My summer was mixed with amazing periods of writing bliss, followed by weeks of never opening Word.  I worked in spurts, and they were very productive, I just wish I’d had more of them.

I’m two chapters into the edit/rewrite of Special Blend, which was my National Novel Writing Month project back in 2007, and I’m finding it a much slower process than I had expected.  For instance, it’s almost scary the difference in my writing abilities now compared with only 2 years ago.  I mean, it’s natural to be horrified by anything I wrote back in high school, but I was making some surprising mistakes far to recently.

Although, considering those two years have seen me go from barely a college junior to a college graduate, perhaps it would be more scary if my writing hadn’t changed.

My basic voice is still pretty much the same.  It’s matured slightly, incorporated more sophisticated, and in some cases simpler, sentence structures, but it still sounds more or less the same.  What has changed is my ability as a storyteller.  I’ve gotten much better at pacing, character development, dialogue…the list goes on and on, and I’m glad it does.

What I’m most amazed at is the amount of boring exposition I had originally used.  Even considering it was a very rough draft, I thought I was doing good.  But some of those scenes are almost unreadable.  I was still just getting to know the characters myself, still trying to figure out their pasts and futures, their dreams and fears, their point.  Perhaps it’s only natural that now, having had the characters in my head for two years, I’m able to write about them much easier.

I’m very happy to be on this project again.  I’m working with two writing groups, and both are amazing.  Now, if only I could stop flitting from project to project, and really finish something.  But then again, NaNoWriMo’s just around the corner, and already I have new stories clambering for attention.