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”.