To Speak or Not to Speak

About a month ago, I started off an entry saying I was going to ignore all that advice about not talking about what I was working on and tell everyone about a plot-in-progress.  I now regret this, and I think it's time I changed how I approach this part of the process.

To put it very kindly, I've been having trouble with my plots.  To put it bluntly, I have not been able to take a single thing from concept to complete plot in a long, long time.  I haven't finished a plot and gotten it ready to write since STARWIND, and that plot was two years in the making.  And I wrote that book in 2016.

It's been nearly two years since I was able to make anything work.

The creative process is a long one, I know this.  And a lot changes along the way.  I've had plenty of ideas grow and twist as I worked on them, to the point that their origins were lost somewhere in their depths or excised completely as I discovered something new within the tale that worked better.  It would be kind of depressing to go through this blog and look at all the plots I've talked about and see what did or didn't happen with them.

But it wasn't until I realized that I was losing the Snow White story that I started to wonder if I should talk about my works-in-progress here.  Oddly enough, it's because people actually said they wanted to read the thing that led to this.  Shortly after I talked about the plot, I lost all enthusiasm for it; I've since realized why, but that's another entry.  And I felt like I was letting people down.

On one hand, I have a story that people want to read just from the basic concept.  But on the other hand, I don't want to write that story, not the way I've plotted it.  I could write it, but with what I have now, it would be crap.  And I will not deliberately write crap.

Considering how much changes over the course of plotting, I've come to realize that I shouldn't talk about what I'm working on when it's still in the early stages.  (Except for the occasional tweet, but I keep those deliberately oblique.)  I think I need to wait until things have developed a great deal more, until I'm at the point where it actually could be a viable plot, when things might not be set in stone but are at least....

I don't have a good way to complete that metaphor, but I'd like to wait to talk about things until I've got the story to the point where I know what it's going to be.  I don't think this will change much about the blog - probably more whining about things not working instead of talking about things that might work, but that's about it.  So if things keep going the way they have, it's not like there will be much of a change.

Anyway.  That's all I've got for this week.  Thanks as usual for listening to me ramble.  I've actually had some reasonable success with recent ideas, which feels good.  Wish me luck on making any of them work.

Next week: IWSG - No More Shiny New Idea.

A Week Off/An Off Week

The past week and a half has been pretty hellish, and I don't have anything to say this week that isn't more whining.  >_<  But I didn't want anyone to worry about me if I didn't post, so this is me saying I'm okay, just... weary.  Weary and not much feeling like blogging this week.  Hell, I couldn't even get around to everyone else's blogs last week, and I apologize for that.

But I'm going to try to pull myself out of this and have something worth saying for my next entry.  And hopefully get some good work done between now and then.  Thank you all for the encouragement on last week's entry, and I'll see you next week.

Until then, here's an H.P. Lovecraft poem that someone discovered scans perfectly with Billy Joel's "Piano Man", so of course, they put them together:

Kicked off the First Step.

I have had the weirdest past few weeks when it comes to querying, but that's over now.

Back in September, I finally heard back from an agent who'd asked me to query her thanks to the July IWSG pitch contest.  To my utter and complete shock, it was good news - the agent wanted my full manuscript.  It took me a while to actually believe that this was happening to me, but I took care of everything and sent her what she wanted.

Then, I accepted that I'd have to wait for a while, and when the answer came in December, it wasn't what I thought it would be.

Querying has a whole lot of "it's not you, it's me" in it as agents tell us (or at least, tell me) over and over again that the writing business is very subjective and just because our work isn't right for them, we should keep trying because it could be right for someone else.  I see this all the time, and now find it odd when a rejection letter doesn't include some variant of that.  But when I heard back from this agent, I didn't actually hear back from this agent.

On December 27th, I got an e-mail from another agent at the same agency, saying the original agent wasn't able to get to my submission due to their workload.  But, this second agent said, they'd read my query and would like to see my manuscript.

If you're getting emotional whiplash from any of this, imagine how I felt.  :P  It's one thing to hear "it's not you, it's me", quite another to hear "it's neither you nor me, it's my workload."

After a significant amount of sputtering at how damn weird my life can get, I sent my book off to that agent as well, and settled in to play the waiting game again.  I've heard that it can take 3-4 months to hear back from a full request, and I didn't get a response from the first one for three months, so I didn't think I'd get word from her anytime soon.

I heard back from her on Monday.  She said no.

When this all started, and I was breathlessly telling people about it, I described the publishing process as like trying to climb a pyramid, and the higher you got, the lower the odds were of you getting any farther.  After fifteen books and hundreds of rejections, this was my first full request ever.  Technically my second one too.  It felt like I had finally climbed onto that first step.

And now, I've been kicked off, and find myself exactly where I was before.

I'd love to say this makes no difference, because it's just another rejection, right?  But it doesn't feel like that.  It feels like one of those "why did I bother hoping" things.  I know I should send more queries, but . . . I don't even want to.  Having finally reached that first step, every time I don't get there is just going to feel worse.

I swear, if I had any other story that was actually working and might become a book someday, I would have trunked STARWIND by now.  But I've got nothing else.

Stumbling.

This feels like the kind of entry I should have made last year.  No, wait.  This is the kind of entry I would have made last year if I'd been able to actually work on anything.

Anyway.

Plotting-wise, I'm having a few difficulties.  I have two different plots that I'm actively working on, at least in theory.  One is the Snow White one I talked about a few entries ago and haven't touched since.  The other is a plot I've told I think one person about and am keeping largely quiet until I'm sure it'll work.  And then there's last week's shiny new idea, which I haven't done anything with since I first wrote it down.

To put it simply, I'm having a hard time drumming up the energy to work on much of anything, even though I want to.  All of these stories have a great deal that I need to do on them, and it's getting to the point where I'm mentally exhausted just thinking about all I need to develop.

...I swear, this didn't sound so whiny when it was just in my head.

I know that writing is work.  It wears me out sometimes, even on an physical level - when I'm working on a book, I usually finish the night's writing session exhausted.  Hammering out 2000+ words over the course of one CD will do that.  But this is the first time that even getting things to the point where I can make them into books is just as tiring.

There's a part of me that wants to blame it all on work - y'know, the job that pays me so I can afford to sit here and whine about my writing problems.  :P  We've been dealing with a massive amount of stuff to do since July, mandatory overtime included.  There's a constant level of stress as we continuously get more work in than we can do.  So a lot of the time, all I want to do when I get home is sit down and relax, not try to hash out a plot and a world and all of that.

On the plus side, when I have felt like working on writing stuff, I've been doing more.  Over the long weekends for the holidays, I tried doing a midday writing shift.  Most weekend days, I have this period around 11AM where I find myself wondering what I should do next, so I figured I might as well try to get some plotting done instead of saving it all for the evening.

It worked really well.  I got a lot done over those long weekends, and while I didn't pull two writing shifts every day, I did it enough that it's something I can try for every weekend.

Of course, me being me, now I get on my own case when I don't do two writing shifts on weekend days, and doing more leaves me, you guessed it, even more tired.

I'm sure I'll eventually figure out the best way to handle all this.  It's just that, after last year's doldrums, I'd been hoping to dive right into this year with a fresh start and go forth and kick ass at everything.  But as if being worn out wasn't enough, it's hard to get past the fear of things not working out, and I have to fight that off every single time I sit down to work.

All I can do is keep trying.  And try to get more sleep.

IWSG: Start Over

Every single year, on January first, I pay way too much attention to what I'm doing for the first time that year.  I recognize my first meal of the year, my first reading of the year, so on and so forth, and try not to attach any symbolic importance to all of it.  (I usually fail at that.)  I think the new year triggers some weird part of what I call "writer brain", and prompts me to think that everything's significant just because the calendar rolled over.

But this got me thinking: if I'm going to be a little bit neurotic about the new year, there has to be some way for me to use it to my advantage, to get something good out of it.  I looked back at how my attempts at writing went in 2017, and at all the time I spent trying to make things work when they just plain wouldn't.

And I realized that the new year is the best time to start over.

I think a lot of the problems I had with making stories work was that I kept trying to build on what I'd already done, or take a few elements that I thought worked and put them into something else, stuff like that.  Most of the ideas I worked on were things I'd been messing with for quite a while.  To be fair, that doesn't mean none of those older ideas could work - as I said a few entries ago, one of my current projects is something I first started working on in 2014.  But I think that one's an exception.

It's possible, maybe even likely, that I would have had a much easier time last year if I'd been willing to just start things over - to let go of what I'd done before and come at it completely fresh.  You can build up a tremendous amount of baggage around a story idea that won't work.  I know this very well; there's a story file somewhere on my computer that's more than fifty pages long and doesn't have a single complete plot or reasonably-developed character anywhere in it, because I kept trying to find a new angle on the same idea instead of just dropping it and starting over.

Hell, my idea file has three or four variants on an idea from 2016 that I never could get to work.  Some of those notes include sarcastic comments about how I'm still trying.  And saying mean things to myself in my idea file kind of says it all about last year.

Anyway.  I'm sure that everyone who reads this has different processes for going from idea to finished story.  But I know I'm not the only one to try to build a new story on the broken bones of another.  So this is me giving advice in IWSG for the first time in I don't know how long:

Stop that.  Start over.  Start anew.  Build your story without looking back.  Because I think you've got a better shot at finding what the story's supposed to be if you're not trying to keep pieces from what it's not.  One of my two plots-in-progress is something completely new for me, and it's the one that's going really well.

So I hope that, in the new year, starting anew will work well for you too.

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.