It’s like a war, but with myself
I’m getting a bit excited about launching Nightlights. Usually, I spend some time everyday thinking about Matchbox Girls 2– I’m not officially working on it yet, but the idea of writing the sequel is so, uh, challenging that I can’t help myself. But the past few days, it’s barely crossed my mind.
OK, some of that may have been the holiday weekend. But today? I had actual butterflies. I have no idea why! It’s ridiculous! It’s not like a whole book is suddenly going to be out there for people to buy and read and my entire career will hang in the balance– no, that’s February. No, it’s just posting a thousand words or so. What do I have to be nervous of? There are reasonable upper and lower boundaries for what could happen and I’ve thought them through and none of them are worth getting hot and bothered over. I literally have no reason to be nervous.
But I am.
I assume at some point, maybe a couple of weeks into Nightlights, I’ll get back to posting more general-purpose writing posts. But currently it’s really all I’m thinking about. I write a scene in the morning, I do some editing in the afternoon, and I work on the website in the evening. In between, I read other people’s posts about their writing, posts about the current business of writing, and related miscellanea. Later this month, I should be getting a revision letter for Matchbox Girls, which will hopefully broaden my horizons some….
Anyhow, this evening I spent time writing up an Introduction page. It’s up at the top of the site and I’ll try to keep it current. But I thought I’d include the text of it here, because I’m lazy and it pads out the post. Plus, it explains a bit more about what I’m doing.
Enjoy!
Hi There!
I’d like to let my stories speak for themselves, but a basic introduction might be in order.
I’m a writer. I prefer to write (and read) speculative fiction– fantasy and scifi. I have a novel called Matchbox Girls coming out in February 2012 from the small press Candlemark and Gleam. It reflects a lot of my interests, including angels, demons, faeries and monsters, as well as family, children, dogs and feminism. You’ll be able to find out more about Matchbox Girls elsewhere on this site.
I’ve also long been interested in the particular appeal of serial fiction. Mostly these days serial fiction shows up as, well, series. We’re coming up on Book 13 of The Dresden Files, and Book 5 of A Song of Ice and Fire and man, I’m addicted. As an audience, we always want to know what happens next and that anticipation is only heightened by a delay in finding out. It’s always seemed to me that the fever pitch of interest raised by an ongoing novel series or an ongoing TV series is never matched by the reaction to one-offs. And as a writer, that kind of interest looks awfully tasty.
I think these days, there are opportunities for old-fashioned serial fiction– serial fiction presented scene by scene or chapter by chapter, rather than book by book– to find a new niche. Newspapers are dying, but newsreaders are thriving. People are more and more accustomed to reading thousand-word blocks of text, often on tiny screens. There are multiple avenues for letting potential readers know of updates, without requiring them to remember to check the website. And there’s large and enthusiastic communities dedicated to discussing and enjoying fiction.
Nightlights is my attempt to fit into that niche. I think of it as bus-stop reading for your smartphone, or coffee-break reading in your office. It’s posted on a webcomic schedule, three times a week, and each entry is the equivalent of 3-5 printed pages. It’s been extensively planned out, and there should be no break in the posting schedule unless something catastrophic occurs. I expect it will run for a year or so, with some bonus material written by audience request upon conclusion of the main storyline.
So What Is It?
It’s a step into the fantastic, as everything I write is, although it’s grounded in realistic characters. While Matchbox Girls is classified as urban fantasy, Nightlights would end up as YA paranormal– the protagonists range between 15 and 17, you see, which seems to be the primary requirement of YA these days. Aren’t genres funny things? Anyhow, would you like a back-of-book blurb? Okay! Like most blurbs, it’s spoilery for the first story arc, so I’ll hide it here.
Nightlights Blurb
For those who don’t want a blurb, just a description, how about: action-filled character-driven fiction about modern teenage monster hunters with magic weapons.
Nightlights is not, in any way, actually related to my upcoming novel Matchbox Girls, except that they both spring from the same mind. However, it’s my hope that if you like one, you’ll also like the other.
And It’s Free?
Although Nightlights will stay available for free on this website (unless somebody offers me seven figures to take it down), I do plan on making it available in ebook format for those who don’t want to read it on a website. Every 12 or 13 scenes is loosely grouped into a story arc, and every month I’ll push a novelette containing those scenes to the ebook vendors. After the whole story is done, I’ll collect the novelettes into a proper novel, and send that to replace the novelettes. These ebooks will be not be free, but will be reasonably priced. I will be selling them less to turn a profit and more to make the story available in more avenues– but if any long-time readers want to buy copies, that would be delightful.
I may also put up a tip jar at some point, although I have to figure out how those work these days.
What’s All This Other Stuff?
Well, this site started out as my writing blog. I’m hoping to maintain my weekly posting habit. I’ll also be posting intermittently about Matchbox Girls and its sequel (although I’ll eventually have a site dedicated to supporting that series). If you don’t want to read anything but the fiction, there should be an RSS feed to the right on the main page to let you subscribe just to Nightlights. I won’t be offended, I promise. I’m also hoping to keep up a proper table of contents for Nightlights, with a sidebar making it easy to navigate between chapters, and proper Previous and Next links on single pages. If that works out, it should be easy to refer new readers to the story, and I hope you will!
All the ways I do not write
I am inevitably irritated with ‘under construction’ graphics on webpages. Nonetheless, I’ve been hammering on Dreamfarmer for days now, trying to figure out a theme and a method for publishing Nightlights when the time comes.
- I could have a separate blog. This is a last resort because I’d like to keep my writing identity on the internet consolidated. Unfortunately, a separate blog would also be the easiest to set up since I wouldn’t have to worry about sorting out blog posts from story posts and making sure the story is easily navigable without mixing blog posts into that. Another benefit is that I could have a separate look for Nightlights.
- I could use WordPress’s categories and a theme that supports featured posts. This has some drawbacks involving navigation, which I’d probably have to do some handcoding to handle.
- I could use a custom post type introduced in the latest major WordPress upgrade. This is a lot like the previous option but provides more flexibility for future plans.
- I could give up on separating out the posts types and providing good navigation on a great-looking site, and cry.
You know what really irritates me? All of the development of intensive customizations for WordPress and there’s almost nothing to using it as a platform to publish fiction. A good friend of mine has resorted to using Comicpress, even though she doesn’t have any pictures, let alone comics, for her serial stories. That’s because Comicpress is one of the only ways to present an archive of posts in chronological order (instead of the reverse chronology favored by WordPress). How crazy is that? WordPress is extremely advanced these days but in order to do what I want to do, I’m going to have to end up hand-coding– and it doesn’t seem like it should be a challenging issue!
Anyhow. I didn’t want to skip a Wednesday. I also didn’t want to draw attention to my extremely unstable blog right now, but I decided maintaining my habits was more important. Hopefully you’re all reading this through an RSS feed and won’t notice anyhow. This, in any case, is all I’ve been doing (other than writing) for the past week. Every evening, I hammer on the website until I pass out. It doesn’t help that half the time the back end is utterly unresponsive, and I have to hope that’s my home network and not my lovely webhosting service. If you HAVE tried to come to this site and gotten any kind of error, could you let me know? Thanks!
Mid-Book Blues
You can’t imagine how badly I don’t want to write today.
I don’t have a good reason. I don’t have other plans. I just want to spend all day in bed, intellectually if not physically. I’ve been procrastinating for hours now.
And what could it hurt, taking a day off? I’ve only had one day off in the last 34 days, after all, and that was when I went on a family outing AND had a dentist appointment. I’ve written on days I had a broken keyboard. I’ve written on days when I had 2 hour doctor consultations eating up my normal writing slot. Surely I deserve a break?
I can think of two reasons the answer to that is ‘No way!’
One is: I have a deadline. Deadlines, even. They’re self-imposed but they matter a lot to me. I’m pretty sure I can meet the first deadline, which is only important so I can meet the second deadline. And I’m a lot less certain about the second deadline. I’ll be asking myself to do more in four months than I’ve ever done before, and if I can squeeze even an extra week of time out of the current project, that could help immensely.
The other reason is my motivation behind wanting to stay in bed all day: I’ve reached the first set of mid-book blues. It’s happened with every book I’ve written so far: somewhere near the middle of the book, I become convinced that it’s all a mess, and one of the worst atrocities ever committed to digital ink. My scenes aren’t cool enough, my dialog isn’t interesting enough, my characters are uninspired and my plot is too convoluted to be even remotely believable. Nobody sane could ever like it. It’d be better for everybody if I just gave up now.
It happens with every book. In a couple of books, the blues have won. With my first major project, the blues actually convinced me to try to quit writing for a couple years. It didn’t last– how could it?– but it did prompt me to spend a lot of time studying storycraft in new ways. That was good, but I’d still like to return to that project someday. I found bits of it the other day and it wasn’t nearly as awful as I thought it was at the time, at least on a scene-by-scene level.
What I really wonder is why this happens to me? It isn’t a function of how long I’ve spent on the project. It isn’t a desire to work on something else. It may be a little bit of jealousy– I think the current bout was partially triggered by reading praise of a few lines in another book and wondering if I had anything that awesome. But usually reading other books while writing inspires and invigorates me as I observe new techniques and get stuffed full of good stuff. So… it can’t just be comparison.
And it might be a little of the echo chamber of constantly trying to improve my work– when I’m constantly looking for ways to make it better, that can easily become only seeing what’s wrong. But I have a supportive alpha reader who offers both constructive and positive feedback (‘needs more particle effects’). So it can’t just be the echo chamber.
And it might just be a bad mood, and it might be the part of the story I’m at, which is supposed to be scary and emotional and wrenching– and how can I write that without feeling some of it myself?
All I really know is that I have to keep writing. Because if I let myself stop, it will undo the habits I’m forming and make it so much harder to achieve my goals. Nobody can enjoy what isn’t finished, after all.
ETA: I finished my daily writing, and discovered neat little resonances between the beginning and the end of the scene. Awesome reward!
Parenthood and Urban Fantasy
I just found out that the artist who agreed to paint a cover for Matchbox Girls has a little girl of his own. Coincidentally, Matchbox Girls is about some little girls. I do wonder if the two are related
Everybody knows people change when they have children. Before I had a kid, I thought that some of the changes were just in lifestyle– it’s harder to jet out for dinner and a movie with an infant, after all. And the rumors of some of the other changes frightened me. Hormones, supposedly, would change my entire personality and completely reshuffle my priorities.
This didn’t happen. At least, not the way I envisioned it. I still valued all the same things I’d valued before. I still disliked a lot of the same things I’d disliked before. Change crept in mostly in places where I was previously neutral. Things that would previously be nothing but background noise can now upset me or reduce me to sentimental tears. Some things got nudged down the priority list, or moved fractionally lower on the dislike list, but I didn’t suddenly love poopy diapers, children screaming in public, or messy houses. It’s just that new stuff got added to both lists, and the ripples were felt all over the place.
So yeah, parenthood changes you.
For the most part urban fantasy provides a landscape where the reader can identify with being young, powerful, attractive and unattached. ‘Sexy’ is a word often used to describe a new UF novel. It’s a pretty safe landscape. Who doesn’t want to follow along with the adventures of a supernatural badass as she interacts with tons of other supernatural sexy badasses?
Parenthood doesn’t show up much in these books. Kids don’t either, especially those who are too small to be useful and too big to be worn in a papoose on your back. Kids are many things but they don’t lend themselves to books described as ‘sexy’. As any new parent can tell you, kids are nature’s favorite mood killer.
Matchbox Girls is about a young woman who unexpectedly acquires a pair of little girls. She subsequently does her best to protect and guide them, in the face of some very tough opposition. It’s still an urban fantasy, so there’s lots of magic, supernatural entities and asskicking. There’s attractive guys. There’s good friends. And there’s even a few bits that I consider sexy.
But it’s also, fundamentally, a novel about parenthood. I don’t think it could be otherwise, written as it was during the first three years of my own child’s life. It’s my hope that, while nothing will replace the charm of traditional urban fantasy, Matchbox Girls will tickle the same place in other people that it came from in me.
I just put The Incredibles in for my little guy to watch, and laughed. In a way, that’s exactly what Matchbox Girls is: The Incredibles of urban fantasy. And I really do hope people enjoy it when it comes out in February.
Next time: Matchbox Girls didn’t consciously start out as a novel about parenthood. It started out as a novel about sisters.
Now or Later
I’m not as good of a writer as I’d like to be.
I’m really, really not. There’s all these stories I’d like to tell. There’s techniques I’d like to incorporate. And I can’t do it. Sometimes I don’t even know where to start.
It feels a little like trying to sing well. I know how I want my voice to sound, and the notes I’d like to reach but I just don’t have the control to do it.
This is not, I’m convinced, a matter of ‘gift’ or ‘talent’. I just haven’t trained the skills. I haven’t practiced enough.
Sometimes the knowledge that I haven’t practiced enough haunts me– usually when a scene I’m writing is falling short of my goals. Then I want to give up, tuck the story away and do something else: read a book on technique, or start a new project that won’t be so difficult, or take a nap and hope I wake up feeling better.
But books on technique don’t make up for practice and repetition, and one thing I know I need to practice is finishing works, and I can take a nap later. I have to sacrifice some of my ideas on the altar of self-improvement. If I don’t write, I’m not going to get better. And if I don’t get better I won’t ever be able to tell those other stories I want to tell, the ones that dance in my head out of reach because I haven’t climbed high enough yet.
If I want to write all the stories I dream of writing, I have to write. Now or later. Better to suck it up now, yes?
As somebody wise told me about the handy small child’s first attempt at making a peanut butter sandwich: good jobs often follow terrible ones.
PS: I don’t think NIGHTLIGHTS is terrible. But it could be. It’s probably not the astonishing work of unexpected brilliance I’d like it to be, either. You’ll have to let me know in July.