Finding Your Voice

This post is going to be a bit different from the usual Ashen Sky posts. It's something I've been thinking about recently, and I thought I'd share.

A couple of days ago, I was asked by someone in the authoring community if I'd "found my voice" yet. My first thought was that, "Of course I've found my voice! I'm using it to speak to you right now!" Thankfully, though, I figured out what she meant. Or at least I thought I did.

I told her that my voice is first person, present tense, or third person, past tense. After some further thought, though, I don't think that's the only thing that determines your writer's voice. To me, a writer's voice is what makes your work different from everyone else's. Everyone has a different voice - both when they talk, and when they write.  It comes out in not only the way they write - their grammar, dialogue, etc. - but also their characters and the specific story they choose to tell.

I'm still finding my voice, but my writer's voice is very valuable to me. It's what makes my work unique and set apart. I want to make my voice as strong as it can be.

As of right now, I think I'm in the "puberty" stage of being a writer. (Bear with me here.) My voice is constantly changing, as are my thoughts, my ideas, my opinions. I'm developing as an author, and as a person. I'm being fine-tuned as I'm molded more and more into the person God wants me to be. And overall, I want God's voice to flow through my writing, no matter what I write about or what kind of an author I end up becoming.

So, now I'm curious. I know a lot of writers read this blog, and I want to hear your thoughts on this. Have you found your voice yet?

-Sky

Just a quick post...

....letting you all know that we have some new, exciting things to blog about in the next week or so. We've got so many things to tell you! 


We'll be sure to post ASAP about this stuff, just wanted to let you know that we ARE alive and well! Working on a lot of different things!

~Ashley

Will and Elle - 30,000

Will and Elle is still going strong, and today we hit 30k. :) At this point, Will and Elle are about to leave for college. Ashley and I are really proud of ourselves for writing a fair amount before hitting the major plot point. ;) LOL. Normally we end up writing a short beginning and then jumping right in to the story, but as for Will and Elle, we needed some time to develop their characters together before developing their characters apart. :)

Now Ash and I are gearing up for a weekend without writing. Ashley's going to spend the weekend at a friend's house, and I have a family reunion. We had a writing frenzy this afternoon, which was really good, and I'm glad we got some time to write together before we leave. :) Will and Elle is turning out to be one of my favorite books we've ever written, and I think that Ashley will agree! ;)

The other day, we added it up, and we've had about 48 total characters in our time of writing together - and that's not even counting all of them. Most of them are couples that we probably won't ever write about, but had good ideas behind them nonetheless. We have so many more novels planned, it's not even funny. Look out, writing world! :D

Next time we post, we'll probably have hit 40k. See you then! ;)

-Kylie

20K and a snippet of the book!

Wow. I have been so busy lately. I don't know if my life has ever been this busy in my entire life. I always said, "Man, I wish that I could be busy, and have stuff to do instead of being bored." Now I say, "Man, I wish that I could be bored, and not have anything to do!" I guess that grass isn't always greener on the other side, eh? Good lesson to learn. 


Despite the fact that I'm busy with work, running around doing different things (voice lessons for me, and some instrument lessons for my sister), Kylie and I are still somehow finding the chance to write with each other. Not as much as usual, for sure. But we are trying to keep a good pace, and write as much as possible. 


Speaking of writing - we've hit our 20K words in Will and Elle. The story is actually going better than either of us originally expected. We're still working on the first summer of the story and we weren't thinking that it would be any longer than 15K, so this is pretty amazing to us. 


I'm gonna share a snippet of our story with you right now. I think you need to realize the relationship that Will and Elle have, as best friends. 
Let me give you a few facts about these two:

1. They're best friends and have been for almost 14 years. (They are 18).
2. They're headed to different colleges in the fall. 
3. Will's brother, and Elle's sister are dating. 
   
   
   
   “Hey Will, look, it’s you!” I point to the cage in front of us. We’ve been at the zoo for the last couple of hours - taking our graduation “trip”. The two of us decided to skip-out on the beach trip that the rest of our class was taking. Maybe it was because we didn’t prefer the fact that most of them went for things that weren’t completely, um, moral. Like drinking and such. And worse things, but good Christian girls don’t speak such things. Or even think them.
   Well, maybe we think them, but we don’t think them out loud. And we don’t ever think about doing them. Ever.
   “What do you mean it’s me?” Will looks at me skeptically.
   “Monkeys.” I point to them. “Maybe they’d accept you to be a part of their monkey habitat.”
   “Oh, very funny.” He looks across the path at the donkey. “And that’s you...”
   I glare at him. “You’ve gotta me kidding me.” I put a hand on my hip and strike a pose. “I am the cutest best friend you’ve ever had.”
   “Sadly you’re the only best friend I’ve ever had.” He puts an arm around my shoulder loosely.
   “And whose fault is that?” I pull away. “I wasn’t the one that came up to you and said, ‘hey,you wanna be friends?’. Cause I would’ve never done that.”
   “Hey! But you’re glad that I did, aren’t you?”
   “Occasionally.”
   “That’s kind of not fair.” He sighs.
   “I was kidding. Sort of.”
   “Sort of?”
   “You know I love you and stuff, Will.”
   “Yeah, well, the feeling’s mutual.”
   Saying ‘I love you and stuff’ is our way of letting each other know that we still do love each other. We just didn’t want to make it awkward, so we added ‘and stuff’ to the end. To this day I still do not know what ‘stuff’ means. I’d kind of be interested to find out someday.
   “Who wants to go to the giraffe exhibit?” Will asks.
   I nod enthusiastically and jump up and down like a little kid. “Me, me! Pick me!”
   He looks at me blandly and scans the area around us. “Anyone else?”
   “Just me, Will! Look at me! I want to go to the giraffes!”
   “Okay, okay. I’ll take you to the giraffes.”
   “Yay!”

Will and Elle

Right after we finished Much Love, Morgan, we started writing Will and Elle's story. Their book has been in the works for a couple of years now. We've had their characters sitting on the back burner for a while, but as we've gotten to know them better, they've become amazing characters. 


We tried writing their story one time before, but nothing truly came out of it, so this time we tried a little harder on their plot and came up with a better one. :P 


We have been writing this story since the 14th. Today we hit 16K. We knew that this story would go fast because we know our characters so well, but I really didn't realize it would go THIS fast. We haven't really had much trouble coming up with plot ideas as we are writing, which is really a new thing for us. Usually we get stuck and aren't sure what to write, but this story is an exception. We've been writing like crazy, as you can probably tell.


If you don't know much about Will and Elle, check out more about them HERE and HERE


Always,
~Ashley

In Which Much Love, Morgan is Finished

Well, I was going to post about how we reached 80,000 words on Much Love, Morgan.

Well, after a huge writing frenzy, I have an announcement to make.

Much Love, Morgan is... finished!

The past few days, we've been writing like crazy so that we could finish MLM and move on to another writing project, the story of Will & Elle. And our writing paid off. Much Love, Morgan was finished in 87 days and has a final word count of 83,127.

I'll end with the last words from our book. It's a blog entry by Morgan.

So today, and tomorrow, and every other day that the Lord gives me, I am going to thank him. Every day is just a miracle that the Lord gives us. It’s a day that we are supposed to live to it’s fullest.Go spend some time with your kids, or sisters, or brothers, or aunts, or uncles, or parents, or whoever is special to you.
Because you never know when it’s your last day. Or theirs.

“Be a best friend, tell the truth, overuse I love you, love Jesus, go to church, do your best, don’t outsmart your common sense. Never let your praying knees get lazy, and love like crazy.”

That last part especially sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

Much Love,
Morgan

70K

Well readers, we've hit our 70K mark. And again, like Kylie said in the last post - it seems like we only write a blog post when we hit a special mark in our story.


Well, sorry about that - but lately we've been writing like crazy and it just tends to happen that way! There are so many others books waiting in the wings to be written, so we are writing our others quickly than anticipated. I guess it's a good motivation for us! 


Much Love, Morgan keeps taking interesting turns that neither of us really thought would happen. We had a plot, but it wasn't completely detailed and we didn't know everything that would happen. That way, we could decide when we wanted something cool to happen, without having to fear about ruining the whole plot.


Crazy thing is, we're at 70K, and we still have a lot more plot left. We know that our goal is 80K for this story, so we're sure it's going to be longer than Becoming Bekah. We'll see just how long it gets. I'm sure as we edit this one, we'll make lots of changes to the beginning, as Much Love, Morgan is not as strong at the beginning as it has gotten more toward the middle and end of the story. We'll have to wait and see how far we get in it, and decide from there. 


Becoming Bekah IS being edited at this time, though is somewhat slow in the process. We are trying to keep up our writing and our editing, which is not an easy task when both Kylie and I have busy schedules. 


At any rate, we're doing our best and we should, hopefully, have a proof copy of Becoming Bekah in the next month. Um, I hope. 


Oh! And don't forget to go to our facebook page and "like" us if you haven't already yet! Maybe write on our wall to let us know if you follow our blog so we don't look and your name and say "mmm..wonder who THIS is?" ;) 


~Ash