on prequels
Jan. 23rd, 2020 03:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/38xz1U4
sigh. at some point today I blew past 10k words on the “series of interconnected vignettes” I was writing myself, to help me work out some things about the background for the novel I’ve been working on on and off since like 2004 (I really should dig up some of the early drafts so I could get a definitive date but I don’t want to, they were– guess– spinoffs of LotR fanfic and also they were bad!) (yes LotR because the movies had just come out, I am a witheréd crone of ages past, hush) and now I’ve run into the fucking thing about prequels, which is that if you unspool a story back far enough trying to uncover the beginning of it, you Joss the fuck out of yourself.
and while it’s fine, none of this matters, literally everything will need to be rewritten anyway and if I’ve written literally a million words on this project without anything to show for it, what’s the problem with tossing out the 50k or so words in the latest (2010? no 2013?) draft?
I’m also struggling with what to actually do, here. If I am disciplined, try to make this a coherent thing of about, ehhhhn, like 30k words? i could make it a novella, polish it up, make sure it’s actually well-written and doesn’t have anything redundant. then there’s a thing. i can either try to publish it, or self-pub it or put it up free somewhere, and take the momentum from that to try to work on The (weighty sound effects go here) Novel, which has sucked me into spirals of unfinishability for no reason for so so very long.
Orrrr I could write a meandery undisciplined thing and just put it up as I go, and hope *that’s* enough momentum to get me to either revise it or leave it as-is and work on *the* *Novel* anyway.
Really I don’t know. And I have a lot of other little projects, but it is nice to be writing again. I’ll probably get nicely into the swing of it and then April will roll around and it’ll be farm season again and I’ll be working 80 hour weeks and have no Internet and forget how to actually write, again. But hey. Better to have and lose a momentum than not to ever have one at all.
So anyway– *The* *Novel* started off with this huge twist about the narrator’s identity. (The paladin character is the narrator.) (I wrote the whole novel in third person, and then realized I wasn’t using a reliable close POV and wanted to get better at it, so I threw the novel away and rewrote it from 1st person, which 200,000 words later had really taught me my lesson there I think, and that was probably 2005, and I’ve been pretty good at close 3rd ever since but now I’m addicted to using 1st and I don’t know if people actually care either way anymore but it’s worth mentioning that I finally worked myself up to letting a trusted friend read a draft of the 1st per version and she read, like, the first paragraph and was like “ew no I won’t read 1st per” so like. I mean, fuck people, but apart from that, I’ve been delighted to be in fanfic where literally nobody gives a shit about that kind of thing.) (where the fuck was I. My GOD my ADHD has been fucking terrible this week. Possibly because I’m hyperfocusing on the writing which is good but like i do need to have a rest of my life sometimes ARGH.)
Where was I. Right. The twist. But it was like… well you find out eventually that his pal, who’s the prequel narrator, knew all along, and it feels weird and sneaky because you didn’t know them before. So…
Well, if I write the prequel from this other guy’s POV, then you know the whole time who the Paladin guy really is. And that was fine, but then I don’t seem to be able to resist putting in really obvious confirmation of this, and like. The fact that Paladin Guy didn’t notice is starting to make him seem a little bit stupid.
And while Paladin Guy is, like all paladins, a little bit of a dumbass– pure of heart, pert of buttocks, bright of eye, holy of spirit, dumb of ass (I wouldn’t call him exactly home of sexual, it’s complicated)– he’s not a complete moron, he’s got to be smart about some things.
So it’s going to be a constant struggle and I think I have to work out exactly how much I truly care about that big stupid first-chapter reveal, in *The* *Novel*, which I’m now so attached to, it’s literally the only thing that’s been there since, well, not the beginning, but about the second iteration of the thing, or maybe the third. And it’s not a good thing, but I’m super devoted to it and don’t know what I’d do without it.
I came closer and handed the bundle over to the healer, who took it in one hand and then took my hand in theirs, looking at me with especial keenness. “Ah,” they said, voice deepening, “accent from the north and blood from the South, aren’t you interesting.”
I stared at them, blank in shock: how would they know my blood from the touch of my hand? I’d taken my gloves off, but the skin was unbroken.
“Not just a healer,” I said, more to warn Zinzi than for conversation’s sake. This was one of the cunning folk, clearly, with some degree of vision at least, if not an ability to cast as well.
Zinzi glanced warily over. The gods-dedicated and the cunning had largely separate spheres of operation, and without some warning, were prone to clashes. The gods tended to concern themselves with matters of war and ruling, battles and heroic feats and the like, while the cunning tended to be occupied most in matters of the home and the hearth, the threshold and the woods and the fields, births and the kinds of death that took you in bed. It wasn’t that there wasn’t overlap, but the overlap could sometimes be contentious. (And there were gods who oversaw the cunning, some of whom even took dedicates; they just weren’t the same ones that warriors dedicated themselves to, generally.)
“And what about you, good young sir?” the cunning-person said, releasing my hand and holding theirs out for Zinzi’s now.
He hesitated, turning to sit on both knees and face the healer. I could see him weighing what to say; normally, he’d just say which god he served, but we were supposed to be anonymous. “I,” he said, “take care,” and put one hand out cautiously, hovering near the healer’s but not taking it.
Even in the daylight, I saw the spark arc from his hand to the healer’s, and the healer snatched their hand back and caught it to their chest, staring wide-eyed at him. Zinzi grimaced and caught his hand back to his chest as well, looking pained. His hard work of charming was undone; the little girl shrieked and buried her face in the shoulder of the older girl, who gathered her in and stared at him as though he were an animal.
“I’m– I’m a dedicate,” he said, “to– I’m not supposed to say the god’s name, we’re on errantry, it’s supposed to be anonymous.”
It was a serious flaw in the whole concept of anonymous errantry, because of course anyone who knew very much about the gods would recognize them.
“There are two,” the healer said breathlessly. “There are two gods. One bright shining strong one poured in from the outside, and I know him, but the other– I don’t know the other.”
Zinzi grimaced again. “No, there’s just the one,” he said. “I’m–”
“The other one is dead,” the healer said, insistent.
I knew exactly what he was talking about, and if I let on, it was more than my life was worth. I hadn’t had any doubt before, but this was incontrovertible, and in my mind I was already composing the message to Mats. I’d need to cipher it. I mentally stripped out as many words as I could.
“I,” Zinzi said, helpless. He didn’t know; that I had figured out even before I’d begun to ascertain that there was anything to know.
“Or– not dead,” the healer backtracked. “Dormant. Sleeping. Old. It has been inside you for– you were born with it, it knew you in the womb. Your mother was a dedicate. Your father. Both.” They clearly were unspooling what they’d– felt, or tasted, or seen, or whatever– in that spark, rolling it around in their mind as it became clearer. “How did you come to be dedicated to a second god?”
“I cannot speak of it,” Zinzi said, polite and regretful. “You know,” and he tapped the plain, undyed leather of his paldron, the borrowed armor, the unbleached undyed tabard over the scarred undyed breastplate. “I’m under a different oath at the moment, and its temporary nature makes it no less binding.”
sigh. at some point today I blew past 10k words on the “series of interconnected vignettes” I was writing myself, to help me work out some things about the background for the novel I’ve been working on on and off since like 2004 (I really should dig up some of the early drafts so I could get a definitive date but I don’t want to, they were– guess– spinoffs of LotR fanfic and also they were bad!) (yes LotR because the movies had just come out, I am a witheréd crone of ages past, hush) and now I’ve run into the fucking thing about prequels, which is that if you unspool a story back far enough trying to uncover the beginning of it, you Joss the fuck out of yourself.
and while it’s fine, none of this matters, literally everything will need to be rewritten anyway and if I’ve written literally a million words on this project without anything to show for it, what’s the problem with tossing out the 50k or so words in the latest (2010? no 2013?) draft?
I’m also struggling with what to actually do, here. If I am disciplined, try to make this a coherent thing of about, ehhhhn, like 30k words? i could make it a novella, polish it up, make sure it’s actually well-written and doesn’t have anything redundant. then there’s a thing. i can either try to publish it, or self-pub it or put it up free somewhere, and take the momentum from that to try to work on The (weighty sound effects go here) Novel, which has sucked me into spirals of unfinishability for no reason for so so very long.
Orrrr I could write a meandery undisciplined thing and just put it up as I go, and hope *that’s* enough momentum to get me to either revise it or leave it as-is and work on *the* *Novel* anyway.
Really I don’t know. And I have a lot of other little projects, but it is nice to be writing again. I’ll probably get nicely into the swing of it and then April will roll around and it’ll be farm season again and I’ll be working 80 hour weeks and have no Internet and forget how to actually write, again. But hey. Better to have and lose a momentum than not to ever have one at all.
So anyway– *The* *Novel* started off with this huge twist about the narrator’s identity. (The paladin character is the narrator.) (I wrote the whole novel in third person, and then realized I wasn’t using a reliable close POV and wanted to get better at it, so I threw the novel away and rewrote it from 1st person, which 200,000 words later had really taught me my lesson there I think, and that was probably 2005, and I’ve been pretty good at close 3rd ever since but now I’m addicted to using 1st and I don’t know if people actually care either way anymore but it’s worth mentioning that I finally worked myself up to letting a trusted friend read a draft of the 1st per version and she read, like, the first paragraph and was like “ew no I won’t read 1st per” so like. I mean, fuck people, but apart from that, I’ve been delighted to be in fanfic where literally nobody gives a shit about that kind of thing.) (where the fuck was I. My GOD my ADHD has been fucking terrible this week. Possibly because I’m hyperfocusing on the writing which is good but like i do need to have a rest of my life sometimes ARGH.)
Where was I. Right. The twist. But it was like… well you find out eventually that his pal, who’s the prequel narrator, knew all along, and it feels weird and sneaky because you didn’t know them before. So…
Well, if I write the prequel from this other guy’s POV, then you know the whole time who the Paladin guy really is. And that was fine, but then I don’t seem to be able to resist putting in really obvious confirmation of this, and like. The fact that Paladin Guy didn’t notice is starting to make him seem a little bit stupid.
And while Paladin Guy is, like all paladins, a little bit of a dumbass– pure of heart, pert of buttocks, bright of eye, holy of spirit, dumb of ass (I wouldn’t call him exactly home of sexual, it’s complicated)– he’s not a complete moron, he’s got to be smart about some things.
So it’s going to be a constant struggle and I think I have to work out exactly how much I truly care about that big stupid first-chapter reveal, in *The* *Novel*, which I’m now so attached to, it’s literally the only thing that’s been there since, well, not the beginning, but about the second iteration of the thing, or maybe the third. And it’s not a good thing, but I’m super devoted to it and don’t know what I’d do without it.
I came closer and handed the bundle over to the healer, who took it in one hand and then took my hand in theirs, looking at me with especial keenness. “Ah,” they said, voice deepening, “accent from the north and blood from the South, aren’t you interesting.”
I stared at them, blank in shock: how would they know my blood from the touch of my hand? I’d taken my gloves off, but the skin was unbroken.
“Not just a healer,” I said, more to warn Zinzi than for conversation’s sake. This was one of the cunning folk, clearly, with some degree of vision at least, if not an ability to cast as well.
Zinzi glanced warily over. The gods-dedicated and the cunning had largely separate spheres of operation, and without some warning, were prone to clashes. The gods tended to concern themselves with matters of war and ruling, battles and heroic feats and the like, while the cunning tended to be occupied most in matters of the home and the hearth, the threshold and the woods and the fields, births and the kinds of death that took you in bed. It wasn’t that there wasn’t overlap, but the overlap could sometimes be contentious. (And there were gods who oversaw the cunning, some of whom even took dedicates; they just weren’t the same ones that warriors dedicated themselves to, generally.)
“And what about you, good young sir?” the cunning-person said, releasing my hand and holding theirs out for Zinzi’s now.
He hesitated, turning to sit on both knees and face the healer. I could see him weighing what to say; normally, he’d just say which god he served, but we were supposed to be anonymous. “I,” he said, “take care,” and put one hand out cautiously, hovering near the healer’s but not taking it.
Even in the daylight, I saw the spark arc from his hand to the healer’s, and the healer snatched their hand back and caught it to their chest, staring wide-eyed at him. Zinzi grimaced and caught his hand back to his chest as well, looking pained. His hard work of charming was undone; the little girl shrieked and buried her face in the shoulder of the older girl, who gathered her in and stared at him as though he were an animal.
“I’m– I’m a dedicate,” he said, “to– I’m not supposed to say the god’s name, we’re on errantry, it’s supposed to be anonymous.”
It was a serious flaw in the whole concept of anonymous errantry, because of course anyone who knew very much about the gods would recognize them.
“There are two,” the healer said breathlessly. “There are two gods. One bright shining strong one poured in from the outside, and I know him, but the other– I don’t know the other.”
Zinzi grimaced again. “No, there’s just the one,” he said. “I’m–”
“The other one is dead,” the healer said, insistent.
I knew exactly what he was talking about, and if I let on, it was more than my life was worth. I hadn’t had any doubt before, but this was incontrovertible, and in my mind I was already composing the message to Mats. I’d need to cipher it. I mentally stripped out as many words as I could.
“I,” Zinzi said, helpless. He didn’t know; that I had figured out even before I’d begun to ascertain that there was anything to know.
“Or– not dead,” the healer backtracked. “Dormant. Sleeping. Old. It has been inside you for– you were born with it, it knew you in the womb. Your mother was a dedicate. Your father. Both.” They clearly were unspooling what they’d– felt, or tasted, or seen, or whatever– in that spark, rolling it around in their mind as it became clearer. “How did you come to be dedicated to a second god?”
“I cannot speak of it,” Zinzi said, polite and regretful. “You know,” and he tapped the plain, undyed leather of his paldron, the borrowed armor, the unbleached undyed tabard over the scarred undyed breastplate. “I’m under a different oath at the moment, and its temporary nature makes it no less binding.”
no subject
Date: 2020-01-24 02:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-24 06:44 pm (UTC)But the prequel novella, at least, I think I can make into a thing. That might be attainable.
It'd be really nice, anyway.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-26 12:28 am (UTC)I will read whatever you post! I like them both, the paladin and the sidekick!
(And as someone who LOVES twists and will literally write the thing around the twist, even if the twist is all revealed in the first half and the story then requires a lot of OMG STORY TELL ME WHAT MORE YOU NEED before it gets enough of what it needs to be finished, I fully support keeping the twist. I bet there are ways to write even the biggest oversight as in-character, if the portrayal comes from a place of affection for the character.)