What Was I Thinking?

Hello Hello!  I'm still here.  I don't know if you are, though.  Ah well.  I don't take blogging seriously, like some people I've met.  I believe I'm going to consider this my training blog, so that when I'm a published writer and people actually care what I have to say, then I'll know how to say things worth saying.

Blah blah blah aside, I'm doing better and worse on the writing front.  Worse, because I haven't written anything of significance in...well, I'm not even sure.  Since I decided to finally put that nameless Baleful Polymorph that I'd been working on since high school out of its misery and be DONE WITH IT FOR REAL THIS TIME.  I am now free to work on my multitude of side stories that are all so much more interesting! 

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You know, despite being a hideous monster with a broken plot that had gone through so many versions it didn't even know what it was anymore...I don't really feel the same sort of dedication for anything else.  Maybe it was just my age, and now I realize it was crap, I'm hard pressed to come up with something new that isn't.  At this point I'm tempted to take it out of storage, dust off the pieces, and see if there's anything I can stitch together.  But I can't.  It's dead.  As it should be and it's time to move on.

I did say I was doing better, though, and here's why:  I'm taking Creative Writing.  Yep.  I displaced some poor Creative Writing major who won't be able to take any actual CW classes for another semester.  Eh.  They have so many generals and literature components they won't really fall behind.  It seems that a lot of the people in that class aren't CW majors either, so it's a nice laid-back atmosphere for me to finally rid myself of this damn phobia.

For those who haven't been following, I have an absolute terror of sharing my writing with other people - what I like to term "page fright."  What I noticed the first time I had to read a poem in that class, however, is that it was mostly physiological.  I was twitchy and tense and kept fidgeting with a yo-yo while I took deep breaths and tried to keep my vision from blurring.  You know, like I was on the verge of a panic attack.  Only I wasn't actually scared.  It was weird.  And they liked my poem.  Better than some of the others.  A lot of the others.  I'm not going to say there are some bad writers in that class, but some are better than others.

So I think I'll be able to kick this habit, since it seems to be a Pavlovian reflex more than an emotional response.  Problems:  It's exhausting.  Writing a poem every week. Reading twenty poems a week.  What was I thinking?  I'm a prose writer.  I'm sick of poetry, and we're not even halfway through the poetry unit.  There's only one short story required for the class, and  - best part - the professor will not accept fantasy. 

Now, if his rationale had been that traditional High Fantasy requires a great deal of worldbuilding that does not work well in short works - okay.  I can accept that.  But no, he just doesn't like fantasy because he thinks it's crap.  This guy, by the way, writes crime fiction.  Murder mystery detective stories.  Room to judge?  I don't think so.  He also refuses trashy paranormal romance - but you know that several girls are going to write trashy mundane romances anyway.

 Does it matter if a stupid girl is in love with a stupid angsty hipster or a stupid angsty vampire?  At least if there's a vampire, you know that someone's going to bleed eventually.  And you know, just bcause a story is a paranormal romance does not mean it has to be trashy - people just write with that assumption.  The thing is, there are some good mundane stories about lovers - The Time-Traveller's Wife, The Gargoyle - okay, I lied when I said mundane.  But this just proves the point I was going to make anyway!  Fantastical elements do not automatically make a story crap!  It is how you use them that determines the quality of your story.

Better stop now, I'm rambling.  I shall return anon!

Vampires

I hate vampires.

Sure, I went through my Anne Rice phase when I was fourteen, and I've read (almost) everything Amelia Atwater-Rhodes has ever written, but by the time the Twilight thing came around I was well over them.  Then, well, the Twilight thing came around, and that killed vampires for good.

Or so I thought.

It was the show "True Blood" that brought them back to me.  Yes, I know they're based on novels, and no, I haven't read any but the first one because I want to keep my respect for the show.  Then there was last summer's collaborative Writing Project of Doom, which involved vampires.  Sexy sexy gay vampires.  Well, all vampires are gay, really.  Seriously, the Meyer woman's attempt at making vampires less gay was to have them sparkle.

Because the Writing Project was Of Doom, my collaborator and I made a pact for this summer:  No vampires.  And what do I do?  I get all excited about a Big Gay Writing Contest, stare at a blank page for a few hours, then jot down the first promising sentence that pops into my head, which happens to be:  After my brother was turned into a vampire, my coming out was almost a relief to my parents.

Oops.

Like a magician with a string of flags, I managed to pull a story out of that first line.  As you may have picked up from my last post, the story needs work (understatement).  The scenes without vampires are all good, and can be worked into the new fabric when I have one.  The vampires will need to be completely, if you'll pardon the pun, revamped.

What I did, as the Nostalgia Chick would say, is create a story from hate.  I hate sparklevamps.  I hate the fact that when I walk into a Barnes and Noble, there is a section just for "Paranormal Romance."  (At least there is one for "Fantasy Adventure" as well.)  I hate how a bloodsucking fiend has had its fangs trimmed, turned into a prettyboy badboy for pathetic teengirls to swoon over.  Vampires.  Are not.  Teenagers.

Thus, in my story, I worked to make my vampires as repulsive as possible and ended up with a sort of AIDS/gangs/drugs screwed up mixed metaphor.  As my beta pointed out, I could replace the vampire with any one of those without changing the story a bit.  Furthermore, I hated the vampires.  They weren't any fun.

I don't hate all vampires.  I like sexy Erik Northman, the sexy badass in charge.  I like Atwater-Rhodes, though her vamps are some of her less compelling characters (I may revise that opinion once I get around to All Just Glass).  To be honest, I never really "got" Rice's vamps.  They were just kind of emo and weird.

What I was going for was a similar vein to Holly Black's "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown," a suberversion of all the prettyfication vampires have recently undergone. Which is a stupid thing to do, because she already wrote that story, so I should write a different one.  In fact, I should get started on that right now, because this whole post is simply procrastination.  I just need to lay down some ground rules for vampires first.  Not just for my story, but for any story I will ever write, read, or respect.

Rules for being a vampire:

1.  You are not a teenager.  Even if you were one physically when you were changed, you are an immortal bloodsucking monster.  You will use your apparent adolescence to your advantage and to manipulate your vicitms.

2.  You will not fall in love with a human.  Humans are food.  If you find one especially pleasing, you may turn it and keep it around as an immortal companion until you tire of it and kill it, or it tires of you and kills you.

3. You will be sexy.  Bonus points for bisexuality.

4.  You will be powerful, dangerous, ruthless, and badass.  No one wants to hear you whine.

5.  You will not be psycho.  Crazies are boring.

6.  You will not be stupid.

7. You will be selfish, and above all, inhuman.  But inhuman in a sexy unattainable way.  Eating people who love you is good.

8.  You cannot be "vegetarian."  No "I only eat animals" or "I never kill my victims."  The latter is acceptable only if your reason is that you do not like to clean up bodies.  Any attempt to make you more benign so that the poor teenage sop thinks she has a chance with you is cheating.

So perhaps instead of angsty teenage delinquents, we have a not-friendly neighborhood vampire slowly taking over a town.  Kind of like 'Salems Lot, only...not.  Hm.  Needs more thought, still.

Blah blah blah

First of all I feel that I owe my very best friend in the whole wide world an apology, because I've been avoiding him.  Why?  I just sent him the first draft of the aforementioned vampire story and asked him to critique it.  Then I spent the next few days convincing myself I was busy, when really I just wanted to convince myself that I had never written anything and no one had ever read it.

I think I need to give a name to this problem.  Presentation Anxiety, how about?  It's like stage fright, only with the written word, instead of spoken.

So right now, having finally worked up the nerve to check my email, I feel pretty wretched.  Nausea is my chief emotion at the moment, a side affect of the anxiety.  I also feel a crushing doubt in my abilities as a writer, and a voice in my head is trying to convince me that I am not up to the challenge, that I should just keep these stupid little attempts at stories to myself and not try to do anything with them.  See, I don't write for enjoyment or ambition.  I write to keep my sanity.  So all that matters is that I write, right?  I can handle the world of the writer, but the world of readers is too big for me.

I am now telling that stupid little voice to shut up, because I can get over this.  I've heard everything I knew made that story suck, but I also heard the things I might have forgotten that made it good.  Right now the vampire plot feels a bit off - and I'm thinking "Why did it have to be vampires?  Seriously, where did that come from?  I don't even like vampires." - and it needs complete overhaul.  I might even nix it completely and go for a mundane plot.  Okay, probably not that; I'd get bored, not to mention that thwe whole story sprang from the first line, in which a vampire is essential.  So some hardcore reimagining.  (But seriously, why vampires?) 

Not to mention that the only scene in the story that seems to work and that I actually like (and my beta-bestie agrees) is a scene that has no vampires...

Ah well.  Here, have a metaphor.  It's like (okay, simile) a massive home improvement project.  You have to rearrange all the furniture and completely gut a room, and then fix whatever is wrong, and then you find other things going wrong and have to fix them, and then you make a mistake and have to fix that, and it's just so much work, you don't even know if it's worth it anymore.

Is it worth it to me?  I'm not going to answer that yet.  I'm just going to say that if I should give up any sort of publication aspiration, I should have a better reason than fear. 

Writing

I'm not even insomniac right now.  A symptom of summer vacation.

So anyway, there's this.

For those too lazy to click on the link, it's a gay writing contest.  I could be published.  Seriously.

And so, in a major counting chickens way, I am going to go pretentious writer on you and talk about my writing process.

It starts, naturally, with ideas.  I looked at the contest guidelines, and all it gave me was a fictional (check) unpublished (check) short story about "being queer."  That should be easy, I thought.  Everything I touch turns to gay.  Honestly.  Even dragons (though really it's more like they're third-gendered...hey, they're my dragons, I can give them whatever biology I want!).

Then I dug up the short pieces I currently have in the works (a very generous way of saying a couple paragraphs saved in a word document), and realized that they somehow all featured heterosexual relationships.  No cheating on this one; I would have to start from scratch.

It was obvious to me that there would have to be some sort of fantastical or supernatural element to the story.  Because it's me.  So in a sense this story would be a double subversion, both of a typical fantasy story and of the typical gay story.  No gay angst or bully-story (I hate bully stories, with utmost apologies to anyone who has ever been bullied).  And absolutely NO.  LESBIAN.  PARENTS.  I will save my rants on the gay-lit genre for other posts; suffice to say that, as my last post hints at, a major part of my inspiration for writing comes from being annoyed at how stories are all written this way, when I would much rather someone tried writing it that way.

Essentially, that is how I decided on a recently-outed lesbian high-schooler with a vampire brother.

Sometimes, writing it easy.  The story is just there, burning like an overly poetic flame, and you have to dash to capture it all on paper before it burns out.  Yes, I really do mean paper.  I feel like I think better with paper.  This feeling rarely lasts for more than a week, which is one of the reasons I have trouble with longer works.

The first draft is insane.  You just write.  It doesn't matter if it makes sense; what matters is that it is right.  Censorship is not your friend.

Then, after a rest to ease my cramped wrist, I type it up as the second draft.  My first draft of the vamp story was 30 pages written, a bit over the 5k word limit, so some things had to be cut.  Some scenes had to be cut anyway, because they had nothing to do with the plot; or, at the very least, incorporated into other scenes that were relevant. 

After that comes what is more of a draft number 2.5 than a third draft.  Read through what you typed, fix typing errors, delete pointless sentences, clean up the prose a bit.  Make it presentable.  Because that's the next step.  Presenting it. 

You can look at my old posts to see how bad this is for me.  It really is just pure cowardice on my part, though.

You see, if no one ever sees anything I have written, I can congratulate myself on being an unrecognized genius, and indulge in all sorts of fantasies of what being a famous genius author would be like.  I disgust myself, sometimes, I really do.

If, on the other hand, I do show it to some select, trusted, friends, and they tell me "Yeah, it's good, but you need to elaborate on that plot point and add some description, I only know what one character looks like, and where are they anyway?" and I take their good suggestions and finish up the story, and send it off to the publisher...I get fifty bucks and a published work.  I gain a foothold in the publishing world, so that all this writing I do might mean something someday (stories don't mean anything if you got no one to tell them to, and all that).  At the very least, I get my first rejection note and attain my first milestone on the way to being a published author.  That seems the more likely scenario, because you just know that some 14-year-old girl is going to submit a poem about wanting to kill herself, which trumps vampire junkies by a college student.  With apologies to anyone who has ever written poetry about wanting to kill themself. 

The point of the last paragraph was to say that a real rejection letter is better than dreams of grandeur.  Right?

Then again, I suppose the point of having dreams is to follow them, and no one ever said that would be easy.