Tag Archives: a look back

August 12, 2013 · 11:59 AM

A (not so distant) Look Back – Grotesque

Two YA novels in a row that left me disappointed.  I wrote a review about one of them.  The other one, written by Amanda Sun, is called Ink.  I am not writing a review of it because my criticisms are very similar.  In short, I don’t like this idea of female main characters both fitting the role of Damsel in Distress and falling for guys who treat them terribly.  Does anyone have a suggestion for a good YA novel?  I’d take General Fiction as well.  Let me know in the comments.

So.  Grotesque.  Want to know what it is and maybe read a chapter of it?  Click here.  Want to see how I used it to illustrate the horrors of character development?  Click here.

Now that you’re all caught up, let me talk about it a little bit.  Besides Hellbound, Grotesque is probably the only book I liked after I finished writing it.  To me it actually seemed worthy of being read by others.  But this was a problem in and of itself.  As I often say: It’s okay when you are your own worst critic; it’s when you’re your own biggest fan that problems start to arise.  It wasn’t until my friend Micah and I went to IHOP to discuss the book that she pointed out some ways to improve it that I would never have thought about on my own.

The biggest thing she pointed out was that Serrafiel – the Grotesque – comes to life pre-programmed with a set of morals.  He knows what’s right and wrong…

“There’s a forest just beyond the village.  Look there.  And make sure the villagers get a glimpse of you.  I want them scared.”

I feel my stomach clench as my feet begin moving to do Master’s bidding.  He wants people to fear me.  I don’t want to be feared, or seen, or hunted.  I don’t want this life, this body, this master.

He’s not at all curious about sex…

I bend my legs up and down to try and get the kinks worked out, and that’s when I notice the thing that’s dangling between them.  I raise my eyebrows at it, and then the word for it, as well as what it’s typically used for, comes to mind.  Heat rushes to my face as I look away from that part of my anatomy.  I definitely won’t be using that anytime soon.

And he understands that his master is evil, which causes him to begin rebelling the moment he’s made to do something bad…

My mind works furiously to find a way around Master’s orders.  He ordered me to be seen, but, I realize, he did not command me to make the villagers scared.  All he said was that he wanted the villagers scared.  But I could give someone a glimpse of me without scaring them.  I’d have to be fast, though.  If I’m going to draw any attention to myself, I want the people who see me to not be sure of what it is they are looking at.

What Micah pointed out to me was that, if he is so new to the world, he wouldn’t automatically know/feel all these things.  Even more importantly, his master would definitely force him to enjoy being enslaved, simply by commanding him to feel that way.  (His master’s magic binds him and forces him to obey direct orders, much like Ella from Ella Enchanted).

Now, I had my reasons.  I wanted to avoid the Frankenstein’s Monster cliche.  You know, where everyone sees a monster and immediately assumes the worst?  I wanted people to fear Serra, but learn very quickly that he is not what he seems.  Just to mess with people’s expectations for the story.  But Micah pointed out that my way of going about it was impractical, and I have to agree.  What’s more, I have to admit that a character who is a flawless hero from the very beginning of the story isn’t very interesting.  A redeemed hero is much more attention-grabbing.  If Serrafiel is made to be happy to do the wrong thing, and then finds out what he has done, his journey to seek forgiveness from himself and others would involve a much more definitive character arc.

My problem, I realized much later, was that I fell into the trap of liking my character too much.  I wanted to protect him from bad things, so I made him dodge around his master’s commands from the beginning, and I made people like him almost instantly and exclusively.

Serrafiel

In the end, I had to face that sometimes bad things have to happen.  Even if it’s hard to write.  On the plus side, changing the things I talked about above will help keep the book from being so formulaic.  As it is now, it’s kind of like: Master gives command, Serrafiel finds way around command, Serrafiel is emo about being commanded, Repeat.

I haven’t started editing yet, because I am very, very lazy.  Also this book requires a lot of knowledge about things like politics and history, which my spurious understanding of the subjects cannot accommodate.  Maybe once I’ve done my research and finished a significant portion of the editing, I’ll share an excerpt from the revision.

That’s all for now!

Word of the Day: Spurious (adj) – not genuine, authentic, or true; not from the claimed, pretended, or proper source; counterfeit.

P.S. I was too lazy to draw a comic.  Again.  Sorry.  I can promise this will happen a lot.

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August 1, 2013 · 11:20 AM

A Look Back – Leaves (Part 2)

Obviously if you’re just joining us you should read the post before this one.

Ok, moving right along.

The problems with Leaves:

For one thing, it is incredibly difficult to write children.  I have probably not spent enough time with children to be able to write them well.  Molly started out as an eight-year-old who spoke and acted with the perspicacity of a world-weary grandmother.  When my mother pointed this out, I changed it so Molly was ten.  So then she became a ten-year-old who spoke and acted with the perspicacity of a world-weary grandmother.

“It probably does,” Molly stated, picking up another nut. “You’re trying to sound sure of yourself to make me feel better, but you know as well as I do that our chances of finding her aren’t very good.  First of all, before I could look for her, I’d have to look for a way back to my village, and that would be hard enough.  Then I’d have to actually search for her all over the countryside, which is also an impossible task.”

The biggest problem, though, is one I still face – I was attempting to write a historical novel when my grasp of history is laughably poor.  Whenever I try to write books of this nature, I run into the same questions I can never answer: How did they speak?  What technology did they have available to them?  What historical events had happened?  How did they travel?  Did they wear hats?  What were the class systems like?  On and on.  And I tried to write despite not knowing any of that, which, as you can imagine, did not work out so well.

Finally, the plot was shaky and cobbled together, the characters not well developed enough, and the tone too kitschy.  I had set out to make it read like a dark fairy tale.  Instead it reads like a book someone wrote with the goal of having it sound like a dark fairy tale.

HOW I’D FIX IT – For one thing, I’d have to do my research.  Maybe learn how kids act, talk, and think.  Definitely learn how History works.  I’d tighten up the plot and really try to give each character a life of his or her own.  Those are the issues that I need to tackle before I can even begin to rewrite this book, and I just don’t know when I’ll have the time.

That’s it for now.  Might want to talk about Grotesque.  We’ll see how I feel.

Word of the Day: Perspicacity (n) – Keenness of mental perception and understanding; discernment

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July 24, 2013 · 7:51 AM

A Look Back – Leaves

Here we go again!  Have you read this post?  If not, consider glancing through it so you know what’s going on.  For those who haven’t guessed, I’m going to go over a book I wrote called Leaves.  This book holds a special place in my heart for reasons I can’t begin to understand, and at 93,300 words (about 175 pages, single-spaced on Word), it is the longest book I’ve ever written.  By far.  And that makes me want to cry, because I want to rewrite the whole damn thing.  Alright, let’s get on with this.

INSPIRATION – It was the summer before I was going to start college, and I had a dream that was exactly like a movie.  I was not in it; I was just watching it happen.  There was a little girl with curly hair who lived with her mother.  Her father, I understood without being told, was a bad man who was either dead or just out of the picture.  Then the girl got separated from her mother, and somehow ended up in another world.  She was standing in a forest, in the middle of a hollow, ankle deep in a pile of leaves.  The trees that surrounded her were crooked and black, and leafless.  Cut to a shot over a man’s shoulder.  He has one hand braced on a tree and is peering at the girl from behind the trunk.  The man looks like Jack Skellington if Jack had skin – huge torso, thin, spindly legs, tattered pinstriped suit.  He has skin like parchment and looks like a fearsome thing, but he is actually kind.  I can tell that this man wants to help the little girl, but he is afraid that she will fear him, so he puts an illusion on himself to make him look more friendly.  Cut to inside the hollow – the man approaches from between the trees wearing a suit that is striped with all the colors of Fall – brown, orange, and yellow.  His appearance has changed so that he looks less like a dead man walking and more like a human.  He steps up to the girl, and she quickly looks down at her shoes.  Then he says, “Aren’t you even going to look at me?”  The girl looks up at him and says, “I’m Molly.”  Then the “camera” pans around them, circling slowly.  As it gets around to the back of the man in the suit, a flash of lightning briefly illuminates his true likeness, though Molly doesn’t notice.  (I swear to God I am not making any of this up)

Then…something.  There is some adventure that I could not remember, but Molly is in danger and the man does everything he can to help her.  They become very close.  Then this happens: Molly and the man are sleeping on beds of leaves.  Molly’s mother appears out of nowhere and wakes her to take her away.  I remember feeling like something was wrong.  I should have been happy that Molly had been reunited with her mother, but even Molly looked apprehensive.  Then the man wakes up and sees that Molly is gone.  He searches frantically for her, then he looks up to the heavens and bellows her name.  And I woke up with the heartbroken wail of “MOLLLLYYYY!” still ringing in my ears.  I tried desperately to go back to sleep.  I needed to know how it ended, but, of course, it didn’t work that way.  I was awake for good, and I never found out.  So I wrote a book.

I swear that is the shortest version I can write.  I can see already that this is going to be a two-parter.  Damn.  I’ll tell you the plot of the book I guess and then save the rest for the next post.

PLOT – A little girl named Molly lives with her mother until one day her mother is kidnapped.  As she runs through town searching for help, Molly stops to catch her breath at a fountain and ends up falling into it.  Instead of hitting the bottom, though, she tumbles through some misty portal and ends up somewhere else, standing in a pile of leaves and…well you know this part.  So then Molly and Zan (I named the Jack Skellington guy Zan) have some adventures looking for Molly’s mother, but all is not as it seems and there’s a whole second part to the book which centers around grown-up Molly which is just stupid because I was doing the whole living-through-the-character thing again.  That’s about it.

I’ll spare you for now.  Soon to follow – the thrilling conclusion!

Word of the Day: Amalgamate (v) – To mix or merge so as to make a combination; blend; unite; combine

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