The FM Wand
YAReads has an interview with me up! I’m pleased and proud to report they’ve chosen Betrayals as their Book of the Month for December, so I encourage you to go on over there and take a look. I’ll also be posting a guest review there in the near future, so stay tuned.
Yesterday, someone brought up a good point: when you’ve got a school full of teenage half-vampire and werwulf boys, and one half-vampire girl, it’s not just the choice of tampons or pads you have to deal with, but also the question of disposal. A steel lockbox is a good idea, but I decided to take the FM approach and just teach Dru a method of burning the stuff with sorcerous fire as a disposal mechanism.
I do spend a lot of time on worldbuilding, and some of it is just FM. What’s FM, you ask? Well, I was married to a mechanical engineer for a while, and that’s a highly-technical term I picked up from him. Basically, it’s F!cking Magic.
Sometimes you can make the decision to just have things a certain way for the sake of the story. You have to make sure they’re consistent, and use the FM wand with a great deal of caution. I’ve read a lot of manuscripts and books where FM is the plot device of choice, because it’s easy and fun and playing God in your own little created world is much less difficult than actually doing research, thinking things through, and aiming for complete internal consistency. (I don’t think any book achieves complete internal consistency–we live in an imperfect world. But at least we can aim, right?)
Sometimes, especially if you’re getting bogged down in details, it’s nice to just make the conscious choice to have something be F!cking Magic. It helps you actually finish the book, and a good editor will call you on it and make sure it’s conscious choice instead of laziness. You may even get to the point where you can call yourself on it, and that’s a rare and wonderful thing.
Anyway, I’ve got school supplies to buy today and wordcount to achieve. I’ve got this heroine about to take refuge in the subways while being chased by vampires. It seems like a good idea at the time, we’ll see how it works out.
Over and out.
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Tags: nattering, novel madness, pennyworth advice
December 10th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Y’know, that’s an *excellent* solution. Not only because it takes care of the immediate problem, but because it also solves the down-the-road problem of what someone else might do to her magickally, using her blood.
Granted, it would probably be easier to break into her room and get some hair from her hairbrush … but I’m sure she’ll be taught all about why cleaning up after yourself that way is a good idea, if by some chance her dad hadn’t schooled her in it already.
Well done!