My Report: Part One

I head home tomorrow, but I thought I'd drop a post regarding my experiences at the Professional Novel Writers' Workshop taught by Dave Wolverton. I'll probably do a series of posts, but for the first, I thought I'd share the greatest thing I learned from Dave.

I need to rewrite my book, fragility.

He said on a line-by-line basis it flowed really well and was even struck by a lot of the language, but plot-wise I was doing too many things. Grr! After my shell-shock, I accepted what he had to say and really listened.

Apparently, I was doing too many things. A romance? Science fiction? Psychological thriller? Wolverton helped me see what I was trying to say. The genre of this book is social science fiction, and if you've never heard of that genre (like me!) think The Giver. So I'm simplifying the tale, and making it younger. That's right, folks. I'm offically writing a YOUNG ADULT book and I can't tell you how excited I am about it. My protagonist will be seventeen (yes, you heard me right. I'm accepting the age I always complain is overused) and the bulk of the novel will revolve around this logline:

"A seventeen-year-old battles with the choice of staying in a terror-inducing compound and its seductive creator or fleeing to a zombie-ridden world."

Originally, it took place during the Second Great Depression when Texas seceded from the United States, but these details kept convoluting the tale. Now I can focus on what happens when a seventeen year-old-girl suffers then triumphs over a tyrant like we've read about in the past... only creepier and sexier and terrifyingly sadistic. Before I killed him too early, then I tried infecting him in the beginning. Now he lives--healthy--for quite some time. I shall have fun with this.