A Tangled Blog

I just broke 20,000 words on Wings of Song! I've been planning on it being somewhere between 40-50,000 words, so I am either already halfway there or nearly so. I'm so pleased!

It's changed enormously from Meggie of Green Gables. The main character is now named Julie, and in personality she's much more like a younger Gwen than Meggie. I've given her the three siblings, like Gwen, too - Jamie, Maisie, and Nicky. AND a living mother. No more twins, no more dead parent - I'm trying to move away from MG cliches.

She's half Mexican-American (her maternal great-grandparents moved from Mexico to California in the 1800s) and half Scottish-Canadian (her father's many-times-great-grandparents came to Canada from Scotland), and it's been interesting having a main character of an ethnicity different from my own, without making it a book about being Hispanic in the 1930s - because that is definitely not the point, just as the Depression is present but not the point of the story. It's a juggling act, but so far I think I'm keeping all the balls in the air.

Peter, Bran, and Polly are still there - I couldn't do away with them. And Peter and Julie are friends much as Peter and Meggie were, though I'm trusting it's a bit more realistic given the age gap now than it was before.

Johnny will be showing up, too - he's actually making his appearance in the chapter I'm writing now. I'm trying to tone down the melodrama with him, too, without losing much of his personality.

It's been so much fun combining the two stories and from there coming up with something of the flavor of each, but a new story all its own.

I still haven't decided on Will or Tryg for Julie's eventual suitor (or Oliver or Hawk for the rejected one, for that matter) - but those are questions for later stories. For right now, I'm just having a blast writing a wholly MG story.

Cathy, how is your new Bertha story coming? Adrienne, I STILL haven't seen Frozen, so I haven't been following your Frozen fic, but if I ever do see the movie, I'm planning on reading your fic right after.

So far, the absolute hardest thing I've found about adapting an LMM fanfic to an original novel is NOT removing all LMM references.

It's making sure the story isn't too treacly.

I've been working on adapting Meggie of Green Gables for months now, and it is not going as swimmingly as I expected. I was glancing over some of the chapters just the other day, and wincing. "What a dear little place," Peter says at one point of [not] Lavender Lodge.

This is the 1930s, and Peter is 18 years old. If an 18 year old boy in a small farming village really talked like that, in the 1930s, he would be so beat up by all the other boys.

On the other hand, I don't want to turn it all gritty and dark and bleak. I want to keep the spirit of hopefulness and fun and light, without turning it into a Pollyanna book.

If anyone has any books along the lines of James Herriot, Miss Read, DE Stevenson, etc, to recommend, please let me know! I could use some more examples of light-but-real historical novels for my own reading, to put me in the proper mindset.

I'm thinking very seriously about killing off one of the second generation in my Blythe by Nature story. Not a tertiary character like Carl or Bruce Meredith, or even, to a certain extent, Di or Nan, but a right up there, in-your-face main character. I don't know how people will react to this, though, but part of me thinks that it might be imperative to the story, to theme of keeping Blythe, always, to have this happen.

No pressure because I know you ladies are busy, but I am craving more of your stories and so I wondered if we could post where we are at with all of our works? Just to keep everybody in the loop.

Here's mine:

Where the Brook and River Meet: I have planned out the end of this story and I just need to get to writing it. I feel like I've written Nancy and Lee into a corner and need to find out how to back them out, so that's kind of bugging me now.

Five Summers: I'm having a hard time thinking of how to move Di from her current position, still reeling from Walter's death, to new storylines. I've never lost anybody close to me suddenly like that so I don't really know how long it should take and I'm ruminating on this.

Stella of New Moon: I'm just not inspired by this right now, so it's hard for me to write on it. But I definitely haven't given up Stella and her crew.

Rilla-my-Rilla: Haven't given up on this, either--it's just slow-going.

And I really need to sit down when I get a chance and repost my Alice stories. They were somehow deleted from my account, with a lot of my older stories (the Pat ones, the Story Girl ones). I'm not sure if I did something wrong here or if my account was hacked and someone is giving me a really thinly-veiled critique of what they thought about my earliest attempts at fanfic. If it was the latter it's my own fault because my password was my username. Yup. Smart. Luckily, I have the Alice stories saved on my hard drive.