When is it Okay to Stop?

"Be persistent, relentless, and unstoppable, even when you want to stop. Especially when you want to stop."  --Adam Warren 

"You'd like to think that, wouldn't you?!"  --Vizzini, 'The Princess Bride'

So, I'm writing another new book, started it this past Saturday.  I didn't think that deserved its own blog entry, since odds are pretty damn good I'll start another one at some point in my life.  It's a book I've always been hesitant about writing, for a few reasons.  The first is that it's the start of a trilogy, and I'm really not sure about writing a book that's only sort-of a complete story when I'm still trying to get published.  The second is a much larger issue, and it's why having doubts after only six days.

The book and the world it takes place in were inspired by a video game I played a ton when I was younger, a game that's still one of my favorites.  I realized somewhere along the way in the world's creation that I wasn't quite being original in my planning, but I went with it anyway, since everything seemed original enough and I thought I'd changed things around enough to keep it from being obvious.

Now, nearly 20,000 words into the book, I have to admit it: damn, I couldn't be more wrong.

What I've written so far crosses the line from "inspired by" to "derivative of".  The book is following the game much more closely than I ever intended.  There are tiny moments that shout out the video game that I didn't really intend to put in - they just happened as I was writing.  Things like that are usually good, but in this case, I feel like it could get me in trouble.  I feel like getting this published would be tantamount to copyright infringement.  ...yes, I'm putting the cart before the horse when the cart is still a tree and the horse isn't even a zygote, but you get the idea.

This is why I'm thinking hard about cutting this off before I spend any more time on it.

I don't think stopping now would be a waste.  The planning document for the trilogy is twenty-four pages, and I already have a new plot in mind, one that would take place in this world but not follow the story that inspired everything.  I just know that there's so much writing advice out there that says not to stop once you've started a story.

But is there really a point to finishing a story when I couldn't, in good conscience, even try to do anything with it?  I know not everything's written to be published, but still.

I haven't made my decision yet, though I'm taking a night away from the story to mull things over.   Could definitely use some advice.

A Query Letter from Another Universe

...in which Skyborne is a Young Adult paranormal romance:

Shiloh used to think the stories of Abraxas were only that: tales from old books, tucked away deep in her high school's library.  It seemed no one else even knew of them.  Until the books opened on their own, and created a path to that other world, letting through something horrific.  Abraxas's gods of conquest, betrayal, and destruction have decided they want Earth as their new home, and Shiloh may be the only one who can stop them.

Too bad she has no idea how.  Tasked by several of Abraxas's other gods with binding the dark gods back into their books, Shiloh finds herself in far, far over her head.  The dark gods plan to enact a ritual on the winter solstice that will cast their influence across the entire world, with Shiloh's school as the ritual site.

On top of all that, Shiloh's just been asked to the winter formal . . . by Alexi, a girl from the dance team, sparking feelings Shiloh didn't quite know she had.  This only grows more complicated when Alexi reveals she's originally from Abraxas.  She's not sure how she came to Earth, but intends to return home once the gods' problems are solved, and would love to take Shiloh back with her.  Among Alexi's people, fighting together signifies a kind of marriage, and Alexi is just itching for a battle.

The dark gods' influence quickly spreads throughout the student body - violent classmates patrol the corridors, the student council ousts the teachers and staff, and every parent or authority figure Shiloh can find has fallen under the influence of a web of lies.  What little Shiloh is able to figure out from the books of Abraxas suggests a magical way to stop the ritual, but Shiloh has no magic.  Doesn't she?

Now, with the dark gods' ritual drawing near, Shiloh must figure out how she truly wants to handle things.  Should she destroy the Abraxas books, and hope that ends the dark gods' influence?  Should she give the three gods what they want, and escape to her beloved fantasy world?  Or should she take a stand, and fight back against the dark gods, with only Alexi to help her?  Time is running short, the dance on the winter solstice is coming soon. . . .

And everything changes when Shiloh learns to fly.

It should be clear by now that I have no idea how to write a Young Adult paranormal romance.  I came up with this after reading some tweets from Juliana Haygert wherein she talked about the issues with writing summaries for different genres of books.  I thought it would be interesting to write a pseudo-query for Skyborne as something very different from what it actually is.

Curious to see what people think of this.  And if nothing else, I laughed a lot writing this.  High school is bloody ridiculous on its own, adding some vengeful gods might actually be over the top.  Heh!

Apologies to a Story.

Dear story I'm plotting:

I'm sorry I ignored you, disregarded you, and otherwise neglected you for this long.

I'm sorry I came up with silly reasons why I wasn't going to write you.  I thought writing you would be a bad idea, because I've plotted you and your kin as a trilogy, and writing you didn't seem like a good idea.  I'd like to think you'd understand - it's easier to sell a stand-alone story than the first part of a series.  I think.  I'm not entirely sure, now that I think about it.  Would a would-be agent be glad to know the writer has more planned?

I'm sorry for my ignorance, story, because it's led to you not getting written.

I'm sorry I neglected you in favor of something I swore I could make work.  Again, I'd like to think you'd understand.  I mean, I've already written two versions of that story, so who could blame me for thinking the third time would be the charm?  I'm further sorry I deliberately ignored you while I struggled with plotting that other story, all those nights I tried to figure out why it always, always seemed like there was something wrong with the plot.  I appreciate your patience while I went through revision after revision.

Though I think I heard you laughing at the relief I felt when I decided to let that other story go.  I forgive you.  A little bit of schadenfreude on your part is more than warranted.

More than anything, I'm sorry you've had to wait so long.  I'm sorry I didn't start working on you two months ago, while I instead wrote 103,000 words I hope to never look at again.  Hell, I'm sorry I fought against the basic idea behind you for years, because I didn't think I could pull it off.  I appreciate you proving me wrong as soon as I started working on you.

I hope you'll forgive me.  I hope we'll work together to create something awesome.  And I hope I'll be able to start on you soon.

Dear Self:

I apologize for making a blog entry after I've been drinking.

It's Not Time to Write that. Yet.

I've seen many experienced authors give a simple bit of advice: write down everything.  They offer different reasons for this, but they all amount to the same thing.  If you don't write something down, you might forget it.

There's a long file on my computer, called "untitled world notes", because I have no idea what else to call it.  The notes themselves started as just a few pages of ideas about a world with a magic system I've never before.  Yes, some people say every idea has been done, and the only difference is in execution.  (Some won't even concede that last point.)  I loved the world and magic I'd come up with, but there was a serious problem: I had no real story.  Not yet.

That changed a little while back.

Inspiration strikes in the oddest places.  I was at Dragon*Con with friends, at the Tolkien-themed event called "An Evening at Bree".  My mind started wandering, and as I was already surrounded by elves, I started thinking of how to do elves differently.  What I came up with fit perfectly into the world I'd created several years ago.

All of a sudden, boom, I had something greater - I had the start of a story.  No, I had the start of dozens of stories.  An epic series in this world started taking shape in my head. When I got back home, I sat down with the old notes file and started taking new notes.  I fleshed out as much as I could of the elves, worked out their relations with the humans and some of their history, figured out how they deal with this world's magic.  And somewhere in there, I realized something else:

Writing in this world, doing these stories justice and putting together the dozens of elements I want to incorporate, will take a long, long time.  There's political and social manipulation going on that will take several books to play out.  There are so many things to determine before I even know where to start.  To put it simply, not only am I not ready to write this, I'm not yet good enough to write this.

It's a weird thing to realize my limitations like that.  My confidence in my writing waxes and wanes, but this is the first time I've ever come up with something and had to admit I'm just not capable of doing this the way I want to.  Yet.  I have the seeds of the first few stories, I have an idea of where things will go, I have a few characters slowly forming themselves in my head.  And I'm writing all of it down.

I don't want to risk losing any of this.  The day will come when I'm able to put this whole puzzle together, when I can plan a dozen books in advance and let things play out as they should.  When that time comes, I'll still have all the notes I've ever written for this story.

Lots of things will change by then, I'm sure.  But I'm also pretty sure it will start with a morbid revelation followed by something blowing up.  Seems like a good way to get things going.

Figuring it Out - Emphasis on "Out".

Warning: the following blog entry contains a link to a TV Tropes page.  Your free time may be at risk.  Please attempt to avoid clicking the link if you have things you want to get done today.

Aside from the obvious distraction and "ooh, that sounds interesting" uses, I use TV Tropes a bit for research.  It often helps to know how something's been done elsewhere, so I can better figure out how I want to use it.  So when I found the page for Coming Out Story, I started reading with Skyborne in mind.  In my book, the two main characters are both women, and they end up together in the end.  But reading through the page made me realize something.

The whole "coming out to someone" thing?  It doesn't work for Skyborne at all.

The main character, Shiloh, only truly realizes what she feels for her companion, Alexi, toward the end.  And seeing as how Alexi makes no attempt to hide either her sexuality or her attraction toward Shiloh, it wasn't like Shiloh could just say "Oh, by the way, it's all mutual now" or something equally ridiculous.  I started really considering Shiloh's sexuality, and realized she had the same issue some of the people discussed on the TV Tropes page had:

Shiloh needed to come out to herself.

Where Shiloh grew up, there's an emphasis on getting married and having children, and people who don't have kids are seen as selfish.  It takes meeting Alexi, who's from a much more open culture, to make Shiloh realize how restricted her home life was.  It takes being around Alexi to make Shiloh realize she was never interested in the people her culture said she should be.  And it takes their journey together to make Shiloh realize what she never felt for anyone else.

I've been writing these two in one form or another since 2002.  In their stories, it's never a question of if they'll get together, only when.  But Skyborne is the first of their stories I've truly tried to get published.  So getting this right has become very, very important to me, and in the edit/polish I'm doing now, I think I've finally figured it out.

Another reason why I'm doing this entry now: another author with LGBT main characters, Adrien-Luc Sanders, is doing a promotion for his book, From the Ashes.  He's trying to get it into Amazon's top 100, a worthy goal for any author.  Drop by and take a look, won't you?


Win $500 or $250 Visa Gift Cards or a manuscript crit if From the Ashes reaches the Amazon top 100!
Contest Rules / Entry Page | Buy on Amazon | Add to GoodReads

Writing when it doesn't matter.

Yesterday, I finished the book I was working on.  I sped like all hell through the final conflict and the resolution, typed up a scene I'd pictured taking an entire night in about half an hour, and closed things up with a tiny spark of hope in an otherwise downer ending.  I saved the file, closed it, and determined that no one would ever read that thing.

It's a weird thing, to finish a book and be utterly done with it.  This is the first time it's happened to me.  Most of the other books I've written, when I finished, I was utterly enthusiastic about them, all too eager to start editing and give them to friends for beta-reading.

But this book?  This hundred and three thousand words of a month-long learning experience?  No.  I'm done with it.  Utterly and completely.  I've finally proven to myself that the idea behind it, that I could apply a plot to an old slice-of-urban fantasy life series I did, will not work.  I've accepted that I captured a certain way of writing a character two years ago and further attempts feel like pale imitations.  I've come to understand that an 80-minute DDR megamix is not ideal music for writing any kind of tension.

Okay, that last one is kind of situational.  But hey, at least I learned it.

Toward the end, when I knew I was going to dump this book as soon as I finished it, I found myself in an odd state.  Writing something I knew would never exist outside my own computer felt very foreign.  I knew what I was writing didn't matter.  But I kept at it, because I knew if I didn't, I'd always wonder if it could have turned out better, if I could have saved it.  Now, I know.

I'm relieved in a lot of ways.  Writing is usually a draining experience for me, but it's not supposed to be a stressful one.  When sitting down to write becomes a chore, it's a sign something is wrong.  I never had trouble once I sat down, it was getting myself to sit down that was the problem. And I think we all know that a lack of desire to write leads to crappy writing.  So finishing that last page, writing those last few words, was a huge weight off my shoulders.

For now, I plan to relax for a week, and make the final preparations for Dragon*Con.  Then, I'm going to spend a month or so giving Skyborne another good hard thwack with the Editing Stick, since I haven't gone over it in several months.  Then, I'm going to start on one of my other two plotted books.  I expect either one of them will go better, as I've had them planned out for quite a bit longer than the thing I just wrote, and it's when I know the plot and characters intimately that I do my best work.

Soon, it will once again be time to start writing and see how it goes.  I'm already looking forward to it.

Waxing lyrical.

I want to talk a little bit about music and writing, mostly about the influence that music has on a work in progress and also about finding a song that reflects the work.

I've heard people say they can't write while listening to music, and for some reason, I can't understand that.  I feel like having music playing quiets the other things going on inside my head so I can concentrate on the story.  More specifically, music quiets the parts of my mind that wonder if I have any new e-mail or if anyone's said anything interesting on Twitter.  Some people say to write on a computer without an internet connection, I say I'll be fine as long as I'm listening to something.  Mostly.

It's kind of a two-way street, now that I think about it, when it comes to music and inspiration.  It's someone else's creation working for you, allowing you to make something of your own.  I tend to find a few pieces of music that work for a story, and listen to only those when I'm writing and editing it.  Sometimes, it's just that the music in particular captures some of the feel of what I'm doing, while other times, there's such a strong connection between the music and the scene or character that I have to have the music to make it work.

Thankfully, that last one doesn't happen all that often; if I only got to listen to one song over the course of an entire book, I think I'd get bored with it pretty quickly.  Six years ago, I wrote a scene that had two characters dancing to a song, and so I played that song on repeat while writing that scene.  To this day, I still expect that song to start over again every time I hear it end.

And then there's the flipside: music I enjoy that I just can't listen to while writing, because for some reason, it just doesn't work.  Much as I hate to say it, one of my favorite new albums is like that, Garbage's "Not Your Kind of People".  Absolutely love the band, the album is amazing, but damn, trying to write to it ends in failure.  Which is why it struck me as so odd that the second song, "Big Bright World", fits Skyborne so perfectly.

Some of it's the mood of the song, but most of it's the lyrics; these two lines might as well be the two main characters talking to each other:

You're mysterious, you make no sense
I love you 'cause you're innocent
You fell out through a hole inside the sun 

And then, the lines after that utterly and completely suit how they are together, and why they become so important to each other:

So magnify the best inside me
Fill the parts that you can't find me
The parts that won't give out when things get hard 

The best part, though, is that the song ends with three simple words that bring everything together for them, words that fit to end the book as well:

I'm with you.

For them, that's what matters most.