like it as much? What if it doesn’t write as easy as that first one?

I found stepping outside the category boundaries easy the first time round because I’d let them hem me in to the extent that I needed to do something drastic to break out. But my writing is different now to what it was then. I don’t feel as hemmed in as I did before. So this time I’m not so much breaking down walls as opening a door. And for some reason that doesn’t feel quite so easy.

Anyway, I’ve decided that my chessplayer is going to get the angsty, gritty treatment. Yes, I know, I’ve rewritten this ridiculous ms a number of different times but it’s never quite felt to me like a category book. So I’m taking the hero pretty much as is (minus the multimillionaire bit), giving the heroine some decent conflict and turning it into something sexy and dark and intense. At least that’s the idea.

I’m also going to give the heroine a conflict that’s quite personal to me. First time ever actually. I hope I’ll be able to pull it off.

So have you ever broken out and written something different? And when the time came to do it again, could you??

But no. That’s not what happened.

Layers happened. My characters ended up having more layers than a really layery onion and that’s why my nice little 20k novella ended up being a 47k monster.

You see that’s what happens when you dig deep. You kind of chip away at the surface conflict and suddenly you see, ooh, bright and shiny, MORE conflict. The REAL conflict. So you start digging away into that and then suddenly you realise that’s NOT the real conflict. So you keep going. But wait, there’s MORE! And then, another 20k later, you finally get to the real, ACTUAL conflict.

Stupid characters.

Anyway, I started out writing this for fun. As a way to do something different and because I wanted to write what I really love writing, which I guess you could say is short length Single Title. Short length cos I hate sub-plots and secondary characters (hence why I like writing category) but not category so I don’t feel constrained by language/hawt stuff restrictions. I don’t know what to call it really. Dark, angsty category? Dirty, dark, angsty category?? Whatever, the great thing about it is that I really, really liked writing it. Loved. And I hesitate to say it wrote itself but…well, it kind of did. It felt like finally all the stuff I’ve been learning about character and plot and conflict came together naturally and became part of my process without me having to worry about it. I didn’t even really think too hard about the conflict, I just sat and wrote and it all came out.

So, I’m not quite sure what to do with it now. I do love my dyslexic, extreme sports loving hero and my rather buttoned up lawyer heroine so maybe I’ll end up subbing them some place. But one thing’s for sure, I like this story. I think it’s good. I think it deserves to be read and I think people should pay me money to read it.

Have you written anything different lately? Have you written anything you really totally love that you want people to pay you to read?