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dragonlady7And yet, this is not as much of a break as one would think.
I am to a point where I have too many things going, and I lack the discipline to put any of them aside. Njall and Nyvaine are, as written, a vanilla love affair that I have to add a great deal more spice to. I have to darken him considerably, and really, I almost don't want to. He's boring, but sometimes, I want a boring man. There are only hints in the alpha of the trouble he could be. Dead father, political relatives, and that mother of his. She has to be a character in order to do what she must at the end. I think, unlike with the other novel, in the rewrite the plot will remain intact. Certainly it's the characters that need work, the background, the setting. Thorkjell's slaughter by the Welsh in Ingamund's ill-fated expedition circa 905, Grainne's bouncing from relative to relative with poor baby Njall at her apron strings; Sihtric Céach's brute ambition driving him to Ireland and thence to York-- the tinder-box that was inter-Irish-Sea politics--- I don't get into that at all, except a bit of hemming and hawing between Hywel and Guthfrith at the end. That's just... out of nowhere, and doesn't work. I have to rework things, intensify them-- Njall is not simply in Wales to see whether it's ripe for raiding. Njall is there to scout out the route for a party to take revenge for his father and for the rest of Ingamund's men. Njall is not there to flirt. He is considerably darker than I have made him, and this is why Chapter 4 is taking so long. I've got a start on it, but God, it's not easy putting so much ill shit behind the sunshine smile of my alpha. Njall needs to be logically descended from the wicked, wicked bitch that Grainne has to be.
So, in short, a lot of Nyvaine's getting cut. A lot of the extremely-vanilla angst is getting cut. And a lot of the faceless narrative exposition is getting cut. I think I've learned a lot about points of view and tightening those up since November-- partially because of November-- probably mid-November. Njall and Nyvaine are really a bizarre, A/U, entirely changed rewrite of Kyweir and Callonia, and it is important to remember that. I learned a whole crapload about writing in my spectacular failures of January through July-- I never did post a final wordcount for 2004, by the way, but in late November the count was One Million, Eight Thousand and some spare change, only counting the fiction. Not counting livejournal or email or anything else. So keep that in mind a minute. These were some hard, exhaustive lessons.
And so I can't just let go of
That's coming along so astonishingly I just can't put them down either. Njall is a snipped-off, historified little bit of Kyweir, thoroughly euhemerized and simplified, and I think I overdid it in the alpha, which is why he is so vanilla.
Kyweir remains a bit of A Good Guy, no matter what I do to him. Towards the end of my Jan->Jul half-million-word binge, I was trying to darken him. I added in a scene where he was tortured and broken, I took away his strength and his virtue, I took away his wife, I took away most of his courage, and I left him half-blinded, crippled, and an emotional wreck. And oh yes, i took his son.
And I got stuck. I was so preoccupied with seeing how much i could take away-- and what would happen to him? What would happen to a man defined by his strength, if he were broken? What would happen to a man defined by his family if his entire family, from his grandparents to his cousins to his only child, were all taken from him?
I went a bit too far, and that's what's hung me up on that section. The answer is that he has to die, and then I can't finish the book. It's not really interesting without him. A large part of me wants no easy answers for that book, and wants no happy ending, but I can't do it. I must give them back to one another in the end, and have the love story work out at least that far. I can't just... See, the tragic love story is his parents. Clethus with fifty arrows in his chest frothing blood amid the wall of bodies he's created, and Vaering running with the baby through the woods with her hair on fire bleeding to death. I can't just rerun that for Kyweir and Callonia.
But the story's not interesting unless I take him pretty damn far down. A warrior gets hurt it's no big deal. There's no tension in that, there's no delving into the interesting parts of a character to tell a story. Kyweir has to be broken, but if I break him I don't know how to fix him. I don't write magic well, and it just comes across as awkward and unreal.
Callonia, however, is coming along beautifully. My word, I couldn't have asked for a better train of thought than having her betray Kyweir. The old, first-through-sixth draft Callonia could never have done what I needed her to do. In the end it crystallized around one line in a song on a Shannon Curfman CD, which I probably ought to hawk on my music page. In "I Don't Make Promises (I Can't Break)", she says, How can you lie when you know I can't?
And it's kind of a cheesy song, but I love it, and there's Kyweir. There he is. He is a man who cannot lie, a man who isn't even on speaking terms with deceit. And she has to lie to him.
I've rewritten her as a spy. She's not a captain's daughter anymore, wide-eyed and virginal and so fucking earnest. You can't pair two wide-eyed ingenoues and have the story be interesting unless it's just a big old festival of good people having bad things happen to them. It's a bit of that anyway, but this way... I give her a past, and I give her an intrinsic talent for deceit, I give her an extremely good reason to love and need Kyweir, and no choice but to lie to him... and then I tell him the truth.
And watch the sparks fly.
And then I add the plot.
And then I watch him realize that he's been entirely mistaken about what's important.
I make him tell her that.
And then?
Then i break him.
I just don't know how far I can take it. That's a story that needed a good beta about ... a year ago, and yet struggling through it on my own has taught me a whole metric fuckload of things about writing I never would have learned if I hadn't fucked up as much as I have. Yes, it means I've wasted eight months. But it's not so much wasting, as spending on painful lessons. The frustration over going so crazy over that story is what drove me to fanfiction. And fanfiction is what taught me about writing for an audience. Which has helped me mature a lot as a writer. I'm still not there, but I'm getting sort of pointed in the right direction. The idea being to leave behind the slightly crazy girl who wrote to amuse herself, and become a writer who writes with the intent of communicating her ideas to other people.
And so we come to the I am determined to write a reasonable Éomer and Lothíriel story, because I have never, never yet read one in which there is not some major thing about the story that bugs me. (Lothiriel does not have to be a Mary-Sue. Eomer does not have to be an illiterate.) And...
Yeah, I'm on about draft twenty of that one. Yeah. Real simple that turned out to be. I published a draft of the earliest version, now abandoned, on Open Scrolls, because it had some good smut in it. People there like it, but I know damn well it's A/U, and that's not what I want. (Open Scrolls was host to at least one charming story that I enjoyed greatly but featured Lothiriel The Anachronistic Feminist Tomboy. So I wrote and posted Lothiriel The Worldly Courtier instead, and amazingly, I only got one flame. It was worth it. And yes, i am still proud of that bit of smut. I was also tired of all the Faramir/Eowyns where worldly, educated Faramir must teach virginal Eowyn the arts of love. All right then, if Gondorians are so worldly, then we'll keep those roles intact: Lothiriel must teach virginal Eomer the arts of love. It was a riot to write.)
Anyhow. I was looking through my latest attempt and think I have a much better angle from which to begin. Eomer and Lothiriel meet, as meet they must, because Lothiriel and Eowyn form an alliance in order to prepare for Eowyn's wedding.
Mostly I'm just pleased, at the moment, that it contains this line:
So, perhaps my writing isn't really maturing all that much, but my heroines are. At least, to an extent. I dunno.
I was going to post an excerpt but I think it best now not to. That was really the only line I'm pleased with.
So, this wound up being a rather long and reflective post, and the CD I was going to listen to is nearly over. How strange.
But those are the three principal ideas that are competing for space in my head. i think it probable that one of the reasons I haven't been sleeping well lately is that I cannot easily conjure a story scene to work on. I am so flighty and distracted, with two and some change ideas competing, that I can't settle on one, and instead I wind up replaying conversations from real life in my head. (See, ever since I was little, the way I fall asleep is by making up a scene in a story and acting it out in my head. It has to be a pretty juicy scene, which is where much of my melodrama comes from. I was eleven when I started writing them down-- after I had finished with my phase of creating Tolkien fanfiction in my head to help me sleep. I did a lot of A/U Boromir Lives fics, and A/U Various Characters Get Hurt And Need Comforting, and when i say I'm glad I never wrote them down, I mean it. But now I try to do scenes for stories I'm writing, and I just don't know where to start now. I lie down and pull up the covers and snuggle in the pillows and think.... OK, which one? And each story has four or five scenes that need an imagine-through, and when you multiply that by three... I can't pick one, not with real life's memories and worries taking up so much of my concentration.)
I just can't escape so easily into fantasy as I usually have, and I fear I may be entering another dry spell. There have been a number of times in my life when I just didn't write. 2004 was unprecedentedly good, from a writing standpoint; 2002 was good as well, as was 1996. But in 1997-98, when I was in love, I doubt I wrote more than five thousand words of fiction the whole year. And 2003? I hated that cubicle so much, I couldn't see straight, much less imagine other worlds.
No, 2004 was my proof that if I drive hard and long enough, I can write something long, sustained, and complete. It is also proof that I can spend a great deal of time on something that goes eventually nowhere. But in the battlefield detritus of that failed (but not abandoned) novel there are a number of treasures I am sure I can salvage-- many of them not plot points, characterizations, scenes, or even ideas. No... Lessons.
Let's hope that in 2005 I can somehow earn a living and still find the focus I need to apply those lessons from 2004. The commitments I've made to Njall and Nyvaine are a good start, so far. Let's hope I can keep that up.
I am to a point where I have too many things going, and I lack the discipline to put any of them aside. Njall and Nyvaine are, as written, a vanilla love affair that I have to add a great deal more spice to. I have to darken him considerably, and really, I almost don't want to. He's boring, but sometimes, I want a boring man. There are only hints in the alpha of the trouble he could be. Dead father, political relatives, and that mother of his. She has to be a character in order to do what she must at the end. I think, unlike with the other novel, in the rewrite the plot will remain intact. Certainly it's the characters that need work, the background, the setting. Thorkjell's slaughter by the Welsh in Ingamund's ill-fated expedition circa 905, Grainne's bouncing from relative to relative with poor baby Njall at her apron strings; Sihtric Céach's brute ambition driving him to Ireland and thence to York-- the tinder-box that was inter-Irish-Sea politics--- I don't get into that at all, except a bit of hemming and hawing between Hywel and Guthfrith at the end. That's just... out of nowhere, and doesn't work. I have to rework things, intensify them-- Njall is not simply in Wales to see whether it's ripe for raiding. Njall is there to scout out the route for a party to take revenge for his father and for the rest of Ingamund's men. Njall is not there to flirt. He is considerably darker than I have made him, and this is why Chapter 4 is taking so long. I've got a start on it, but God, it's not easy putting so much ill shit behind the sunshine smile of my alpha. Njall needs to be logically descended from the wicked, wicked bitch that Grainne has to be.
So, in short, a lot of Nyvaine's getting cut. A lot of the extremely-vanilla angst is getting cut. And a lot of the faceless narrative exposition is getting cut. I think I've learned a lot about points of view and tightening those up since November-- partially because of November-- probably mid-November. Njall and Nyvaine are really a bizarre, A/U, entirely changed rewrite of Kyweir and Callonia, and it is important to remember that. I learned a whole crapload about writing in my spectacular failures of January through July-- I never did post a final wordcount for 2004, by the way, but in late November the count was One Million, Eight Thousand and some spare change, only counting the fiction. Not counting livejournal or email or anything else. So keep that in mind a minute. These were some hard, exhaustive lessons.
And so I can't just let go of
That's coming along so astonishingly I just can't put them down either. Njall is a snipped-off, historified little bit of Kyweir, thoroughly euhemerized and simplified, and I think I overdid it in the alpha, which is why he is so vanilla.
Kyweir remains a bit of A Good Guy, no matter what I do to him. Towards the end of my Jan->Jul half-million-word binge, I was trying to darken him. I added in a scene where he was tortured and broken, I took away his strength and his virtue, I took away his wife, I took away most of his courage, and I left him half-blinded, crippled, and an emotional wreck. And oh yes, i took his son.
And I got stuck. I was so preoccupied with seeing how much i could take away-- and what would happen to him? What would happen to a man defined by his strength, if he were broken? What would happen to a man defined by his family if his entire family, from his grandparents to his cousins to his only child, were all taken from him?
I went a bit too far, and that's what's hung me up on that section. The answer is that he has to die, and then I can't finish the book. It's not really interesting without him. A large part of me wants no easy answers for that book, and wants no happy ending, but I can't do it. I must give them back to one another in the end, and have the love story work out at least that far. I can't just... See, the tragic love story is his parents. Clethus with fifty arrows in his chest frothing blood amid the wall of bodies he's created, and Vaering running with the baby through the woods with her hair on fire bleeding to death. I can't just rerun that for Kyweir and Callonia.
But the story's not interesting unless I take him pretty damn far down. A warrior gets hurt it's no big deal. There's no tension in that, there's no delving into the interesting parts of a character to tell a story. Kyweir has to be broken, but if I break him I don't know how to fix him. I don't write magic well, and it just comes across as awkward and unreal.
Callonia, however, is coming along beautifully. My word, I couldn't have asked for a better train of thought than having her betray Kyweir. The old, first-through-sixth draft Callonia could never have done what I needed her to do. In the end it crystallized around one line in a song on a Shannon Curfman CD, which I probably ought to hawk on my music page. In "I Don't Make Promises (I Can't Break)", she says, How can you lie when you know I can't?
And it's kind of a cheesy song, but I love it, and there's Kyweir. There he is. He is a man who cannot lie, a man who isn't even on speaking terms with deceit. And she has to lie to him.
I've rewritten her as a spy. She's not a captain's daughter anymore, wide-eyed and virginal and so fucking earnest. You can't pair two wide-eyed ingenoues and have the story be interesting unless it's just a big old festival of good people having bad things happen to them. It's a bit of that anyway, but this way... I give her a past, and I give her an intrinsic talent for deceit, I give her an extremely good reason to love and need Kyweir, and no choice but to lie to him... and then I tell him the truth.
And watch the sparks fly.
And then I add the plot.
And then I watch him realize that he's been entirely mistaken about what's important.
I make him tell her that.
And then?
Then i break him.
I just don't know how far I can take it. That's a story that needed a good beta about ... a year ago, and yet struggling through it on my own has taught me a whole metric fuckload of things about writing I never would have learned if I hadn't fucked up as much as I have. Yes, it means I've wasted eight months. But it's not so much wasting, as spending on painful lessons. The frustration over going so crazy over that story is what drove me to fanfiction. And fanfiction is what taught me about writing for an audience. Which has helped me mature a lot as a writer. I'm still not there, but I'm getting sort of pointed in the right direction. The idea being to leave behind the slightly crazy girl who wrote to amuse herself, and become a writer who writes with the intent of communicating her ideas to other people.
And so we come to the I am determined to write a reasonable Éomer and Lothíriel story, because I have never, never yet read one in which there is not some major thing about the story that bugs me. (Lothiriel does not have to be a Mary-Sue. Eomer does not have to be an illiterate.) And...
Yeah, I'm on about draft twenty of that one. Yeah. Real simple that turned out to be. I published a draft of the earliest version, now abandoned, on Open Scrolls, because it had some good smut in it. People there like it, but I know damn well it's A/U, and that's not what I want. (Open Scrolls was host to at least one charming story that I enjoyed greatly but featured Lothiriel The Anachronistic Feminist Tomboy. So I wrote and posted Lothiriel The Worldly Courtier instead, and amazingly, I only got one flame. It was worth it. And yes, i am still proud of that bit of smut. I was also tired of all the Faramir/Eowyns where worldly, educated Faramir must teach virginal Eowyn the arts of love. All right then, if Gondorians are so worldly, then we'll keep those roles intact: Lothiriel must teach virginal Eomer the arts of love. It was a riot to write.)
Anyhow. I was looking through my latest attempt and think I have a much better angle from which to begin. Eomer and Lothiriel meet, as meet they must, because Lothiriel and Eowyn form an alliance in order to prepare for Eowyn's wedding.
Mostly I'm just pleased, at the moment, that it contains this line:
Lothiriel shrugged. "I am determined to marry late," she said, "and to retain the power I was born to. Woe betide the man who thinks he needs to find something useful for me to do. I always have useful things to do."
So, perhaps my writing isn't really maturing all that much, but my heroines are. At least, to an extent. I dunno.
I was going to post an excerpt but I think it best now not to. That was really the only line I'm pleased with.
So, this wound up being a rather long and reflective post, and the CD I was going to listen to is nearly over. How strange.
But those are the three principal ideas that are competing for space in my head. i think it probable that one of the reasons I haven't been sleeping well lately is that I cannot easily conjure a story scene to work on. I am so flighty and distracted, with two and some change ideas competing, that I can't settle on one, and instead I wind up replaying conversations from real life in my head. (See, ever since I was little, the way I fall asleep is by making up a scene in a story and acting it out in my head. It has to be a pretty juicy scene, which is where much of my melodrama comes from. I was eleven when I started writing them down-- after I had finished with my phase of creating Tolkien fanfiction in my head to help me sleep. I did a lot of A/U Boromir Lives fics, and A/U Various Characters Get Hurt And Need Comforting, and when i say I'm glad I never wrote them down, I mean it. But now I try to do scenes for stories I'm writing, and I just don't know where to start now. I lie down and pull up the covers and snuggle in the pillows and think.... OK, which one? And each story has four or five scenes that need an imagine-through, and when you multiply that by three... I can't pick one, not with real life's memories and worries taking up so much of my concentration.)
I just can't escape so easily into fantasy as I usually have, and I fear I may be entering another dry spell. There have been a number of times in my life when I just didn't write. 2004 was unprecedentedly good, from a writing standpoint; 2002 was good as well, as was 1996. But in 1997-98, when I was in love, I doubt I wrote more than five thousand words of fiction the whole year. And 2003? I hated that cubicle so much, I couldn't see straight, much less imagine other worlds.
No, 2004 was my proof that if I drive hard and long enough, I can write something long, sustained, and complete. It is also proof that I can spend a great deal of time on something that goes eventually nowhere. But in the battlefield detritus of that failed (but not abandoned) novel there are a number of treasures I am sure I can salvage-- many of them not plot points, characterizations, scenes, or even ideas. No... Lessons.
Let's hope that in 2005 I can somehow earn a living and still find the focus I need to apply those lessons from 2004. The commitments I've made to Njall and Nyvaine are a good start, so far. Let's hope I can keep that up.
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Date: 2005-01-14 01:48 am (UTC)Little pre-teen blues guitar prodigy, right? Where the hell'd she go?
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Date: 2005-01-14 04:15 am (UTC)I think she only released the one album, which is too bad.
She was kind of overproduced, and her vocal stylings were a little weird, but y'know she was good anyway. I would love to hear more from her.
Maybe puberty was unkind to her. (Just kidding.)