I've been drawn to writing since childhood. It's the only serious dream I've ever had.
And yet, if you'd asked me about my writing ambitions a few years back, I probably would have told you I'd missed my best shot at ever completing a manuscript dr...
If you're reading these essays, you already know I'm about 2.5 years into a multi-book Wattpad project.
Some days it feels like it's going really well. Other days, it feels like I will never finish.
I'm not publishing my riff on superhero-comic-urban Toronto storytelling as I go for a variety of reasons, but I hope to be ready to share Book 1 in 2018.
In the meantime, I also have this weird, Young Adult romance novel on the cooker involving a girl, a boy (well, more like a young man child) and a merboy.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Yup, you read that right. That's the cover I knocked together in about three seconds. If you have better suggestions, come at me. (Visual art is not my thing.)
The story's set in Georgian Bay of all places. You'd be surprised how many people I know with first-hand knowledge of what it's like to scuba dive in the Great Lakes. I sure was.
From the beginning, I planned each chapter to start with a text conversation between the main character, Sam, and her best friend, Tasha, who never appears on camera in the main story. Their emoji-heavy exchanges give insight into the life-long dream Sam's been forced to give up as the story opens, but which Tasha is still chasing: going to swim camp with her friends to train for the Olympics.
I've written about 40,000 words of this story, but the texts were the element that seemed to sideline me on completing it.
Imagine my surprise when Wattpad launched the Tap by Wattpad app: a new interface for text-like storytelling that makes you feel like you've stumbled across someone else's messaging screen.
The feature that fakes the ellipses you see when waiting for the person on the other end to finish typing is my favourite. As you might expect from someone who writes book-length material on her phone, I am a speed-texting fiend and I haaaaaate waiting for that.
Want an example of how it works? Go read "Hide," written by a Wattpad staffer: http://bit.ly/2nM4Dz7
As you'd expect for anything built by Wattpad, Tap is easy-to-use for writing, editing and posting. When reading, you simply tap the box at the bottom to see the next message in the story. The messages are organized into scenes rather than chapters and can be easily added to, deleted and re-ordered if you decide to switch things up on reflection.
After messing around with Tap for a bit, it occurred to me that splitting the text convos between Sam and her friend from the main story on Wattpad would be a fun way to build an interconnected narrative on both platforms.
You could just read one or the other and I hope that would be satisfying. In an ideal world, reading both gives you a fuller picture of the overall world I'm building.
(The marketer in me also likes the idea of cross-promoting my profile to both Wattpad and Tap audiences in advance of the bigger writing project I have underway becoming public.)
So there are two versions running of "Summer of Exile": the text conversations posted on Tap under that title (two so far), and the more traditional chapter-based story on Wattpad that you can read here: http://my.w.tt/UiNb/pnbkyAsndC
I'm planning to release one of each a week until I get to the end of my existing material (about 10 more chapters to come).
Have you checked out Tap by Wattpad? What's your take on it? Are you using it to experiment with different ways to tell or read stories?
