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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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July 11, 2013 · 11:44 AM

A Look Back – Familiar

Chugging right along, here’s a look at one of my books, Familiar.  (If you’re just joining us, you might want to read this post first)

INSPIRATION – You know that archetypal witch on a broomstick that you usually see silhouetted against the moon, her black cat inexplicably riding behind her without falling off?  Usually as a Halloween decoration?

Witch and Cat

I was thinking about that image and decided to write a story from the black cat’s perspective.  But I ended up writing it from both the  cat’s and the witch’s points of view, alternating every chapter.

PLOT – A young woman named Aradia is a modern-day witch who attends college and works a part-time job, and when she’s not doing those things she’s practicing magic with her familiar, a black cat named Kemnebi (Kem for short).  Aradia and Kem soon learn that an evil, immortal shapeshifter has been summoned to do the bidding of an unknown evil mage who has a keen interest in Aradia because of her unusual connection to the elemental spirits – Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.  (Magic, in this book, is created by drawing on the power of the Spirits, which coexist with the real world and are born from strong emotions and feelings and things that cause strong emotions, like Death or a Home.  And also from just…strong things, I guess, since there are elemental spirits.)

PROBLEMS – My biggest problem, I realized after gaining a great deal more experience in the field of writing, is that Aradia is a Mary Sue.  She is beautiful, but doesn’t see herself that way, she acts cute and demure around her friends and her love interest, and she is Special in the way that needs capitalization.  There’s nothing wrong with main characters being Special, of course.  It happens all the time – Harry Potter, Clary Fray, Katniss Everdeen, to name a few – but these Special characters do need to have personalities outside of their Specialness.  Aradia does not.

“Should’ve known better than a surprise party, huh?” I heard Lynn say to Aradia.

“I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have reacted that way, but thank you.  Now that I’m over the shock, I can acknowledge that it was a nice surprise.”

“You certainly know how to make an entrance,” interjected Nameless-Snake-Man.

“Yes, it’s a gift,” Aradia replied. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that you helped replace the bulbs, but I’m afraid I have no idea who you are.”

“Lynn invited me,” was his reply. “I’m Theo, and this is Samson.”

He pointed to the snake around his neck as he spoke the second name, and it responded by turning its fluttering tongue in Aradia’s direction.

“It’s nice to meet you both,” Aradia said politely. “It looks like you’re not the only one to have brought a pet.  Have you met mine?  Come here, Kem.”

So that was the biggest problem I could think of.  Aradia was a Mary Sue who easily fell in love with Sean – the love interest who has a wolf familiar named Circe – in a matter of days.  And he fell in love with her.  And that led to INCREDIBLY embarrassing dialogue like:

“You’re lying to yourself, Aradia,” Sean stated. “Do you understand that?  You’re so afraid of hurting someone, you won’t even let yourself try and see if you’d actually do it.  Deep down you know you can control it, but you refuse to believe it.”

“Sure I can try to control it, but what if I mess up?  I don’t want to take that chance.  It would be too painful, and I don’t think I would ever be able to recover from it.  Would you please just let me go?”

“Well, I don’t mind taking that chance at all, and I’m not letting you go.  If you leave then you’ll be taking my heart with you and then I’ll never see it again.”

Ooey Gooey Schmaltz

Why did this happen?  Because Familiar, as well as a number of other books, was written in a time when I was trying desperately to live vicariously through my characters.  I wanted a boyfriend and a relationship so badly that many of the books I wrote ended up being about a stupid, sappy, romance-novel-worthy relationship with only a shaky plot that was added in as an afterthought.  I also contributed my own self-consciousness and low self esteem, making a character who thought herself plain but was actually beautiful, since that is what I so wanted to be true of me.  I, like many young men and women of a certain age and awkwardness, wished fervently for some prince to come along and tell me how wrong I was about my looks, how I was a beautiful thing to behold and all my self-consciousness was unfounded.  Since I didn’t see that happening anytime soon, I made it happen again and again in my books.  And my writing suffered for it.  So…

HOW I’D FIX IT – By taking all of the above information into account and changing it.  Aradia would become surly and guarded, foul-mouthed and friendless, except for her faithful familiar.  Kem would continue to be his proper, tightly-wound self, with his own love interest – a calico named Trinka – and his own motivations – get Aradia to open up to other human beings, stop the evil shapeshifter, yadda yadda.  This could work.  I think I could do it.  It would just take a lot of effort.  I didn’t leave myself very much to work with when I wrote this one.  But I’ll try my best, because I like the idea.

Next post will be about Leaves (as if that means anything to you).  See you then!

Word of the Day: Demure (adj) – characterized by shyness and modesty; reserved

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