What do you Fear?

We've all heard it: "Write what you know."  It seems like a lot of people interpret that as you should write about what you do, or what you've learned, as though everyone's life would make good fiction fodder.  That's not what I'm talking about here; there's no chance in hell I'm writing a book about working medical claims.  I don't think anyone would want to read that, and I'm not writing it even if they did.

But writing what you've done, what you've experienced, what you've been through - that, I think, is what "Write what you know" really means.  And today, I'm talking about what we all know whether we want to talk about it or not: fear.

I've talked about my fear of failure before, of knowing that it's possible I'll never make it as a writer and I'll die with dozens of stories that no one ever read and dozens more I never wrote; that's not what this entry is about.  In the sequel to TAW, I'll get to touch on the feeling of waking up lonely and alone, and the cold anxiety that comes with wondering if every single morning will be the same; I've dealt with that my entire life.  But that's not what this entry is about either.

I'm talking about my overwhelming fear of things with way too many legs crawling on me.  *shudder*

It's not that I'm afraid of insects.  At a distance.  If I see a spider or some other large bug in my home, I might freak out a little at first glance, but I'll usually trap it under a glass or something and set it free.  (Unless it's near the bed.  Then it dies as a warning to others.)  But few things put me on edge more than feeling something crawl across my skin, tiny legs pricking with every step, its path wavering back and forth as though it's searching for something--

By this time, I've freaked out and either shaken it off or swatted it so hard I bruise whatever part of myself it landed on.

This reaction is precisely why, for one of my plots in progress, I'm basing the otherworldly antagonists off of insects and their ilk, all the things that crawl and skitter and stare at you with way too many eyes.  I figure that if this stuff creeps me out, it'll creep out my readers as well, and there are all kinds of frightening things you can do with bugs.  Bites, stings, wrapping in webbing, crawling into ears and noses and worse orifices, laying eggs inside so the young have to chew their way out, so on and so forth.  Giant hives.  Hurricanes made of bloodsucking bugs.  Apple spiders.  I could go on, but I suspect I'm losing readers with every word.  ^_^

Oddly enough, I'm looking forward to fleshing out this plot, if only to see just how much I can freak myself out.  Bonus points if I feel something crawling on me while working on it.  How about the rest of you?  Anyone else working a potent fear into their stories?  And if you've done it already, how did it go?

The Key Idea.

Yes, I'm here talking about ideas again?  Why?  Two reasons.

One, nobody needs another writer blogging about the trials and tribulations of the query process.  If I wanted to post about that, not only would I wait for IWSG, but I'd just pull up some angsty poetry I wrote in high school and let my 15-year-old self speak for me.  I mean, if I'm going to mutter about how much life sucks, I might as well make it amusing for everyone.

Two, I'm in the editing stage, and blogging about editing is boring.  Seriously, what am I going to say?  "Today, I took out words.  I also added words.  Most importantly, I replaced some words with better words.  And despite my best efforts, I can't get this book under 95,000 words.  Woe."  And then we're right back to angsty poetry.

Anyway, I too often find myself having tons of ideas and not enough actual plot.  I can come up with cool stuff happening and interesting places to have it happen without any trouble, but figuring out why it's happening and who it's happening to and what's going to come of all of it?  Not always easy.  So that moment when I have the key idea, when I find the thing that was missing that's going to turn this pile of people, places, things, and various other oddities into a real story?  That's something special.

I'm writing about this now because I had one of those moments today.  Naturally, I had it when I was at work and due to clock out in less than a minute.  (I'm neurotic about my precise clock-in and -out times at work.  My former supervisor asked if I was okay when I clocked in seven seconds late one morning.)  I wrote it down, and spent most of the drive home figuring out how to make it work.

As a side note, am I the only one who gets their best ideas when they're not trying to think of anything story-related?  This is why I keep a notepad at work.  And I've had more good story ideas while in the shower than I want to count.

But it hit me, right as I scribbled it down, just how important that key idea is to how I work.  I blogged before about how having that one idea took me from a jumble of various ideas into an actual story, and I'm thrilled to have it happen again.  I still need to actually plot the thing, and that will have to wait until editing is done, because I'm horrible at working on more than one project at once. 

All the same, though, it's one more step on the road, one more discovery of my creative process, one more thing to look for on future plots.  And it all leads to one more story to tell.

So, does this sort of thing happen to anyone else?  Do your ideas come to you fully-formed, or do they take some digging to fully unearth?  And, though it's perhaps less important than where they finish, where do they start?

Hey, That was My Idea...

So, this happened:

A few days ago, I saw a tweet about a new book, with a plot summary that sounded remarkably like the base idea behind my current plot-in-progress.  I checked it out, and sure enough, this book uses one of the same ideas I'm using.  It kind of threw me, because I'm the type to think ahead and plan ahead to ridiculous levels.  (It's one of the few ways I'm like Batman.)  I found myself wondering what would happen in the future if the thing I'm working on becomes an actual book and gets published and people wonder if I ripped off this other person.  Mentally, I was caught between "Hey, they stole my idea!" which is ludicrous, and "Oh great, now I have to come up with a new idea!" which is much the same.

Before anyone asks: no, I'm not saying what the book was.  I know if I name the book or the author, and my book-to-be eventually gets published, someone will find this entry and spin it to make it sound like I'm accusing someone of stealing an idea that I had for a book I was still plotting when the other author's book was soon to be published.  I know how some people on the internet work, and I'm not giving them any help.

Anyway.

I know it's just plain stupid to think someone stole my idea.  I don't think you can steal an idea, only mimic the execution of that idea.  And from what I can tell, the ways we're handling the idea differ quite a lot, and will result in very different stories.  So assuming my plot eventually becomes a book, I'm not worried about being accused of ripping anyone off.

But it still threw me for a loop.  Here's something I've been developing since last year, something I only came up with an actual plot for last month, something that's been slowly pulling itself out of my head ever since I came up with an antagonist and characters and a real plot.  And then boom, I read about someone else doing something very similar.

I've never actually been hit with a watermelon, but that's what I imagine this feels like.  A heavy shock from something completely unexpected.

I know it's all in the execution.  And I plan to keep going with my plot, because the story I'm working on is nothing like the one that inspired this entry.  But some small part of me, the part I don't usually let write anything on the internet, is standing with its hands on its hips and saying "Heeeeyyyyy......."

So, has this ever happened to any of y'all?  Did you end up changing what you were working on because of it?  Or did you go straight for the petty and ultimately doomed lawsuit?  ^_^

IWSG: Tales I Once Wanted to Tell

There's a file on my computer called "ideas in progress", and it's full of stories I haven't told.

Some of them are ideas I had years ago, going back to reworkings of things I wrote in high school and/or college.  Some of them are just ideas with nothing more than a few sentences detailing what a story about them could be.  Some of them are multi-page entries, summaries of plots and characters, waiting to be moved into a separate file for fleshing out.  A few are nothing but titles.  And for the most part, they all share one thing:

They're stories I once wanted to write, things I look at now and say "Meh."

This probably bothers me more than it should.  I think most writers, if not all, have more ideas than they could ever turn into stories, not even if they had several more lifetimes.  More lifetimes only means more ideas, after all.  But what bothers me is not having these half-formed stories, but looking at ideas that once excited me and now seem dull.

For example, earlier this year, I was plotting a dark fantasy novel.  It had a bunch of things I really wanted to put into a story - ancient evils from beyond the stars, long-lost mind-warping magic, disturbing signs of the way the world once was, horrible secrets unleashed by the unwary and unwitting, so on and so forth.  I went through two different plots with it, as per usual, then started working on a third when I realized I wanted to tell the origin of the story's status quo, not what happens when that status quo breaks.

Somewhere along the way, after I'd put together a basic plot, I lost interest, and I haven't touched that plotting document since March.  And this isn't the first time.  I have a full set of world notes in search of a story, and I had an awesome idea for how the way magic works there affects another race . . . back in 2012.  I added that to my notes, and haven't done any significant work on it since.

I've written down so many ideas that I might never get to use, that I might never want to use.  And that gets to me.  Whenever I pull those older documents up, they just seem boring or ridiculous or convoluted to me, and I have no desire to work on them again.  I wonder if I ever will.  It makes me a little sad to think about this, because it feels like a waste.  And yet, I know nothing good comes of forcing myself to work on something I don't want to do.

The one positive note I can bring to this is that I created Abraxas, the world THE ACCIDENTAL WARLOCK takes place in, back in 2003-04.  And I set those dozen documents aside for many years before writing the book that brought me back to that world, which led to TAW's predecessor SKYBORNE, which led to TAW.  So there's always hope.  Ideas are never wasted, I suppose; they're just waiting.

Unnamed Blog Entry

Yes, the title is because I can't think of a name for this entry.  Because sometimes it's hard to come up with a name.  And sometimes that name makes all the difference.

For my current plot-in-progress, I started off with two characters I've written before as the main protagonists.  This was both to make sure I started off with people I knew and to give me a kind of character shorthand, a way to determine these characters' thoughts and actions with ease and without worrying about it too much.  Yes, it's lazy plotting at its finest, I know.  It got me started, which is what I needed, considering how long I'd been trying to find the story for this world.  But I knew I couldn't keep using those characters.

So I came up with new names, applied them, and everything changed.  One character grew about six inches and was suddenly from the eastern US, grew up on a farm, and had a love for knee-length sweaters.  (She kept her hair like she's Merida from "Brave"'s stunt double, though.  Cleaning blood out of it is going to be a pain.)  The other character gained a background in the film industry as well as uncles he'd hunted with in his youth, and went from being white to half-black, half-Scottish.  (Why half-Scottish?  Partly as a shout-out to a game I love, and partly because kilts.)

I swear, even knowing this is all happening in my head, it's weird as hell to see characters spontaneously change like that.

With the name changes, these people went from characters I'd written before to new people to explore and discover.  Working on their backgrounds has been fun, but seeing what they do now as I work on the plot is really interesting.  I no longer automatically know how they'll react to all the weird crap I'm going to put them through, and watching that come about as I plot is both fascinating and occasionally worrisome as they develop in unexpected ways.  Yet at the same time, I can see how they interact much better than I could before, because they now only exist for this story, not in several others.  And even though most of the story's events will still happen the same way, I really feel like these new characters could throw me a bizarre curveball.

And then there's the one who is a bizarre curveball, the one who currently has no name.

Seriously, this is one of the most frustrating aspects of character creation.  I know who this character is, where she comes from, her lengthy past and how she got to where she is when the others find her.  I know why she does what she does, and why she considers the others' mission so vital that she's not only willing but enthusiastic about joining up with them.  I know how she looks at life, how her view is significantly different from her companions', and why that will prove vital over the course of the story.  I know she 'hunts' by singing to forest animals until they get close enough, then snaps their necks.  She's a raging berserker elven Disney princess avatar of a war goddess, and I have no idea what her name is.

Next entry: IWSG and all the stories I once wanted to tell.

Process This.

So!  Last week, Liz Blocker tagged me for the writing process meme.  Little did she know that giving me a chance to talk about myself and about my writing at the same time is one of the few ways guaranteed to get me rambling at length and depth.  Let's get started, shall we?

What am I working on now?
In June, I'll start the query process for THE ACCIDENTAL WARLOCK, a story about a young woman who discovers she was prepared before birth to serve as the body for an extremely powerful demon.  I've been polishing this book for months, and I'm eager to see how it does once I start querying.  I also have three or four plots in various stages of development, one of which I've had all kinds of success with over the past nine days.  No details about those, because I have no idea which will actually become books.

How does my book differ from others within its genre?
Both the heroines are gay, and the main couple is an interracial one.  Sad to say, those are going to be the major differences people see if TAW gets published.  I really wish both of those were more common in the fantasy genre, where in theory books could feature all kinds of people and worlds and situations never before seen, but the idea that heroes have to be straight, white, and male is still far too prevalent.  -_-

Why do I write what I do?
Because it's in my head and needs to come out.  Seriously.  I came up with Abraxas, the world TAW takes place in, back in 2003, and my only first published story took place in that world.  I have over a dozen documents developing the place, some of which I deliberately ignored when writing TAW because they didn't fit the story.  I've also been writing Shiloh and Alexi, the two heroines, in various forms since 2002; they've appeared in about half of the books I've written.  I love these two, and this world, and would like nothing more than to start my writing career bringing them to the rest of the world.

How does my writing process work?
Before I begin writing, I take a shot of liquor (usually rum) and eat a little bit of chocolate.  Alcohol loosens up the brain, and has proven to affect the language centers, while sugar has always been fuel for my writing.  (I used to eat lumps of brown sugar before writing when I was a teenager.  Don't judge.)  I then play the song I've chosen for the book - every book gets one - and pace about my apartment, mentally preparing myself.  Then, I put on a CD - every book gets one of those too - and pull on my headphones.  By then, the first sentence for the night's work has usually come to me, so I write that, and then I'm off and running.

Most of the time, what I'm writing flows out of my head without too much trouble.  Not bragging, it's just the truth.  And much of that stuff that flows so easily gets the hell beaten out of it with the editing stick.  My editing process is lengthy and intensive, but it's totally worth it.

Music is an absolutely essential part of my writing process.  I can write without it, but it just plain doesn't feel right.  I am thankful to be able to drop a CD into my computer, though.  Way back in high school, the stereo at my dad's house was around the corner from the study where the computer was.  That computer was a DOS machine with 640K of RAM and an amber monitor.  So I had to put a CD in the stereo, crank it way the hell up, then hurry to the study and start writing.  Many times, my dad came home from work to find me in the study, pounding away at the keyboard with seven fingers since I didn't know how to touch-type yet, with Meat Loaf's "Bat out of Hell II" cranked up to eleven.  Sorry, Dad.

So now I need to tag some other people for this thing, hmm?  Let's see...  I'll tag Rena, because she and I have had more than a few rambling back-and-forth conversations about our processes before, and I'll tag Anna, who said she liked hearing about others' processes.  ^_^  Have at it!

Next entry: what's in a name?  Or, for some characters, What the hell is your name?!

Rise and Fall and Rise Again

This is not the entry I expected to write.

More important stuff first: I finished writing the book this past Sunday.  And I don't like it at all.  It was fun at first, and a real thrill to be writing again - I hadn't written a new book since I finished TAW last year.  And there's always that rush of starting, of the infinite possibilities before you, when the book can be anything.  Unfortunately, that didn't last.  I grew disenchanted as I kept going - the characters felt flat, the settings felt lifeless, and I realized some major plot holes revolving around the ending that I somehow didn't discover with the dozen and more times I went over that plot.

This was a book that came from my head, not my heart.  It was something I pushed ahead with writing because I was so bloody-minded in my determination to make an interplanar adventure work.  And I should know better.  I've written books before with concepts that I had failed to make work before but I was so sure, this time, I could get it right.  It didn't work.

So I wrapped up the story with some decent explanations, and set it aside.  I might go back to it later, I might not.  But the day after I finished that book, something awesome happened.

I read this article, over at Fantasy Faction, about creating layered antagonists.  From this article, I got the sudden idea of an antagonist for a story idea I've been working with for a while.  I had nothing but setting ideas and character bits, not a real story.  But once I knew who the antagonist was, the story started forming.  On Tuesday, during one of my breaks at work, I pretty much pulled the entire book out of my head.  I now have a rough plot, with plenty to flesh out and figure out.  I love the new characters, the empire that both is and provides the much-needed antagonist has some great concepts for me to work with, and more than anything, it's something I haven't done before.

If nothing else, it's good to know that I haven't lost it.  I just need to be sure that I'm really working with it, not just what I want it to be.  Whatever 'it' is.  You know what I mean.  :P

So, yes.  It's another learning experience, and another new plot.  Par for the course, really.  But at least now I know better what to watch for, and how much I have to listen to my heart about this, not just my head.

In other news, my computer completely died this morning.  I'm typing this on a tiny and very slow netbook that's connected to my new mouse and keyboard.  My computer-related stuff will be limited until I build a new machine.  Fortunately, I have a friend who's one unbelievable guru for all things computer-related, and he'll be sending me a list of parts to build a new machine soon.

It's been a week of endings and beginnings, death and soon-to-be birth.  Let the creative cycle continue.  ^_^

Next entry: Liz Blocker flagged me to discuss my writing process.  I'll be talking about music, sugar, and alcohol.  :P