Challenge Accepted

I finished a novella today.

SO excited...and out of it. This is definitely the sort of day where I am better off far away from motor vehicles, being responsible for small children, or working with anything flammable.

This is a project that I have been toying with, off and on, for three or four years. It's a sci-fi story, which has been a nice little break from my fantasy series. Hopefully it too will be the start of a series...which will either be awesome or very confusing for me.

Anyway, I've been working towards an open submission deadline for this Sunday for the past two months. I had to check my sent mail in gmail to figure out how long I've been seriously working on this thing. 2 months, almost to the day. 2 months and about 36000 words. That's not huge and I know there are plenty of writers who could write three times that. But I'm pretty psyched that this thing basically went from “Characters...IN SPACE!” to what (at the moment) seems like a decent story.

As I am sure you remember, I have kind of penchant for re-writing stuff. And I am ok with that. BUT I didn't have time to with this deadline. I did a lot of little rewrites along the way. Lots of scenes were altered, scrapped, added back in from a new POV, all kinds of things. However, as I hit about the last 3 chapters I started to have the uncomfortable feeling that I wanted to scrap the whole damn thing and start over again. However, instead of deciding to abandon my hopes of meeting the deadline in favor of a huge re-write I pushed myself to press on and finish the story that I had started.

I do like that perfectionist impulse because it does keep me working hard. BUT there is a time when you have to just...move on. Honestly? I suck at that. It's really hard for me to let something go, which I'm sure is part of why I second-guess myself and go back to the beginning and do things over. (The other part is the obnoxious voice in the back of my mind that tells me that I am a hack.)

I love days like today. Not only is it a great feeling to “finish” something for a little while, but it feels like I managed to push past my comfort zone a little bit. Time to rest tonight before prepping to meet the submission guidelines and hopefully send it off in the morning. Wish me luck!

Chase Your Character Up a Tree and Throw Rocks at Them

There are a couple of questions that I have gotten asked a lot since my book came out. “What's wrong with you?” certainly comes to mind.

Anyway, apart from that there's one question/comment that I hear a lot:

“Did you/will you base a character off of me?” or “I think I know which character you based off of me.”

Now, to be fair, this is no one's fault but my own. In my first post I talked about how the protagonist of my book was essentially me, but in breeches and tallboots. Well, it shouldn't be a surprise that an author who writes herself into her world is also going to write people that she knows into her book.

I think it harkened back in my days of writing fanfiction with friends. When I was in high school, especially my freshman year, one of my best friends was really into fanfiction. We started working on one together for the Redwall series by the much-missed Brian Jacques. We had this huge outline and all our friends were in it. It was a lot of fun to go to people and show them a scene or a character bio and watch them react when they realized that they were, in fact, one of Log-a-Log's shrews or a fearsome badger. I think I was a squirrel. We did end up getting distracted and ended up abandoning the project, which was ultimately for the best.

However, for a long time when I was working on my own original characters I followed the same pattern. So, the first draft of the EBR featured not only a self-insert Mary Sue, but also a number of supporting Sues and Stus, all based on people that I knew.

:shudders:

I promise I'm not exaggerating, dear reader; it was bad.

Thankfully, as I worked I started to run into some problems. Strangely enough, I wasn't afraid to torture my self-insert. I put that poor creature through hell. Unfortunately, I dealt with it by making her “practically perfect in every way”, although if I'm honest you should probably go ahead and remove the “practically”. But the problem was...I found it incredibly hard to treat my characters as I needed to when they were closely based on people that I know.

The title of this post is a much-loved axiom in the writing community and for good reason. How can you have an interesting story if you aren't willing to put your character through anything? Would Harry Potter have been half as interesting if Harry hadn't been flawed and put through the ringer? Would we have cared about him so much if we hadn't been with him through his lowest moments? Or, my fellow Supernatural fans, how much are the Winchester boys tortured in-universe? Talk about sending your characters to Hell and back. Any Joss Whedon fans out there? There's a reason that the man's name is now linked to a trope that is often used to reference “gutwrenching main character death”.

In other words...characters have to suffer. Literature has often been a way for humanity to come to terms with the often brutal nature of the world that we live in. That is part of why some of the most enduring stories aren't the ones that pretend that the world is all sunshine and rainbows, they are the ones where characters are dealt the shit-end of the stick and manage to make it work.

As a reader, I can usually tell when an author is pulling punches. It yanks me out of a story when a character should suffer some consequence for their behavior and they don't. If they are someone who treats everyone around them terribly, then I don't want to see everyone around them sing their praises. I don't want to see a character make stupid decision upon stupid decision and get rewarded for it. If a character screws up they should have to deal with it.

Those things are what make writing about people one knows and cares about almost as dangerous as writing about oneself. How can you possibly be open to anything happening to your characters if you are trying to protect them for the sake of the people they are based off of?

This post is pretty much the long way of saying that I don't want to “throw rocks” at people I care about, but I do want to throw them (hard) at my characters. If I write someone I know into anything I am working on I know that I am going to be inclined to make that character's life easier. And there's a flipside to that too. I don't want to write about someone I know who I am inclined to throw rocks at.

I am not a perfect person. I am not universally liked and I make no pretense of liking everyone. There are people who I have not had good relationships with. I don't really want to be the author who is obviously attacking those mean cheerleaders from high school.

Writing people you know into your work is of course your prerogative. It is your story. I just wanted to talk a little bit about why I got away from it. That's not to say that there's nothing in common between my characters and people in my life, but I no longer base a character directly off anyone I know and I hope this post explains some of why. If I am worrying about protecting characters or managing the feelings of the people who might recognize themselves in my work then I am not working towards writing the best story I can. The characters and the world need to work together. As much fun as it would be to bring my dear friends and family into the worlds that have come to mean so much to me...it's probably for the best that they stay out. I hear the creator of those worlds is a bitch.

Reading Amazon Reviews

Today is a day that I feel like someone should warn my characters that I am coming. Due to feeling generally like something from my cat's litterbox last night, I took nyquil. I am definitely a little loopy today so please bear with me.

Anyway, I wanted to write about something that I did yesterday: read amazon reviews. Now, before you roll your eyes and accuse me of being utterly self-absorbed, let me explain. It isn't actually my own reviews that I am talking about (although I can't deny that I have read those more than once and sincerely appreciate them).

This habit actually started back in January, right before my book came out. I was excited, of course, but I was also absolutely terrified. Once the book was out...that was it. It was a real thing that people would be reading, which was great, but it also meant that soon I would start hearing people's opinions about it.

Trying to prepare for this I read a lot of articles and blog posts about criticism and had intellectually accepted that once it was published my book would don its blindfold and begin its march towards the literary firing squad. However, I am not too proud to admit that I was terrified. I started questioning myself and asking if I could really handle it. I have a pretty thick skin, but suddenly everything was very real. And imminent.

Dragon Touched came out and was summarily sent out to friends, family, and reviewers and I found my anxiety growing. Every little flaw suddenly seemed bigger and uglier than my worst monster and I was pretty sure that everyone was going to come back and say: “THIS? This is what you spent all that time on? Really? You hack.”

One night, in a desperate attempt to not think about all of that anymore, I happened to be on Amazon reading over reviews of a bunch of books and trying to decide what I'd be bringing home on my next trip to the library. I'm pretty sure I was reading a review of a new Tamora Pierce book I hadn't read yet when an idea occurred to me. I picked a few other authors who I've been reading for years, like Mercedes Lackey, J.K. Rowling, and the grandfather of epic fantasy himself, J.R.R. Tolkien. Then, with a degree of trepidation, I began to read their one-star reviews. Yep, you heard me correctly. The one-star reviews.

It was probably the best thing in the world that I could have done for myself at the time. Bear in mind, these are authors who I LOVE, whose books have inspired me both as a person and as a writer. It was really hard to pick a book like Wild Magic, by Tamora Pierce (which is the first fantasy book I ever read, I'm pretty sure) and read the bad things people had to say about it. I found myself getting defensive, wanting to jump in and argue with the reviewers and defend these books. I found myself asking: “How could anyone not love___? Inconceivable!”

And that was the epiphany moment, the smacking myself on the forehead moment. Well of course not everyone was going to like those books. There are plenty of books who people around me love and I can't stand. There are books that I just can't get into, books that, while I can see that they are well-written, just don't speak to me.

In other words: “...if you are holding out for universal popularity, I'm afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.”¹

It may seem very basic and maybe it seems silly, but it was a really important moment for me. If someone as brilliant as any of those authors could have bad reviews what grounds do I have to worry? An enormous amount of pressure was lifted with that realization.

A few months ago I had a very kind blogger tell me that my book didn't speak to him. We had a fantastic conversation about my book and tastes in fantasy in general, but the fact that I'd read those reviews helped me have that conversation.

When I start getting anxious about sending out review queries, or as I worry about an upcoming submission deadline for a genre that is outside my comfort zone, I read the one star reviews. They remind me that it is really ok. That I all I can do is what those authors do: write the best story I can and learn from my mistakes. The criticism is important to me as a writer, whether it be my own work being critiqued or the work of authors I deeply respect. Reading those reviews has helped me to look harder at my own work and assess it more honestly, which is never a bad thing.

1. Rowling, J. K. "Rita Skeeter's Scoop." Harry Potter #4: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. New York, NY: Scholastic, 2002. 454. Print.

Why start blogging?

Hi everyone! Welcome to my brand new blog! I am simultaneously really psyched and kind of freaked out. Since my book was published I have been thinking a lot about starting a website or a blog, but honestly I've been a little afraid to.

Writing isn't the problem; I love to write, but it's that whole writing about myself thing that throws me. I'm a fiction writer. I create people and write about them. I try really hard to keep some distance between myself and what I do. But this, this is just me. My thoughts and feelings and I have the niggling voice in the back of my head (which, incidentally, sounds rather a lot like Gollum) saying: “You? Nobody wants to read about YOU. Filthy authoress...”.

But this morning an idea occurred to me as I was thinking about the story I am working on this month. This particular story, much like my published one, has been re-written a fair few times in the past couple years. There is a marked difference in the story now versus the one I started four years ago. The word that occurred to me to describe these changes was: “de-sueification”.

Now, unless you're a lover of bad fanfiction like I am there's a good chance you've been spared having to learn the term “Mary Sue”. I first learned the term when my oldest friend and beta reader, Amelia, was reading the story that would eventually become my book TheOverlord Rising: Dragon Touched. We were talking about the character traits of my protagonist Wren, and Amelia casually asked if I had ever heard of the Mary Sue Litmus Test.

I was intrigued. I promptly went to the site and took the test and Wren scored above a 36. Ouch. I tried to rationalize to myself. I used all the excuses that readers of bad fanfic will recognize. “Her awesome is a curse because no one can understand! Her flaw is that she doesn't think she's good enough! It's awful to have too many people fall in love with you!” But even as I made the excuses they sounded hollow. So I did what I always do when in doubt. I started researching.

My research led me to some really interesting blogs and websites dedicated to criticism of written works (both published and fanfiction) that feature the dreaded Mary Sue. A lot of the criticisms are done in the form of “sporking”, which is not a reference to the sex thing that Urban Dictionary says it is. Think of MST3K or rifftrax and you have what a sporking is at its core. It is taking apart stories and addressing the flaws in logic or character development, cases of obvious Author Insert or wish fulfillment, and oftentimes just focusing on bad writing.

I spent (well, still spend, reading these blogs has become one of my favorite pastimes) more hours than I can count reading these blogs and similar things like TV Tropes.com.

It was eye-opening.

It is really hard to look at a character and realize that you've done them the disservice of making them a walking, talking posterboard for everything you wish you could be. I looked at Wren, who I had known since my junior year of high school, and realized that she was the epitome of a self-insert Mary Sue. She wasn't real. She was just me but in breeches and tallboots instead of fleece pants and a raptor sweatshirt. There was no depth to her world either, it was all cliches. It was an un-researched mishmash of all the things I loved about fantasy.

This was almost four years ago and Wren and her world have gone through a whole lot in that space of time. I have struggled every day to push myself beyond what I want or think to find the truth of my world. The book that was published this year has been re-written a LOT. Twice (I think) I got halfway before realizing that I needed to start over and twice I got to the end, turned around, and wrote it again. I am NOT just an anal-retentive perfectionist, I promise. The problem was that each time the story wasn't right. It kept getting closer, but I was still telling MY story instead of the story of the Eight Boulders Realm. Each re-write, each question someone asked me, each thing led me deeper into the world. With every stroke of my red pen (literally, because I was channeling my inner English teacher) I got closer to the truth of the EBR and its characters.

That-that journey towards “truth” is what I hope to write about here. This blog is about the process of becoming real. And it's not just my characters and worlds that I'm talking about.

When I started writing about Wren back in 2003 I was in the beginning of what would become one of the darkest periods of my life. I was still convinced that I could “handle” my depression alone. Wren helped me cope, she gave me an escape, and she gave me an iteration of myself that I liked a whole lot better than the one everyone knew. However, once I started cutting myself it was impossible to pretend I was “handling” it anymore, though God knows I tried. I kept trying, in fact, until the night I just couldn't anymore. I started cutting while on the phone with my best friend and couldn't stop. I didn't want to stop. I didn't want to hurt anymore and was ready for it to end. I wanted to die. My best friend, to this day I still don't know how, knew something was wrong. He asked me to stop for him, to clean up and meet him the next day so “we” could figure out what to do. He gave me the strength to really open myself up to getting help. He stood by me, still stands by me.

My depression has changed me, getting help changed me, college, moving across the country, marriage, all these things have changed who I am. I am luckier than I can begin to understand because I have more love in my life than I think I deserve. The girl most people knew in high school was, in a lot of ways, a projection. She was the me I wanted to be, the one I wanted everyone to think I was, but not an accurate reflection of the scared, unhappy, insecure girl on the inside.

I am still struggling to find out what's “real” in me, just like I struggle to find it in my characters. But that's life, right? I am still undergoing my own “de-sueification” process, even as my characters are. So let's double up. Why not write about both? I don't intend to use this site to promote my work or anything like that, I promise. It is just a space to talk about the process of living with writing (makes it sound like a disease, doesn't it?). I'll probably rant about characters, editing, research, writers block, and the general white-wearing, attic-dwelling crazy that accompanies me on my journey to be a “real” writer.

For now, dear reader, I should go and get back to that writing thing. I do have a deadline, after all. Thank you, thank you so much for taking the time read this long introductory post. I hope that it was engaging for you and that you'll come back and keep me company “there and back again”.