My Writing Process Bloghop

I’ve been tagged by Amy Giuffrida to join in this fun bloghop. You can check out Amy’s My Writing Process here.

As for me, here are my answers to the bloghop questions:

1. What am I working on?

I’m a multitasker who’s determined to get published, so I’m querying one manuscript and revising another.

WORLD’S EDGE is the MS I’m querying. It’s YA sci-fi about a girl named Hazel who is trapped on the fringe of two parallel worlds. In one, there’s her life, her friends, her boyfriend; in the other, there’s a mysterious guy that needs her help. To complicate things, Hazel’s pretty sure her multi-verse vision is a genetic curse she got from her mother. WORLD’S EDGE has some horror elements (or so my CPs claim) and some romance (because, you know, young adult).

THE BUTTERFLY GHOST is the MS I’m revising. It’s YA…something. At this point, I’m waiting on my CPs to help me figure that something out. I’m also on the verge of writing a blog post asking for help from my readers. I’m gonna go with YA thriller for now, but like the title, that could change at any moment. THE BUTTERFLY GHOST is about this girl named Emma who’s has a huge crush on her classmate Alex, who is way out of her league. The day after Alex is killed in an accident, she spots him at school. He’s a ghost…and she’s apparently the only one that can see him. He asks her to help him figure out what happened to him and why. It doesn’t take them long to realize Alex isn’t really a ghost, that something else is going on…and that someone else is stalking Emma to try to get to Alex.

2. How does my work differ from others in its genre?

Umm…this is one of those questions that every agent wants to know and no writer really seems to know how to answer. For WORLD’S EDGE, I’ll say that for as many YA novels as I’ve read, very few sci-fi ones have a contemporary setting and deal with parallel worlds. For THE BUTTERFLY GHOST, I’m not even sure of the genre yet, but if I’m going to go with thriller, I’ll say it has—dare I say it?—a sci-fi twist. Think Paul Blackwell’s UNDERCURRENT…only not.

3. Why do I write what I do?
 

I LOVE YA. My favorite TV shows, my favorite books, they’re all YA. I think it’s because I love first loves and awkward romances, which you don’t really get in Adult books. I also love how every day seems like THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY EVER. I miss when life was like that. Now, most of my days blend together and things are relatively calm.

I don’t just write YA—I take the contemporary world and throw a twist at it. Most of the time, the twist is sci-fi in some fashion, which I blame on my significant science background. I grew up watching and reading science and science fiction. In school, I always excelled in my writing, reading, AND science classes. I like to think I look at the world a bit differently than most people. Though that probably isn’t true in real life, I try to make it real in my fiction.

4. How does my writing process work?

It takes me a really long time to take my initial concept and develop the details of the story. I don’t outline, instead using my ninety minute commute to and from work to hash things out in my head. Once I have a concept I love, I can’t let go of it until I’ve figured out the rest. Then, I put it on paper…or, you know, computer. I start at the beginning and write through to the end. If in the middle of the story I find some new plot point or character, I go back and fix the previous pages before moving on. Every day when I sit down to write more, I always read what I’ve written the day before.

Who’s next?

I’m tagging Sean Grigsby, who writes about werewolves, pirates, and firefighters. I’ll let him tell you all about that.