A Certain Slant of Light

It has been some time since I posted any writing news, because it has been some time since there has in fact been any writing news, but at long last the wind has turned! I’ve been holding off on posting so as not to jinx anything, but now I have a draft, so:

1. In early October sholio mentioned that short romance is having a Moment on Amazon, and I thought “Oh in that case perhaps I can finally write that Christmas romance I’m always talking about… if only I can get an idea…” SO ANYWAY I’ve completed a short (~12,000) Christmas romance about two rival spies, a Soviet and American, whose twenty-year rivalry culminates at a Christmas party thrown by an upper-class English doofus at a French chateau in 1991.

2. As my goal is to get this out in late November, I have backburnered poor Diary of a Cranky Bookworm yet again (SORRY SAGE), but I truly do plan to publish it next year!

3. Although possibly not until late spring as I would also like to do a short m/m Valentine’s romance… SORRY AGAIN SAGE. Have firmly forbade myself to brainstorm for this one until I’ve got Deck the Halls with Secret Agents done and dusted. Ideally it would be a bit longer, perhaps 20,000 words or so.

4. But after the Valentine’s romance! THEN I will publish Diary of a Cranky Bookworm! It truly is all ready to go except for the cover.

5. And also perhaps I will begin work on a Halloween m/m to complete the holiday trio.

6. I would also like to do an f/f holiday trio but I am not sure that I can face the exponentially lower payout. I ran the numbers one time and my m/m makes literally ten times as much as the f/f. Did I post about this before? It was discouraging. OTOH these holiday trio stories are quite short and I can write quite quickly when I’ve got an inspiration. (This is why I’ve been holding off brainstorming on Valentine’s Day, so the inspiration will be piping hot when I start.) So perhaps…

7. Honestly I’m probably procrastinating on publishing Diary of a Cranky Bookworm because I’ve been working on it on and off since 2012, and it’s about 100,000 words, and it’s a project of the heart so in a sense it doesn’t matter that it’s going to make perhaps two hundred dollars, but also that’s not exactly an incentive to publish.

8. Final news! I’m planning to wrap up my Patreon at the end of December. With a full-time job I can’t keep up with it, and also TBH I’ve missed posting WIPs here with you guys.

I’ve got some other ideas kicking around, but this post is quite long enough, so I will perhaps make another post later on.

Since I started a new job in January, I've been so busy that I've really posted about nothing but books. In this post, I thought I would catch you up on a few other things in my life.

The scrapbookening continues! I had vague visions of doing this in some sort of systematic way, but in fact I've been hopping around in time from event to event. Right now I'm on a wedding kick, having realized that wedding invitations are an excellent "scrap", as are the thank-you notes if the bride and groom happened to send them. (When you are trying to scrapbook events that happened years ago, which you were not at the time planning to scrapbook, often it's difficult to rustle up anything but photographs for the pages.)

I was similarly inspired by the idea of using birthday cards from my 30th birthday bash in my scrapbook. I'd just finished laying out ten beautiful pages when my cat Baby Boy leaped on the table. "Baby Boy!" I wailed, and Baby Boy fled to the far end of the table top, at which point the table tipped under his weight and all my beautiful pages went flying as the table fell over.

Baby Boy is alive, but he was for about ten seconds in serious danger of being made into cat stew.

I've put the 30th birthday pages back together. (Baby Boy fortunately didn't damage anything except one of the cardstock sheets, which is of course now part of my Adventures in Scrapbooking scrapbook page, with a photograph of the destruction that he wrought, with Baby Boy crouched in the background gazing dazed at the fallen table.) But I haven't had the heart to start in on the captions; hence working on weddings instead.

I've also been on a Quest for the perfect three-ring binder. After some experimentation I have concluded that the path of wisdom is a series of one-inch O-rings, as the scrapbook pages turn much more easily than in either O-ring or D-ring two-inchers.

Other things! I'm signed up for an intro to watercolor class tomorrow. As a child I really enjoyed watercolors, but it's been years since I've used them, so a class seemed like a good way to ease back in. Over the summer I acquired a book about nature journaling (a castaway from a retiring professor's office), which enchanted me, and watercolor seems like the perfect medium for a nature journal, since so much of what I find enchanting in nature is the color.

I haven't done much writing - aside from book reviews for DW, and letters, and scrapbooking... Okay, I haven't done much fiction writing this year, but I am ever so slowly dragging myself through the copy-edits on Diary of a Cranky Bookworm. My goal is to get it out in October! (Sage starts her diary in October. Maybe I should make her diary start date my deadline.)

Oh, and I've started going on an evening Cat Walk, as I call it, which consists of walking around the neighborhood to meet the local cats. Porch Cat is an orange tabby who lies reliably in the sun on his porch; Trinket is a one-eyed black cat with a white bib who sometimes prowls around my house. He likes to be petted if he's in the mood, but his two-eyed lookalike runs away whenever people approach. There is a house with a set of associated kittens, half-wild, including a cream one with dark rings round the eyes whom I call Goggles; and around the corner, a fluffy black kitten all tail and eyes named Umi.

As aforementioned, I finished a draft of The Sleeping Soldier! A draft that I am willing to let other people clap their innocent eyeballs on, no less! It took a mere three years… nine attempts… blood, sweat, and tears… okay I think there was no literal blood involved, but there were in fact tears.

What finally cracked it:

1. Accepting that I was simply going to have to spend a few chapters dealing with Russell’s grief about the fact that, you know, everyone he loved died while he was in that hundred year sleep, which ultimately meant rejiggering the timeline to include an extra year;

2. Making an outline, which is what got me excited enough to give the book another try despite copious failed attempts; and

3. Retyping the whole thing rather than copy-pasting from old drafts, as suggested in Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. To be honest I thought this advice was barmy when I first read it, and it’s possible that it will never work again for any of my other projects, but at the moment I am a CONVERT.

Conveniently, I have another project ideally suited to this method! My YA novel Sage has existed as a complete but imperfect draft since 2016 and I would love to finish it and get it out there, even though it has the commercial prospects of a rutabaga. I love these girls! Everyone else should have a chance to meet them too! And I really do think it will make it slightly more saleable if Sage’s enemies-to-friends arc with her nemesis’s head minion Angelee extends to enemies-to-friends-to-lovers…

Oh, and I’ve got some prompt fics I need to write for Patreon. Maybe I will take a little break to tackle those before diving into Sage.

At the beginning of March I hoped to prepare The Threefold Tie for publication and complete the final round of major revisions on Honeytrap, and… I have achieved both those things! (In fact, The Threefold Tie is available for preorder - I’ve never done preorders before, this is so exciting - it goes live on Friday. And yes, there will be paperbacks too, but I couldn’t figure out how to make those preorder, so they’re not showing up yet.)

Of course the global pandemic meant that I had much more writing time than expected, but on the other hand the whole global pandemic thing has been, how shall I put this, distracting, so I feel I did pretty well.

The library where I work is now closed “until further notice,” with the earliest possible reopening date of May 4th… which makes it particularly unfortunate that I’m going into April without my next writing project lined up. I’ve been poking at the m/m Sleeping Beauty, but I’m having trouble seeing the shape of the book; I suppose I could write the parts that I have and see if something develops as I go.

The other option is - well. I’ve been organizing my computer files, and I finally made a folder for “completed but unpublished novels”… and discovered that I have six… which seems excessive, frankly, but here we are.

Three of them are unsalvageable, but the other three have been neglected mostly because it would be difficult to market them under my current pen name, and they’re also too unlike each other to lump together under a different pen name. However, at the moment I have oodles of time and a burning need for a new project, so… clearly the moment they’ve been waiting for!

1. The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball, a middle grade novel about two girls who live in the same house fifty years apart and become friends through the medium of time travel (yes, a popcorn ball is involved) and briefly gain the ability to fly on Halloween, at which point they enchant a bunch of Kit Kat bars so that when they eat the Kit Kats, they can travel through time to visit each other. It is bonkers? Yes. Did this bother agents when I sent out query letters? Absolutely. Do I nonetheless love this book and wish to inflict it upon the nation? Yes.

I’m planning to start with this one, even though it’s probably the oddest fit for Aster Glenn Gray (although The Wolf and the Girl was also a non-romance with weird magic, so maybe people just expect this of me now?), because it will be by far the easiest to prepare for publication. Obviously there will be small revisions throughout, but are only a couple of scenes that need big changes.

2. Sage, a YA novel in diary format, about an ambiguously bisexual high school senior and her three best friends and the books they read and the adventures they have and their hopes and fears for the futures etc., and I have never figured out a good hook for this book, which may be what bothered agents when I sent out query letters about it. Clearly it would be more hook-y if Sage fell in love with her nemesis’s chief minion (currently they just become friends), but that would shift the emphasis away from friendship and when I was writing it I really got attached to the YA novel without romance aspect, because I never saw that growing up (I still don’t think that’s really a thing) and I wanted that to exist.

I wrote the first half of this my first year out of college, and the second half about four years later after I’d written three coffee shop romances and also Reciprocity, and it’s obvious that there was a STEEP learning curve in between… and also I’ve tried to revise that first half in the past, without success. (On the other hand, Honeytrap has given me lots of practice revising a book with a messy and badly organized beginning, so I might finally have the chops to revise this.) But it would require a lot of revision for maybe not that many sales.

3. Harriet Peabody, an m/f historical romance set a couple years after the Civil War. Former Civil War nurse Harriet Peabody and Civil War veteran Dr. Thomas Conroy both think they are Too Damaged for Love, but of course they fall in love with each other.

This was originally intended as a Jennifer Montgomery book, and it’s not wildly out there for Aster Glenn Gray - it is at least a romance, although unlike the other Aster Glenn Gray books, it’s m/f. But I have a suspicion that it needs lots of revisions, and, to be honest, it’s not a passion project like the other two… But on the other hand it would undoubtedly outsell them both by a factor of at least five.

I finished a draft of the Sage novel! Oh my God, I actually have a draft! It only took... four years to complete, oh wow, but I wasn't actively working on it for most of those four years so that's not as bad as it sounds.

I walked over to the ice cream store to celebrate, and got one of the chocolate-dipped cones and the chocolate got a bit melty in the hot sun and it was delicious, and I am contemplating buying myself this Breaking Cat News mug to celebrate a bit more.

Then I got out A. S. Byatt's Possession, which I intended to read for the 2016 Reading Challenge "a book published before you were born"... only to discover that the book was published in 1990, at which point I was already tottering around and learning important lessons about not chewing on books.

I was 100% sure that Possession was published in 1980. It's very disturbing to realize that I was so certain and so wrong at the same time.

I'm still going to read it, because I've been planning to read it this month for aaaages and also I talked evelyn_b into reading it along with me. (Join us if you like! We could be a peculiarly dispersed little reading group!) But clearly I'll need a new book for the challenge.

I have been toying with the idea of trying to write a novel, again, because apparently I am a glutton for punishment and didn’t learn any lessons at all from the last four I tried to write. And I ought to add a fifth in there: Sage also, my magnum opus of last spring, collapsed in an ashen heap.

My kingdom for a plot!

Supposedly if you just keep writing a plot will appear unto you from the ether, and presumably this does in fact happen for a lot of people, but this has not ever worked out for me.

I wrote ~70,000 words last year in the novel about Sage, and I love Sage and her friends and their small town, the problem is that the story never exactly moves forward. It just kept expanding outward, in a sense: it became a melange of subplots, Sage and Her Relationships with Lots and Lots of People, Chiefly Her Friends But Also Her Parents, Her Sister, Her Favorite Teacher Who Doesn’t Like Her, Her Least Favorite Teacher, the Boy She Has a Hopeless Crush On, the Editor of the School Newspaper, and Sundry Others.

This is not a story. There is no way to bring this sort of thing to a satisfactory conclusion. I must become mistress of my subplots.

***

Fun fact: I have yet another idea for a fantasy novel about empire and colonialism and culture clashes and possibly theocracy, although no slavery this time, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. And by yet another I mean like “ten more,” because apparently all my fantasy novels are about this. including the one about the princess imprisoned in the tower who brings to life an origami bird that eats a frickin’ forest and then, grown to monstrous size, comes back to break her out. Presumably it will eat the shingles off the roof, thus obviating the “So why is she imprisoned in a tower with a window large enough to jump through?” problem.

And then...and then what? I have the first scene written (why yes, this is a tragic plea for a reader); but I know from experience that if I don’t know where I’m going, I won’t get anywhere; and I don’t know where to go. I don’t want to plot a “And then Princess Arenyay bel Nessanen takes vengeance, VENGEANCE on her enemies” story.

As you may or may not recall, I've been working on a teen novel about a high school senior named Sage.

Well, "novel" is possibly a little strong. It's more than long enough to be a novel, but it's more like a series of loosely connected vignettes featuring a rotating constellation of characters, some of whom have what a generous person might term "story arcs," but most of whom simply fall off the face of the earth.

Clearly, something had to be done.

So I've spent the week pruning subplots. Away with the newspaper! Adios to most of the colleges subplot! Even Geneva must go!

Geneva the character, not the city. She wants to be called Jen; Sage thinks it's ridiculous to truncate an awesome name like Geneva, and therefore never remembers to do so. Their friendship was doomed anyway, but nonetheless having to cut it out of the novel felt like clubbing a baby seal to death.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, what's left may actually be coherent and have an emotional arc and, you know, all that other good stuff. And I have ideas for how the story ends now! Or if not ends, precisely, at least I know what the climax looks like.

I think the makers of Get Smart intended Steve Carrell to seem charmingly awkward rather than totally obnoxious, but, uh, they missed. And why are he and Anne Hathaway together at the end? Were the moviemakers under the impression that they had sparkling banter, in which animosity only thinly covers an undercurrent of attraction? Because I see no undercurrent. I only see animosity.

On the other hand, Anne Hathaway kicking badguys in the head is amusing - wow, she's super flexible.

***

Read Charlotte Bronte's The Professor, which is like Villette except without qualities that give Villette its own strange genius: the intricate character studies (and, connected, the subtle character interactions), the wrestling with religious concepts, the despair.

It's not that The Professor is a bad book; it's perfectly competent; but no one would be reading it today were it not Charlotte Bronte's.

***

So far, the grad schools do not like me. This is their loss.

***

I have 65,000 words. I'm thinking that I need to start wrapping things up soon or else this is going to be an unpublishable monstrosity of a YA novel.

Although really, the length is the last thing that's going to make this unpublishable. It's about four girls and their friendship in their senior year of high school. Only one of them has a boyfriend. None of the others are going to acquire one.

And the boyfriend, in the preceding 65,000 words, hasn't managed to show up on-page. Because he is unimportant.