Going quiet for a few weeks

I mean, this is a pretty quiet blog to begin with, but still.

I was chatting with a coworker this week about blogs and business. Afterwards I was kinda like, Y'know, I'm not really even sure what I'm doing with that blog of mine.

Originally this was intended to be a personal sort of Public Object, a daily writing log where I could track the progress of the former Manuscript. After I met my original goal (111 days, which is to say a semester, of steady work on a novel) I dropped off to occasionally posting updates and snippets. In July of last year I removed all of my original daily log posts, leaving the blog a bit barren. About a week later, I went on a seven-month hiatus due to various personal circumstances (including limited computer access from mid-October until after New Year's).

And, well, now I'm back. And I'd like to post things. But I haven't really got a goal or a gimmick here.

So I'm going to have a think (and maybe even a post or two) about blogging and where it belongs for me. The blog's almost definitely going to have a makeover, and while it won't be disappearing, it might take a backseat and once again become a place where I offer brief updates and the occasional snippet. In the meantime, you can find me:

- on on deviantART (I post only rarely, but I do quite a bit of reading and commenting on others' works) and
- on Tumblr (which I am also trying to figure out what I'm doing with, because it's so cool but also a horrible massive timesink)

Process and worldbuilding

As of April 1st, I've blown past my personal deadline for my VP submission! I figure this is reason enough for another ramble about process.

My intent, with this story, was to rework my process so that (a) the story would be structurally sound before I started diving into scenes, and (b) I could actually get it done in a reasonable amount of time.

This is how my process was supposed to work:
1) Draft an outline and a few early scenes, to get a sense of the characters and plot structure.
2) Fix the plot structure before doing any more work in-scene.

2.5) Get a strong sense of character personalities/arcs.

3) Figure out what worldbuilding needs to be done and take the time for what is ABSOLUTE NECESSITY for the submission.
4) Redraft and polish the early scenes/outline for submission.
5) Do more worldbuilding in the interim.

This is how my process actually worked:
1) Draft an outline and a few early scenes, to get a sense of where everything is going to fall apart.
2) Start fixing the narrator's character arc.
3) Realize the narrator's character arc is entirely dependent on another character's political views, which are in turn dependent on the most significant and time-consuming chunk of worldbuilding.
4) Spend approximately 15,000 words and three weeks trying to work through said worldbuilding.
5) Emerge with a vague sense that the worldbuilding is only marginally tenable, but at least knowing how it's going to fuel the story, and dive into the non-narrator's political views as March 31st (and the cheaper application fee) flies past.
6) Become utterly enamored of a short story idea about said non-narrator, which APPEARS to need far less worldbuilding -- oh, but wait, that's a first draft and I'd have to start over from Step 1.


So. Yeah.

The good news is, working from an outline seems to have the effect I was looking for -- it helps me figure out snags before I'm neck-deep in scenes. The plot is much more coherent this time around (although it helps that I had a good idea of the overall structure to begin with, where, for my last story, I was flailing around among a dozen alternatives), and I've already picked out and started to remedy the biggest structural weakness.

The bad news is, worldbuilding.

A brief list of some of the topics I need to research and reinvent in order to make this story work:
- Political theory/philosophy (so as to build the working ideology of a relatively stable repressive pseudo-democracy that operates on a theory of innate and unequal intelligence)
- Descriptive politics/political science (so as to figure out a working mechanism of the above government)
- Economic...everything (to figure out whether a repressive pseudo-democracy could exist alongside what so far appears to be a relatively capitalistic system)
- The history of (among other things) the car, the airplane, the phone, the computer, and the Internet (to see if it's feasible to have tablets with instant messaging, but phones unconnected to wifi; car dashboards with their own Siri and internet access; and no sign of airplanes anywhere)
- Agriculture/environmental science (because most of the world is a wasteland and I have no idea how these people have enough to eat)

Now, on the one hand, this IS a fantasy, and so I get a teeeensy bit of hand-waving leeway for the latter two questions. On the other hand, the actual ~fantasy magic~ is not in any way incorporated into the everyday life (or even present!) for of 99% of the world's inhabitants, and I can't really say "Demons destroy all the airplanes" and "the Lowells invented ultra-productive agriculture that doesn't require any space at all, and they synced up wifi to everything except the phones, oh and this was all in the two years where they were inventing a super-secret protection against the evil demon things too".

So: Research.

I've rambled elsewhere about my struggles with research, but I'll rehash a bit here. Essentially: research is work for me. Hard work, because it's time-intensive, it involves only minimal writing, and the answers to my questions are often frustratingly elusive or ensconced in technical jargon from a discipline I'm unfamiliar with. My 'writing fix' -- the enjoyment that makes writing worthwhile for me -- only really happens when I'm putting words on the page, and when I'm researching, I'm usually not writing. Worldbuilding requires writing, but it's of a 'going in circles, patching up holes, finding inconsistencies, and deleting the untenable half of that idea' sort. And...I'm simply not very efficient at all of this. I don't know if there's a way to BE efficient at research when (as above) the research I need amounts to 'a ground-level beginner's understanding of this entire discipline as well as some fairly advanced knowledge of recent theories on specific subject X'.

On the plus side, you don't have to learn the beginner's ground level of a subject more than once. And, by and large, these are subjects that will be useful to me in other stories and other worlds.

One answer to this MIGHT be 'start worldbuilding before you start writing and before you put yourself on a deadline'. Which...is a thing I'm planning on trying, for a Super Sekrit Project that may or may not happen if I ever get this story done. But it's difficult for me, because I'm a very results-focused person, so I don't like to wander around reading up on this and that when I don't know what plot/character element it's going to be used for, if at all.

Anyway. I'm still chugging away at my submission, and keeping my fingers crossed that it'll be done before the final deadline. But I'm not sure, at this point, that I'll be satisfied enough with my draft to submit it to anywhere professional.



(P.S. If any of you have book/article suggestions re: the research subjects above, I'm eternally in your debt. The political/economic sciences are broader and less easily-defined fields than the history of ancient Rome, and I'm not even sure where to start. At the moment I've got a brief primer on political philosophy that is maybe a little too fond of Enlightenment-through-Victorian-era Upper-Crust Dude Philosophers, and more than a little light on more recent theories. I've got an eye on Hannah Arendt for totalitarian theory, but I picked up Origins of Totalitarianism a few months ago and dropped it because it was pretty intimidating.)

Reading to Think: Hope and Horror (The Medium)

This is a thing I was doing on Tumblr for awhile, only now I can't be bothered to go on Tumblr because it sucks up huge chunks of my life. Essentially, it's odd thoughts about books from the perspective of a wannabe author-lit theory lover-avid reader-sf fan.

The book: The Medium by M.R. Graham


A brief summary, pulled from the series website:
Lenny is good at teaching physics. He is good at fixing things, making friends, and not attracting attention. He is good at being a medium, helping spirits pass beyond the Veil. But as a vampire incapable of violence, he has always been a bit of a joke.

All it takes is a drink in a hotel bar, a stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time, to run him afoul of Sebastian Duran, a lunatic who controls other people’s minds better than he can control his own. Torn away from everything he knows, trapped and starved and under constant mental assault, Lenny’s best hope is Kim Reed, a wizard tasked with bringing down Duran. Kim cannot believe that Lenny is evil, but neither can she hide him, and while she battles for his freedom, Lenny is forced to confront his own potential for monstrosity.


I am a huuuuge fan of M.R. Graham, because (a) she has this INCREDIBLE eye for detail that makes her fantasy worlds real and immersive, and (b) she self-publishes (which means she is her own agent, editor, cover artist, marketer, and goodness knows what else, unless she hires someone out of her own pocket) and I am generally in awe of anyone who can produce a nuanced and polished work while doing the work of entire departments. If this post piques your interest, I'd encourage you to give her books a try (and review them so she gets more exposure!).

Anyway: On to the vampires.

(no major plot spoilers below, but includes a discussion of the book's major characters)

Narratives

So I've just returned from a much-needed trip to my alma mater and a weekend of fabulous recitals*. A ten-hour round trip gave me lots of time to think about life, writing, and potential blog posts. I thought about travel and the writing process, then decided that a self-absorbed post about my brain and my life would be more fun for me to write. :P

I'm a person who makes a deliberate effort to live an interesting life. This is partly because I'm also a person who likes adventure stories and thinks in narratives (so, a fulfilling life for me is one that produces adventures) and partly just because it's not that hard. I have a formula: Figure out what you find interesting, figure out a way to incorporate a little bit of it into your life, and then TALK IT UP because the key to the story's in the telling. And enjoy the misadventures that happen despite your best efforts, because they're the most interesting of all.

This weekend's interesting story: college trip. My college is fairly small and chock full of wonderful people, so walking around campus with my face was a bit like wearing a sign that said "FREE HUGS IF YOU KNOW MY NAME" (or: hugs for existing!). This was the conversation that cropped up every time someone tackled me:

"Hi! Hi! How are you?"
"Boring!"
"But you went to England!"
"WENT now I am back and my life is boring. Also I'm applying for the Peace Corps."
"Wow that is interesting TELL ME ABOUT IT"

And we would go on to have a very interesting discussion about our respective lives or about who's seen who naked. After half a day of these I was beginning to feel vaguely like a fraud. Oh my goodness, I thought, distressed. I spent three whole years convincing people I was interesting and now they're brainwashed into it!

And then, uh, I took a second look at that thought.

I mentioned above that I tend to think in narrative. Let me clarify that a little bit. I frame my experience the same way I frame the stories I write -- not as Plots with a beginning, middle, and end, but as the interaction of flawed but essentially valuable people moving toward a complicated and temporary conclusion. (This is a nice summary of why I have trouble plotting and finishing stories, by the by.)

This is a useful way for me to understand other people, but there's a problem in that I am always in the middle of my own Narrative**. So when I'm in a phase that doesn't strike me as particularly interesting (for instance: copy-pasting, filing, and house-sitting while waiting for my diploma and whittling away at various applications) I start to think of my life as not very interesting.

Until, that is, people who've known me for three years are interested in my life. Because they're probably the best people to judge. They've seen me doing awesome things and also locking myself in my room with a book for six hours because TOO MUCH STRESS CANNOT HANDLE, which is about the closest I come to a breakdown.

There's a thing I learned at college that I tend to forget at inconvenient moments: We don't shape our lives around Truth or Reality. We shape our lives around what we perceive as true and real, and every day we choose what we believe to be True. I mean, not in a ridiculous way -- obviously, you can't take a green pillow and call it red, and now the pillow is red. But you can say, "That pillow belongs on the couch," because the pillow is your favorite and you sit on the couch all the time, and you can say, "That pillow does not belong on the couch," because it's neon orange and clashes horribly with the couch, which is a sort of dull yellow. Neither of these statements is inherently more True than the other, but in choosing one and acting on it, you make it your truth.

So the upshot of this rather long-winded post is that I need to stop telling people that my life is boring, and also that the entirety of Potsdam needs to come live in my house to give me hugs and occasionally whack me on the head.


-

*This remark is in no way influenced by the fact that I was taken to a delicious and fancy dinner by the performers' families. They're wonderful people as well as excellent musicians ;)
**I've used the word 'narrative' for this way of thinking for years, but I've just finished Redshirts by John Scalzi, and now I can't stop thinking about that Narrative and it's making my brain hurt. (Also I will never be able to watch a long-running TV series again.)

Having (finally) finished A Dance with Dragons...

Here is my fantasy casting for the court of Westeros at the end of the series:

(Spoilers abound, so have a cut.)

Travel photos

So I'm wanting to keep this blog alive, as best I can! My goal is to post at least once a week.

I'm not just going to ramble on about my writing - that would get tedious awfully fast. I have a decent storehouse of fun stories from my three months abroad, as well as some photos. Here's a sampling of the latter:

The village of Dolgellau, Wales.

Calton Hill, Edinburgh.

Two friendly goofballs whom I met off the Appian Way in Rome, one of whom I named Anklebiter and the other White Bear. There's a story in how we crossed paths.

One of the mosaic floors in the Baths of Neptune, in ancient Ostia Antica. I went on a scavenger hunt for mosaics and frescoes in Rome, because I was running out of ideas for my novel. It was great fun. :D

The pictures are crap quality, because my camera was having an adventure separate from my person for the majority of the trips. /sigh. (It was my fault.) But I figure they'll hold the fort until I have time to write a longer post.

Further on Viable Paradise, and putting The Manuscript away

So. After nearly two and a half years of research, drafting, backwriting, rewriting, drafting, and workshopping, I've decided to put The Manuscript away. Maybe for good.

It's terrifying, because for the last two years I've been working on virtually nothing else. But the fact is, all those hours of research amounted to only about a third of what the novel needs, and despite revision after revision since around a year ago, the novel was still a structural mess. When I started, I absolutely did not have the skill either to flesh out a fully-developed world closely based on real civilizations or to build approximately six interlocking plot arcs into a coherent narrative. The Manuscript shows this.

I think it still has promise if I'm willing to put several more years into it, but I don't think that several years on one novel are what I need as a writer. I've learned a ton about my process by working on it, I had an awesome experience workshopping it in my supervision course at school, and it's given me confidence that I can, eventually, develop into a Real Professional Writer. But there's only so much to be learned from sludging through the revision bog.

-

So, now what?

I've got another story that's been sitting on the back burner for quite some time now. I drafted a very confused version of it around March 2013, decided confused was about as good as it was going to get at that point, and consigned it to the depths of my file folder. Remembered it a couple of months ago and started toying with the ideas.

I originally wanted it to be a short story, but it would like to be awkward novella length. I'm going to see if I can wrangle it into a novel. It's deeply disturbing and kind of verges on the horror genre. It would be the first of a number of stories set in the same universe.

I've got a (structurally coherent!) outline and the first two scenes drafted. It's going to be my submission to Viable Paradise. Once I finish drafting the submission (I think the first five scenes will fit) I'm going to throw it up on Google Drive and see if I can bribe a few writerly friends to look it over for me. (I would wink at the people I've marked out as targets, but I don't know if any of them are following the blog just now.) Once I've got some realistic feedback, I'll write my cover letter and send it in -- at the moment trying to write a cover letter feels like diving into an abyss of inadequacy, mostly because I have no idea what anyone will think of this new story.

I think I've written the paragraph that will hook the instructors, though. I think that reading this story has destroyed my sense of reasonable human behavior in a novel, because it's kind of a scary paragraph.