The Dream Dasher/The Writer's Commandments

I started writing this novel the weekend after my 20th Birthday.

My twin had passed away 3 months earlier, and I had laughed for the first time since the day before, when Mum, on the phone to a family friend who had a history of accidentally spilling secrets, accidentally blurted out the destination of my birthday trip.

I wasn't laughing the next day, when my first trip to Bruny Island included a 6-hour hiking trip and my legs declared a Strike protest on hour 4.5.

Fortunately, I'd brought a notebook, so while I lay whimpering on the couch waiting for the feeling to come back, I started writing. Dad had introduced me to Mystery Science Theater 3000, and I'd fallen in love with Bad Fanfiction being similarly ripped apart by the Canon characters around the same time.

So, my Main Character was an editor, who had managed to irritate her boss enough to get stuck reading through all the novel submissions from people with more ego than talent, and who would have benefited from beta readers and a line- and developmental-editor before submitting their works for publication. At some point, the poor MC would start getting sucked into the documents she was editing, navigating her way through badly-written worlds to the end of the submission.

Eventually, the story would end with the writers responsible for the never-ending Bad Submisions actually reading the feedback and taking a break from querying in order to work on their writing skills, and the poor Main Character taking a long overdue vacation.

I started strong, with a list of writing rules, one for each chapter, and a solid outline. Rules like:

• "Thou Shalt Remember Spellcheck and Use it Regularly"
• "If Thou Canst Not Pronounce A Name, Neither Can Thy Readers"
• "Punctuation and Grammar Are Not Optional!!!"

I wrote the first three chapters in a week. I had a good chunk of the Real World bits planned out and even a bunch of scenes that were waiting for the plot to reach them. I wondered if my original title of The Dream Dasher was too on-the-nose, and changed it to 'The Writer's Dilemma'.

Unfortunately, stumbling blocks also quickly presented themselves.

While many on the interwebs would loudly concur that a lot of peoople are capable of writing very badly indeed, writing badly on purpose is actually a lot harder than it sounds. Writing badly in ways that are screamingly obvious, rather than just frequent typo and synonym errors, is harder. Writing badly in ways that can be made funny, is really freaking hard!

You're writing a bunch of comedy-skit short stories-within-a-story, but you can't make them too repetitive, or too derivative of other fiction. They have to be bad, but they can't be so bad that people will stop reading the actual book. They have to be funny, but they can't be too cringe.

At the same time as I was running face first into Writer's Block, I was also writing poetry, fanfiction, and what would become my first novella, The Highwayman's Legacy.

It was a far more co-operative project than The Writer's Commandments...

After that came my first foray into twisted fairytales, more poems and short stories, and the slow journey of recovering from grief and learning how to be just a single person.

I still have the partially completed draft in a folder somewhere, waiting for me to be inspired enough to pick it back up. Perhaps one day I will... after I finish all the other stories that are demanding my attention. Perhaps it will be the story that traps me between worlds, haunting a manuscript until someone finds and finishes it.

Writers can speculate, but only the future knows what it holds.

I have plenty of story ideas that stayed in the concept stage, or never got past the first chapter. Of course, what writer doesn't?

This particular story stood out because it was the first time I really tried to write a novel, and it's been waiting reproachfully in my drafts folder the longest.