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I'm Having A Literary Crisis Please Help

Which project should I focus on?

  • Gold Nails/Cheaper Than Divorce

    Votes: 1 14.3%
  • Where Jeremy Goes

    Votes: 3 42.9%
  • Oneymoon

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Princess Was Here

    Votes: 3 42.9%

  • Total voters
    7

The Amazing Rando

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EDIT: Added basic plot outlines for each story. Just click on the titles.

As I posted here a few months ago, I finished a writing project. Then, I started a new one. I am closing in on the 30K word mark but am having, as the title of this post says, a bit of a crisis. I just have no idea if what I am working on is worth continuing in my pursuit of being traditionally published. However, as part of a new journaling project I am forcing myself to write down a new Silly Writing Idea (tm) every single day. The problem with this is that sometimes I just hit upon some bangers.

Below I will explain four of these. The first is my current project, and the other three are some I have had in the past few weeks. Vote on which you think I should put most of my time and energy into.

1. Gold Nails/Cheaper Than Divorce - Valerie Stein is a 25 year old living in NYC who earns money by doing "date counseling", taking affluent married men out on dates where they are to treat her as they would their wives. She then uses this information to decipher how to improve their marriages. After causing a local news anchor's marriage to fall apart after a strange date with her husband, she takes time off to seek a relationship for herself. She then must contend with falling for a blind date, discovering her best male friend's feelings, how much she really doesn't know about relationships, and the anchor's desires for revenge.

2. Where Jeremy Goes (the kid's name isn't that important right now) - a recently-divorced mom discovers her son's emotional stress allows him to enter a Narnia-like fantasy world. Now under the most stress she's ever experienced, she finds herself able to follow.

3. Oneymoon - Sam Harris's engagement is broken off the day before he wins a honeymoon vacation in the Caribbean. He takes the trip anyway, but a resort naming mix-up puts him on a boat to a remote hotel where everyone believes him to be the new manager because they share the same name. When the real manager, Samantha Harris, arrives...love may end up being in the air after all. I'm still debating on a B-plot.

4. Princess Was Here - A decade after a princess was rescued and finds true love, she finds herself bored with palace life and sneaks away for a day amongst the common folk. She discovers a tourism industry based around the adventure of her rescue and all of it gets everything wrong - mostly by painting her rescuer as way more of a hero than he ever was in reality, which she discovers is a ploy by the rest of her family, and her prince, to make him look as good as possible for when he becomes king in the future.
 
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tekcop

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I picked the second one. Give me a good melancholy story about a family having problems and right proper chuffed.
 

The Amazing Rando

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Oh the last one would be a romcom, especially as I’m positioning the rest of the family as propaganda hounds. She’d end up falling for whomever her tour guide was.
 

Laz

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2 and 4 are the best choices. I went with 4, because there's a smorgasbord of tropes to either embrace or subvert alongside a perfect opportunity to use random encounters as padding while you allow character development.

"I was in a Dungeon, not a Tower! And he bought the map off a DWARF, not an Ogre!"

Potential b-plot for Oneymoon: Go full on 80s resort trope here and have some greedy land developer trying to swindle the property owner out of their hotel so it can be made into a family resort. Hijinks ensue.
 

Laz

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Dude...you could pitch the fuuuuuuck out of Princess to an animation studio. That's ripe for adaptation.
 

The Amazing Rando

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It is an understatement to say I would have no idea how to go about such a thing. If you are thinking "oh, write a script" then you are also sorely mistaken at my scripting abilities, which are absolute garbage based on my few poor attempts.
 

HarleyQuinn

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I opted for #1 but that's largely because I just imagined the total Lifetime-y vibes of it all.

#2 would be an interesting, strong Young Adult book if you wanted to go that route from the son's perspective rather than the mom.

#3 just strikes me as a one-note trashy rom-com on the Hallmark Channel if they set it during Christmastime. Very meh.

#4 is probably the strongest from a trope/having fun with twisting conventions around aspect though.
 

muzzington

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I'm with Laz on Princess, definitely sticks out the most to me as having great potential.
 

Laz

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It is an understatement to say I would have no idea how to go about such a thing. If you are thinking "oh, write a script" then you are also sorely mistaken at my scripting abilities, which are absolute garbage based on my few poor attempts.
Who's here that knows people (who know people) in cinema? Is it @Big Beard Booty Daddy or am I confusing him with somebody else? They might be able to hook you up with how.
 

The Amazing Rando

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I'm doing a deep mental dive on the princess story. I don't love the title, but I don't think P's & Queues is that good either. I want to position the property the royal family lives on as similar to the property of Disneyland, by that I mean surrounded by tourist sprawl. However unlike Walt in the late 50s and early 60s, the king and queen actually like it for the propaganda reasons I put forth in the outline, they just keep this information secret from their aloof princess daughter.

I want the village right outside the castle walls to be thriving economically because of the (somewhat misleading) rescue story but also kinda shitty and second rate. Maybe I will have the princess see an "Official" attraction (basically the Sleeping Beauty Castle Walkthrough) and a really prominent gift shop where nothing even really looks like the princess and since she's been kept hidden from the public eye nobody in the village even knows who she is if they see her.

I want the technology of the story to be somewhere between medieval and industrial revolution. Like cameras take forever to take photos and the princess is too energetic and fidgety to ever have sat still long enough for a photograph so when guards go out looking for her they have to rely on overly dramatic paintings that aren't quite perfect because, again, she doesn't like to sit still. But also like I mention in the outline, I want some kind of rudimentary PA system to exist in places. I also enjoy the idea of a giant parking lot full of horses and carriages.

Other possible title options off the dome...
Sale Of A Tale
A Tourist's Guide To Being Rescued


Maybe I'll think of more later...
 

Laz

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Whatever you do, I'm calling dibs on the erotic fanfic of it, Laying Some Piper.
 

The Amazing Rando

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I have an update.

I have not been putting as much work into this new project - which I have decided to call A Tourist's Guide To Being Rescued - as I would have liked to for reasons I don't necessarily wish to elaborate on, but recently I got back on the creative writing horse and finished writing a rather rough first three chapters. So far I'm enjoying how things are playing out, and I have plenty of notes waiting for me to help fill out the world the way I see it in my head.

But anyway, these first three chapters kick things off enough that I feel like I should share, so I am. And hey, it's like 6900 words, so NICE.

Just click the link ---

VVV

 

The Amazing Rando

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Okay...so here's what happened...

I had, like, 13K done on the princess story.

Then, in the middle of April, I decided that what I really needed to work on was a Middle Grade/Young Adult story I had an idea for a while back. It was something that I knew could be a series (like four or five books) and because they were MG/YA I could make them between 30 and 40K and be fine.

Now, 48 days of writing later (and 52 actual days), I have completed Best Medicine #1: Playing Doctor, the story of a thirteen-year-old girl who starts giving advice to her friends using an old doctor's notepad and finds herself embroiled in a web of middle school romance, both requited and unrequited. At 37,896 words, it's actually a bit higher than my goal of 35K, but in this case I think more is better.

Not sure if I'm going to start #2: A Patient Relationship tomorrow, because I haven't fully nailed down the plot, but it could happen.

Also not sure if I'm going to try shopping this around or if I'm just going to Fiverr out a cover image and throw it up on Kindle in a couple days. We'll see. Either way, I'm pumped, smallish word count or not.
 

HarleyQuinn

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(waits for your book to get banned in the South for referencing sexuality aka "Playing Doctor") ;)
 

The Amazing Rando

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Look... I did it again...

I was working on Book 3, right? Everything was going okay. I was figuring out the story. I had plans.

Then a friend asked why I wasn't more focused on traditional publishing, and that I should go back and give that another try. Since I couldn't really use Best Medicine for such a thing, and I wasn't thrilled about going back to the princess story immediately...

I wrote a YA trans love story...story.

Why Love Who is the story of Rob and Andy...how they meet, how they connect, and how they fall for each other. It also involves love letters, school projects, and of course Andy's past and transition.

I have completed a fairly rough first draft and am actually going to put the work in to reread the entire thing over the next few weeks and see what's what. It is currently incredibly dialogue heavy and while I don't think much of that is going to go away, I feel like I need to add in some flavorful prose here and there to balance things out.

Though it features a trans main character, I do not delve into things like dysmorphia at all. I also don't go anywhere near political type stuff. I wanted the story to be a happy one about finding love, not about conquering bigotry. Heck, I'm not even sure if the way Andy deals with her past is something a person transitioning would even do, but I'll cross that bridge whenever I get there. I'll probably search out things like sensitivity readers at some point, too.

I'm mostly just jazzed that I randomly decided to start a project of this scope and then completed it (at least this part anyway) in under two months.
 

The Amazing Rando

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So, uh, yesterday morning I finished a first draft of another thing, though I'm not planning on doing any editing any time soonish for reasons I'll get to later.

At 68k, my newest project is shorter than Why Love Who, and I can say that I am not as satisfied with it as I probably should be, but oh well. It's called Open Mike, and is the story of, well, Mike...a high school junior that suddenly realizes he's bisexual and pursues a relationship with another boy. Like I said, I'm not over the moon in love with it, but that might be because when I was around 90% done the draft I was hit with another idea that I became desperate to start.

My newest idea, which I also started yesterday, is Cabin F 4 Ever, an alternating chapters type of story about a boy and a girl as campers (age 13) and counselors (age 18). The camper chapters are from the girl's point of view as she pines for the boy, while the counselor chapters are from the boy's perspective as he flirts with the girl, but of course something happened when they were campers that she hasn't completely gotten over yet five years later that the boy obviously doesn't remember or think mattered.

I think I've finally cracked open the part of my brain that can actually put together a credible, fun YA romance and I hope I'm able to properly put onto paper/screen the story as it appears in my head.

Who needs NaNoWriMo when I can do almost 70k in, like, 25 days? You don't scare me anymore, you stupid month.
 

The Amazing Rando

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It's been almost three months, and about a year plus since I first started this thread, so here's an update:

My camp counselor story hit a roadblock. It's a fixable roadblock, but it wasn't one I felt like fixing in the moment. My notes tell me that happened at the end of November, around the time where my sister asked me if I was ever going to write a F/F romance story.

So I jumped over to that when I had an idea. Finding The Right Words is the story of two childhood friends who meet up in college as randomly paired roommates years after one moved away. The MC is an aspiring poet but is having trouble writing, while the friend is an aspiring musician who has only ever done instrumentals. The two soon begin using each other's work to inspire themselves and, duh, fall for each other.

So that came in around 65K. Still haven't went back and edited it, though I've really only just started editing Open Mike so I'm not exactly multitasking well.

Then, around 70% of the way through that story, I hit on an idea for another story about a boy and girl in a small town that share the exact same birthday, but the boy was born in a hospital (on time) and the girl was born on the side of the road stuck during a blizzard (arriving earlier than her parents expected). The boy grows up resenting how the girl is treated by the town that joined together to rescue her, until a near miss car accident forces the two to spend time with each other and realize maybe they have more in common than a single day.

I just finished that yesterday. Again, it's around 65K, and is probably something I might self-pub if I ever get around to editing it. It feels more like a self pub thing than something I'd shop around.

And of course, when I was about 70% of the way done this project (which was literally only a few days ago because I wrote like 10K yesterday to finish), I had another idea which I've only just started fleshing out. If anyone really wants the details on that story idea, just DM or something, but it involves a high school cooking class, the MC helping her female boss woo another woman, and the MC's love interest (and eventually the MC herself) dealing with a rough home life. It's called TANGY.
 

The Amazing Rando

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It's been like three months, so it's time for updates.

TANGY fell apart pretty early into February because I just wasn't having fun and I didn't do my due diligence in trying to flesh out an entire story. Then, between the end of February and the end of March I had two of my co-workers each give me ideas that I've been plugging away at since. My word count production is still down from where it was at the end of last year, but I know I will get both of these done by July.

The first is a more of a new adult romance than YA and is called Nothing Scientific About It. It involves two childhood friends, a boy and a girl, spending the night in the girl's childhood home which the boy has just purchased because it was always believed to be haunted and he is a bit of a ghost hunter. She is there to clean out her old bedroom, while he arrives to help (and also ask her to help look for ghosts), and they end up seeing visions of people they had relationships with since they had left the neighborhood. They're not exactly ghosts, but it is the work of the ghost that haunts the place. It makes sense in the context of the story, I swear.

The second is YA and is called As If Real, and is a shifting POV story about a boy and girl who use VR to compensate for their lack of confidence when it comes to flirting with each other and trying to take their friendship to a new level. The secondary plot involves the girl's stage fright and using VR to try to work through it. It's kind of my way of updating the "I can say what I feel, just not to your face 'cause I'm scared" story.

Also, I've decided that because I'm a 40 y/o male that would probably (definitely) never be able to sell an F/F romance traditionally that I am just going to put it up piece by piece over the next few months using Kindle Vella. You can check that out here. It uses a weird token system but, actually, if someone would read through the whole thing once it's posted using the tokens I'd actually make more from that than if I sold it as a paperback through their self-publishing service.

That's about it. I'm still plugging away trying to send my Trans story to agents, but I also have my M/M bi story edited and could use that, but my current synopsis is way, way too long. I really need to figure out how to pare that fucker down. And I still haven't edited my shared birthday story, but I'll get around to that eventually, though I do feel better about it as something I could shop around than I used to, even if it is really short.
 
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