the goddamn muse

On Themes, and Horror

fog lolly

I may actually have to turn the heat on in some point. I love living in a temperate zone where I don’t have a lot of heating or cooling costs, but when my toes get numb even in socks it’s time for the indoors climate adjustment.

Work on Harmony has taken a strange turn. I’ve recently read quite a few pieces on Shirley Jackson, and this one in particular struck a chord. Quote: “The literary effect we call horror turns on the dissolution of boundaries.” This has been knocking around in my head for a few days now, and finally I chased down the tail end of the thought it spurred, grabbed it, and dragged it out into the light.

I don’t ever want to write YA again, for a variety of reasons. Yet there’s Rattlesnake Wind, and now Harmony, stories where the protagonist is a teenage girl. I’ll probably have to self-pub the former, since several YA publishers are demanding it be watered down before they’ll accept it and I am unwilling to do so. The latter most probably won’t see publication as it’s merely a gift for my agent, but neither of them are “young adult.” They have teenage protagonists, but they don’t fit easily into the YA genre. Consequently, nobody would know where to market or shelve them. C’est la (publishing) vie.

In both of them, the dissolution of boundaries happen. Women are constantly forced to endure invasions of their bodily sovereignty, and the pressure on young women to accept such things as the status quo is immense. You must be thin enough, pretty enough but not TOO pretty, independent enough but not to the point where it makes men uncomfortable, you are “upset” instead of “passionate”, you must cut and bind and shape and sculpt yourself to fit into a narrow, always-moving ideal–and if you do not, others will. Your body isn’t your own, it’s for people to make judgments (and catcalls) about.

Both stories qualify as “horror” for other reasons, but I had not seen this commonality in them. Also, in both the theme of bodily (and psychic) sovereignty under assault shows up. The strange thing is, I didn’t know that was a theme in Rattlesnake until I started thinking about it today. I didn’t even realize it was part of Harmony. It’s not quite blindness. I think it’s more not seeing the forest for the trees, in a way.

One of the questions I used to get in writing classes was “how do I put a theme in my work?” My answer: you don’t. You just focus on being honest, not looking away, not punking out, and the themes will happen. You won’t be able to swing a dead cat without hitting one. The time to worry about a theme and highlight it, if such a thing needs to be done, is in revision. Trying to “insert” a theme is a short road to damnation in the form of bullshit, and readers are allergic to that. Even if they were not, it is to be hoped that a writer aims to avoid the fragrance.

I tend not to see themes in my stories until an editor or my writing partner points them out. (There’s a funny story about the Valentine series in that respect, but it’s–say it with me–another blog post.) Once it’s pointed out, I feel like I was blind not to notice it. This is why I say trust the work, and trust the Muse. Your job is to show up, to get your ass in the chair and your fingers producing the words so you can catch the magic when it drops. Themes will happen almost to spite and despite you.

One of the more exotic parts of revision is coming across passages I don’t remember writing, especially when they solve some deep-seated plot problem I wasn’t even aware of during the zero draft in a particularly elegant way. The sensation is close to being haunted–a sense that some other intelligence was at work while I was in a creative fugue state. The idea that I’m not quite in control of what comes through in my stories used to be incredibly disconcerting, but parenting, at least, has taught me that total control is neither advisable nor possible in this mad, messy, beautiful thing we call life.

These are my somewhat rambling thoughts this chilly Tuesday morning. The weather report swears there will be thunder later, which I will like but Miss B will not, and Trundles will ignore. There is chicken soup to be made, with plenty of garlic to make my corpse uninhabitable for the cold threatening to fill my nose and knock out my immune system.

Over and out.

Story Bones

Story bones are strange and difficult things. Imagine a skeleton, structure for the dips and curves of the whole body, or a scaffolding to hang a three-dimensional tapestry on. Either way, there are weight-bearing supports in your stories, things that have to be strong enough to keep the whole thing from sliding into a pile.

Sometimes they’re character-driven. If you have a particular character who, say, has a volatile temper, your reader will believe them making bad choices in a fit of anger. Or it can be point-of-view based–a character who appears outwardly calm but is boiling inside, so we can believe it when they erupt. Showing either character’s internal state is a fine point of craft, not necessarily a structural choice. The structure is deeper, in whatever purpose that anger serves in the story.

Some bones are pure plot. These are tricky, because you have to make sure your characters are serving themselves and their own wants instead of said plot. A villain in an action movie has to work harder to avoid being a simple mustache-twirling device. At the same time, to sell a farfetched plot you have to do a lot of heavy lifting and scaffolding in other areas. Ideally, a plot should be inevitable, even its twists, from the very first sentence. Every beginning should carry within itself the seeds of its ending.

Notice I say ideally. It’s something to aim for, a moving target that changes shape, direction, speed, and everything else each time you begin a story.

There are other types of bones–emotional, where your character’s reactions and internal states reflect the motion and disturbance in the story. Or worldbuilding, which requires more than you’d think. Shoddy world building makes for a shaky scaffold, even if all other structural elements are in place. It also hikes the threshold of disbelief to chest-high, if not further.

About a quarter of the structural work in every story I write is what I call “excavation”. I’m not really building a narrative, I’m digging around a patch of disturbed dirt and clearing a submerged shape. Sometimes you only find a cellar down there, but other times you stumble across a palace to be dug out with shovel and toothbrush. There comes a certain point in writing–about a third of the way in, just before the long deadly slog–when I have to sit back and think about the shape that’s forming under my fingertips as I type. I’ve grown much better at seeing the whole thing earlier in the game, so to speak, but there’s still the odd book that will refuse to be seen from above. For those, it becomes a swing from one handhold to the next, with attention to how I’m shifting my weight–now there’s a rock-climbing metaphor, but it’s the closest I can come to the sensation.

Knowing where the bones are can save you a lot of time and trouble, and it helps in the other sixty percent of writing a story, which is–are you ready?

Revision.

Revision is where you see the bones and can wrench them about to make the body take the shape you want. This is not a painless process, for you or for the book/short/novella/whatever. At the same time, it’s so much easier to revise when you have the whole thing on the table and can see both its current shape and the one you want it to take. Sometimes books have a weird butterfly effect going on inside them–one thing changes, and the changes ripple out until all of a sudden the structure clicks into place with a jolt you can almost hear and certainly feel. Other times–let’s be honest, this happens a lot–you’ll be going through and looking at the underpinnings, knowing you have to solve a problem, and the solution will be in a passage you don’t even remember writing, a little gift from the Muse. She anticipates, the bitch; there’s nothing she enjoys more than leading you through the labyrinth and letting you sweat a bit thinking the bull is right behind you and there’s no exit.

I do some revision in my head while zero drafting, of course. I don’t recommend doing much, really, because you can end up grinding the same few chapters over and over instead of finishing the damn thing. This is the seductive trap of mistaking the effort of circling for the effort of writing, which I’ve covered elsewhere. For me, the majority of revision happens between zero draft and the first draft I send to my long-suffering agent. It’s rare that I have to do more than one more pass for an editor after that, but there are exceptions–I think Cormorant Run, in particular, needed more than one revision. After that it’s copyedits, and then proofing.

So how do you know where to set the bones, or where to yank them around? That is a matter of instinct and craft, and you learn as you go along. It helps to be a voracious reader, because you end up absorbing a lot about structure, what works, and what doesn’t, just by the act of reading. There is no magic secret…but if there was one, it would lie in two words: internal consistency.

Characters must be internally consistent. So must the plot, and the worldbuilding. With a story’s beginning, you make choices, and those choices narrow the range of options further and further, all the way down the line to the ending. If you break that chain, you must do it in a way that is consistent with all three: plot, character, world. A deus ex machina at the last minute is lazy storytelling, though there have been geniuses who make an apparent God-in-machine internally consistent, but those are far and few between. If your magic system is built on rocks, all of a sudden having someone use an internal combustion engine for said magic isn’t going to fly. (Wow, that is a weird sentence.) If a character is a rage-filled sociopath, their sudden, unprompted change of heart at the end is likely going to make your reader throw the book across the room.

In revision, one of the hardest questions to ask yourself is about internal consistency. You can fool yourself into thinking it’s just fine because you’re the writer, goddammit, and you are the god of this small world. Sometimes it helps to map a book’s structure out on a roll of butcher paper, or with Post-its or a whiteboard. Sometimes it helps to give it to a beta reader who can pinpoint the weak spots, though you must choose your beta readers with care. When you’re also revising for craft, getting rid of weasel words, layering in more details, and whatnot, adding one more thing to the pile to watch for and manage can be overwhelming. You may even want to break up the revision of a zero draft into two passes: a structural pass, then a detail pass for everything else. And of course the process is never going to be the same twice, each book/story is different and more than likely will demand a different strategy.

And people wonder why writers drink.

I want to say “just pay attention to the bones and everything will work out fine”, but that would be a lie. They are an important, critical component, and not the only one. But that’s (say it with me) a whole ‘nother blog post.

Over and out.

Something Solid

My agent wants me to write her a YA. It’s one of the more fun ways to write a book, either for said agent or for my writing partner. It fees me up to do a lot of things I wouldn’t normally, since I’m not writing for anything but their happiness. Given my druthers, I’d probably work half on the projects that sink their teeth in my head and need to be popped and drained like an access (what a mixed metaphor, ew) and half on personally tailored books that make my writing partner or agent happy. I’m lucky that I’ve been able to do both to the extent that I have. Most of them end up selling, though no YA publishers will take Rattlesnake Wind because it’s “too brutal”. I keep telling them it’s not a YA, it’s a book with a teenage protagonist and that doesn’t automatically make it YA, but they don’t listen. Which is fine, it would kill me to have that particular book edited by committee, and I would not be graceful to suggestions like “give her another love interest!” or “make her more LIKABLE”.

Fuck that noise.

So I gave my agent a choice: Robin Hood with werewolves, or a cult–both books I have scaffolding in my head for, ready to be built upon. She picked the cult. All yesterday I was tooling around with it, turning it this way and that, and now I know where the book actually starts (which was not anything I’d written yet) and where it finishes. The things in the middle are hazy, but that’s always the way. Getting there is most of the fun.

This morning, absorbing coffee and scheduling the day out, I suddenly had the first scene. It burst upon me in hallucinatory detail, tied to a very specific sound: car tires on a long, unpaved country driveway.

When you think about it, tires crunching on gravel is one of the worst sounds in the world. It sounds like thousands of little teeth grinding away at each other, a real headache right through the ears. With the windows—even the cracked ones—open for a little bit to air the farmhouse out, it reverberated through plain rooms and rattled in my head in the kitchen, where I stood in front of the balky old stove trying to convince it to boil a pot of water. You had to watch it and not let the element go for too long, or it would blow a fuse and you’d have to troop into the cellar, past dusty shelves with non-dusty jars of preserves and pickled beets—ugh—to flip it. Well, there were other things pickled besides beets down there, to be honest. For once we hadn’t worked through all the string beans or the pickled garlic. The woodstove in the living room was hot, and I’d have to close everything up and sheet the windows before too much longer, or it wouldn’t warm up in there and I’d shiver all through the night.

*peruses paragraph above* Not bad. It needs work, of course, but there’s a definite voice in there. She’s speaking loud and clear. Next she’ll look out one of those cracked windows they have to block with towels in the winter, and see what’s coming down the drive. It won’t be pleasant, of course. It never is.

So that’s today’s work all laid out for me, a tiny feast. It’s nice to be back in the engines of creation again, after so much revising. For all its frustrations (oh, and there are plenty of those) that’s the part I like best. The heart-trembling-in-throat sense of breaking new ground, stringing together the words, uncovering the new set of people in my head and their various joys and tragedies. All this, and best of all, I can wear pyjamas while I forge a whole new world. Though today I probably won’t, since there’s other things to be accomplished.

But for most of the day, I’ll be at the forge, hearing the music of hammer and anvil, and making something solid where before was only air. Best job in the world.

On Professional Envy

This morning, Delilah Dawson asked a really thought-provoking question.

Hm. The answers on the “How do you deal with pro jealousy?” Q are mostly from folk who’ve found peace with it. Who is struggling? I sure am.

— Delilah S. Dawson (@DelilahSDawson) July 21, 2016

I think a certain amount of professional jealousy is healthy, just like a certain amount of fear is. Not the amount (or kind) of either that makes you act like an asshole, but a normal pricking of self-applied spurs, to push one to evolve. To finish more books/short stories/novellas/poems/whatevers. To hone one’s craft. To have more fun on the page.

It’s okay to feel “bad” emotions. It’s like alcohol, sex, or juggling–practiced in moderation, it’s good for you. Fear can keep you from stepping on a venomous danger noodle, and great things have been written with a gnawing sense of god DAMN it all, I’m going to show you how to REALLY DO THIS.

Fear, discomfort, professional envy, these are all part of a full emotional spectrum. You can feel however you want, and plumbing those feelings can help you write more evocatively and, incidentally, become a more compassionate person. Imagine trying to write someone who’s furiously jealous if you’ve never felt the green sting; it can help you understand, and understanding brings not only depth to your writing but kindness to your daily outlook. Now, please note that compassion is not–and should not be mistaken for–admiration or the condoning of asshole behavior, whether one’s own or anyone else’s. It is also not weakness, though people might mistake it for such, and then it’s time to have a big stick handy.

Feeling some amount of professional jealousy is normal. Accepting a certain measure of it robs the feeling of a great deal of shame, just as setting the timer and telling my kids they could swear as much as they wanted until it finished robbed cursing of a large measure of its “forbidden fruit” draw. Certainly you can set a timer and wallow in jealousy, too. (It might even be therapeutic, as long as one gets back to work afterward.) I think a lot of writers have the idea they’re not supposed to feel envious at all, which loads the emotion with all sorts of shame-weight and drags you down.

So how do you tell how much is healthy, and how much is toxic? Two simple metrics:

1. Are you using it as an excuse to act like an asshole?
2. Are you using it as an excuse not to write or finish your works?

IF the answer to either is “yes”, back up. Take a deep breath. Of the two, #1 is the most short-term critical, because one moment of nastiness can–and will–be dragged behind your name in publishing like an anchor, lo, yea, until the end of times. Other people have written at length about how to know if you’re acting like an asshole, so I won’t add more here.

#2 is the more insidious, and the one that you can mistake for actual effort. There are millions of excuses not to write, and the deep cultural narrative we have of the “tortured creative” actively helps to feed them and make them monstrous. I, too, have felt the seductive call of “my career is crap because it’s not as ‘successful’ as someone else’s, therefore I will watch YouTube videos instead of writing.” This is where the habit of regular writing is crucial. The discipline–ideally, or writing every day, even if only for ten minutes–will do more to get you over that hump than any amount of short-term effort.

Humans don’t like uncomfortable feelings. They’re, well, uncomfortable. Frantically shaming yourself and spending a lot of mental and emotional effort pushing those feelings away easily becomes counterproductive. Drawing their venom by letting them be what they are and continuing with the work anyway is a path of, if not less resistance, certainly more wordcount.

Over and out.

Muse, Exercise Vengeance

The Muse has decided that I need to write short stories after finishing revisions on Cormorant Run. I finished a 7K short for an upcoming anthology, and it made me feel almost frantic with loathing. Not because the story is bad, though it could very well be, but because it’s Perry. If there’s a single character that makes me want to scrub myself with hot water, bleach, and a wire brush, it’s him. If I didn’t feel like scrubbing myself raw after a scene with him, I went back and did it again, over and over. Trying to do justice to a hellbreed’s disgustingness is no small order.

So it’s leaving that zero draft to soak in itself for a little bit, while I write the carnivorous mermaid one–alternately titled Fish and The Sea Has Time, though I suspect in the end its title will be a third choice–and then it’s straight into revisions for The Marked. I know Cormorant Run will need another pass, because it’s just that type of book.

So it’s all short stories all the time over here, for at least the next couple of days. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say I dislike writing them, I do find them difficult in different ways than novels. A full-length book is an endurance contest, and I am particularly fitted for those. Short stories are a sprint, an iaido cut instead of a drawn-out slugging match, and they require that I know the arc already before my hand even moves for the hilt. It’s an entirely different set of mental muscles, one I don’t use naturally. So, short stories are hard, and I prefer not to work in that vein.

Which just makes it ever so much more ironic that the Muse is serving them up now. “Here,” she says, “is the entire arc, I already did it for you, now write me this.” Serving up what she thinks I need, dammit. It doesn’t help that short stories aren’t very financially viable, either. Not a good return on my investment of working time. Although I should put together a collection of them, one of these days.

It doesn’t matter–my job is to swing for what she pitches, no matter what brand the spinning globes are. But I really would prefer it otherwise. I think maybe she’s getting back at me for exercising her in new ways. Cormorant Run was probably the strangest thing I’ve ever written to date, and Afterwar, the next big project, is similarly complex, new, and terrifying.

So maybe the Muse is just giving me her version of a breather before we go into the trenches for Something Different again. it’s a version that’s twice as much work as regular work, of course, because the Muse is a bitch and wants me to despair.

*sigh* Off I go to write a mermaid. Enjoy your Monday similarly, my chickadees.

The Madhouse Reopens

After two years, the Madhouse fan forum is back open! It had some significant teething troubles, but I think it’s at least workable now. Enjoy.

We’re also coming up on the release of Wasteland King, the third and final installment of the Gallow & Ragged series. It drops on the 27th, and people are already emailing me with questions and begging for ARCs. I’m sorry, but I have no ARCs to give. (The Madhouse also has a dedicated Gallow & Ragged forum.) I should also say, if you liked the series, please leave a rating or review on the online bookstore of your choice. It really does help, and the more it helps, the more books I can write for you!

Okay, that’s all the shilling I’ll do for today. I know I have to do marketing stuff, but I always feel like a jerk when I do.

The kids have roped me into playing Pokemon Go. The Princess chose Red Team, the Prince chose Blue, so I had to choose Yellow as to keep things fair. (I kind of wanted blue, but alas.) I can see why it’s so popular, but the kids are not allowed to go hunting alone. The risk of walking into traffic or something similar is just too high. On the bright side, I’ve found it can be up while Runkeeper is logging my run, so I can grab a Pokestop or two on my morning sweat-and-stride. I do not catch Pokemon while running, though I will admit to thinking, maybe I should double back and get that one when I’m finished.

So the kids have to buddy up or go with me, and we did a nice long walk last night. We all three bagged a Clefairy, which is good, I guess? I still think someone is going to get badly injured or God forbid killed while doing it, and that dulls any enjoyment a great deal as well as making me somewhat of a wet blanket to go on expeditions with. But the kids are all agog and it’s something we can do as a unit, so there’s that.

And now it’s time for me to go get some of these short stories out of my head, including one told from Perry’s POV for an upcoming Urban Enemies anthology. It’s going to take a couple stabs before I get that one out whole, and there’s the carnivorous mermaid one, as well as one titled Fifteen Wings I need to take a running start and bounce off from before it will settle down. I have no idea why my brain is suddenly turned to short stories; they are viciously difficult for me and I don’t really enjoy them as much as, say, fresh wordcount in a novel. That’s what the Muse wants, and what she wants she gets, at least while I’m in that magical, fairy-dusted period between deadlines.

Internal Notes

I’m back in my body again, mostly. I can feel the edges of “me” and the edges of my physical parts aligning. I’ve never endured quite this sort of thing before, and was busy taking internal notes. Who knows when a character will need this particular sensation?

All things serve the work.

After writing for a while, there’s always a section of your brain thinking, “okay, going to have to remember this, a story might need it later.” Heartbreak, car accident, joy, panic–everything serves the work, everything goes into that hopper inside your head. Everything is material. Maybe there’s a bit of self-protection in there too–when you’re taking internal notes about the exact sensations and what the other parts of you are thinking and doing, you aren’t losing your shit over what’s going down.

Of course, motherhood means you can’t lose your shit, either. When there are small humans depending on you, you just can’t afford to let go, no matter how satisfying it might be to have a monkey tantrum. I can’t count the number of times a good old-fashioned screaming meemie fit would have felt luxurious, but if Mum starts losing her cool, the little humans will lose theirs, and then everything is just so much more difficult. Who has time for that?

So, yeah. The interesting thing is, as my writing partner suggested, that this may be how I deal with severe stress when I have meds to even everything out and make the anxiety manageable. It’s preferable to a half-dozen physically exhausting “I am going to die” panic attacks per day. Some research suggest a feeling of derealization or depersonalization is common with high anxiety and can trigger panic attacks, so maybe this is what it feels like when it doesn’t? It wasn’t painful, or even really distressing, it was just…odd. Allowing myself to experience it, knowing it was more than likely temporary, turned out to be the best way through.

It’s more Cormorant Run revisions today. I think I have to write a whole new scene, and expand another in a new direction. I knew the complexity of this book was under the surface, but my first run through it I was too busy getting the bones down to really dive. Now I have the luxury of uncoiling the strands and peering deeper, and it’s turning out to be fascinating. Sometimes I am a little chary of the worlds that apparently lurk inside my head. It’s an odd thing, to think that maybe one is simply channeling or taking dictation from somewhere else. There’s a certain submission to the shape and the strictures of the work, difficult for anyone stubborn to practice. Especially when that stubbornness must be fed and grown monstrous to keep you writing day in, day out.

First, though, Miss B needs a walk, and so do I. Maybe it will clear my head and bring me fully back into my body. You never know.

Over and out.