Research rules the day

Well, it's been awhile.

I'd like to say I was slaving away with the rewriting, but aside from some work that got me past the most difficult section, I am stalled again. The good thing about this stall is it's a practical one.

Brookline University was originally written as a series of short stories - basically a chapter was a story. When I combined them into a book, there were areas that of course needed to be smoothed over and "chapterized" a little better. I also re-read everything and because I changed elements in the first book, they have to be changed in the rest of the series.

When it was posted online, I corrected some things in the two later books, but only adjusted a few things in the first two - so the first two books lagged behind the last two in terms of their readiness. The third and fourth books are definitely in better shape. In re-reading, I've decided to drop some stories, and of course, I need to replace them with something. So I've done a lot of brainstorming over the past few weeks for story ideas. There were some things that seemed like good ideas when I was 22 and wrote this, but now at 34, I think they're a bit silly and unrealistic.

One thing I never addressed in the series really was sorority initiation. When I first began writing the series, I was not a member of a sorority and knew very little about them. Since then I have joined one, and in the process learned a lot about the Greek system. So a big portion of my editing is correcting things I got wrong the first time around. I didn't want to show the initiation ceremony (where a new member becomes a full-fledged sorority member) because I didn't know what they were like. Later, I was paranoid I'd inadvertantly make the ritual too similar to my own sorority's, and I didn't want that.

Since that time I've done a lot of research on ritual in general, and sorority and fraternity rituals in particular. Since these rituals are secret, information is difficult to find. Doing general research on ritual and viewing open rituals from some organization has helped me see that many of them are very similar in structure and content. They basically ask for secrecy, mark the passage of the person from new member (pledge) to full member (active) and share the secrets of their symbols, name, etc.

So for the past few weeks I've been mulling over an initiation ritual I can write and use in the second book. I think it'll be well worth the wait, as I want it to be something that makes sense and stands on its own.

Aside from that, I have a few more upcoming stories which need complete overhauls, and I need to figure out what to do and write before I do it. The good part about this is since I know what the third and fourth book contain, I can foreshadow, drop hints or mention things that are yearly occurrences - there are things in the last few books that get mentioned once but were never developed previously, and now I have a chance to do that.

So hopefully I'll get back to the actual writing soon - but for now, research rules the day.