Series vs Singletons

Remind me never to serialize a story again. Never.

I've decided I'm not enjoying my new-found closeness with the reading process. I hate the days when I post -- Comment Day. It's a nerve-wracking nightmare, is what it is.

I suspect authors who release their stories as whole units, all at once, do not endure this. I long for that, to just write the story and do all the necessary drafts and then just give it over as a fully formed piece. Not that I would walk away per se, but I would not be forced into the constant see-saw of first draft jitters -- completion relief -- comment jitters. It's really getting to be tiring, doing it this way.

But I don't want to be a quitter either. All my writing life, when continuing on got threatening or even boring (yes, let's all admit it -- it happens), I threw in the towel. I can't bring myself to do that this time, frayed nerves or not. I don't owe it to the readers half as much as I owe it to me to just finish this thing.

So I guess I better get my chores out of the way, huh? LOL But I'm never serializing again!

Unblocked

So I am unblocked and the story is up and running again. This is good! I can sleep again. My headaches are gone!

Yay.

Blocked

I still have writer's block. I only get this when something's intimidating me. And there's so much to choose from right now!

Is it the fact that I'm near the climax of the story, and fairly certain that many readers will not like where I'm going after all? I've certainly given them enough indications of where I am going with this. If this actually happens, I can't say I won't be pissed off. Maybe that's not fair of me, but I did say I would wear my heart on my sleeve here.

Maybe it's that I am afraid that the big emotional climax will fall short, that the climax will be no climax at all. Put more succinctly, I'm afraid I'll screw it up.

Or maybe it's my actual life getting in the way, the one where my school-averse 5 year old has to start school anyway soon enough, and she's going to be a holy terror about it, and it will start 12 years of school conferences in which I will have to fend off her teachers' attempts to diagnose her as something they can medicate -- simply because she is a girl who does not need their approval to feel good about herself. Girls are expected to be approval hounds, so they can usually be counted on to tow the line and play the game. But my five year old is not like other five year olds. She is far too self-possessed to need some older stranger's approval, thank you. She doesn't play games and she doesn't tow lines. So, yeah. This will be fun.

Clearly, I'm feeling intimidated, and angry, and self-important, and sorry for myself, and a host of other negative things. Did I mention obsessive? That too. I need to take a break, but I also need to wrap this up. So this morning I'm not sure which way I want to solve this. But I have had a headache for 4 days now, so this obviously can't continue. I did try writing again this morning, like every morning this week, and like every morning this week I felt like I did two years ago when I started: everything felt clunky and weird, like i had someone else's shoes on.

I'll let you know what I come up with as a solution, if it's anything other than just shutting up and writing anyway. I think it'll be that, though. Boring, but necessary. And intimidating.

Re-focusing

Dang it.

I meant to update this daily. I really did. But this week sort of got away from me.

I haven't written anything, so already I feel funny. And then the fandom for whom I'm writing this little story exploded over a piece of news that puts my story effectively out of business.

Now, I knew this little development was coming, and for my own peace (piece?) of mind I will finish the story, though I'm not really sure when yet. Right now, only dribbles are coming to me, when it was a flood previously. But you see, the Canon-Keepers of the fandom killed the heroine, and my story deals with that aftermath, and now they are bringing the heroine back. Never mind the bait-and-switch nature of all this. This development means my work here is not done, it's just irrelevant. Not that the story wasn't alternate-universe anyway, but now i feel like my own heroine is at risk of being reviled for not being the Canon heroine.

And that I am even in this position is just dumb.

I think it's time for me to return to that original novel, and gather in all my ideas for other novels, too. To that end I have pulled the old research books and begun re-submerging myself in that milieu, trying to work out the problems encountered in the first draft. I must say, it's far more satisfying than walking on eggshells all the time around this fandom.

For the record, it's not all the time. But around this one character? Oh, yeah. Eggshells in between land mines laced with trip wires connected to shrapnel-filled pipe bombs. On a good day.

I don't like wasting my time, I don't deserve to be dogpiled for having my own opinion instead of someone else's, and this is just a show! So for the moment, I am returning to my real life and just lurking everywhere else. Hopefully I will be able to update this more often as progress -- real, honest progress and not just defocusing! -- gets under way.

Success vs Damnation

So I updated the story this weekend, on Saturday, and my regular readers were wonderful about it. They really seem to love the story. One person called it 'pure magic'!

Can you imagine? That sound you hear is me bouncing with excitement!

But I'm putting it this way for a reason, if it sounds like I don't believe them. Of course I believe them, that this is what they think of the story. And yet...I have trust issues. Not that I don't trust the readers, and I most certainly trust the characters. That's the funny thing, I just realized. I have a friend who is worried about not getting to know her characters, but it occurs to me while I'm typing here that the real issue for me -- I don't know about her -- but the real issue for me is that I have to trust them to know themselves. Get out of their way and let them do their thing.

My trust issues are all around two things. First, I don't sit down believing I can replicate the previous level of work. I have learned to trust, a little, that I will know what the characters do next when I start to let them do it. And I have learned to trust that I will know when I am forcing my solutions on them, instead of letting them work it out on their own, so I will know when to rip out clunky passages. Now I have no idea if any other person who ever attempted to write feels this way. I just know this the working method I can manage. But what I don't trust is that I will ever be able to weave this alleged magic again, that I will sit down one day and suddenly be writing not a novel but an insurance report.

My biggest trust issue, though, is believing that I can have this level of success and praise, and not somehow be damned by having it. That, I think, is a particularly religious way of looking at things -- ironic in that I am not a particularly religious person. But I was raised in a family that was very traditional in this sense, and this is what it's left me with:

Enjoying success = eternal damnation

So when people compliment me, I cringe. I really do. It's easy for me to say I'm sure I don't deserve it, but the blunt f'ing truth is, sometimes I'm pretty damned sure I do. Some of these chapters I'm very proud of, and I fiercely resent this overwhelming fear I carry, that it's inherently wrong of me to be proud of them. Conversely, I recognize that this isn't a very healthy attitude either. I just don't yet know what to replace it with. In the meantime, I'm opting for thanking people profusely, which seems appropriate anyway, because no one owes me an ounce of comments. It's good and kind of them to make the effort at all. I just wish I didn't crave the comments and loathe my reaction to them at the same time.

Yeesh, what a whiner I am.

Silence is Golden

And, it's also very telling.

Like when your children suddenly go silent in the house, and you wonder, "Do I investigate in case they've drawn blood or gone unconscious? Or do I just enjoy it while I can?"

Yes. Silence is indeed golden.

Deconstruction and Assassination

Hello all. I realize this is outside the usual scope of my blog, but I feel strongly that this needs to be said.

I have only a few literary passions, and one of them is Robin Hood. Robin is one of those timeless characters in literature, a Everyman who sets his own needs aside in the service of others, who shows us through his actions that the letter of the law and the spirit of the law are sometimes two different things, who demonstrates through his own sacrifices that being a good person is not only possible, it is within everyone’s reach -- and you can have a spanking good time of it too.

So if you're familiar with the current series on BBC One, you can imagine my horror at it.

This version of Robin Hood has been very deconstructionist in nature; at this juncture, it appears its sole purpose has been to “knock” Robin Hood “down to size”. Certainly this is in keeping with Foz Allen and Dominic Minghella’s original promise that this would be a Robin Hood we had never seen before.

Funny how I thought they’d mean that positively.

This is NOT a post about how awful Guy of Gisborne is, or the terrible things he has or has not done, or how he deserves to pay for his crimes. I’m NOT here to vilify him, or to vilify actors Richard Armitage or Jonas Armstrong. Truthfully by now, both Robin and Gisborne can polka their way to the finale for all I care.

No, my problem is that Gisborne’s redemption is coming at the cost of Robin’s good character. This is wrong. If you are a fan of this series, please step outside the show for a minute and look at the overall issue. You see, I’m unclear on the purpose of a production that focused on the destruction of a cherished hero to millions. Yes, of course it’s new and different – so is arsenic the first time you taste it. That doesn’t make it a decent idea. Frankly it feels to me like I’m stuck in my local pub with that old guy who hates everyone and won’t leave. I don’t understand what reasonable story-purpose there was in destroying Robin this way.

Please let me anticipate you and point out that Guy of Gisborne’s story could have been told, and told well, without making Robin his villain. It is enough, truly heartbreaking enough, to know that he was turned out of his home as a boy and left to fend for himself in a world that would only value him if he held property. That alone is a tremendous backstory, just as knowing he put his sister Isabella into a clearly unsafe marriage just for his own gain. You could have made a series out of those two facts alone. Robin’s destruction is not necessary.

But to make Robin himself the cause of all this backstory is entirely different. Towards this end this series has made a caricature of Robin, as someone who is only arrogance personified – and nothing else. Gone is the Robin Hood of legend. Instead this series has steadily marginalized Robin Hood, by replacing the real Robin with a self-absorbed thug bent on achieving his own brand of power regardless of the cost to others, as if being outlawed is the easy route to fame, fortune and conquest. Again, it’s new and different, but that alone doesn’t make it a good idea.

It is true that making Gisborne all bad is poor storytelling and therefore he ought to at least have a chance at redemption, regardless of whether he takes it. That chance can be obvious or subtle, but to balance the scales and make Gisborne human, the chance must be available. Any character who lacks self-discovery through these chances is just poorly drawn.

And thus by the same token, making a one-dimensional character out of Robin Hood – turning him from a man who wrestles with his desires and does for others anyway, into this unrecognizably violent and impulsive brute – is also poor storytelling. Worse, it’s character assassination. Such a serious change requires a clear rationale, but there is none given, as if we are to believe in spite of all we have seen and heard that Robin has always been this way.

Again, step outside the details of this show. The only themes or ideas I can take away from this are that I can’t trust heroes, that people who put themselves in harm’s way for others are actually cynical ego-maniacs, that every man who ever tried to do something nice for another is actually in it for himself, for his own ego gratification or perhaps to assuage his guilt because he’s secretly a thug, and that all great inspirational legends are just a pack of lies.

Why is that old guy at my local pub so threatened by anyone who gives freely of himself? Perhaps he is threatened because he feels he could never be so selfless. Perhaps rather than aspire to the same selfless behavior, he finds it easier to bring down those who can put others first, by denying that they even exist, by spreading lies about their true motives, and by mocking those who would aspire to selfless deeds.

I find this alarming, because it tells me just how many people in this world do not believe any of us are capable of good. I’m unnerved by how many people are that old man. Please set aside loyalties here – I would be just as disgusted if this had been done to Michael Praed’s Robin, or Kevin Costner’s, or Richard Greene’s. It’s just wrong to do this, to destroy one hero to create another. Two heroes can exist at the same time – and for God’s sake all of you out there about to tell me they both will be heroes in the final scenes, please don’t. That is simply not what’s happened here. The frightened old men behind this production have dragged Robin Hood through the mud, repeatedly, simply to create a second hero, and this was never necessary. Were Gisbourne inspired by Robin, instead of allegedly brutalized by him, then the legend would remain heroic. Smearing Robin this way something very ugly about human nature and benefits neither the story nor any of the characters.

This series has turned the entire legend on its ear, turning Robin Hood’s pure motives into the twisted idea that he is only in it for the glory and to assuage his own guilt over actions the real Robin Hood would never have committed in the first place. Robin Hood was never that man, and never needed to be that man, and so I don’t understand why this series felt it had to assassinate his good name this way.

Is It Over Yet?

I keep trying to end this practice story, and it keeps not ending.

I assume this is a skill gap I have, that details and loose ends keep having to be sewn up and I can't seem to get them all done in too timely a manner. Oh, to be Ernest Hemingway and get it all done in one or two sentences, and then back out to the bar again...

I'm sure I will have other thoughts about this soon enough, but right now I just want the story over with. I'm so tired of feeling nervous about it, and it's taking a lot out of me to write this climax. The only death here is someone's concept of himself, and I think it's probably easier to write someone's physical death. It takes time and effort to structure a believable rearrangement of someone's soul. I don't want this to be cheesy or cheap, or emotionally bereft. So I'm taking my time with it and it's hard, careful work, and I'm tired.

Ok. Thank you, I'm done complaining. Back to work!

Keep a Word, Drop a Word

Or in my case, keep a scene, drop a scene -- and I just dropped a doozy.

I am serializing my little practicey story in real-time, meaning I'm only a scene or two ahead of my readers. This, as anyone with a brain can tell you, is a pretty bad way to go about writing a story. But it's fun and rather dangerous-feeling, for a writer. Yes, I know I need to get out more -- that's a blog for another time. Meantime, writing this way effectively guarantees that I'll lose control at some point, and I just finally did. I dropped a very important scene, because I just plumb forgot to include the information. Now I have to work the revelations from that dropped scene in some other way, and the whole thing is going to feel clunky and weird. It's not too much to say it feels like my underwear is about to show.

Lesson learned.

Trust, Sabotage, Addiction -- Good Clean Fun!

Remember I said I was learning to tolerate people reading my work? I think 'tolerate' is the right word. It's still extremely uncomfortable and it still throws me off beam for hours after I get comments. I have a tendency not only to read a person's words, but also to gauge their tone from their sentence structure and choice of words and punctuation, rather like I might a person's body language more clearly than their words. I have no idea if this is appropriate, or even healthy, but it certainly does allow me to self-sabotage at an alarming rate.

In other words, those who aren't raving I automatically assume actually hate it.

Now, unless someone comes out and says they hate the piece, they probably don't hate it. One has to take the time to open a window and compose a comment, so one has to be invested enough to bother, and I think it's safe to assume that this level of investment comes along only if one is in fact enjoying the story. Either that, or they would tell me flat-out when they hate it -- not that I'm asking people to do that! But you get my point, that it's just self-sabotage for me to sit and analyze a commenter's word choice and punctuation. Chances are they didn't, and are just relaying their thoughts as they have them, same as I would do.

So why the over-analysis?

Serializing a story is hard, because it allows the reader into the development of the story rather than just presenting it as a done deal and walking away. It's like being stuck in the same room listening to them as they read the entire book out loud and talk about it to their friends. There is something about this process that is fairly excruciating, and yet at the same time addictive. Because when I get something right in a reader's eyes, there is no feeling like it. It is addictive. I don't know how I will do without it.

But when they simply think out loud, with no conclusion or with a word or two I might consider disapproving, I don't know how I will continue to live with it.

I need to finish this story, get the thing to the climax of it and get it over with. And I am thinking this morning that I need to do this in isolation so I get it right. I need to withstand and brace myself against my addiction to comments and just write the whole rest of the story before I share any more of it. I can feel myself being tempted to design the story to what I am guessing the readers want, even while I do understand that's not why they are there. Of course they have opinions. But this is my story, not theirs, and I need to go away from them for long enough to get it told the way it needs to be -- not the way I am guessing they maybe want it to be when they don't know the characters like I do. Trust myself, and trust that my characters will live their lives the way they need to, even if I don't agree and the readers don't agree.

One more thing...

Today I don't feel like being a decent person. Today I just want to be a whiney, self-indulgent, attention-grabbing idiot. I don't plan on doing it, but do you think it's wrong to acknowledge the urge anyway?

A Quickie!

Just some quick thoughts this morning before I get going for the day.

1. I can't decide whether I hate the story for needing so much from me, or the rest of my life for needing the same amount from me. There is only one me and way too much neediness going around. Worse, the story is the only fun thing that needs me. Dirty pots and pans are never fun, and I never feel better when they're clean. They're just out of the way then, and something else filthy slips in the take their place. And doing them means the story is still not done, still in my head haunting me and following me around yelling in my ear, like a harpy with a copy of Publisher's Weekly.

2. I definitely hate that my opinions don't jibe with other people's and it throws me off beam when it shouldn't. So I disgree with someone? It's hardly going to change life in the cosmos, for crying out loud. I think it would be a good skill for me to learn to be loathed a few times, instead of thinking I have to cow to what other people want out of me. Hmmm...apparently I'll go back to my first point now?

3. My roof is definitely leaking. If it turns out to be something easily caught, I've got a whole list of people to scream at.

4. I want to go back to bed.

All right, on that whiny little note, it's off to make breakfast. In the midst of all this, I am supposed to eat too. Am I the only stay-at-home mom trying to launch a career who finds eating just gets in the way of everything else?

Do-Over

The original point of this blog was to chronicle my transition from amateur to professional author, and maybe explore what being a professional author means, aside from someone actually paying me to write.

Only I am not nearly as close to that goal as I thought I might be in March, when I started all this. It's kind of hard to chronicle what isn't really happening in the first place!

I took on the task of writing what I assumed would be a small story, a piece that is essentially an extrapolation from an existing story. I though I would just use that as practice to work over a few situations and transitions I don't have a lot of practice writing, as well as get myself used to the anxiety of actually allowing others to read my work. And for those purposes it's working out splendidly. I'm gaining confidence and working at my highest level of competency since...well, ever, I think. And the story has become huge. Seven months later and I am only halfway through it. I'm enjoying myself, which I think is really the whole point in the end. If I didn't enjoy writing, and just wanted a J.O.B., I would be standing in a McDonald's right now.

But I'm not getting paid for this thing, and since it's an unauthorized practice piece shown only to a few trusted friends, it's not going to be publishable. So I started to lose my confidence in this part of things, that I am showing myself and anyone who cares to stop by my progress on the road to so-called legitimacy. Because my original work has been mothballed for the moment while I finish this enormous story that seems to eat whatever comes near it. It's huge, it's not half-bad if I do say so myself, and sometimes...it scares me a little. I had no idea a story I personally wrote could have this power over me and my life.

And that's the hardest part of doing any writing, including this blog. Writing this story, and any story, now threatens to subsume the rest of my life. I could easily write all day and all night, but that's not fair to my family and not fair to me. Whether I like it or not I have to be a whole person before I can be a writer. I think that's just one of those distasteful lessons I have to learn.

A while ago I wrote that right around my college graduation, real life subsumed my writing and I had to stop -- then, I needed a job, any decent paying job that would keep me sheltered, fed and clothed. I stopped writing, finally altogether, for about ten years. And by doing so I found out the hard way that the less I wrote, the less I could write, and I spent a lot of time trying to forestall the misery of that by lying to myself: I didn't really want to write. I didn't really care if I had any talent. It didn't really matter that I told myself stories in my head all day long, or that even the slightest aroma (much less a big event) triggers full-scale stories in me, or that this happens to me all day long, every day, no matter what. It meant nothing that I can only relate to anything through story -- so what anyway?

So what anyway.

The writing came back, full-force, about 18 months ago now. I was shocked at how grateful, truly, plaintively grateful I was, to know that I could still do this thing. Even more so to know that, in fact, words are the only things I can do well. I merely manage everything else, and a lot of that I manage badly (ask me about my leaking roof on today, this fine stormy morning!).

But words are the only things I can actually do.

So I thought I better just shut up and do them. I've decided to change the focus of this blog just slightly, to make it a chronicle not of my transition from amateur to professional, but to detail my thoughts on writing in general, in an atmosphere that really demands I be a stay-at-home dynamo, which anyone who deals with me knows I'm just not cut out to be. My goal here is to be as honest about all this as possible -- to wear my verbal heart on my sleeve. I'm a lousy essayist when you come down to it: too many words, not enough time taken. But I will try to be, if not entertaining, at least informative. Maybe I'll be nothing more than a train wreck. But I plan to use this space to say what's on my mind and what I need to get off my chest about allowing myself to write, to tell the stories my brain simply will not stop producing, and to see what happens to them and me as I try to form them into something entertaining and eventually marketable. I'll do the best I can, because really, that's all I can do.

Thanks for listening. :)

Temporary Shut-Down

Too much going on...be back as soon as possible...