Word Count Wednesday: A writer's musings

I won't have an "official" Word Count Wednesday this week. I'm lame and didn't write anything. When I wasn't working weird hours or traveling or taking care of my sick mother, I was reading books b/c I've challenged myself to read/review a certain amount of books later this month. More on that this weekend. I also can't really write unless I'm online, so even though I had off the last three days, I was taking care of my mom, who stayed out of work for a few days. Hopefully I can write a lot this week.

I spent the past two days reading and re-reading both of Cindy Pon's books, though, and it made me stop and think about my own writing. Her novels are heartbreakingly beautiful, as delicate as a butterfly's kiss upon your cheek. You want to curl up in them and never let go. Yesterday, I finished re-reading Silver Phoenix, and today, I finished her brand-new novel, Fury of the Phoenix. As I reached the end, I was desolate. Bookworms, these books are so good that you'll read them again and again until the characters feel like an old friend. I can't wait to share my Fury review with you (but at the moment, my heart is still in my throat and I have no words to explain the awesome contained within these pages).

There's so much that goes into high fantasy. The writing style is very unique, too. It's one of my favorite genres to read and write. I love worlds that are lush and poetic and full of imagination. I've written in that style before, too. With what I'm working on right now, I feel that the writing has...lost some of that soul. The tone is very different from other things I've worked on, and it needs to be for what it is. But is my writing losing something by going this route? I feel like this idea is solid, unique, and (hopefully) marketable, not to mention the fact that it's a genre I've always loved. But it's so hard to come to terms with the...lightweight nature, I suppose, of the text. Perhaps, in part, because I don't always read books in this tone, either. This is especially true when I compare it to things I've worked on in the past. Today, Fury of the Phoenix brought an Asian-influenced high fantasy I once started writing to mind and I remembered how fluid my writing style was. I remembered the way people have pointed out that it's my descriptions that make my writing stand out and say something unique. It's a tone that hasn't seeped into my current WIP, codename FIZZYPOP.

And then I think, "Well, maybe I'm overthinking things (Everyone always tells me I do this). I haven't even started editing/revising or a second draft yet. I can always go back and add more of this later. But what if I can't? Or what if what I've been working so hard on just...isn't as good as I want it to be? I'm actually debating sharing what little I have (b/c really, 5 chapters and change isn't a lot) with a select few people I know and trust, but I'm also at that stage where this is still my infant and I'm not ready to share with anyone. It's still fluid, constantly in motion, evolving, changing. A draft in such an early stage isn't fit for anyone else's eyes.

So I'm struggling to come to terms with what path to follow and at war with myself. Is this normal? I don't know. You writers reading this will have to tell me.

But for now, that's what I've been up to on the writing front this week. What about you? Did you make good headway on your word counts? Is your WIP shaping up the way you want it to?