Year in Review: What the Fuck was That?

I know I'm not the only one out there who had a rough 2017.  But this is my blog.  :P  And most of what I have to say about this year is summed up right there in the title.

I have never had such a hard time with goddamn everything as I've had this year.  I've never wanted to quit more than this year - and that entry was back in March.  Things went bad for another eight months after that.  There were times when I came close to writing an "I Still Want to Quit" post, not only because it was how I felt but because things were going so bad that I had nothing else to say.

There are a lot of reasons I could point to for this.  The current political/world climate is one, to be sure; I don't want to get into that here but I will say that the way the world's going right now is not exactly conducive to me being a happy and productive artist.

Another reason is the multi-layered hell that is the querying process.  I started querying STARWIND this year, though barely - I only sent out thirty-two queries because it all started to feel pointless.  Getting rejected for this book hit me harder than any other.  A lot of that is because it feels like no one's looking for the sort of story it is.  As I said in my "I Want to Quit" post, the book's weird and finding an agent who wants it will be a struggle, and if I was writing anything but what I want to write, odds are good I'd be getting better results.

Then again, if I was writing something I didn't want to write, it probably wouldn't be worth reading, so then I'd have written shit and be getting rejected for it.  So I'm better off getting rejected for writing what I want, as depressing as that is.

To add to all of it, I've spent most of this year trying everything I could to get a plot that works.  For most of the year, nothing did.  Back in February, I plotted out the sequel to STARWIND, which is largely wishful thinking and won't do me any good unless the first book sells.  So that felt even more futile than my usual attempts.  I then spent the rest of the year making my usual attempts and watching every single thing fall apart.

This is the heart of why I felt like quitting.  There's something staggering about watching a dream fall apart and feeling like every new attempt makes it worse.

Among everything else, I was ready to quit blogging here too.  I'd mentally prepared my last entry - it was going to be this one, and this paragraph was going to say that I couldn't keep struggling to find something to talk about and I felt like people didn't want to read my constant litany of failures.  I would end it by saying I'd be back if things got better, but not to wait up.

Thankfully, things turned around for me earlier this month, and I don't have to make that entry.

It's scary to think of how bad things got, knowing they can fall that far again.  But it's been a good December.  I've been switching between the two plots I'm working on, spending about a week on each before going back.  I put one of them into its own planning document last night and did some good character work, fleshing out both the main character and figuring out the antagonist's plans.  So many times, stories start to die when they get their own plotting docs, so I'm glad this one's still alive and kicking.

And so it goes, hopefully up from here.  I'll start querying STARWIND again next year; I still believe in it and I don't want to give it up yet.  With time and work, I should be able to get at least one of the plots ready to become a book; I'd love to have both.

Here's hoping next year is a great deal better, for me and for all of you.

Magnificent

This is the part where I ignore all those other writers who say not to talk about what you're working on.  :P  I figured that, after ending last week's entry with the premise for what I'm hoping will be my next book, I might as well talk about it, especially since I spent so much time this year wondering if I was ever going to have a next book.

Anyway.

The basic premise for this book actually comes from an old "Pinky and the Brain" bit, wherein Pinky responds to "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?" with "I think so, Brain, but who wants to see Snow White and the Seven Samurai?"  I heard this many years ago, and as much as it stuck with me, it took me a long time to develop it into something I wanted to write - I first started talking about doing this more than three years ago.  I totally thought I had it figured out back then.  (Spoiler alert: I did not have it figured out back then.)

To make one thing clear: this will not actually feature any samurai.  What I'm doing is taking the fairy tale trappings of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" and applying the plot structure known as The Magnificent Seven Samurai.  I do, of course, have to bend things to make the two fit together - it's less "assemble the crew to save the village" and more "learn who you truly are and return with those who trained you to save your home kingdom from a dragon."

Yes, of course there's a dragon.  What kind of writer do you think I am?

There's also the magic mirror, because you don't do a Snow White story without one, and an evil stepmother, which I almost wish didn't work because I did good character stuff with Snow's mother and having to kill her off makes me sad.  Snow herself is determined to step up and do what must be done and would never just wait around for her prince; much of the story is her journey and how she deals with the blood curse put on her before she was even born.  I've never liked the idea of the passive princess, and she's got some real surprises ahead of her.

The poison apple won't be a thing, though.  The stepmother in this story does not fuck around with little tricks like that.  Not when she's enacting a decades-long revenge plot.

It's been interesting to work with magic in this plot, as it's different from what I've done before.  I tend to like well-defined magic systems, but fairy tales keep magic mysterious and hard to nail down, so I'm aiming for that.  The people Snow works with are those who try to figure magic out and make it work for them, many of whom were affected by magic themselves.  I can't help comparing them to a fairy tale version of the X-Men, and I'm okay with that.

So, yeah, that's where I'm going with this thing.  I'm still combining the two versions of the plot I've worked on over the past few years, but it's going well so far.  There's a lot of work ahead of me, but really, what else is new?  I'm just glad to have a plot that's working out and characters I want to write.  (Including the one who turns into a bear.)  I'm hoping to continue making progress on this and start writing it next year.

Next entry: 2017 year in review.

Dwarves.

I tend to go through several different versions of an idea as I try to make it work.  This past year being what it's been, I've been doing this more than usual; when nothing works, it's easy to try throwing everything away and starting anew.  One story I've been trying to do has its origins in the classic Snow White fairy tale, so when I first tried to figure it out and it didn't work, I thought there was one major thing I'd done wrong:

I hadn't included any dwarves.

Looking back, I'm not sure how I ever thought I could tell a Snow White story without dwarves.  I mean, they're right there in the name.  So when I started to plot a new version of my story, the dwarves were front and center from the beginning.  There would, of course, be seven of them, because that's just how it's supposed to be.  However, the farther along in development I got, the less I liked what I was working with.  It took me months, but I eventually realized that I'd fallen into a trope's trap.

That trope?  Our Dwarves Are All the Same.

Much as I hate to say it, this one's really true.  I'd bet that, when you read this entry's title, you got a mental image of a dwarf that would be about 90% similar to anyone else's mental image.  And I found that, when I tried to develop seven distinct dwarven characters for the story, I had some real trouble getting them to be different from each other.

This is not an issue I've ever had.  I've written a bunch of humans, some elves, some dragons, several cat-people, quite a few demons, so on and so forth.  STARWIND alone contains wargolems, a gnome, a lamia, and a handful of different species I didn't even give names.  Yet somehow it's easier for me to write a small furry creature as the ship's pilot than it is for me to imagine a dwarf who steps outside of the usual dwarven traits.

The weird thing is, this took me out of the story entirely, and I stopped wanting to write it.  The idea of having so many characters who just blended together in my mind had me wondering if it was worth working on or not.  I genuinely don't get it.  What is it about dwarves that makes so many people want to only write them one way?  There are always stereotypes about fantasy races, but for every magical, forest-dwelling, utterly stuck-up elf out there, there are dozens of variations on the race.  So what was wrong with me that I couldn't get this right?

Eventually, I accepted that it wasn't going to work out - I couldn't find an answer that led to me writing the characters as the individuals they should be, not just plain dwarves.  I delved back into my notes for the initial version of the story, and looked up the characters who'd originally played the roles of seven specific people.  Then, I put the two plots into a blender and started mixing.

The result has been overwhelmingly positive so far.  Part classic fairy tale (I even worked in the evil stepmother), part classic movie plot.  I'm starting to think this one's going to work out, and hoping I can get the plot done this year and write it next year.

Because if I'm finally going to do "Snow White and the Seven Samurai", I'm going to get it right.

IWSG: Something from Nothing

This isn't the entry I was going to write.

I had it planned, I really did.  I was going to leave the entire thing blank, except for the IWSG logo, for the length of my usual entry, with a sentence at the end saying the above text consisted of all the writing work I'd gotten done in November.  I might have left it up for all of December, if things continued to go so badly.  Some part of me called it melodramatic, but I thought it would be a good way to show what it felt like to look back at an entire month and see that I'd done nothing.

It was also kind of a riff on John Cage's 4'33", but that's neither here nor there.

Things didn't seem to be shaping up last week either; I thought I had an idea that would work out, but once I wrote it down, I realized that I didn't want to write it at all.  That was Tuesday.  On Wednesday, I accepted that I didn't feel like trying to get anything done, and pulled up an old e-mail from a friend.  The e-mail is something she copy-pasted and sent to me, titled "falling in love with your story", but that's not really what it's about.  It's a writer talking about finding out what's wrong with your story and figuring out how to fix it.

Something about that must have sunk in, because on Thursday, I started thinking about a project I hadn't worked on since August.  I remembered what the e-mail said, and came to realize what was wrong with the main character that was keeping me from wanting to write her.  I scribbled down notes at work for the first time in I don't know how long.  And later that day, when I was out on my second break, I started having ideas.

No, let me rephrase that: I started having IDEAS.

Do you know that moment, when you put something together in your head for the first time, and it sparks a character and setting, a place and a reason for them to be, and you know you've got something worth pursuing?  I got that.  For the first time in I don't even know how long, I got that.

So, I went home and got to work.  And to my great surprise and relief, everything I worked on actually worked.  I leaned back from my keyboard, thrilled but exhausted, and felt like I'd just woken up after spending most of this year in one long nightmare.

It's been a busy few days since then.  The new idea is still going strong; I've been developing it a little bit at a time and seeing how things play out, letting the actual plot work its way into my head as I develop the world.  As for the project I'm getting back to, it still needs work, as I have the entire thing plotted but something about it still doesn't seem right.  But I have ways to try to fix that.  And even if I can't, then at least I have something that is working.

We'll see where it goes from here.  I know it'll only take another story crashing and burning for me to feel like it was all for nothing.  But I have a place to start from and one to build on.  And it feels good to have hope for my own work again.