musings, on art and Writing, and a buried response to the username meme

[dragonlady7]

It's a bad sign that I'm totally lost for words in my simple attempt to describe Widespread Panic, the band I'm listening to.
I just don't have words, today.
Actually it's freezing in here-- I left my bedroom window open a little, and it's sixty, and I'm not turning the heat on because I'm the idiot who left my window open and it's my fault. So if I can finish this blog and make some sense, I'll go have a cup of tea and maybe some breakfast, and then I'm going to write this fucking novel already.

I'm trying to write the novel, of course, but I've taken a short break. Blogs I'm reading today that amuse or move me:
Haters on Dooce.com: she answers some of her hate mail. What amused me was the last one. She read an exclamation-point-laden screed of vitriol out loud to her husband and her (21-ish-year-old) cousin GEORGE! (his name is spelled with all caps and an exclamation point).

After I was done the room just sat there silent until GEORGE! said, “Ask her if she’s hot.”

I died laughing: that's the perfect response to hate mail.
"OMG you suck die die!!"
"... a/s/l?"

Publishing Kills: On the blog she shares with her collaborator Bob Mayer, Jenny Crusie hits the wall, slides down, and sits on a puddle on the floor while her brains leak out her ears, wondering how the hell anyone does this without an established fanbase. It's a masterpiece of not-whining. They hit the NYT bestseller list at #21-- and that is actually disappointing, because in total sales, they've sold more copies than several of the books in the top five. It's a hot book and their blog in particular is a fan-generating machine. Seriously: when's the last time I went out and bought a book?
I didn't. I don't. Especially not in a flurry of excitement the day after it comes out. But I did. It's a hot book.

But it does make me think about the vast majority of authors who do not have TV ads and book tours, who give everything they’ve got to a story that gets shipped to the bookstores, shelved, and then lost in the mass of books out there, good stories that are written from the heart that may never find their readers. Publishing can break your heart, NOT because you don’t hit higher on the NYT list (that’s a high class problem if there ever was one) but because your book never finds its readers at all, the readers who will love it and read it over and over again, keeping your characters alive.

On Writers and Ambition: Simply Wait is a blog about a waitress who becomes a novelist. Not that I'm finding that particularly near and dear to my heart, or anything.

I write because I'm mysteriously impelled to do so and have been since childhood. If I was never published anywhere, I would probably continue--simply because I have no idea how to stop. But writing only for myself has never been my goal. I write to share who I am and what I know, what I've seen and heard and felt; I write to resurrect the lost and to give flesh and voice to the ghosts who often take up residence in my study.
I also write with the hope of earning a living that will prevent me from ever having to hoist another waitress tray.

Which tied in, for me, with what Crusie said above, about keeping your characters alive. They are real to me, of course, and their stories really happen, as far as I'm concerned, but if nobody else ever reads them... One likes to think, from a purely artistic standpoint, that they go on, somewhere out there, doing their thing. But...
And I was just thinking about my username. That meme is going around, people explaining what their username means.

Dragonlady7 is not the first online handle I've ever had. I used to be the Snork Maiden, and have also been the Penguin Queen. But when I signed up for a livejournal I wanted something less whimsical, and more in keeping with the more serious part of my imagination.
So I'm named for the main character in the first novel I ever started writing. Not her name, but her title. She's the 7th Dragonlady. But I haven't so much as mentioned her in years. I thought of her a few months back, made a desultory attempt to re-imagine the story. She's still there, sure enough. Most of her struggles are still there, the important parts of a character that I scraped out of bare nothingness over the course of over a decade that I spent working on that novel. Give me any prompt you like and I could write her for you, and she would be herself, an entity thoroughly distinct from any other characters I've written. But nobody else knows who she is, because I have never finished her story-- not in a way to present to the rest of the world.

I've let her down.

Comments

[tehta.livejournal.com]

I've let her down.

Ah, but does she want to be presented to the world? I know I wouldn't really want to be.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Well, you aren't a fictional character who has been trying to tell me a story, so perhaps you wouldn't be. I think she does, because she spent so long trying to tell me her story-- which consisted largely of her moving me away from adolescent fantasy roleplaying into a strange insistence on the justifications of the horrid things she did. If I'd been directing the story, I'd be content to lay it to rest, but I wasn't. I do think that she spent all that time with me because it was a story worth telling, and my not telling it does it a disservice.

And I stole her name.

[tehta.livejournal.com]

I just know that in some cases the characters who "tell me their stories" is an obsessive manner don't actually want me to show many of these stories to people. Ecthelion being one example, but some original characters being others.