Writing is a Socially Acceptable Form of Schizophrenia

Here's where I am in the rewrite phase for Necromancer Syndrome:

157 / 379 (41.4%)

I recently received rejection numero four for "To Reign in Purgatory" from The Town Drunk. I don't know why this rejection bothered me while the other ones I managed to brush off. Maybe it's because I'm getting close to the bottom of the barrel as far as places I plan on sending it, and it'll go back in the drawer after that.

Maybe it's because I was horribly sick this week and my mood was already not so bueno.

It's hard to remind yourself that rejection is just part of the process to publication when you're hacking up half a lung and your abs feel like a ninja monkey has kicked them repeatedly from coughing too hard.

Oh, and being heavily medicated probably didn't help.

Right, so fuck it. On to the next place.

As far as the 2YN goes, I think I've fixed some character motivations, filled in a few plots holes, and am very pleased with the two characters I combined into one. I also moved around the order of a good number of scenes, and it seems to have picked up the pacing a good bit. So, all in all, I'm still pretty happy with this project.

I still think I need to write something new. Just for fun. Maybe Justin's exercises might give me a boost.

Right, off to write!

So, the first time I read the section in Donald Maass' Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook about combining characters, my brain rebelled.

"But, but...I need those characters! All of them! Combining them together will destroy them!"

Now I'm starting to see that combining them may in fact make them stronger.

I'm in the rewrite phase of ze 2YN and I've been having a big problem with my MC's love interest (who happens to be a ghost). She just didn't seem to come to life (pun very much intended). If anything she was just kind of there, urging him on when he needed a nudging. My MC has a former FBI partner (also a ghost), who is way more important to the plot, has many more scenes, and is more emotionally involved and causes tension.

Why not combine them?

It seems so simple now. You know, after rewriting about a third of it from scratch.

Of course, I might think this is a terrible fix and change it again...

Right. So, I don't draw or sketch often. Probably why I'm not very good at it. But every once and a while I feel the need to try. Hopefully it'll look way cooler once I put the effort into coloring it. I hope the stringy bits on the monsters will look like the muscles you see in biology textbooks.

So, I received a really nice rejection from Andromeda today. I'm just glad that I made it to round three, but I'm still a little sad it didn't get chosen. The consensus from the other places that I submitted to seems to be that stories set in Hell are very unoriginal (even though one Andromeda reader commented that my piece was "genuinely funny") and the market is saturated with Hell stories.

Still, I'll get it back out to a couple other places on my list.

In other news, I have OMG SHINY NEW STORY brainworms, which are eating at my brainmeats. The idea's changed a bit from focusing on a genocidal alien cult, to something with many different scopes. The peacekeeping translators. The humans and their desperate bid for power. The main character's gen-engineered memory and her need to find her "brothers" and "sisters" with the same problem.

Mmmm...brainworms.

*brainmeats get eaten*

I've been rewriting Necromancer Syndrome kind of slowly. I pretty much rewrote the first 25K from scratch. It's only been recently that I've found stuff from the first draft that wasn't so horrible, or actually made sense in the larger scheme of things.

I've also noticed that in the first draft a good portion of the female characters are the take charge, brook no nonsense, kick your ass as soon as look at you type. And I have to admit, I usually cringe whenever I read about that type of uber-woman in fiction (because they're usually poorly written). And guess what? Yup. Same is true for my characters.

I've never rewritten anything quite this large. When I got to the end of the first draft, I was like, "Yay! I'm done! But...not really. It's kind of the start."

But I've realized something. I'm still in love with this idea. The first book I ever finished...none of the characters or ideas really chased after me. I didn't know where I was going, what I was doing, or what the hell it was about (oh yes, 637 pages later, I learned it wasn't about anything. Oh, and was a poor semi-imitation of my favorite book).

But this one...I feel like it's all mine. Not some poorly veiled attempted a fan-fiction or something.

Right.

Anyway, I just finished reading The Golden Compass and started on the next one. Now, I really liked the first book, and so far I like the second one. They're both damn fine books. But in places the author gets perilously close to going on long-winded diatribes about religion. Already in places it feels a little...heavy handed.

I hate diatribes. Whether or not I happen to agree with the author's point of view or not. Trying too hard to make a statement in fiction...just doesn't work for me. If you want that badly to take a stand on something controversial or hot-buttony, get it out of your system and write an essay. Then, set that essay aside and write fiction now that you're a little farther removed from the issue at hand.

Not to say that fiction should be empty, or shouldn't say something important about all sorts of issues. The best stories in literature do that (and I hated reading Victorian literature, but the ones we read chipped away at or challenged the strictness of women's roles, which showed it can be done subtlety). It just shouldn't...rant or push or shove the issue down you're throat. Maybe it's an issue of subtlety. Maybe it's going into the story without an ulterior motive, or the idea that you'll change the world and make everyone see as you see.

I once read a different book in a very popular series by a very popular fantasy author where one of the characters literally stood on a soap box. Seriously. Up on a box. Ten pages later and the character was still ranting. Ten pages of dialogue rants. It didn't move the plot forward. It didn't reveal anything about the character. The character became a two-dimensional mouthpiece for the author's views.

I haven't read anything by this author since.

Ah, and now that I've gone off on a rant about rants (but you'll notice I didn't write a short story about a young recent college grad who is angry about rants in fiction), I shall say adieu.

Erm, adieu.

I went on a trip to visit at friend recently, and I had plenty of time to kill while sitting in the airport waiting to board the plane. Rightly, I decided it would be a good idea to get something writing related done.

I've had a character floating around in my head for the better part of two years. And at last she decided that, damnit, her story would be my next book.

She first popped up two years ago while I was sitting in Linguistics and I wrote down that words with -nym on the end means "name." My brain thought "Nym" sounded like a cool name. And who would have a name that means "name"?

Someone lacking an idenity.

Since she showed up during Linguistics...that would be her job. Translating alien languages.

Anyway, I wrote a bunch for the background of the plot, and several "candy bar" scenes, and the history for some of the important alien races.

I felt like I got something accomplished, a feeling that's been sorely lacking as I haven't been editing much or writing anything new that's sparked my interest.

Anyway, time to go back to work!

A topic on the FM boards got me thinking about all those Epic Fantasy novels I used to read.

I don't read them anymore.

There was a time, from the point I was about fourteen to when I was twenty, when I exclusively read Epic Fantasy. Well, pretty much. There was always the odd science fiction book thrown in here and there, my obsessive stint with Anne Rice's angst, and the British horror books that were so gory my mom insisted I read them after I turned eighteen. But all in all, I read Epic Fantasy.

I guess the question is--why? I loved that I could become so engrossed with this whole other made up world, that I'd learn about other cultures (even if they were made up), culture clashes, and problems when people with power would use it for good or ill. I was always less enthused about the epic war battles. Sure, I knew that Epics usually focus on wars that sweep through the entire world, but that usually seemed less interesting to me then the interaction of people (or other fantasy races). I guess there's always been a little bit of anthropologist in me. Actually, when I'd finsh an Epic trilogy, or with the longer series not have enough money to buy the next ones, I'd feel reluctant to jump into a new world. I'd just have to expend as much energy as I did before to familiarize myself with all of its new peculiarities.

My first novel was an Epic Fantasy.

During the time that I wrote my first book, I stopped reading Epics. As a lit major I had too much to read for my classes. On top of that, I read somewhere that you shouldn't read in the genre that you're currently writing, so you don't steal too many ideas. (Yeah, it sounds a little weird but I did it anyway). On top of the top of that, the series I'd been reading started to...decline.

I think I started to fall out of love with them partly because some of them wouldn't freakin' end. Kind of like those shows that go on beyond their prime, where the major actors have left and have been replaced with characters everyone hates. Sort of like that.

I think I also developed a bit of reading ADHD. I lost patience trying to figure things out until it picked up around page 80. For a while, I actually cringed every time I picked up a big fat Fantasy. I'd always put it back on the shelf.

But how did I come to fall out of love with a subgenre? How did my reading tastes change? Does this happen a lot?

I read lots of Urban Fantasy and Space Opera now, but I'm wondering if I should retry my hand at reading an old favorite. I'm already pretty sure that I don't have what it takes to write one...or maybe it was just the problems involved in writing a first novel (even if it was a bad knockoff of my favorite trilogy, and no, it's not The Lord of the Rings).

That makes me wonder how I came up with my 2YN, which is a sort of mystery/paranormal/cyperpunk-esque mish-mash. I only hope it's not so much of a mish-mash that no one wants it.

Of course, I have to finish the rewrites, and then edits, then line edits, then more edits...first.

I yoinked this meme thing from ravens_quills. The list came from the top books most often tagged as unread by LibraryThing users.

The rules are to bold what you've read, italicise what you've started and not finished, strike out what you couldn't stand, put an asterix next to what you've read more than once, and underline what is on your 'to read' list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath* (hated the book, but had to read it more than once for different classes)
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound And The Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: A Novel
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

As you can see, I'm not a big fan of the classics. Sadly, I have no desire to read a good portion of these. I'm not sure what that says about me.

If you were wondering who I am, I'm macaroni_thief over at Forward Motion.

Right. So, this is my writing journal. As you can see it's new and shiny. My LJ friends over at my other journal who are mostly non-writers got tired of me blabbing about my writing constantly. Who better to irritate with writing angst than other writers?

My current projects...er, project, is my 2YN now hesitantly dubbed Necromancer Syndrome. I say hesitantly because titles are the devil. I can never come up with ones that are half-decent. I'm in the rewriting phase, eagerly looking forward to the editing phase, and the get-it-out-the-door phase.

Seeing as this is only my second book, I have high hopes for it. I've never edited something so large before (as my first novel is languishing in all it's 669 page not-so-glorious glory in my desk, propping up some other not-so-important documents).

I have my first submission ever, "To Reign in Purgatory," floating in round three at Andromeda. Before that I gathered my first rejections from a few biggie mags. YAY!

I also need to edit a short I wrote at 4am because Justin's exercises are eeeevil and they give you tenacious plot bunnies. Not quite sure what to do with it, so I'm holding off on the editing thing.

Let's see...OH! Sticky the stick figure. Right. A while ago I wrote a Top List of Things to do Before I Get Too Old To Remember My Name. In it was "Create a comic reel and have a fan base of at least three." Thus, the stick figure was born. I will have to rescan the drawings before I can post them.

So...yeah. Welcome!

I visited the local Borders recently since our hole-in-the-wall Waldenbooks mysteriously disappeared. After becoming gainfully employed I went a little crazy with the purchases, most of which have been on my To Be Read list for a while now.

Before I knew it I had six books in my arms. I forced myself to put one of them back.

Anyway, here's the damage:

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

A couple different people I know have highly recommended this book. I bought it because it's always on a really long wait list at the library.

Alien Taste by Wen Spencer

I've been looking for the first in the series for about a year now. I finally found it somewhere other than amazon.

A Thousand Words for Stranger by Julie E. Czerneda

The only book I picked up randomly, mostly because of the title. I've been craving a really good Space Opera to read. I hope this one fits the bill.

Moon Called by Patricia Briggs

Honestly, I usually stay away from books with superultramega hot chicks who look sexy on the cover. I don't know why. Maybe I worry there'll be too much romance, not enough...er, plot. But I read the first few pages and the character seemed strong and capable, but not (hopefully) OMGAWD which boy will I choose out of the droves slobbering at my hooker-booted feet.

Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher

Okay, so I've read all of the Dresden Files. Yeah, all of them. I decided to give his other series a whirl.

Right now I'm reading Wicked. Strange that someone who always hated the Wizard of Oz movie when she was little would be reading this retelling. Oh yes, I hated it. Hated it about as much as a seven year old can hate a movie. Maybe even then I thought Dorothy was full of it.

As far as my 2YN goes, I haven't been editing it as much as I'd like. I blame the new job for sapping my energy and brain power.

Here's where I am:

Necromancer Syndrome

65 / 379 (17.2%)