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Monday Man: Jenks
Good evening, gentle viewers! I confess it took me a wee bit of time to get around to you today, but I blame Tin Tin. And my sore muscles. And a nap. Nevertheless, here I am, and you look so charming today. Do you have snow? I don’t have snow. More’s the pity.
I was thinking around through the various fantasy series I read and have read, and I decided to go a wee bit unorthodox with today’s Monday Man — I opted to choose a pixy.
Jenks is way more badass than this. Thanks to pixie.wikia.com!
If you haven’t read Kim Harrison‘s series of books about The Hollows, I daresay you should put down this blog and go track down Dead Witch Walking and read it. They’re fun, quirky, and like to play with stereotypes before they eat them and stuff them into the Ever After.
Jenks is introduced in the first book — and the first imagery I recall of this introduction involves him sitting on Rachel’s hoop earring, muttering in her ear. He’s her backup (the only pixywho would even agree to take the hazard pay for such a job), and he sticks.
One of the things I find most interesting about Jenks is that in spite of his size (around 4 inches tall) and the bluebells and daisies sort of image pixies put off and the fact that he is only about 16 years old, his role is most assuredly that of a father figure. He looks out for Rachel and Ivy in the field and personally. He takes great pains to ensure that Rachel knows his opinions on her various suitors, and he is responsible for getting them out of more than one very tight and uncomfortable place.
Jenks has a massive family — something around 20 children — and a wife named Matalina whom he loves to distraction. He is fiercely protective and defends his land and their lives throughout the book series. At a couple points in the series, he is changed to human size, which has some serious and unintended consequences.
Jenks is highly motivated by his loyalty to those he loves — his family (both natural and adopted). His primary driving force is to see his wife and children safe, as well as Rachel and Ivy, though his dynamic with the living vampire often shifts based on his perception of her threat to Rachel. Jenks risks himself more times than he has children in order to perform his role. He is a bona fide hero, a diverse and interesting character, and — let’s be honest — quite the stunner.
Jenks, you are…
Even heroes are sometimes very, very small.
Related articles
- Every Which Way But Dead by Kim Harrison (caughtbetweenthepages.wordpress.com)
- Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison (caughtbetweenthepages.wordpress.com)
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How Do You Know She’s a Witch?
She looks like one!
It's not easy being green. Image via oz.wikia.com
As Kermit so aptly put it, witches have had it rough. I’m sure that was what he referred to with his comment. Always looking out for others, that one.
Witches have always had a bit of a bad rap. If you go searching through the history books, you’ll find whole heaps of instances where a drought or famine or rash of cattle deaths — or a rash in general — prompted the good townspeople to fear a witch in their midst. One might even call them the scapegoats of humanity throughout the centuries. It resulted in not a few bogus trials and torture and death sentences. It also happened to be one of those guilt by association things. You know nice little Esther Pemberley down the street?
You do know her?!! You must be a witch too!!!! [Insert torches and angry mob with pitchforks here.]
What do you burn apart from witches? MORE WITCHES! Image property of the Monty Python boys, brought to you by rjciurus.com
Needless to say, the witches who were accused and inevitably found guilty met rather ignominious fates. And instead of being witches, they were mostly just…you know. Women. Sometimes old, quirky, or wealthy (magistrates loved to accuse wealthy widows because when they offed them in the “justice” system, they got to keep the spoils estates), sometimes young and into some kind of mundane trouble.
Makes me rather happy that I not only live in a land where women are mostly equal, but I live here in the 21st century. Four hundred years ago, there is probably a stake with my name on it.
Like this steak. Wait... (Drool courtesy of steamykitchen.com)
Like vampires and horror, witches were one of my childhood staples. I loved magic. I loved magic so much that I begged Santa for a real magic wand and figured he had just forgotten or ran out of time on Christmas Day that year. I subsequently looked under my bed every day for over a year. I contented myself with reading about witches or magic. Books like the Chronicles of Prydain made me yearn to be Eilonwy. Whenever I played Candy Land with friends, we fought over who got to be the magical blue witch (because as children, this is a never-ending and vital argument).
I was never afraid of witches, even the really bad ones like the WWW (Wicked Witch of the West) or Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. I thought Glinda was a wee bit dumb. I loved the idea of witches who had power within them, wand or no wand.
It didn’t take me long to fall in love with urban fantasy. The Night World witches came first and had me hunting through herb shops wanting to try Thea’s spells. Then I discovered the Secret Circle, and I was hooked like magic was crack. When I got older, it was the sorcerers from the Belgariad and the Aes Sedai of the Wheel of Time (I know, I know, not “witches” and not urban fantasy). Then came Kim Harrison‘s Rachel Morgan. Her witches fall into either the “earth witch” category or the “ley line” witch category. Magic has defined lines, though as Rachel of course finds out, where the line is tends to move. I liked that, but I still loved the idea of magic coming from within the character, like the Will and the Word used by Eddings, or being able to channel the One Power.
Little did I know that all of those ideas and preferences were beginning to culminate in the germination of my own witches, the ones who populate my trilogy. To me, nature is the essence of magic, and witches, if you will, are nothing more than conduits of that essence. They can change things and get nature to do things for them, but it all comes from the same place. Nature, science, that type of power that is bigger than humanity. Magic in this sense is never “good” or “evil” — it is the user that gives it the intent and meaning, for good or ill.
My question for all you fantasy readers out there — and writers — is this: how do you know she’s a witch? What gives witches their powers? Where does magic come from?
You can make it up — that’s what this is all about. But show me your magic.
How do I know she’s a witch? Well, I’ll tell you, gentle viewers.
If she weighs the same as a duck, she is made of wood! And therefore…a witch!
Related articles
- How did people react to witches and witch craft (wiki.answers.com)
- Grave Witch by Kalayna Price – Review 4 of 5 (readingdivas.wordpress.com)
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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!
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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.
Character Torture
To branch off from the topic of the Big Bads that infest our stories, “character torture” is a phrase I’ve heard many times to describe the misfortunes that befall our characters. Writing them feels like torture sometimes. It’s a fine line to walk — while conflict is central to a good story, if you over do it, readers will detach from the story and refuse to connect with the characters. You have to make the conflict painful enough to evoke a reaction both in your characters and in readers without crossing that line of the suspension of disbelief or alienating readers to the point that they can no longer trust you as a narrator.
I stopped reading a prominent series of historical fiction for that very reason. The main character went through so much in the six books — torture, rape, broken bones, sheer terror over and over again — that finally after one more capture, I snapped. I couldn’t do it anymore. I loved that character and her husband, and it was just too much for me to keep seeing her get beaten into a pulp. I was invested in the character and the series, but I put it down four years ago and haven’t picked it up again. The same thing happened with a fantasy series I was reading — after they killed off half the point of view characters in by the third book, I couldn’t make myself keep reading because I couldn’t let myself get attached to characters I thought were going to arbitrarily get the axe within a few chapters.
If you write fiction that involves bloodsucking vampires (as opposed to the fluffy kitten sort of vampires), or shapeshifters that have to eat internal organs to survive, or witches who can’t be killed except for burning, beheading or dismembering — there’s going to be some violence. Your main character will probably not escape that violence, and mine certainly doesn’t. However, that doesn’t mean I’m going to have her captured, hog tied, and tortured every chapter. I try not to make my character torture gratuitous; it has to serve a purpose for her development and the furthering of the plot. Not one or the other. Both. I think the pitfall the aforementioned historical fiction series fell into was that the series had gotten so long (each book is around a thousand pages, and at the time there were six of them) that the author ran out of other ways to steer the plot. And after six thousand pages, her character had been to hell, chopped into handbasket sized chunks, and sent back in the basket. If you have to torture your character to squeeze another book out of a series that could be wrapped up, you should probably find a new idea to write a book about. A new character to torture who isn’t already covered in scars from your writing.
Like I said, it’s a fine line to walk. Especially in the supernatural genres where the bad guys want your characters dead. But it can be done masterfully so that you love the characters and know they’ll pick themselves back up and come back with more fortitude the next time they’re tested. That’s the tightrope I’m walking with this second draft. Let’s see if I make it to the other side.
Less than 100 pages left to polish up. I also fixed my prologue issue and closed a couple plot holes. Not a bad week’s work so far. Bring it on, gorse bush.
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Late Night Rewrite
At long last, a rewarding post appears. Due to an ill-timed evening nap of three hours in duration, I found myself wide awake around the witching hour. After watching Face/Off and walking the dog we are sitting, I settled down at my trusty iBook dinosaur to work on revising the first draft of my novel. I got a solid twenty pages or so done. What that accomplished is more than just rewriting — I recently rewrote the beginning in its entirety, and today I got the new bit woven into the original, ironing out that seam a bit. It flows the way I wanted it to. I might need some cutting done, because it’s a little exposition-heavy, but that can wait. Because you know what?
HUZZAH!
I got something done!
Do you have any idea how good that feels, gentle viewers? I’ll give you a clue. AWESOME.
My character is getting where I want her. The tone is closer to what I was trying to achieve. There’s some quirk and some wit, and some grit. I smoothed out a few bumps. Filled in a few holes. All in all, I am tremendously happy with what transpired this evening. It may be almost 4:30 a.m., but by golly, I feel accomplished. If I can keep this up (When! When, Emmie!), I should be on track to start officially agent fishing this fall. Trundling right along. Thank you, gorse bush in the bum.
It doesn’t hurt that my day job (night job?) is slinging beers at a brewery, and it has been painfully slow lately. The money has not been seeking me out much. July and August are our slowest months of the year, and I’ve been feeling it. My bank is broke. As Louis C.K. says, “I’m so broke that if it’s free I can’t afford it.” Nothing like financial trouble to start pushing you in the right direction for your dreams. I will make writing my career, dang nab it.
Cheers to a night where I got some work done. Today was a progress-laden day. Hour and a half workout, finished reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and tackled my second draft with renewed vigor. I think this calls for a second HUZZAH!
New Spring
These times, they are a-changin’. Beyond the fact that we are fresh into a new season, trundling along in a newish year, et cetera, I get the feeling that there are good things coming my way. I wrote a while back about feeling how moving to Maryland was like stepping on a solid plank on a rickety rope bridge with the other side of the chasm in sight. While I could have taken the switchbacks down the side of the canyon years ago only to take them back up the other side with no guarantee I would end up anywhere near the destination I had in mind, the rope bridge provided a risky, yet seductive alternative. Not that plunging to my death is an attraction to me; I just meant it was a route bound to get me closer to what I want to do with what time I have here.
There’s no doubt that I’m a writer. I may be an as-yet unpublished one, but I do write. I’m even a novelist — I have indeed completed a novel and almost a second one. So there’s that. It’s just time to get this thing in gear. For the past month, I’ve been busily revising the first draft of said novel. Adding depth where necessary, detail to watercolor. As Bob Ross might airily say, I’m making happy trees out of formerly formless blobs. Not that the first draft was as vomity as I like to call it, but the voice I was searching for is getting more fleshed out in the rewrite. All in all, I’m quite happy with where it’s going. Spring time seems to bring out the creativity in me. Maybe it’s the happy trees dotting the landscape around me. Or the birds chirping. Or the spider crickets bouncing out of nowhere until I gasp a startled expletive and pounce them with my Swiffer. Nothing like battling hideous, monstrous insects to inspire a writer’s ambition to explore apocalyptic epic urban fantasy. Ah, the writing life.
But I digress. Critters aside, it feels wonderful to write. I haven’t committed my scribblings to the all-knowing iBook yet (yes, my trusty lappy is a dinosaur), but I’m working on it. And I’ve written about 50 pages recently, which bodes well for the future.
Wish me monsters.
Aaaaaaugh! End of Year Stress!
So much for that peaceful sail on the coast. More like plunging through a raging river of death. Okay, slightly melodramatic there, but a little melodrama never hurt anyone.
My poor WordPress bloggity. I’ve been neglecting you. My sincerest apologies. I’ve been rather sick. And busy with that whole raging river of death thing. The silver lining is that all of this junque is almost over, and I shall be free to flit about as I see fit.
This week has been not so good for actually producing anything, but I did go to my writing group on Monday and got some really helpful and awesome feedback on the chapter I submitted. I am going to use their suggestions for fixing my chapter. They also asked me to post more, which, as I’ve already discussed, is the highest compliment anyone can give to a writer. So much work to do…egad, Brain.
I’m hoping — possibly in vain — to get more done this weekend. However, my boyo’s dad is in town, so that may not happen. But who knows? We shall see…
Love and kisses.
In Pursuit of Happiness
According to the preamble to the Constitution of the good old U.S. of A., this is one of those little inalienable rights that we are endowed with as human beens. And it’s this particular right that I am in the process of taking out for a spin.
I know that it doesn’t guarantee happiness, but if the right to pursue it is there, that’s good enough for me. (Random thought: how is it possible to guarantee this?)
What this means for me is that I am going to chase this little fledgling (actually full-fledged) dream of writing for a living. I don’t say “being a writer” because I am one of those — I just don’t get paid for it. Unless I am a horrible person and write at work when I should be doing other things…ahem.
Today I was thinking about my story. And the stories of others. There is a quote that says a story is life with the dull parts taken out. I don’t know if that’s entirely true, seeing as how plenty of stories have dull bits in them — and the idea of what is dull is subjective. However, I will say that I think a story has to be told as though it’s unfolding in front of you. Some authors manage to make it work in other ways, like telling it through letters or through dialogue — I’ve seen that work effectively in the past — but most of the time it needs to just play.
Even though 99% of novels are written in past tense, when they’re written well, it’s like you’re in the same room with the characters. You can smell their sweat and feel the shivers. If it’s told like you would tell a friend what you did yesterday, it won’t keep my attention. It lacks the flow, the tide that sucks you in. Such a flow is not something that is easy to accomplish, especially in a vomit draft.
A lot of times, when we write, we have a concept in our head and we write it down the way it makes sense to us. It’s in the editing process where we go in with a scalpel and cut into it until it makes sense to others. The best writing makes readers forget they’re reading — and this holds true with non-fiction as well as fiction.
This post is really not cohesive. For that, gentle viewers, I apologize.
Here’s a brief update on my writing progress before I attempt to cajole my body into sleeping:
(Ooh! “Sleeping” put me at exactly 500 words so far! How exciting.)
Today one of my characters got blown up. I kind of think she deserved it. She’s been in a snit this entire book. Regardless, I feel bad for her. She has a lot going on in her noggin. I just wish she’d stop acting like a 12-year-old hormone bomb and more like the badass lion she is. Seriously.
I am making some good progress. Elemental looks like it will wind up being about 100,000-120,000 words, which is right where I want/expect it to be. Primeval will probably get trimmed a bit, but its successor might be able to get away with being a bit longer. Right now I’m at roughly 85,000. I did the math on Primeval yesterday and found that as is, it’s about 440 book pages if you count it out assuming around 250 per page. That’s the length I’m going for. I’m not Jo Rowling…yet.
To round out this meandering sort of post, I just stumbled across a rather perfect metaphor thanks to a friend who posted a picture of a little dark cloud against an overcast sky. It reminded me very much of Winnie-the-Pooh, who decided one day to disguise himself as a little black rain cloud in his pursuit of honey, which happened to be at the top of a tall tree. He did so by rolling in some very black mud and holding tight to a balloon, hoping that the bees would not think he was threatening their livelihood.
Whilst floating above the earth, Pooh sang, “Oh, I’m just a little black rain cloud!” (The full lyrics to which can be found here) Needless to say, the bees were not fooled by this endeavor, and Pooh swiftly found himself plunging rear-end first into a gorse bush.
The moral of this story is this: We have the freedom to pursue our honey by whatever means we see fit. It may be at the top of a very tall tree, but if we’re not afraid of falling a few times and getting some gorse in our bums, we just might get there one day.
*In case you’re wondering which books these are, they are, respectively: David Eddings’ Belgariad and Malloreon series, which are phenomenal; and Daughters of Darkness, by LJ Smith, who was the woman responsible for hooking me on vampires about 15 years ago. The characters to which I’m referring here are Ce’Nedra and Mary-Lynnette.
Write Until You Can’t See Land
I am feeling the burn.
It’s a good burn. It’s a marathon sort of burn, the kind where time begins to blur to the point that you feel you’re hurtling through the space-time continuum at warp speed and you lose track of entire hours.
I started writing at 8 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time. It’s now 5:06, and I have written 19 pages. 11,341 words. I’d say this makes up for my last few days of inactivity. And I’m not done yet — I’m going to hop into the shower at 6:15 to get ready for work, and I’m going to push through until then.
I’ve written about 10% of my novel tonight. And no, I’m not on speed, or methamphetamine, nor any other kind of drug (well, some caffeine, but only in the form of tea).
I don’t even know how to express the elation I feel right now. It’s effervescent. Or possibly scrubbing bubbles. Hm.
To put it in perspective a bit, I haven’t written like this since fall of 2008. That’s over a year and a half ago. In point of fact, I don’t think I have ever written over 11,000 words in one sitting. It’s therapeutic. It’s like a cleansing fire. I feel purified.
I blame Michael Larsen. In case you don’t know who this is (which most of you probably don’t), he is an American literary agent who wrote a fabulous book, entitled How to Get a Literary Agent, which, after reading 2/3 of in the past 48 hours, I am convinced every aspiring writer must read. I was trucking along in the book tonight, thrilled beyond measure at the information therein, amused by the humor and anecdotes from his experience as a literary agent, and invigorated by the prospect of setting out on this journey when I had to put the book down and bust out my laptop. That was nine hours ago.
Will I survive teaching my class in the morning? Maybe. If all else fails, I can assign them freewrites all period (ha) while I sit comatose at my desk. I won’t do that. But I could.
Anyway. This is a hopeful day for me as a writer. I cannot wait to finish this draft of my novel and begin revision on the completed novel I already have, with the help of a good friend who is actually an editor. And I fully plan to implement every scrap of advice in Mr. Larsen’s book, so that when the rejections become pouring in, at least I’ll know each one is just a rung on the ladder to a yes.
Yep, that’s the optimistic spirit I need.
As my grandmother would say, “Oh, hordy.” It has been a long night, but a much needed one. I have been so drained this year due to a too-stressful job that makes me feel like a punching bag on a daily basis. Maybe this car accident will prove itself to be the best thing to happen to me all year. I have no doubt in my mind that I would not have typed the 11,000 words I’ve typed tonight if it hadn’t happened.
That alone might have made my busted neck worth it. Said busted neck may hurt right now, but…it’s a good burn.
