Blog Archives
Let the True Blood Flow
Logo from the television program True Blood Français : Logo original de la série télévisée True Blood (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Warning, here be some spoilers. Arrrrgh. Enter at yer own risk, matey.
It’s getting to be that time again.
I can tell when the premiere of True Blood is imminent, like a scent on the breeze. Well. Sort of. Really I can just tell by the number of people who stop me to say:
“Hey! Has anyone ever told you that you look like that girl from True Blood? Jessica?”
If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that in the last four years, I’d seriously have like $157. That’d be enough to buy me a bike. A rather crappy bike, but a bike nonetheless.
I’m very flattered to be compared to Deborah Ann Woll. She is quite lovely and she and I share the L’Oreal gene of red hair. It’s nice to be compared to someone that beautiful, and more so than the time someone said I looked like Tracy Lords not expecting me to know who that was. (She is most known for having falsely represented her age as a teenager in order to do porn — incidentally, anything with her in it from that time period is now illegal to possess, as she was a minor.) I actually quite like Tracy Lords in the mainstream films she’s done, but I have a feeling the comparison wasn’t meant as a compliment.
I’ll leave it to you to judge, gentle viewers.
C'est moi en rouge.
And here is the lovely Ms. Deborah Ann Woll:
Deborah Ann Woll at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles on January 23rd, 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My purported doppelgangers aside, I was surprised to find how not enthused I am about the fifth season of True Blood. The first two seasons killed it — witty writing, an attention to plot, and great characterization made a show worth watching. But then it started to go downhill, in my opinion. I kept watching, like not being able to look away from a painful recitation of teen angst poetry.
That and because looking at Eric Northman is never unpleasant.
Eric Northman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I mean, really.
It began to annoy me how they treated the African-American characters on the show. Lafayette is three-dimensional and fascinating, but Tara has to be one of the most obnoxious and insufferable characters I’ve ever seen, and let’s not forget that her boyfriend Eggs, who was rather interesting, got killed off before he could really take on a solid role. Other than that, there are no main characters who aren’t white — that don’t get dead faster than your fangs can come out, anyway.
I have the same criticism of The Walking Dead — we’re supposed to believe that in the South, all they come across are white people? Oh yeah, they fed the one new black guy to the walkers the moment he walked onscreen.
I found myself rooting for Tara to just bite the dust already halfway through season three. I’d like to see some more sympathetic characters from different racial backgrounds (no, I did not forget Jesus — but is he still alive?) this season. I was reading several articles about the response to Rue and Thresh being black in The Hunger Games — a fact which, if you read the books with any kind of attention whatsoever, you’d already know and thus wouldn’t be surprised by their casting the lovely Amandla Stenberg as Rue and Dayo Okeniyi as Thresh. That some people were outraged by Ms. Stenberg’s beautiful performance as Rue purely because they expected a little blonde white girl sickened me.
We still, it seems, have quite a long way to go.
So as season five of True Blood looms, I don’t have very high expectations. Last season they jumbled so many elements (and did it rather poorly, to boot) from Sookie‘s fairy-ness to the bizarre witches to Bill’s power-hungry demeanor to Eric’s memory loss and kind of contrived relationship with Sookie, season four disappointed me over and over again. The one redeeming quality I saw was in Sookie finally choosing to not be with either Bill or Eric, if only for her demonstrating some real inner strength for once.
I found throughout the season that it’s Jessica, Lafayette, and Jason I care most about, and they are probably the only reasons I’ll even watch season five.
What I hope most is that the writers get a clue and keep it fresh, make intriguing story lines with compelling characters and don’t overload us on subplots. There’s nothing worse than old blood.
Oh, who am I kidding? I’ll watch just to see more of this:
Image via true-blood.net and property of HBO. Visit true-blood.net for True Blood news, predictions, spoilers, and photos! 
Any Truebies out there? Are you excited for season five or do you share my apprehension? What do you think of season four? Do you wish you could have an Eric of your own? Will Tara come back to annoy like the wind, or is she gone for good? Will they give us more than a token sympathetic black character…ever?
Like this:
Wednesday Woman: Dawn Summers
First of all, I want to extend my heartfelt gratefulness and thanks for the kind words and everyone’s thoughts. Yesterday was one of the most difficult days of my life. I am glad I could be there with my family to mourn the loss of someone we all loved — someone who will always be a part of us. Someone found my blog yesterday searching for Nate — I hope that person knows how much he was loved, and how much he will be missed deeply by his family and friends.
As with my Monday Man feature, today’s post is for the women of urban fantasy. I thought a lot about who to write about, both from books and television (if you’ve been following this blog for a while, you should know by now that I wouldn’t dream of leaving out Buffy in any discussion). I considered a character analysis of Rae “Sunshine” Seddon from Sunshine, as the primary dude (can a vampire be a dude?) took the cape Monday, but ultimately decided against it.
My first Wednesday Woman is…
Dawn Summers
What a cute little key! Although she's not one anymore in this picture. Thanks, vampires.com!
Yep, Buffy right off the bat. Buffy’s kid sister, no less. This blog will contain some spoilers. Not too many, but enough to pester the spoiler-phobe.
Dawn started out one of the strangest characters I’ve seen on television, let alone in fiction writing in general. Plunked into the series in season 5 with no explanation other than that she is clearly Buffy’s little sister, a great many viewers hated the poor thing for the duration of the show. I’ve never hated Dawn, though. Her character demonstrates the kind of moving, life-like development that Joss Whedon has been venerated for. Her character’s journey is truly…extraordinary.
Dawn is fourteen when we meet her, but she acts quite a bit younger. She’s klutzy and breaks things, and both Buffy and Joyce treat her like a child, talk about making sure she has a baby-sitter (by that age, I’d been a baby-sitter for a couple years already), and she has some mannerisms of a younger child. As the season progresses and the nature of Dawn’s mystical appearance are brought to light, she begins to undergo some massive psychological shifts. Instead of being able to trust her memories, she finds out that she’s only been around for six months. Six months. To me, right there, that’s an excuse for most of the whining Dawn is accused of. She forms a relationship with Spike, who exhibits a desire to protect her even at that early stage. It’s with his help that she discovers the truth about her existence.
One of the huge themes associated with Dawn’s character is loss. She was created by Joss Whedon as a way for Buffy to have an intensely emotional non-romantic bond, and the dynamic that exists between Buffy and Dawn has a massive impact on Dawn’s development. When Buffy enters a trance-like state to see what is hurting her mother, she instead sees the truth about Dawn, telling her that she’s not her sister. Dawn takes that as a blow — at that point, she doesn’t know she’s not “real.” After the death of their mother, Buffy assumes a more parental role with Dawn, and it’s clear that Buffy truly sees Dawn as her sister. Following Joyce’s death, Dawn attempts to bring her back with black magic, but she destroys the spell just as the Joyce-apparition approaches the house, causing Buffy to break down completely for the first time since Joyce’s death. At this moment, Dawn’s character takes a leap forward as she comforts her older sister, the Slayer, the badass, the stoic woman she admires so much. Buffy’s grief-wracked words hit home for me even now, “Dawn…who’s going to take care of us?”
As the season moves along, it becomes clear that Dawn’s role extends to more than just some arbitrary sister plunked into Buffy’s life. She is a mystical object sought by a hell-god named Glory. Good. Something that’ll end well.
Both the source of terror and hilarious honorifics -- your outrageously scrumptious luminescence. Gorgeous rendition of Glory from fanpop.com.
It takes a solid running away and encounter with Glory for Dawn to realize that however she came to be in Sunnydale, she is Buffy’s sister. Summers blood. This revelation comes to a head when Buffy has to sacrifice her own life to stop the apocalypse after one of Glory’s minions successfully activates Dawn’s blood. Season 6 dawns (haha) with new maturity in Dawn as Willow and Co. bring Buffy back. It’s clear Dawn learned her lesson with the spell with Joyce — that tampering with life and death is dangerous no matter how successful you are. She calls a spiraling Willow out on it, telling her that she can’t just fix the world to her liking and mess with people’s lives. This shows a big step forward in Dawn’s maturation.
Dawn assumes a role of caretaker for Buffy in the early bits of season 6, but she quickly gets pushed to the side as Buffy’ struggles to adapt to her new life after 147 days dead. She gets angry and feels neglected — and resorts to petty larceny more often than not. She also experiences her first kiss with a vampire, which is a nice, non-ironic situation. (Kidding.) She is then forced to stake him, compounding the ever-present theme of loss in Dawn’s life. Her arc is brought home (literally) when she accidentally wishes to a vengeance demon for people to stop leaving — subsequently making everyone stuck in her house. Oops. When the spell is reversed, Buffy realizes that Dawn needs her and makes the choice to stay with her when everyone else bolts.
Through the rest of the season, Dawn insists that she is old enough to handle being a part of the Scooby gang, but Buffy pushes back, not wanting to endanger her. Dawn’s frustration is as normal as any teen’s in this case — just another shining example of how well Joss manages to tell human stories through a supernatural lens.
Thank dog for urban fantasy.
This struggle culminates when Darth Rosenberg (that’s Dark Willow, to you) drops Buffy and Dawn into a fight against superhuman creatures made of earth and roots — and Dawn holds her own, even saving Buffy a few times. This is one of the more affecting moments of their relationship.
Dawn…I don’t want to protect you from the world. I want to show it to you.
In season 7, Dawn takes on an almost Watcher role, helping the gang with research and training with Buffy as a full Scooby. There are many moments in this season where she proves herself, from translating ancient Sumerian to battling ubervamps, but what stands out to me is the episode Potential. For a time in this episode, a spell goes a bit wonky, and Dawn thinks she’s a potential Slayer. She takes off out of the house to figure things out, and she finds a friend from school who has had an encounter with a vampire. The two young women go to the high school to attempt to take him out, only for Dawn to discover that she isn’t the potential; Amanda is. When this happens, she not only steps back immediately, but she empowers Amanda to do what she has to do. What Xander says to her sums up her character’s progression:
They’ll never know how tough it is, Dawnie, to be the one who isn’t chosen. To live so near to the spotlight and never step in it. But I know. I see more than anybody realizes because nobody’s watching me. I saw you last night. I see you working here today. You’re not special. You’re extraordinary.
I think it’s only fitting to show Dawn Summers some love. She’s a character who has experienced unparalleled psychological trauma and shock, as well as extreme loss, from the death of her mother to Buffy’s death, to being the one to discover Tara’s body after Warren shot her. She lost a number of parental figures and still came out of it with grace and poise — by the show’s end, she is the same age Buffy was in the early seasons, and she bears the trials of her life with a lot more finesse.
Dawn Summers, you are Wednesday Woman.
Related articles
- Buffy Fans Rejoice – Season 8 Getting a Hardcover Release & Season 9 Getting Its First Collection! (dreadcentral.com)
- Entertainment Weekly Review on Buffy Season #9 Comic (houseofvampires.wordpress.com)
- ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ stars: Where they are now? (herocomplex.latimes.com)
- Joss Whedon’s THE AVENGERS Might Feature a Vampire! (geektyrant.com)
- Joss Whedon Discusses His Defunct ‘Wonder Woman’ Movie (screenrant.com)
- The Recalcitrant Vampire: Immortal Pop Culture Emperor (emmiemears.com)
Like this:
Monday Man: Constantine
to Monday! To lighten the fact that you’re likely back at work and I’m not (come on, you get weekends), I bring you Monday’s new feature: Monday Man.
I'm sure Con will be happy about this.
The idea is simple. On Mondays, I will pick a male character in the urban fantasy (or sometimes other fantasy) genre to dissect. But not really dissect, because I don’t think I could even catch this one if I tried, let alone get him to hold still.
You could buy this for yourself for SolstiChristmaKwanzukkah! The image links to Amazon for your convenience!
I’ve just finished reading Sunshine by Robin McKinley, so it’s only appropriate for me to pick one of her characters to begin, no? If you haven’t read the book, I would get on that. I’ll try not to include any excessive spoilers, but a couple might slip in. Ready?
We first meet Constantine shackled to a wall with a warded anklet. He’s a vampire. Right off the bat, I loved that Robin McKinley’s vampires were not pretty. Their skin is grayish and dead-looking. They have no heartbeat and irregular breath. They move without humans being able to follow it, and when they nab Sunshine at the beginning, she doesn’t hear them coming.
Right away, it’s evident that Constantine doesn’t really have any desire to hurt Sunshine, which is already a nice contrast to her assumptions about suckers. He helps her stay untempting, and I liked the twist that humans have to invite the suckers to drink their blood or otherwise enter their bodies. (Ahem.) Granted, if you look into their eyes, they’ll be able to persuade you to give that invitation, but I am a sucker (mua ha) for anything that gives supernaturals a human-accessible weakness.
The situation in which Sunshine finds herself shows a lot about Con’s character. One of her captors makes the remark, “He likes old-fashioned things” right before making her dress in a red ballgown. It’s evident from Constantine’s careful positioning that he is trying to minimize any possibility that he would hurt Sunshine, both for her sake and because he has no desire to succumb to Bo’s game.
At one point, Con informs Sunshine that there is more than one way to live the life of a vampire. Though he never goes into detail about this, it’s inferred that they can survive on animal blood and that taking human lives affects not only their personality and level of evil, but their ability to age well. Con, it seems, has been very careful.
He’s also described as passing-ugly. Sunshine makes mention several times of his blatant Other-ness, differences in his body shape and movement that make him almost abhorrent, even though she is intrigued by him. It’s clear early on that he views their sort of forced bond as both necessary and a curiosity.
I love gray areas, and Constantine is a great gray area. He goes against the stereotypes of vampires in that world, and he makes his own rules, though he’s not overly aggressive about it. He also represents a darkness Sunshine fears and challenges her assumptions about what that means for her character. He has a lot of roles that don’t seem to fit, such as healer, though again it falls outside the lines of expectation, both for the reader and for Sunshine. Con is in many ways a contradiction, and I think that’s why I liked him so much. He managed to do all of that without being broody or maudlin, and I always appreciate a good self-actualized vampire. Above all things, Con knows his place in the world and doesn’t waste his time wishing for the sun or fat grandchildren.
I’ll close with a bit of fan art of the two of them. Con looks a little bit more ogre-y than I imagined him, and less stringy and lean, but it’s cool to see them depicted anyway. I give you: Monday Man!
Mmm, gray skin in the sunlight. How attractive. Image via fanpop.com
Related articles
- Chalice – Robin McKinley (booklolly.wordpress.com)
- The Hero and the Crown – Robin McKinley (booklolly.wordpress.com)
- On Bookstores, Books, and the Number 33 (emmiemears.wordpress.com)
Like this:
Realism and Urban Fantasy
Last night I wrapped up the second book of my trilogy and began on book three. While book two definitely posed some challenges and obstacles (hell, I stopped in the middle and wrote book one when I realized the story didn’t really start there), this last one is going to be the most involved in some ways.
For starters, my primary POV protagonist (though it will switch between Sarah and Anna as well) is a 400-year-old vampire. Her back story is fascinating to me as well as being integral to the progression of the series, so last night I wrote upwards of 3,000 words of historical fiction.
I already know some stuff about 17th century Poland — or more correctly, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that existed at the time. I know in 1655 the Swedes invaded (that’s when her home was burned to the ground and she ended up becoming a vampire), but other things I had to look up, like this dude:
Fabulous hat, sir.
Regardless of the fashion of the times, I want to create little forays into the past that pluck the reader out of the 21st century and punt them backwards, so they feel the grit, the reality of a life back then.
For my dear little Ewunia, she has a rough go of things. So there are a good number of things I need to look up and figure out. For instance:
What would have been the role of a widowed merchant’s only daughter? Would she have been educated at all? What sort of practical skills might she have, if any?
How exactly were women of the day treated? Would she have been on the cusp of being married to someone twice her age? Probably.
What would an invading army do with stray women? (I think I already know the answer to that — it hasn’t changed in five thousand years since the dawn of time.)
Muskets or arrows or bolts?
What would Ewunia have worn given her sex and social class? What did 17th century Poles eat?
In spite of the relatively short amount of time my book will spend in the 17th century, I need to go back there to hunt myself. I need to learn more about this world Ewunia is at the mercy of once her father is dead and her home burned to the ground. Because ultimately, I want readers to understand why she makes the choices she does, and her background will determine a lot of that. Not to mention the vampire who makes her one — he is very important to the story, and his development gives me some chills to think about. He’s a little bit like Anakin Skywalker, but with fangs and an old Swedish name instead.
Speaking of him, his name is the one I had to change, as was Ewunia’s, to protect the validity of their characters. They’re supposed to be centuries old, so his name wouldn’t be Damon. Plus, Ewunia begins to go by Elaine later, and I realized the Polish version of that is Elena (and not common)…Elena and Damon? Dammit, Vampire Diaries.
So yeah, they’re now Ewunia and Einarr, circa 1655. I like “Einarr.” It means one warrior, which suits him. And his chosen replacement name later will be nice and ironic.
I’ll probably have a wee bit more to say on this as I continue to write, gentle viewers. Until then, love your characters, love your story, and be true to it however you know best.
Like this:
Day 10 and Novel 2
Day 10 winds its way to a close with some fabulous news.
Elemental is finished.
During my many hours at Panera today for my Corridor Writers write-in, my word count for the novel hit 111,000, and as tomorrow is 11/11/11, I decided it was done. Just kidding. That wasn’t my reasoning, but I found that the story didn’t need another 10,000 words. More might happen in the rewrite, but for now it’s finished.
You know what that means?
That means I have written TWO WHOLE BOOKS!!!!!!!
Yeah, sorry for the spaz attack. I felt it was merited. Two whole books, and a quarter million words. Geez oh Pete’s, that sounds like a lot of words. Probably because it is.
I am now about 2,500 words into book three, going way back in time and into some nitty gritty historical urban fantasy for the prologue, which is interesting but exhausting — and torturing a character is never that fun for me. I feel bad for her. She’s a little shaky, but she will evolve. And we’ll get to see that happen.
We will also learn the back story of one of the trilogy’s major antagonists, one of the superbad baddies. And that is worth it, for sure. He will grow a sympathetic side for a time — although that time is four hundred years ago.
So here we go. Book three of three. Wish me luck.
Like this:
A Twilit Diatribe and Other Sordid Stories
This post has been milling around in my brain like a school of directionless fish for the past several weeks. I thought about re-reading the entire series before writing it and then decided it wasn’t necessary. So here I am to tackle one of the literary phenomena of this decade:
Twilight.
Before I get started, I want to make plain and clear that I am in no way attempting to demean Stephenie Meyer or her work.
I’ve read all the books. I will begin with that. And I wanted to read them. I picked up Twilight in the hot, humid Tennessee of 2008, and after plowing through the first volume, went out and bought the second and third. And then I went to the midnight release of Breaking Dawn at the Nashville Borders where I used to have my writing group. I even went to a book discussion group about it. Through all of that, I wouldn’t call myself a Twi-hard. I read them again a little while later, and things started to bother me.
I had just gotten out of a bad relationship. Suffice it to say that this man wouldn’t take no for an answer. Re-reading Twilight, I started to ask how it was okay for a man (one ultimately decades older) to sit in a high school girl’s bedroom and watch her sleep. Any man. As their relationship progressed, I wondered why Bella put up with the fact that Edward seems to think any decision she makes is stupid, and that he knows better always.
Let me interject here that I do not think any of that was Stephenie Meyer’s conscious intention.
The fairy-tale lover inside my head at this cries, “But he loves her!”
The part of me who has dealt with abuse both first and second hand responds, “Controlling, boundary-crossing love is not love.”
I get the forbidden love thing. I do. It’s enticing and seductive. But there’s a lot of wisdom in throwing that kind of love out the window from the get-go. Because even though Edward and Bella got one, in the real world, happy endings don’t exist. I actually said this in my wedding vows: Anyone can get on a shiny horse and trot westward, but it takes a truer and more perfect love to be there when the sun comes up, or when the sun is obscured by clouds, or when life happens. True love is only found on the other side of the sunset.
As I re-read the books a couple times, I began to be a bit irked by the writing. Lots of passive voice, some inconsistencies (one moment Charlie’s eating one thing, the next something else entirely). From a literary standpoint, the books are far from perfect. This is something I blame a lot more on Meyer’s editor than on herself. The books also improve in quality as the series progresses, as well they would.
I stumbled across a blog once devoted to ripping Twilight to shreds. Line by line. Impressive endeavor — that’s a lot of lines to rip apart. At first, I felt like someone had torn scales away from my eyes. “Really?! That happened?” But after a while I began to feel pretty bad for Stephenie Meyer. If anyone took that much time out of their lives to put my book through a wood chipper, I would probably be a sobbing mass of snot and tears.
Which got me to thinking. Yes, there are some things wrong with the series. I don’t think that Edward and Bella have a very healthy relationship, and Jacob isn’t any better with his rape-y kisses. I’ve always hated romance novels that begin with a big strong man stealing a woman and raping her into loving him. It’s a big, sick exercise in Stockholm Syndrome, and it perpetuates some very, very nasty myths about women. All that said, for all you can pick apart Meyer’s books until Edward’s old and gray, there is one vital little fact that Twilight critics miss.
She did something right.
In spite of all the nit-picky (and some glaring) things, Stephenie Meyer accomplished something that just about every writer yearns for. She wrote four books that not only set her up for the rest of her life, but forged an intensely loyal and devoted fan base. She branded herself. Very few authors ever achieve that. Millions of fans around the world love her books, and I have a feeling that although the literary critics might hang themselves at the prospect, her books are going to stick around for a long time. More than the money, she has fans who adore her. Her pages grabbed hold of millions of people and dragged them through her story.
No matter what you think of Twilight, you have to admit that she did something very, very right. You can’t fabricate the kind of response she has gotten. Yes, she’s had some seriously good marketing and publicity, but face it: the response of her readers is genuine. And you can pour as much money into books as you want, but you can’t buy that. She found a bit of magic, and she communicated it to her readers in a way that keeps them coming back for more. Begging for more. Hysterically crying at the thought of having more. Twilight fans are so rabid that I can’t go see the movies in the theater unless I find a time all the kids are in school and I’m the only one there — I can’t stand all the screeching every time Robert Pattinson or Tayler Lautner shows his face.
Regected Riter is My Hero
While I don’t expect my books to take over the world like Stephenie Meyer or J.K. Rowling did, having even 10,000 readers like theirs would pretty much make my life. Having a readership that thinks of your characters as friends, who thinks about what they would do, who gets to know them and the story to the point that they have whole conversations about it — that is the dream, gentle viewers.
So as we trundle through NaNoWriMo and frantically try to achieve our word counts for the month, I’ll be thinking about a woman who has inspired both undying love and virulent vitriol. I’ll be pondering Stephenie Meyer and what she did right, trying to figure out what my magic is.
Like this:
Into the Breach
Good afternoon, gentle viewers, and a Happy Halloween to you! Or a joyous Samhain, if that’s how you roll. Or you know, Dia de los Muertos is tomorrow, I reckon. Holiday season is in full swing! And I have the tea to prove it. Nom nom nom.
Twelve short hours before NaNo begins. I looked around for a midnight write-in, but the closest one to me was downtown D.C. (snore), and I’m not driving over an hour to hang out in a Starbucks at midnight. It does look like there are some serious NaNo events throughout the month in Maryland, though, so I should be able to find something. In fact, I am going to a write-in on Thursday because it’s close and my day off. Woohoo!
Apart from my NaNoRebels challenge goals (1,500 words a day, an hour or more a week refueling), I’ve set a few goals for myself for the month. Here they are!
1. Finish the first draft of book two (almost there!). This is so that when I pitch to agents in January, I will not only have one bright and shiny work to show them, but two! That’s right, people. For the low price of ink on paper, you get two — count ‘em — two finished works! If this woman can write two, she can probably write more.
Salesman Jesus wants you to publish my books.
2. Get a start on book three for the same reasons as Goal #1, if you change “two” to “three.”
3. Behind Goal #3, we have one last little thing to say on my goals! While in general the idea for NaNoWriMo is quantity and not so much quality, my personal goal is to write lucid and cohesive work this month. I don’t want to have to spend another month making it readable when I go back and edit.
Anyhoo. I wrote almost 3,000 words yesterday, finally pushing book two forward in plot and action. That’s a huzzah moment. I also went back and read it and liked what I had, even though I wrote it with my pink earbuds glued to my ears rocking Daft Punk at 3 a.m.
Right now I’m at about 87,000 words, which should be right on track for the end to be at around 120,000 for the first draft. It’s long, but I wanted hefty books. They’re supposed to be chronicles, for FSM’s sake, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t be 250-pagers.
The fun thing about this trilogy is writing different characters who are also different species. The first protagonist was a seer and a shapeshifter (she’s still around), and the second is a witch who was forcibly turned into a vampire against her will. That gives me some fun things to work with and to explore the magic of the world a lot more in the second book rather than having to look at it solely from an observer’s point of view. Anna gets to be actively involved in the magic aspects of things.
My chunk from last night also introduced a new character who will be awesome. He is going to be tricky to write for a lot of different reasons (not the least of which that he is completely batshit insane), but he’s got a lot to offer the story and the other characters. Plus, I got to hear him say, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty” to Sarah. Ha. She deserved that.
It’s Halloween time, gentle viewers! Get your spook on!
Like this:
Unity
I worked on draft two for a while today and found myself frustrated. Not only is the first draft way too exposition heavy at the end, but it didn’t flow the way I wanted it to. A lot of that ties in with the previous post about pacing, which I think will be easily fixable, but some of it has to do with creating unity.
7. Unity
One method for creating a sense of unity in a piece of writing is the use of selective repetition. A detail or remark or even just a unique word mentioned early in your piece can be echoed later, creating a sense of wholeness through the reader’s recognition of the previous mention. That recognition also imbues the repeated element with a resonance, not unlike a coda in a musical composition. The reader enjoys a satisfying sense of progression, of having moved from one literary moment to another.Reread a piece you’re working on with an eye toward finding that element you could repeat in a subtle way, and then look for a place later in the piece where you could drop it in. If you’re unsure which one would be most affective, experiment by trying several. Ask yourself: If you had to cut all the details or images and retain only one, which one would you keep? That’s the one you want.
—Heffron
While some of the exposition is important, it doesn’t have to be an info-dump like it is in the story so far. For now, there are perhaps four or five main events that occur after the main climax of the novel. I’ll summarize them here:
1. Sarah’s impressions of Scotland (this is description, but it ties into a few different things.)
2. Sarah and Cam’s Moderately Bad Decision
3. Sarah’s dream
4. Meeting Mariusz and seeing Anna for the first time
5. The Awakening of three more seers
6. (Oops, I lied!) In Which Sarah and Cam Have a Conversation With a Tree
Somehow in the first draft those things take up approximately fifty pages. Not necessary. So far I cut out about 10% of that, but a lot more needs to come out. Every single one of those things creates a flow between books one and two so that the reader can pick up the second book and feel connected to the story in spite of the fact that the protagonist will be Anna instead of Sarah for most of the second book (with the exception of a few chapters). The seer thing will most likely land itself at the end of the book, and be referenced in an epilogue. What is frustrating at the moment is the structure. I like a lot of the writing — as writing, not as part of the story. There’s some beautiful description and some quirky funny bits, but they’re not really useful to the story, and thus need to be relegated to the bin of scrapped verbosity.
I like the very end a lot. I think it does a great job of setting up book two whilst wrapping up book one. It’s just a bit in the middle of the end that irritates me. It’s like having a bramble stuck in between my shirt and my bra, right between my shoulder blades. How annoying.
I don’t think I’ll get draft two done before the honeymoon, more’s the pity, but we are getting there. Slow and steady. The other applicable bit about unity is that I need to add some things that bring the first book back to the beginning a little. Tickle the reader’s memory so that he or she feels the continuity. There are a lot of good ways to do that, so I don’t think it will be a problem. That could go in the polishing draft; we’ll see.
I have a lot of food for thought. I wish I could just go poof and make it perfect, but what would be the fun in that? Come on.
Vale la pena, no?
EDIT NOTE: No idea why, but apparently this never got published. That’s why I was so confused as to why I couldn’t find my post on unity when I went onto the next part of The 25. Silly me. It was still a draft. I think it is still relevant, so here you go. A little Easter egg in October. Like a Halloween egg. Just not thrown at someone’s house.
Like this:
Go With the Flow
In the spirit of the 25 Ways to Improve Your Writing (henceforth to be referred to as “the 25″ for the sake of brevity), I’m going to go for it. The structure of these posts will probably consist of me rambling on a bit about how a certain tip relates to my revision process. So here’s the first one!
1. Flow
A piece of writing is a living thing. Our goal should be to serve it and do what it wants, to be its instrument. The flow of words from our mind to the page is impeded in two main ways—if we try to make the story do something that it doesn’t want to do, or if something in us isn’t ready to face the full implications of the work’s theme and emotions.
I’m going to diverge a bit from the implications of writers’ block that exist in this tip, because that’s not something that I’m dealing with during this rewrite. The flow of the text and the flow of narration are entwined in my view. I agree wholeheartedly that when I am having trouble, it’s usually because I’m forcing it, but for the purpose of relating this wisdom to the second draft of my novel, I’m going to talk about the narrative flow.
One of the overarching themes in my story that I noticed glimmering through both books and know it will continue into the third is a sense of connectivity, a belief that the earth connects us all and links everything together. People, places, everything. Magic is the essence of nature, the elements — the responsive and breathing energies that my supernatural characters tap into. One of the big turning points in the first book is when my protagonist visits a reservation after being called there in one of her visions. This challenges the long-held beliefs of the supernaturals that magic is confined to their people — one character in particular has an issue believing that humans (Muggles, if you will) have access to it. It’s a theme that will be explored much more in the later books.
What I am having a few issues with is streamlining the little field trips my character takes with the narrative flow. They need to feel integral to the reader, not gratuitous. I think the best way to convey that sense of immediacy and necessity is to focus on bringing the scenes to life, using language that can be repeated as a sort of key throughout that clues the reader in to that connectedness. I think for the most part it achieves that already, but there are a few rough spots that should come out in the polishing phase after this second draft is done.
It’s getting so close. It’s unbelievable to me to see this coming together and to feel so confident about it. I think it’s a good, salable novel that would appeal to a lot of people. I even think the timing is okay — if I can get it published, it would hit shelves a couple years down the road, which would be post Twilight and enough post that I could catch my target audience — which is the urban fantasy lovers and Twilight fans who have grown up a little. There’s still a lot to do before the query stage officially begins, but it’s coming. By November, I want to be ready. That gives me six weeks to get this thing all prettied up with bows in its hair and a minimal amount of blood spatter.
Wish me luck!
In Production
Yesterday was a blazing success of productivity for me. My fiance had music stuff to do, so I found myself plunked in front of the dinosaur to do battle with a stream of inexplicable ants and get about 10,000 words or so done in my revising of the novel and blogging.
No idea where those ants are coming from or what they’re after, but they’re prolific and make my skin tickle as if they’re crawling all over me. Ew.
I wish today could be the same, but alas my one day weekend is over, and it’s time for me to go back to work. Tonight will see me in a very short skirt serving up a new beer and hoping I make money. If they’re making me flaunt what I’ve got for the night, I better be well-compensated. As my grandma would say, lawdy.
I discovered this blog yesterday, for which I’m quite happy. The author is also working on revising her novel, and reading her blog makes me feel like I’m not so alone in this little sphere of revision. On the subject of revision, she discovered a gem of an article titled 25 Ways to Improve Your Writing in 30 Minutes a Day, which may sound cumbersome, but it is pure sparkling fairy dust, gentle viewers. Check it out.
In terms of novel, I’m right about at the novel’s climax for my second draft. Going into this next bit is going to be rough on poor Sarah, and I know some streamlining, precision, and clarity (thank you, Writers Digest) to ensure that the resolution that follows the wham pow crumbling action is at the same time satisfying and tantalizing. There’s a book two after book one, and a book three after that. I need to give my readers some clarity on the situation without giving away too much and tugging them on toward the second book.
My goal with this project is to have the first draft of the second book completed (it’s at about 85% right now) by the time I start an active search for agents. I want to be able to wave my arms and say, “Look! I can write consistently! If you decide to be my partner in this, I promise you I will work my arse off to make this a viable career for myself and make money for you by writing a book a year and each one better than the last. Love and kisses!”
While it’s not the kiss of true love that punts me toward happily ever after, having the next book in a semblance of completion can’t hurt. It can only help show that I’m serious.
Anyway, I know my characters are stronger this time around. I fixed a heap of dialogue issues when it came to a few Scottish characters whose accents looked nonexistent on the page in the first draft except for the occasional verbal tic, and I’ve gotten much closer to the tone of grit and quirk I was looking for. I’m even getting excited to start working on the final book in the trilogy, because my main POV character in that one is actually a vampire. She was born that way, and she’s three hundred years old. Writing from her perspective is going to be challenging and enlightening. I can’t wait. Ah, the joys of urban fantasy. I get to daydream all day and then write it down.
Onward with the progress! The end of draft two is in sight — I can smell it.
