Been There, Done That.

This could be an IWSG post.  But don't worry!  I have an IWSG post already set for next week, and it's a doozy.  O_o  This isn't just a blog, it's a damn therapy session.

Anyway.  The recent issues I've been having with the TAW reworking/rewrite/rrrrrrrrgghhh have me thinking.  As anyone who knows me knows, I think too much.  My brain never stops until I fall asleep, and it starts again at full speed as soon as I'm awake.  And thanks to that, I realize how I'm falling into not one but two patterns with my writing.

The first is one that I'm guessing a lot of writers fall into: I keep trying to find new ways to make the same old stories work.  I'm not talking about the idea that there are only a few different plots, I've covered that before.  I'm talking about continuously seeking out new spins on stories I've told before and hoping that maybe, just maybe, this time it'll work.

I wrote both urban fantasy and new adult before I really knew what those things were, in a long-running fiction series that took place at a college.  It was all kinds of fun, it had no plot, and it was entirely unpublishable.  People loved it.  Seriously.  I didn't think it was possible to post anything on the internet and not get a single negative comment, but I managed it.

I keep trying to find ways to make that story series into an actual novel (or four), and it crashes and burns every time.  Sometimes this happens after five or six pages, sometimes this happens when I write the book and hate it by the end, and sometimes this happens in the plotting stages, like what happened this past weekend.  After I swore I'd never try to make it work again.

And this isn't the only thing I've tried to find a new way to make work only to have it fail.  No matter how many times I tell myself to let these stories go, there's that part of my mind that says "But what if you do it this way?" and I chase that rabbit.  Every.  Single.  Time.  And it sucks, it well and truly does, because it makes me feel like I've failed yet again, which does nothing for those particular insecurities.  I know that a lot of writers find new ways to write about the things that fascinate them, but this doesn't feel like that.  Probably because their stories actually work.

So, to get ridiculously metaphorical, that's one slice of bread on this neurosis sandwich.* The other is the loop I keep finding myself in with regards to books I try to get published.  Write something, spend a ton of time editing and polishing it, try to get it published, have no success, find insurmountable flaws with the book that I somehow didn't see before, set it aside or drop it completely, write something else.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

I know this is the sort of thing everyone goes through when trying to get published, but for some reason it feels like I ought to be better able to stick with things.  I feel like I quit too easily, even when I realize that I've written something that probably shouldn't be published, like the book I wrote a few years ago that topped out at 209,000 words and doesn't really bear further mention.  It bothers me that I'm in this cycle and can't seem to get out of it.

I don't think it's that I'm unwilling to take the time to do rewrites and revisions; I once rewrote an entire third of a book to make the major changes necessary.  I don't think it's me being too easily defeated; if that was the case, I would have quit a decade ago.  I don't know if it's the thrill of the shiny new idea.

Hell, I don't know if this loop is actually a good thing, so I don't spend years and years trying to get a book published that I've lost faith in.  I don't generally think quitting is better than being stubborn, but this might be one of the few exceptions.

So, yeah.  I'm constantly fighting against these things.  And as much as I hate to turn this into me asking for advice again, I've already called this blog a therapy session, so... thoughts?

*For the record, the filling of my neurosis sandwiches is a squishy, gurgling blackness that constantly whispers, "You have already failed" over and over and over.  It's tough to choke down, but that's the only way to get it to shut up.

...but I Want Them to Love Her.

Okay, this isn't actually a sequel to my "They're Going to Hate Her" post from last year, but what I can I say?  I like the title symmetry.

I also like my characters (and ham-handed segues), and I want other people to like them too, that other blog entry notwithstanding.  Which is why there's another bit of feedback I've received about THE ACCIDENTAL WARLOCK that has me concerned.  It's something I've seen several times and tried to ignore, but with a reworking/rewrite/completely new Shiloh & Alexi story on my mind, this is something I have to consider:

I've heard from quite a few people that they couldn't connect with or relate to Shiloh, the book's main character.

This is difficult for me to deal with.  I've lived with Shiloh in my head since 2002.  She's been through various forms and incarnations, from floating runic to wielder of Mjolnir to the demon-touched girl she is now, but she's always been easy to write, and I've always loved writing her.  She's a bookworm who gets thrust into some sort of adventure, and I don't get why readers aren't connecting with that.  Haven't we all wanted to be in the stories we're reading?  (Okay, maybe not fans of The Hunger Games.)  I can't be the only one who's dreamed of something happening that pulls me out of my normal life and launches me into something amazing.

I've done my best to give her engaging personality traits, especially in the first few pages of TAW, where it's most important.  She's chasing after something she's dreamed about, she's driven to find it despite what others say, she's willing to admit she could be wrong but refuses to let that possibility stop her.  When things go horribly wrong, she doesn't freak out and have to be rescued; she panics a little but keeps her head and fights back.  I know I'm biased, but if this was happening in the first five minutes of a movie, I'd be all kinds of engaged and want to know what happens to her next.

Oddly enough, pretty much everyone who's read the book loves Alexi.  But I don't think I'm ever meant to tell a story from her point of view.  Ever had an idea and felt your muse threaten rebellion?  Yeah.  That.  I don't get it, but I'm not fighting it.

I can't help thinking I'm doing something wrong if I keep hearing this same sort of thing.  One potential critique partner listed it as a reason why she stopped after the third chapter, and of the two times I've entered this book in Pitch Wars, four out of the eight mentors I applied to said this.  And I know not every critique deserves consideration, but when a bunch of people say the same thing, it's safe to say there's an issue that I need to address.

So here's my question: how do you make your characters engaging?  I know there's no magic formula, but I'm doing the best I can and it's clearly not working.  I know that part of the problem might be that the mentors only read one chapter; when I think of characters I love, it's how I feel about them at the end of the book, not the start.  But I'm open to suggestions.

Next entry: been there, done that.

Pressing Pause.

Delirium: "Um. What's the name of the word for things not being the same always.  You know.  I'm sure there is one, isn't there?"
Morpheus: "Change."
Delirium: "Oh.  I was afraid of that."
--'The Sandman', issue #43, written by Neil Gaiman

This is not the journal entry I planned to write last week.  That seems to happen a lot in this blog.

I spent from last Wednesday to last Saturday in the kind of deep mental funk that we writers get into (I'm sure I can't be the only one) when a project isn't going well.  When my writing isn't going well, nothing in my life is going well, so the comedown from DragonCon was worse than the usual post-convention mental hangover.  And it stemmed from the kind of doubt that, were it mold, would devour an entire city block.

It started when one of the mentors for Pitch Wars said THE ACCIDENTAL WARLOCK didn't read like YA.  And I started wondering if I really want to write YA.

It's kind of strange thing - I'm not even sure why I made TAW a YA novel.  It just seemed to fit.  The teenage years are a time of discovery, so why not make those years even more interesting by having Shiloh discover she wields a forbidden magic?  But that one comment got to me in a way none of the other critique I've received for this book did.  It got me thinking, y'know, I can do a lot more if the main characters don't have to be teenagers.

Then, like dominoes falling, the thoughts kept coming.  I don't want Abraxas to always be a YA-only world.  Working with Shiloh and Alexi in their early twenties could be fascinating.  I'll relate much better to older characters, and thus be able to write them better.  I'd like to be able to have these characters age as the series goes on, since Shiloh's at the upper limit for YA and Alexi's actually a few years older.  And all this was going on in my head while I was trying to write the sequel to TAW.

As I'm sure you can imagine, that didn't go so well.

For the record, I haven't settled on anything yet.  But after a lot of thought, I'm putting TAW on hold, and won't be doing further querying or contests for now.  I'm also not writing the sequel for now.  I don't know what's going to happen with it.  I might do a rewrite to fix a lot of issues I've realized about the story.  I might write yet another story for Shiloh and Alexi.  And by 'might', I mean "My Muse was hard at work yesterday, and now I have a basic plot summary, half a page worth of details and ideas, a title, and a frickin' pitch line for a brand new Shiloh & Alexi adventure".  Not actually complaining, just mildly bewildered.

But in order to truly figure out what I want to do, I need to work on some other stuff for now.  I have been, and that's going well so far.  Here's hoping it continues to go well once I actually start writing it.

I want to thank everyone who's read TAW, and everyone who's helped me with advice and encouragement along the way.  I well and truly appreciate it, and I hope y'all will be willing to put up with further badgering about reading when I have Something Completely Different sometime down the road.  Eh heh heh....

Next entry: on engaging characters.

IWSG: Someday, They'll Love You.

I got back from DragonCon almost two days ago, and I'm still tired.  Going back to work tomorrow is going to suck.  >_<  But it was an awesome trip, best time I've had at the 'con in a while.  I stayed up late hanging out with friends, was first in line to get a book signed by Jim Butcher, and took a bunch of great pictures.

I also got into a dance-off with one of the Blues Brothers at a Tolkien-themed 70s music dance party.  I lost, of course.  One does not simply get into a dance-off with a Blues Brother and win.

One of the greatest things about DragonCon is that it's cross-fandom like crazy - it's all about fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, and there's representation from hundreds if not thousands of different works.  For example, I went as Bumi from "Legend of Korra", while my friend Paul had costumes for both Harry Dresden of "The Dresden Files" and Rincewind from Terry Prachett's "Discworld" series.  (Together, we were an awesome crossover.)  And seeing so many different people celebrating so many different things got me thinking.

Every single creator behind all those series was once just like us.

They looked at their hard work and wondered why it seemed like nobody liked it, why nobody wanted to hire them or help them get published.  They wondered if they had what it takes, or if they were just deluding themselves.  They wondered if all their hard work was worth it.  They wondered if quitting would be easier.

And now, because they didn't quit, their names are known all over the world.  They have people lining up for their new releases.  They have sales numbers that mean they can keep doing what they love.  And they have fans who show the world just how much they love their work.

So no matter what you're feeling now, no matter how difficult it seems, no matter how much you want to quit or wonder if you could quit if you tried: keep at it.  Because when you make it, it'll all be worth it.  Because someday, they'll love your work too.

I'm writing a lot of this for myself, to tell y'all the truth.  I didn't get chosen for the contest I mentioned two weeks ago, and looking at the critique I got, I'm sitting here torn between "Maybe they have a point on that" and "How the HELL much do you expect from FIVE [expletive deleted] PAGES?!".  So I needed to write this out, to remind myself that someday, I'll look back on this and laugh, because I just got done telling someone who's at a convention dressed as one of my characters how much I love their costume.

Next entry: I started writing the sequel to THE ACCIDENTAL WARLOCK last night.  My next entry will be about that and why I'm writing it now.

The Story Elusive

It's time once again for another blog entry that I didn't know I was going to write until I sat down to write it.  Brought to you by the letters W, T, and F, and the punctuation mark ?.

So, I have this story idea I'm trying to work on.  This is nothing new; anyone who's read more than a few entries here knows I spend way too much time going on about one plot or another.  But with most of the things I write about, I have a character or two to work with, some solid ideas about the plot, and a few definite locations.

This idea?  I have none of those.

What I have is a whole cluster of vague ideas and concepts, things I think should happen in a story where I don't know what the actual story is yet.  I have mental pictures of settings, locations that might or might not be part of the story, since I don't know how the main setting should be shaped but I know it's going to change, maybe a lot, over the course of the story.  I have vague hints of main characters and minor characters, without names or faces or personalities, just the knowledge that there needs to be People Doing Stuff, and that Stuff has to happen for the story to happen.

If this sounds difficult to understand, it's because I know that the story itself is supposed to be surreal and dreamlike and should be more than a little scary if you look deeper.  It's inspired by some fictions that have come to mean a lot to me, and might even be seen as a tribute as I try to put them all into one place and see if they'll blend.

It's the sort of thing I'd question my ability to write if I had any idea how it was supposed to go.

I know this is nothing new for we writers.  I'm not the first one to feel this way about a would-be story and I damn sure won't be the last.  It's just that plotting has been going really well for me recently; I have one plot ready for writing and another nearly so, with a third that's still in progress but going well.  So it's frustrating to me to have something I really want to write that's taunting me with vague glimpses and strange visuals, like the moon quite literally turning into a rose, when I can't figure out for the life of me what the story really is.

While I usually take a shot before plotting or writing, I don't believe in writing drunk, else I'd be trying that for this story.

Anyway.  I feel better after getting that off my chest.  Here's hoping I figure this out sometime soon.  A single named character would be nice, or an idea of the story's actual structure.  But I'm about to head off to DragonCon for the long weekend, so I'll try to spend five days not thinking about this.  Who knows?  Maybe I'll get inspired....

Contested.

For the record, this is the entry I was supposed to write last week.  Last week's entry demanded to be talked about sooner, and now I regret last week's entry almost entirely, because now I have people looking forward to a story that, assuming everything goes as well as possible and I don't hate the entire thing as soon as I've finished writing it, probably won't be reader-worthy until 2016.

Anyway.

Before I started this whole blogging thing, I hardly knew about the various "help you find an agent" writing contests.  I heard Rena mention them now and again when she was participating, and I had my doubts about them.

I've often seen agents described as the "gatekeepers" of the publishing world; they're the ones with the connections, so they decide who uses those connections.  Entering contests seemed like adding yet another gate, and that never seemed like a good thing to me - the whole publishing process is enough of a pain, why make it more complicated?

After participating in a few, though, I don't see it the same way.  I've received some good feedback from contests, and that helped me solve a few key issues with THE ACCIDENTAL WARLOCK's opening chapter.  Just reviewing that first chapter over and over for various contests has helped it as well.

Reviewing my query letter for Pitch Wars helped too, as I caught an errant 'and' that I'd somehow missed when I sent said query out to over twenty different agents.  >_<

Also, I think the agents participating in these contests are more likely to give better consideration to contest entries than the usual daily query letters.  Contest entries will, in theory, have had the hell polished out of them and be better for it, and I've heard a lot of success stories.  So it seems less like the contests are another gate, but something to give you a better chance of getting through the gate in the first place.

Yes, I'm stubborn enough that it took me a while to realize that.

On a personal note, back when I was working with SKYBORNE, I actually won a full request from a contest I entered.  I was beyond excited, for obvious reasons; the readers were from a quite successful small press.  Unfortunately, I didn't know that this small press only handled books with a heavy romance element, and the romance in that book was barely there.  Even now, I feel like that quasi-win hardly counts.  -_-  It's for the best, though.  That book would have been a horrible way to start a series.  I mean, when you not only save the entire world but quite literally put it back together in the first book, what the hell do you do for a sequel?

Next entry: umm.  Next Wednesday is the last day I'm here before leaving for DragonCon.  I can't promise a thing.  ^_^

Cracking the Magic Mirror

I never really thought I'd want to write something based off a fairy tale.  But I think we all know what it's like to have an idea that won't go away.

I've seen a lot about fairy tale rewritings or retellings or whatever you want to call them over the past few years.  From an abstract perspective, I can understand why they're popular - these stories have become such a huge part of our culture, they're tales that most people will recognize immediately, and there's just something about them that resonates.  The way they can freely change in the telling, the way they've been reinvented all across the world, and the fact that the original stories are often violent and brutal...  There's a lot to work with there.

Hell, if I hadn't already decided to work with this one, I might have talked myself into it with that last paragraph.

But until a few weeks ago, I'd never had an idea that lent itself to reimagining a fairy tale.  I've plotted enough stories, though, to know that my best plots tend to come from combining two different ideas.  A song I kept hearing at work gave me ideas toward one sort of story, just vague hints and images, so I did the usual note-scribbling, unsure if anything would come of it.  That same day, I explained the concept of apple spiders to a co-worker.  She said it reminded her of a particular fairy tale, and my brain made the connection.  I suddenly realized what the story I'd been taking down notes for was meant to be.

I'm still putting everything together - hell, I just figured out how the story starts today, right in the middle of my drive home.  (Getting story ideas on the freeway is all kinds of fun, believe me.)  But the way it's coming together now, I can tell this is one that will work.

I'll need to read the original tale to really make sure I get things straight, but there are all kinds of elements I'm already putting together into the plot.  The magic mirror, the glass coffin, blood and snow and ebony, so on and so forth.  A system of magic I thought of years ago will fit perfectly into this world, and it's something I've wanted to use for a long time.  This is why I write everything down and urge other writers to do the same - you never know when it'll be useful again.

Granted, I still don't have a full plot, and the standard number of characters for this tale means I have a lot of work ahead of me.  And as I said, this isn't a story I ever expected to tell.  But I'm excited about it.  With any luck, I'll hash out the plot this winter and have this ready to be my second book for 2015.

I'm well and truly glad I figured all this out, because it fulfills a story desire I've had for a long, long time: I just plain really want to do "Snow White and the Seven Samurai".

Next entry: Contested.