In the face of darkness, high stakes, and horrible odds, you can save yourself and the world
On the writer accountability front:
75 pages of troll story rewritten. The cuts will soon be surgical.
Oliver Toddle back out. To Clarkesworld. I know, I know, but I need to get a rejection from them eventually, yes?
Point River back out to Pedestal Magazine.
And that’s where we are for the week so far…
Catherine
I actually like the whole process of getting rejected and shooting something back out there, right away. It really makes me feel like an active, real writer.
Well, that and the writing of course. Yeah. Writing. As much as I can. You betcha.
What makes you feel like a real writer? Dare I ask that question?
Catherine
Have you seen this yet? I’m betting you have, because I’ve been on vacation, but if you haven’t, here’s Dean Wesley Smith on rewriting.
Confession: While in Tempe, I took a real vacation. No writing, no working, no nothing but reading and Disc World convention. Not a bad idea all around, considering.
And now, back at it. Writing will be this afternoon, tomorrow evening, and Thursday before I meet with Cat at 8 about squids. That means maybe I can get some new snippet here this weekend.
I’ve been reading some interesting things that I wouldn’t normally read, mostly through the auspices of the SF book club, and trying to get a feel for what some of the people I know write. Here’s some surprising results because of that.
Lies of Locke Lamora: Expected to hate this. Not really a fan of high fantasy anymore. Reversal–loved it!
Do you want to know about administrating Rosetta Stone? That’s where I’ve been.
Do you want to see me in Tempe, Az at North American Discworld? That’s where I’m going.
No? Let’s do this instead.
***
I want to link you to Greg Frost’s recent journal concerning the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard who recently returned home after being held for 19 years by her kidnapper, who raped her and fathered her two children. Greg’s thoughts about Jaycee and Shadowbridge are worth your time.
The situation makes me think. A lot. About my own childhood. Many of you have heard me allude to the abuse in my background, both parents, full guns a-blazin’. Unfortunately, when you grow up in the world of abuse, that is baseline normal. You make strange, strange assumptions that the rest of the world is like the one you know. As you begin to understand that this is not the case, your world stretches and dialates.
What helped me refocus myself during such a situation was that I developed a rapacious capacity for mythology and folklore at a very early age. I imagined an alternative life for myself. I was the one who didn’t fit in my environment, like the heroes of mythology, or the misplaced princesses in the woods. It is true that I came to see myself more as the misfit in the stories and tales as I was older, but my youngest expression of a fantasy life was to imagine that someone would find me and take me away from where I was because I was truly something else.
I can’t speak for Jaycee’s situation. I know that in mine, if there hadn’t been the old stories, and then the fiction written by minds that were rich and speculative, I probably wouldn’t have gained the ability to imagine myself anywhere else, and it wouldn’t have led me to eventually recreate myself as something else. It gave me something else to focus on besides depression and despair.
If I can wish Jaycee and her children anything, I can wish them the hope I drew from fantasy novels, the certainty I gained from them that, regardless of what happened around me, I was something more and better than horror and exploitation, and the ability, even though it took a lot of work, of truly becoming an entity apart from where I started.
Catherine
That would be today’s writing, then.
I revised the troll battle, and half of chapter 4. While I added 500 new words, I whacked two scenes.
Today’s writing question: when you are writing, do you find yourself with boring explanation? One of the reasons I’m reworking these chapters is because I realized they were like watching an old school Star Trek film. Blah, blah, blah, planet fall, blah, blah, plan of attack, blah!
I realize that readers would prefer action to explanation, especially the young crowd that this book will no doubt be marketed to. Of course, there are scenes that are not active, but keep the plot moving, but so much of the last draft seems to be me figuring out what’s going on, punctuated with some action. I’ll be cutting a substantial amount, and replacing it with things that happen whether someone’s sat around a table to suss it out or not.
Just curious about whether or not this happens to you.
Catherine