IWSG: With Apologies to Kenny Rogers.

I was raised on country music, thanks to my mom, and some of my earliest memories involve car rides with that music playing.  I remember Kenny Rogers's "The Gambler" very well, as even then, I understood what the song meant.  As much as I could at four years old.

How does this relate to writing?  Oddly enough. . . .

For all that I exulted two weeks ago about how well one of my plots was going, when I was nearly done with the thing, I found myself reluctant to work on it.  While I'd gone through most of the book in a reasonable amount of detail, the entire third act was two short paragraphs, and something about it didn't feel right.

It should have been working, I knew that.  The story is one I want to tell.  I've had a great deal of fun plotting this thing and figuring out how to make it all work.  And I was so certain that the scene that made up the first half of the third act would be absolutely brilliant, hilarious and action-packed and heartwarming all at once.  No matter what, I wanted to hold onto that scene; it was one of the first I'd come up with when plotting the book, ever since I first knew the story featured intrigue and blackmail and airships.  Yet despite knowing where the story was going, I felt like I was hitting a wall whenever I tried to think on those three important words: "What happens next?"

As I'm sure some of you have guessed by now, that should-be-awesome scene was the problem.

Part of the problem with writing is that things change along the way.  What should be the story's Crowning Moment of Awesome may become the last triumphant moment the heroes have before everything goes wrong.  That minor character who only existed to help with some world-building might stand up to become a main character as they're being written.  Someone who's supposed to live through the book might decide to stab a dragon in the back.  Things like that.

Far too often, the solution is to cut something you really wanted to keep - to fold, so to speak.  And sometimes that's enough to make you want to walk away.

I was fortunate enough to figure out something that works a great deal better.  But it never would have happened if I hadn't taken the time to go over what I had in mind and recognize that the problem was a scene that I thought had to be part of the story.  No matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't hold onto it.

In the end, though, the story will be better for it.  The story feels right without it.  And that's what matters most.  Here's hoping that, whenever I actually write this, the gamble pays off.

And the Plot Hid from the Author.

And now, in contrast to last week's entry, I get to write about something I'm plotting that's not going so well.

I think most writers, if not all of us, have been asked where they get their ideas.  (I always say "the shower."  It's true, and it throws people off.)  Ideas can come from anywhere, and most of the stories I've told and plots I've worked with have come from combining several different ideas and seeing what works well when put together.

Since May or June or thereabouts, I've been attempting to plot something that's really different from what I usually write.  And ye gods, it will not play nice and let me figure out what the hell it's actually supposed to be.

The story's origins come from hearing this song on the radio.  Roses are important to me, so I scribbled down notes based on what came to mind when I listened to the song's lyrics.  When I got home from work, I watched the video, and found it inspiring in unexpected ways.  I noted all the weird phrases that appear in the video, and started to get some story ideas from thinking about what all those things could mean.  I wrote everything down, of course, and my notes showed the first hints of forming a story.

That might be the last coherent bit of plotting I managed for this thing.

Since then, trying to figure out anything about this story has been like trying to pick up enormous spheres of Jell-o without damaging them while wearing Hulk Hands.  I know that dream logic will be a significant factor in the story, as it's entirely possible that the whole thing takes place in someone or something's dream or in a dream realm.  I know that the setting is supposed to be a school that's not a school, though exactly what it is fluctuates several times in the 2.5 pages' worth of story notes.  And I know that things are going to get progressively weirder.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I could draw worth a damn, because most of what I can think of for this story is visuals, and I don't know how to fit them into words.

This is the sort of thing that scares me.  I've planted the seeds of a story that I quite literally do not know how to tell.  How do you show that a character has been completely forgotten, to the point where the remaining characters would never mention that person again because to them, the person never existed?  Can you create a workable system of dream logic when dream logic only makes sense because you're dreaming, and would seem wildly inconsistent in text?  And what does "The ways themselves may be asleep or awake" mean?

I wrote that in my notes - it came out of my head - and I have no idea what it means.

I know that I could be overthinking this; there's a reason some of my characters think about things too much, they get it from me.  In most cases, I would just sit down and tell myself I was going to work on this particular plot, and that would be that.  Most of the time, I can hash out where the story's supposed to go and what it's supposed to be with time and focus.  But everything about this story eludes me.  And that's why it bothers me so much.

I know I can't be the only one who's dealt with ideas like this.  Commiseration time, anyone?  :P

And the Plot Ran Away with the Author.

I was going to try to come up with a parody of the nursery rhyme for this entry's title, but it seemed like a bit of a stretch, and I couldn't think of a truly suitable rhyme for "author".  Aside from "bother", I mean.  And I'll leave calling authors that for agents and publishers.

So!  With the last book done, I'm back in the plotting trenches, tugging scenes and ideas and characters and locations out of my head and doing my damnedest to form them into something resembling a coherent story.  I'm happy to report that it's going very well so far.

...yes, I'm writing this after today's plotting session, so as not to jinx myself.

I'm working on the plot for another Shiloh & Alexi novel, as I've talked about before.  It's a new tale*, which means some re-imagining of both the characters and the world. I've been writing these two for a very long time, and setting stories in the world of Abraxas since 2007, but I always do the same character work for them as I would for new people.  It's been interesting - developing new backstories for characters I've known for so long leads to discovering new aspects of their characters, and it's like meeting someone you haven't spoken to for several years and finding out that so much in their life has changed.

 Very tempted to go into detail, but considering how much has changed already, it really wouldn't serve much purpose.

The plot itself, though, has changed a great deal from how I first conceived it.  I'd originally thought of it as more of a continent-spanning adventure, something with a real Indiana Jones vibe, involving hunting down ancient artifacts.  But as I worked out the backstories for the cast, familiar faces and new people alike, I started to see where they would all be at the start of the story.  And that meant a very different kind of story.

There are times when I'm plotting when the tale itself seems less like something I'm making up and more like something that already exists, something I'm discovering along the way.  It seems less like the plot's not going where I want it to and more like my original ideas of it were mistakes, so now I'm seeing what's really supposed to be there.  I know how weird it sounds to have something I'm creating surprise me, because it's coming out of my head, isn't it?  But that's how it goes.

And this is right up there with "compatible parts and fluids" in terms of how difficult it is to explain to people who aren't writers.

I did explain some of this to a non-writer a while ago, about how it can be difficult to know what's supposed to happen in a story and yet not know how it's all supposed to fit together.  When the key elements include ancient artifacts, high society social events, dealings between merchant houses including both blackmail and an arranged marriage, and several different kinds of airship-based trouble, it gets difficult.  But seeing it all fit together, and figuring out how to make it work?  That's worth it all, every time.

The plot might be running away with me, but I'm not letting go of it until the story's told.

*For the curious, I did try to re-plot TAW with a better antagonist.  I really did.  But I realized that it wasn't what I wanted to do, right in the middle of a paragraph, and deleted those notes.  I hope to return to the book's concepts of the warlock and all that someday, but I've shelved that specific story.

A Little too Crazy.

As promised, this is an entry about the book I wrote last month.  Said book doesn't have a title, which is oddly appropriate, since one of the characters is the one whose name took me forever to find.

The story is, essentially, a godpunk portal fantasy.  The world is littered with dead gods, most trapped in stone or similar.  People from all across the multiverse fall into the world, and there's no way back, so it's a bizarre place filled with all kinds of beings.  The story starts with one of the main characters, a guy from Earth, having his surfboard disappear from under him.  He then realizes that he's in a different ocean, one that actively hates him.  He's quickly captured by the Evil Empire, who finds people as soon as they show up and forces them to bond with the dead gods so they can serve as power sources.

Much of the rest of the book is spent freeing people from the Evil Empire and gathering them together, leading up to a final conflict at an ancient elven city, complete with one of the ancient elves newly awakened by the presence of people bonded to the dead gods.  It was fun to write, quite crazy at times, and deliberately over the top - one of my goals on this one was to turn everything Up To Eleven as much as I could.  In some ways I succeeded, as shown by the flying motorcycle, fifty-vs-three battle, and the aforementioned character who showed up in the ocean that hates everyone deciding that the best course of action against the thing trying to capture him is to kick it in what he thinks is its crotch.

I'm sure I could make things more ridiculous in editing.  But I'm not sure if I ever will.

Here's the thing: the world I've created for this book is bizarre, but in a more subtle way than this story conveys.  There's more to it than anyone in this story suspects, a greater purpose behind the place that could take half a dozen books to truly explore and figure out.  Granted, most of this is in my notes in extremely vague terms, but I know I can get a lot more out of it.

In other words, I'd be better off with a story that's not deliberately crazy.  The empire's machinations have to be more subtle and hidden for it to truly work - less Borg, more 1984.  A story about people within the empire figuring out the secrets behind both the empire itself and the world could work very well, as there's a lot of room for espionage and trickery in a setting where no one but those at the very top truly know how things work.

Also, I'd like to see some dark reflections of the characters.  A character who can exist as three of herself would make an incredibly good spy and infiltrator.  A man bonded with a god of the hunt would make an impossibly good sniper.  The sheer amount of personal manipulation you can do with someone bonded to a goddess of love is ridiculous.  And while brainwashing someone to use them as a weapon is cliched, I really think I need to do that with the raging berserker elven princess.

As I said last entry, I don't hate this book after finishing it, which is a minor miracle.  I had fun writing it.  I needed to clear my head by working on other things, and it did the trick.  But I don't think I'll go back to this specific tale.  This world is worthy of so much more than a fun, violent romp that ends with our heroes triumphant.

Besides, writing someone with a god-granted power based on Cupcake Ipsum was just a little too silly.  Though clearing a hallway of guards with a wave of marshmallow creme was fun.

I've already begun taking down notes on how to make a new story work.  Part of that will involve better-defining the parts of the world where the story takes place, so that I know all the wheres and whys and hows of it right from the start.  There's a great deal more I can do with this, and it's time to figure all that out.

...eventually.  I'll add it to the other dozen plots-in-progress.  I really need to win the lottery or something so I can do this full-time...

IWSG: Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe.

"...I need it to be mine alone while I carve it... When I'm finished, then the world can have it, but when I work on it, it is to be my vision and mine alone."
--from Terry Goodkind's Faith of the Fallen

As writers, I think it's in our nature to talk about our work.  Especially with each other.  If nothing else, fellow writers understand.  You can talk to them about the problems you're having, and they won't look at you funny when you talk about characters running away with the plot or how you had to go back and change things since you blew up the wrong half of a city or the troubles with writing an interspecies romance when the beings involved don't have compatible parts and fluids.

This is the part where I look back at what I just wrote and understand why I often don't talk to people who aren't writers about these things.

I'm not saying talking to other writers about your work isn't a good idea.  It's an excellent idea.  I've had talks with friends where they helped me close plot holes and the like before I ever started, and riffing ideas back and forth is great fun.  Talking with others has led to some great stories.  But there can be a downside to it as well.

If you talk about your stories with other writers, odds are good they'll ask if the story goes how they think it should go, or they'll tell you what they've done before and how it worked for them, or they'll talk about things they've read that sound similar.  And if you ask for advice, well, get comfortable.  Because I think it's safe to say most if not all of us love talking about our craft.

While this all seems like a good thing, if you have a bunch of other people's words in your head when you're actually writing your story, it's easy to feel like it's not your story anymore.  And if you feel like the story's getting away from you and realize it's because now you have someone else's idea in your head and can't get it out . . . it sucks, to say the absolute least.  As much as I've tried, you can't unthink things.  You can't unhear someone saying "Well, what if you do this?", no matter how well-meaning their advice was.

This is especially bad if someone tells you, "That sounds a lot like this other thing I read."  It might just be me, but it's so hard to stick with an idea if I think it's too similar to a published story.

So, with deliberate irony, here's my advice on this: when it comes time to write the story, keep it to yourself.  Keep it your own, and only your own; Stephen King referred to this sort of thing as writing with the door closed.  I've seen many different writers say to write the story that you want to write, and I think the best way to do that is to make sure that when you're writing it, you're the only one telling the story.  Once you've finished it, then yes, get a bunch of people to read it and take their advice (or don't) as you see fit.  But make sure the heart of the story, what makes it what it is, comes only from you.

I'm writing about this for November's IWSG because on October 3rd, I started writing a book and didn't tell anyone.  Thirty-one days and 94000+ words later, I finished it.  And I don't hate it, which is nice.  Now that the first draft is done, I'll talk about it next week.

And if anyone's wondering, no, I'm not going to do NaNoWriMo, seeing as how I just did.  :P

Recommended Reading: Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines

No, I'm not turning this into a review blog.  :P  I am, however, shot for blog post ideas this week, so I thought I'd talk about a book I think you all should read.

Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines, first in the Magic ex Libris series, is an urban fantasy tale with a magic system that's every book geek's dream: the titular libriomancers are able to pull items out of books and use them in the real world.  The main character, Isaac, is of course both a libriomancer and a massive geek, so you can imagine the sheer joy he gets from doing this.  And that's what drew me in so much about this book, and why I love this series so much.

There's a kind of magic in the written word.  As writers, I think we know this; whether we see it in our own work is up for debate because we know everything that goes into it, but I think it's safe to say we've all seen it in our favorite books.  That's part of what makes Libriomancer so good - it makes that magic real, and takes you along for the ride with its infinite possibilities.

The sheer joy of reading also comes into how Isaac and others like him work magic, and that's actually how part of the magic works.  The more readers love a book, the more they believe it could be real, the more powerful it can be.  It's a unique and interesting magic system, and there's a good deal more to it than Isaac knows.  Learning about it over the course of the story was fascinating.

And there's the part where Isaac gears up by putting on a long brown coat that has dozens of pockets inside, and he fills those pockets with books from his library, pages marked with rubberbands so he can get what he needs quickly.  I've read a lot of "preparing for battle" scenes, but that's the only one that had me looking at my bookshelf and wondering how well I could arm myself.

If you're considering your own bookshelf right now, then yes, you should read this book.

The series itself also moves quite quickly.  The second book, Codex Born, came out earlier this year, and shows that there may be no status quo - the changes that happen are the sort of things I'd expect in the fifth or sixth book of a long-running series, serious shake-ups.  The third book comes out in January, and I have no idea what's going to happen.

Also, since Mr. Hines has shown himself to be a big proponent of diversity, that's there in this book as well.  Not everyone's white, not everyone's straight, not everyone's male.  The main woman character is Lena, who's not only strong and capable and has interesting magic of her own, but she's based on an ancient Greek ideal of beauty (long story (literally)).  She's distinctly not the modern cultural ideal of what a woman should look like, but Isaac has absolutely no problem with that.

I hate to say I hope this series doesn't ever get made into a movie or TV show, but I kind of do, only because I know they wouldn't cast Lena right.

So, yes.  If you like reading (and if you don't, why are you here?), and think you'd enjoy a tale with vampires of various breeds and dryads on motorcycles and mysterious magic and characters who do the kinds of things you've probably dreamed about while reading, you should check this book out.  The first chapter is available through Mr. Hines's website, linked above.  Share and enjoy.

Next week: IWSG.  Keep it secret, keep it safe.

Antagonized.

I know I'm supposed to be working on things that aren't a TAW fix and/or another Shiloh & Alexi story.  And for the most part, I have been, I swear.  But I was on a walk during one of my breaks at work when, just for the hell of it, I decided to think on what I could change in TAW to make it work.  And that helped me realize a serious problem that I somehow missed throughout the entire creation process:

The book lacks a good, solid antagonist.

It's one of those things I would deny if I hadn't realized it myself.  But it's true.  The Big Bad makes two appearances, and we get little of its motivation.  (Yes, it's an it.  Demons in this world don't have genders.)  Other than that, there are the demon's nameless minions, two minor demons, a powerful minion with a name whom I only brought in because he was going to be significant in the sequel, and ████████, who becomes the surprise antagonist right at the end.

So, since the antagonist's part is both weak and spread among too many beings, the entire story comes off as an excuse for the two main characters to go on a journey and end up together.  There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I was going for.

I think this is part of a larger problem for me.  I write characters I like, and I want to see them do well.  Hell, I want them to be awesome.  So it's a lot easier for me to write them doing great things rather than being in direct or indirect conflict with a main antagonist.  Too many of my plots have the heroes and the Big Bad come into conflict only right at the beginning and at the end, with the main characters simply achieving various goals all throughout the middle.

I realize this structure is exceedingly common.  Yet somehow it doesn't quite feel right.

It's kind of a given that the antagonist has to have more power and resources than the heroes, otherwise it's not much of a conflict.  The trick is finding ways to keep both sides involved without either overcoming the other until the end of the story.  (Ways that make sense, of course.  If the antagonist is a political manipulator type, it's hard to justify them as behind the carnivorous badgers that dog the heroes' every step.)

The other side of this is risking the antagonist becoming a cartoon villain.  If the main adversary has reason to kill the main characters, they can't encounter said antagonist every few chapters, or it turns into "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" after the third or fourth time.  (Or you run out of main characters halfway through the book.)  If the antagonist wants to capture them, it's easy to assume they'll always escape, until the story's final act.  A variant of this is when the antagonist sends mooks of subsequently greater power after the heroes, all of whom end up defeated, leaving the heroes stronger and the reader wondering why the Big Bad didn't send the strongest mooks right at the start.

I think the Empire from the original three 'Star Wars' movies is probably one of the best examples of how to do this right.  They bring about conflict both personal and galaxy-spanning.  They're more powerful than the heroes, yet still the heroes can both achieve major victories and suffer significant defeats without either side being brought down.  Lastly, their final conflict is orchestrated on multiple levels, and it couldn't have happened at any other point in the story.

So, question time: what sort of antagonists do you like the most?  What sort do you like to write?  Have you also struggled with making sure they work as they should?  And if so, how did you fix them?