Plot is how you get there. Story is why you get there.

The glorious failure

The Lucas Series story is done. 12 chapters, 23,000 and change words. I had a plot, and characters, but the plot decided to die in chapter 3 when one character objected to being cursed even minutely in the strongest terms and certain plot threads felt too closely tied in tone and nature to Roadside Attractions at the End of the World, a novel I first wrote in 2007 (and revised in 2009). Some of it was the nature of a magic involving cursing, some a character I excised from the draft. Which also removed most of the role for a major character. And so the story fell apart entirely despite efforts to shore up and fix the plot.

The characters worked, though the story became less dark than it should have; some characters never got a chance to shine at all, and eventually I mean to rectify that. Point of order: I wrote 23,000 words in 18 days. To some, that might seem like a lot but the first 7K were on the first day: everything after became a bit of a slog, for many reasons, enough that only 2 of the 12 chapters will survive semi-intact in the next version.

Things to fix:

• This story wanted to be a novel. I knew I didn’t have the time to give a novel treatment what it deserved. A first draft is basically the writer telling themselves how the story works, and I knew this wouldn’t even be that at this point.
• It needs to be told from multiple POVs: Taylor needs a POV chapter (at least one) since he’s too damn shy otherwise. Also, with a longer timeframe Rico could show up and having to explain to your boyfriend exactly why you have a friend he doesn’t know, a magician and a ten year old kid staying at their condo will be a scene that practically writes itself.
• Kells and Eric both got shafted, plot and story wise. They need bigger roles and a lot more time in the story. Also, Lucas’ family needs to be involved.
• I need to work out the actual feel of a magic based on cursing a lot better, and have Lucas use it more often as well as having it use him. This is magic in the horrible evil witch sense of things and the story should be made dark and ugly because of it.
• The story is character-based. My idea of doing such a story with a friend and publishing it online won’t work too well with such a story; I’m not a person who writes in chapters by nature, and the beats required for a serial story don’t fit my writing style for such stories; will need to re-think the approach toward one. 

On Voice

I was asked for writing advice earlier, during which I pointed out that my writing a novel (2 drafts of) while trying to work out a plot problem for a novel I mean to be editing means I am probably not the best person to ask. I made a comment in it about finding one's voice and learning when to let go of it. One that is going to fit into Ghoulish Happenings rather well. My default 'voice' tends to be this low-level snark that works well for some stories* but not for others.

It pretty much won't exist for the MCs in Ghoulish Happenings as far as the two MCs are concerned. Both are rather insecure in themselves and not too likely to use humour as a defense against the world. This will change as the series goes on, but not to a level normally found in urban fantasy, ideally. The genre is pretty much littered with the default male protagonist as walking dead-pan snark and a pop-culture machine even when the humour no longer fits the thrust of the stories. I won't avoid it -- a few secondary characters will be pretty snarky for one reason or another -- but both MCs will be far less in that voice than for other similar projects I've done.

We shall see how it all goes. I have notes on magic and monsters semi-done for this draft of GH and will work on characters proper today as well, fleshing out new relationships and backgrounds. I am slowly getting ready to dive back into that world and quite looking forward to what results from it as well as how many of the characters are even going to survive this draft, and how they cope with that later on. Currently I have plans for three novels in total, the second one being redone entirely because of an evil writing prompt, which should at least make it work rather well...

* Such as in nanowrimo last year for a thriller/lit style story in which one character described the nanowrimo of another as 'Lolita, as if it was written by a five year old'

On Second Drafts

I'm at the 12.5K mark of the second draft of Kiln and Kin. In about a thousand words I'll hit one pivotal scene I'd hit at before the 9K mark in the previous draft, which isn't bad at all.  That I'll be able to fit most of the scene in verbatim is also handy -- I'll likely read ahead in the first draft and see what else I can yank out soon, including a few decent bits of dialogue that will hold up just fine in this version.

The second draft does come slower, but I also know the characters better. I'm still feeling out where the plot is going but by this weekend I should have the end-game in mind and go toward that. Doing the second draft of this story is actually helping a lot with the second draft to Ghoulish Happenings, mostly in terms of figuring out how to decide what to keep and how best to keep it. I think I'll just go through the first draft of that again with a lighter and mark the passages that should survive in some form to the second draft, sketch out the plot a bit better and then discard everything else.

GH is going to need a few subplots added, since the one major one is being excised entirely. Since it was full of problematic issues and constant struggles to get it to make sense in the narrative, this is for the best. It also means the relationship between Bryce and Wray can be explored in different angles in that story and probably end up being a lot creepier. I hope.

As for this story: I'll probably be at the 15K mark before the actual antagonist shows up (by proxy, but even so), which does fit the story. Jonas isn't aware of what Qirjin is, or that the gifted exist at all among the masses of humanity. It also means that the characters have almost a week in novel-time just to become friends, get to know each other and have things be mostly normal before that all starts falling apart. Normal is good. It gives the characters some goal to strive toward, after all.

Now back to writing.....

Small break, as I figure out the next scene :)

It's always interesting to read comments and go "well, yeah...." Ended up browsing a tor article and came across a comment by Jo Walton:

It's much harder to write fantasy that avoids saving the world than it ought to be, and I think that's really worthy of consideration.

To some extent, this exists in many novels in a not-explicit form (the 'world' the character saves doesn't have to be literal, after all, and can be as small as friends/family/relationships). The magician series of stories is a direct 'nope' to this. There have been towns saved, and creates from Outside the universe dealt with but I began it meaning it to be small, that the magician is, in effect, a kind of janitor who cleans up small problems. And that's it. There are magicians who protect whole cities, being tied to the place in exchange for power, and they tend to have limited impact on the city proper, mostly making sure things remain the same in the world.

I like reading 'save the world' series. I have no desire to write one, and that does seem to be where most series end up* if they run long enough. Stakes get raised, the existence of magic changes a world, and so on. Most novels I write that don't directly deal with that issue avoid it. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. The magician series is going to get more explicit about that as it goes on, not that it's above the magician's pay grade but also above his power and what magic can do. The world outside the door in it is normal in the series. Most people have entirely normal lives. If magic could change the world, it would. It hasn't, but being a magician is still an important thing, perhaps because it helps stop the world from becoming the kind where magic has to save it or change it. The second novel in the series that is very, very embryonic in my head is going to be about this, at least a little.


Oddly, this isn't even a concern in the current YA novel I'm poking through (Kiln and Kith) nor has it been in any YA story I've done. (The eventual 'dogs of war' trilogy will, however, be about saving the world, among other things.) Some of that is because I refuse to make parents useless in the stories. If the world was at stake, they'd be saving it. Or at least instrumental in how the characters do it. I should probably get back to writing but it is always neat to see a giant trope and realize how often you've refused to use it, often without even knowing it.


* The first novel in the Ghoulish Series does claim one town can be used to destroy the world, but this is actually a giant red herring. Unfortunately, the person who made it didn't tell the people on his own side that, so they keep trying to get ahold of the power they think is hidden in the town, rather than another family just wasting power and resources to protect nothing. This will probably be more explicit in the second draft but was intended as a fun inversion.

on writng certain events

If you have not experienced X, you should not write about X.

Every author writes about things they have not experienced. This is the nature of writing, of placing yourself into the heads of characters, into the events they have experienced. No one copes with events in quite the same manner, no one deals with shit in the same way as everyone else does. To say that someone should not be able to write about events they themselves have not experienced strikes me as censorship of the worst kind. No one owns events. No one owns concepts, or ideas, or even pain and trauma. Nor the expression of it.

Whether one understands a situation/concept/group better from the inside or the outside is an old, old debate, and one never likely to cease. But telling people they should not even make the attempt, that the way they put their own pain into words is invalid because it is not your way, strikes me as dangerous ground to walk on. Yes, some things should not be glorified, but telling people they shouldn't be able to write about them is not a solution at all but perhaps an even worse problem.

No one is going to write about anything in the same manner, or see the same events with the same eyes. We will hurt each other: we can't not hurt each other. But writing can be an act of understanding, a fumbling toward truths in one's own way. And it seems to me to be a poor and narrow thing to limit others because they do not see the world in quite the same way as one does, to say nothing of deeply insulting to imply that because someone turned pain into a kind of poetry that they never experienced said pain at all.

Story

"Never include anything the audience can reasonably and easily assume has happened. Never pass on exposition unless the missing fact would cause confusion. You do not keep the audience’s interest by giving it information, but by withholding information, except that which is absolutely necessary for comprehension.

Pace the exposition. Like all else, exposition must have a progressive pattern: therefore, the least important facts come in early, the next more important later, the critical facts last. And what are the critical pieces of exposition? Secrets. The painful truths characters do not want known.”

— Robert McKee, "Story"

This. So much this.

There is no love plotline in Housekeeping, because not every story needs one. No one expects Holden Caulfield to find love at the end of his self-explorative adventure, and we shouldn't expect every female character to either. Coming of age novels are supposed to be about finding yourself, not finding someone else. 

- "It's Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel About Women That's Not About Love: Literary girls don't take road-trips to find themselves; they take trips to find men."
                                                                              (The Atlantic)

On magic and artificial scarcity (also politics)

Came across two interesting articles today. The first is about the world's oldest clove tree, and how the first multinational company (the East India Company) deliberately limited the market.

"All clove trees not controlled by the Voc were uprooted and burned.
Anyone caught growing, stealing or possessing clove plants without authorisation faced the death penalty."

And then I came across how "according to the Canadian federal Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 75 percent of the world’s mining companies are headquartered in Canada", and how said companies have sued publishers out of existence for trying to print books on the subject. On this, the internet becomes quite awesome.

It did get me to wondering about how one regulates and controls multinational corporations and at what point their existence clashes with ideas of democracy (though arguably not capitalism, if one defines it as profits before people). And also how interesting such situations can be in fantasy and alternate history/sci fi novels. Trade is important and making such things the cornerstone of a novel could prove interesting, if handled right.

Makes me consider a fantasy world were magic is a minable/renewable resource, corporations and artificial scarcity ....

Quote

And there are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books-especially the dark and dangerous ones-will save them.

As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.

And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
— Sherman Alexie, Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood

"I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed" That says it all.

Critiques and Writing Groups

Blame the monkey for this one ...

Writing groups are odd beasts. I've been part of a few IRL ones (both for writing and poetry) and two online ones. I got spoiled by the first online one in the late 90s since it did focus on the writing, had a lot of submissions and we critiqued and cheered on each other's work. It died when the founder got too busy to keep it going, which happens, and  I am also looking back through a fifteen-year lens at it.

Critiquing is hard, but boils down to a balance of criticism, being constructive and giving compliments. Not the 'awesome!' sense as much as 'this line rocked because...' or 'this scene was spot-on' and the like. Telling someone what they did right is as important as pointing out where a story goes wrong.

The group itself is the harder creature to get right. You have the people who want to write for a hobby, the ones serious about wanting to be published, ones who think they should already have been published because they are pure awesome and people for whom it was just a lark and they aren't serious about it at all. As long as everyone wants to improve, such groups can work though it does work best for the ones for whom writing is one of their major passions.

So there's that.  But the issue of critique to submission is vital as well. People write at different paces. Some like to share unfinished work, others should never do so. (See: me. My first drafts are terrible.) And everyone has slumps when they have no creative energy at all and aren't sure where a story is going. It happens. But a writing group can make one feel compelled to produce, or not wanting to remain if one doesn't have submissions even if their critiques are valid.

I suspect that a solid (and large) online group is better suited to navigating these issues. The danger is that all such groups move away from writing at times. You can't have a group just focused on one subject forever, and I find online ones tend to devolve into the general chat areas while the writing stuff slowly fades to the background. Real life ones, at least, can balance the writing/everything else aspects a little better.


All of which might make one see it as some weird hydra to avoid, but I don't think so. It takes time and commitment: both to write and to critique and edit. And you will learn, if you want to, and grow. It may take time. You might not even realize it is happening, but you do get better.  You learn how everyone does their first drafts, and definitely that no one has the same method at all. You get to see second drafts and how they improve, do your own and see how they improve.

All of which boils down to the fact that writing is a time-consuming and solitary thing, so having others to share the pain is definitely a good thing. Because the pain isn't always bad and  -- the major thing -- if the group is a good group, if they're solid, they'll cheer you onto publication (if that is your goal) without resentment. Find a group that does that, and everything else isn't important.

Urban Fantasy Conceits

A major downside to making a world in which both monsters and magic are real is to what extent it is hidden from the world and the means for doing so. If you can do whatever you want and just wipe the minds of mundane people after, the system is obviously a) going to be abused and b) make your characters into jerks. To say nothing of being difficult to sustain in a modern age of high-tech phones, google maps and so forth.

For the Ghoulish novels there are two systems in place. The family of magicians who are called the Illuminati [this is both an insult and the name they've picked for themselves] can alter memories and make illusions and such. This is not always effective, and sometimes they need to have humans killed, hard drives stolen and so forth, but they try to hide that reality from other magicians in order to preserve their image as able to fix any mess. The reasoning behind this in-universe is that magic is quite dangerous and having more families of magicians would lead to even more magicial fallout(which creates monsters, urban legends, ghosts etc.) and screw the world up further. Also, magicians don't want to share power. But the stated reason for the system does have altruistic aspects.

(There are hints that repeated mind-wiping and the like has damages people via increases in ADD and the like, but I'd rather leave that as  hinted at  since it's a giant minefield I have no desire to dance around in. It is probably not true but does make for a fun conspiracy about a conspiracy.)

The other system, that being fae glamours over other monsters, is less well understood. The fae offer the service, and seem perhaps compelled to do so, but no one knows why and they aren't likely to tell. As the fae are a mystery even to the magicians this is likely going to remain entirely unsolved during the series, along with many other questions about the nature and goals of the fae. Technically, the first system could get by without the second but it would definitely be very difficult in the modern age.

Criticisms and worries of the systems will crop up in the novels but for the most part, more magicians does mean the world would be far, far more dangerous place so the general conceit behind them hiding magic and monsters from the world is, if not necessary, at least understandable.

On the exhaustion of a finished draft

The draft of Ghoulish Happenings has hit an end. 75,000 words done, including a few edits to the first 10 pages and I am exhausted. Between the draft that failed gloriously in November [aka  a reminder that post-apocalyptic and me don't mix well at all], I've spent three months working on this story and while the sequel is niggling at me I know I need a break before I consider plunging into it in any depth.

(Which has not stopped me from writing over 2 pages of notes for it... *coughs*  Though today will be spent writing an essay to myself on magic in the world because I think I was horribly inconsistent with it and really need to fix that. Magic isn't a science per se, but a lot of the characters will approach it as one due to upbringing, which needs to be reflected more clearly. Also comparisons to computers should crop up.)

It's always weird for me to surface from a novel. Nanowrimo novels are skeletal drafts, ideas tossed up into the air. Crapped out, if one wishes to be inelegant. Actual novel drafts are for me 2-3 month affairs of ~1K words/day on average.  This draft took just over 70 days of devoting the vast majority of my writing to it and I feel -- not empty, so much as pleasantly exhausted. There are things to fix, but all are fixable. The ending needs work, but that's okay: I like a story that ends on a quiet note, with the characters moving on to the next step of their lives.

Not everything is resolved, not everything should be: entire plots don't actually connect to each other at all because I get cross with novels when they do. I know there's some stuff to beef up, things to fix, and I need to take a long, hard look at the character of Bryce again, though doing a short story two nights back that was set two months after the novel helped with that a lot. I need to flesh out Elsa and Hamish more, dial back on a couple of other characters but that's all stuff I will know going into the print/read through.

I think this is the first time in many years where I've had a finished treatment* that I'm happy with, and said wary happiness might even survive the read-through of it. Knowing what didn't work and what has to be fixed as I read is huge. But I need to do the print/read aspect before I start on that. In this case, I won't be ripping the story apart as much as putting caulking into it.

Things that definitely helped this draft:
1) I went into it knowing it would need fixing. The nano-draft helped a lot, in that respect. Going into a draft knowing there will be at least 2 major drafts after it is a huge mindset change. It helps that I've come to terms with the fact that my novel-writing method is: write draft, discard. Write draft, discard. Write draft, fix. With that in my head I should be able to go back to my pile of unfinished projects and give some of them a solid boost back into life sometime later this year.
2) I was definitely doing a sequel, so that influenced the draft in a lot of ways I probably don't consciously realize. In this case, it's being curious myself at what happens next, and finding out where Bryce and Wray go from here. Which is a fun head-space to be in.
3) Knowing that if I do more than two novels, the third will probably involve the MCs getting therapy during the course of it. Which is probably illegal in urban-fantasy series, but makes perfect sense.

Now off to work on figuring out magic in a more cohesive sense ....

* Drafts doesn't really work, given that the november version and the december-jan version of GH have very, very little relation to each other; i think I kept part of one scene and nothing else at all.

Benefiting from error

The first section of Ghoulish Happenings is done: what was going to be the end of the first novel has happened in the story and became more abrupt than planned, also changed a fair bit due to plotting out the second novel in my head at the same time. The major plus side is that the ending, which felt abrupt even when plotted out initially, now flows into the second story/half of the novel far better. I'm almost at the 63K mark in the story and will probably have another 20K to go after this, paring down what would have been the second novel to the basics as an ending to this story.

There are still things to alter in the early part of the story, a couple of useful scenes to add but so far it is working. Now what will happen in the sequel, on the other hand, is mostly still a question in my head. I know some of the players and their goals but I'm still working out the overall thrust of the story though I know it is going to be more of a quiet and personal story than the first novel was.


From last night's output:

“He killed my friend,” I said
“And that’s the solution?” Lance didn’t lower his gun. “Do you plan to kill everyone who kills your friends?”
“Yes.”
“Killing them won’t make you feel better,” he said, and there was nothing save certainty in his voice.
“It won’t make me feel worse.”

Dry Amusements & Novel Stuff

In which i go meta on my own work. Kind of. I used to write poetry pretty often. Way back in 2006 I did over 500 in a year (the genesis of this blog, in fact) and did a 30 poems in 30 days and poem an hour for 24 hours once as prior experiments as well. I did write poems in 2007 but slowly petered off, to the point that my ones from 2009 onward languish on my computer without having been printed out.

This is only interesting because I have been posting older things on tumblr, having gone through 2004 and into 2005, ignoring the longer ones -- most of them being, in retrospect, not that good at all. The differences are interesting. 2004 was a mishmash of styles and influences, whereas 2005 is largely rhyming poems, many of them relatively challenging and some needlessly complicated. Some of them are decent. Most, I think, suffer by being constrained too deeply into restrictive styles.

I tend to post a poem a day, mostly because I will run out eventually, but it is nudging me into writing small bits of poetry again though I tend to view the results thus far as not that good at all. I may have to do a poem-a-day project soonish just to find out if that spark is, mostly, gone. It shall wait until the current novel is doing before I really think about it.


In better news, the draft of Ghoulish Happenings has passed 53K. It's worked out to roughly 1K a day of 'finished' material though I have a series of notes on some characters and things posted to this blog that need to be fixed. None of that is major and much of that has been incorporated into the latter part of the book (Post 40K). As the last third of the book is plotted out in very loose terms -- meaning I know the ending but the details of getting to it are a bit sketchy -- I suspect this draft will count as 'done' sometime by the end of February.

At which point I shall give thoughts to the sequel, which I've begun to write. It was going to be a short story submission to a zine but I realized there is no way I was going to make the deadline for submissions and figured that having a first chapter as a short story is probably a good idea anyway for a novel. As long as it connects to the larger plot of course.

Small excerpt and thoughts on genre

Between work, feeling like crap from some cold, work Xmas parties and Christmas baking (later today) my word count since the first of December has been ~5K. I am now on plot point 7 or 20 and a few hundred words away from 20K into the story so things are shaping up rather solidly. This story will lead into a direct sequel, though I may hold off on writing it to give  myself a small break from the setting and give thought to other sequels set after a small time-jump. Mostly because it occurred to me that a lot of urban fantasy uses the occult detective theme, but very few show the character in the process of becoming that.

Which seemed suited to YA, as a platform at least. Both Wray and Bryce get to grow over the course of the two  novels and then I work out the ones after that. As the second novel is going to involve preventing the end of the world, the novels after it will not up the ante. You've saved the world, and then someone asks you to deal with some sheep being killed on a farm, say, and how you cope with that shift, and how one makes small things matter again, will be fun to explore.

Also, at one point down the line, Wray is going to put 'saved the world' on a resume when applying to work at a McJob.


On a deeper level, I've been working on urban fantasy stories for some years now, shifting characters and situations around and trying to find an idea that grabs and holds me. I make no guarantees that this will be it, or that I won't shift between this story and others, but lately every novel I have worked on ends up with plots whispering, in a chorus not at all greek, 'sequels, stupid!' in the back of my head.

I have no idea if this will be that story, or just a flavour of X month/year in my head, but we shall see. It has more potential than some, since I'm starting the characters -- and reader -- off at ground floor, rather than the usual 'established characters, A, B, C major backstory events that will be Important umpteen novels down the line' that tends to be more common. Not that I dislike that: I've used it often enough, and I think it works for what it does. I just wanted to try a different tack and see if it held together better.

We shall see :)


Excerpt from Yesterday:

And it all made Hamish that much harder to stomach. I didn't want to hate him, but I was learning that it was really hard not to hate someone when they hated you in turn. Especially not when the part of me that looked in the mirror at the ghoul that stared back agreed with him in some small way. What better response to a monster than hate? So, to drown out all of that, I walked slowly and tried on mantras, like: 'It's not me, it's you' and 'I may be a monster, but it's not all I am'. It probably didn't help, but it also didn't hurt. Much.

Mental Rummagings

I am no longer a fan of epic fantasy: reading bucketloads of it in high school turned me off of them, to the point that trying to read one about 7 years ago by an author I liked proved impossible. On the other hand, most everything I've written for the past few years has been set in the modern world, or at least a recognizable facsimile thereof. I am hoping to do sci-fi for nanowrimo this year, but sci-fi is just -- at heart -- extrapolating on the present.

The crappier the present, more dystopic (or, in reacting to all that, utopic) the sci-fi settings are for that period. The novel is set in the future, but it is also a meditation of privacy and cameras and a big-brother/ID tagging society, so the core of it is set in present worries and concerns. Fair enough: a novel without relevance isn't one anyone would want to read.

And yet it feels like a long-term rut, in a lot of ways, and I find my mind straying back to fantasy worlds that never-were and considering settings and character ideas for such a story again. Part of me wants to revise an old novel from 2004 about two brothers who end up on another world and whose goal is to get home, the one brother worried about rent and his car being towed because most 'travel to another world' novels tend to ignore issues like that and it royally bugged me. On the flip side, while the novel I write now would be a lot better I am not sure I'd be saying anything new to add to the concept. The other idea involves the stereotypical 'prince sets off on quest' from the POV of the prince's manservant wondering how the hell the King and Guard and so forth are letting this happen and would lead the prince and servant to realizing how little power the throne really has and such.

I may write one of those. I may not. Hell, I could end up doing one of them for nano given my brain. It would be a fun change at least.

This. So much this...:

Writing requires discipline, but disciplined writers are not necessarily prolific. Most good work gets produced over time, sometimes many years, allowing the writer to grow with the material, to allow his world, his command over craft, and his psychological maturity to coalesce at just the right moment to produce something of value. This process often involves dreadful periods of not writing, or, worse, periods of writing very badly, embarrassingly badly. As time passes in a writing life, the writer learns not to fear these arid periods. The words come back eventually. That's the real discipline: to train the mind and heart into believing that words come back. 

...

Be willing to wait. In the meantime, write when you don't feel like it. If you can't write, read.

- Monica Wood, "The Pocket Muse"

Good for entire weeks in which nothing moves and prose feels dead on the page. Like a whole long weekend on one attempted story that only died each time I tried to work on it.

rereading stories ...

Waaay back in 2005 I did a sci-fi Nanowrimo called Guardian Monsters. I hadn't planned to do nano that year, as I was both moving and job hunting, but was talked into it. The end result was, I felt, an incoherent mess I ended abruptly because I was sick of the story. A re-read of it as a sort of prep for this nano (aka what went wrong with sci-fi last time) shows a few things:

• The first 20 or so pages were good. Not great, but they flowed, the world made a certain kind of sense and a few lines jumped out as being more than decent. 
• The bathroom sink that was an AI and sex-starved stole the show. It turned out to be my favourite  character and some of the stuff struck me as funny even 7 years later. That being said, the humour is at odds with the more dystopic aspects of the rest of the story. 
• The combat scenes were all badly done. And there were many of them. Entire combat scenes shouldn't have existed at all as it ended up feeling too easy. 
• The psychic kid, while fun, was poorly thought out and too trope-y. To be fair, I was aware of that at the time and figured I'd fix it in a second draft.
• The Whispering/Psychic Dragon sections were sci-fi. In that they would make sense after one read the novel at least twice and bordered on incoherent otherwise. 

There are other issues, most relating to the setting and that it wasn't developed enough at all. I had about two notes on setting, and 4-5 on characters, the latter in surprising detail including presumed 'growth' during the novel and info on the core of their personalities, even for characters who barely show up. And a lot of them do that, or appear in the novel for seemingly no reason, their motives entirely unexplained to the reader.

On the plus side, the Buddhism parallels with the one main character were fun, though too obvious in some spots, and the idea that the nearly-immortal Rich people were all businesses whose stock values fluctuated depending on what they did was a fun, fun idea that I barely did anything with. Much like the introduction of the bathroom sink, I pretty much tossed too many sci-fi concepts it and the entire thing fell apart. Haven't finished re-reading the draft, so shall have to see if the ending was quite as bad as I thought it when I was done.

“You don’t look good,” Olen said as he came in. The boy was sitting on the couch and watching a holo vid.

“You’re a telepath. That should be fucking obvious,” Stephen snarled. “I need a bath.”

“I need sex!” the sink screamed.

Stephen walked into the bathroom. “Shut. Up. Now. I’ve had people try and kill me. I’ve shat my pants. I had two religions declare me their messiah as I left the remains of a city block. I had five people try and kill me on the way over because I wasn’t carrying some weapon the size of a giant dick. I’m not in the mood!”

“For sex? That’s the perfect mood for sex,” the sink said. “I like it when humans get violent. Then I can be broken and upgraded.”

Stephen turned the water on for the bath. “Have sex with the telepath then.”

“Oh no!” the sink filled the bathroom with a strobe light. “I’d never do that. He could infect me with some horrible neurosis.”

“I’ll infect you with a dissassembler then,” Stephen snarled.

“Well.” The sink retreated back into the wall. “There’s no need for that kind of talk! I bet you’re a virgin, aren’t you? No one else would begin a relationship threatening to atomize their partner!”

the slow crawl of writing

Sometimes things come fast, sometimes they don't. When you're writing bits and pieces of three projects at the same time, nothing comes fast at all. Not that I haven't been writing, but the end result has been 2-300 words added every day or three to one story or another, which seldom feels like progress. That each story is a very different beast in tone probably doesn't help either. Currently, the following are being worked on:

Boy and Fox, under the title of Falling Toward the Sky, a story about a boy and a fox. Also a werewolf on the run from a prince, a kingdom whose king is going mad, foxes, self and memory. At heart, it's about a Boy who perhaps does a very terrible thing and gets to start his life over, wiping away memories of what came before it, only to discover it's never quite that easy. I consider it YA, but I could be wrong.

The Empty Book is about a failed suicide attempt and the insanity that results once Brodie begins to see more of the world than humans are meant to. It's about gods and religion, madness and family and is very, very dark. I tend to add to it in fits and starts, half when the weather is crappy more than anything else, and take breaks from it simply because it's not all that fun a mindset to immerse oneself in.

The Book of Going Forth by Night is the first book in a quadrology* of stories centred around an exorcist, his friends and allies, and the various situations he gets himself into via being hired by dubious people over the internet in a world where most people don't believe ghosts really exist because the servants of the gods alter their memories. It's very much urban fantasy and the story I'm planning to focus on for the next month or so in an effort to get a working first draft of it done. Again.**

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* Meaning that 20K exist toward a draft of the second novel and the third and fourth exist as one-line notes in a file somewhere.

** In the space of about six months I've redone this story from scratch over 4 times. The fact that I have not burned out on it surprises me, to say the least.