The only way my brain is able to treat writing like a day job is if I actually “go to work” every day…meaning I get in my car, drive to my “workplace”, do work, and then go home when “time” is up. It’s not like I’ve never thought of doing my writing elsewhere; I’ve written in fast food places, coffee shops, bookstores, libraries. But I think in my mind I was still treating these excursions as get-aways or mini-vacations instead of a job, so it wasn’t something that I would think of doing every day. And the problem with choosing a restaurant or coffee shop as a writing office is that you’re morally (and sometimes actually) obligated to purchase something every couple of hours. That gets expensive real fast.

The other issue is hours. I’m free from 8 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon. Unfortunately, most places don’t open until 9 or 10, sometimes even 11. Technically I’d have more hours to work if I stayed home and started working at 8…but if I stay home, I often don’t get anything done at all. It’s a lot like abstinence-only sex education: looks great in theory, but in practice, I’d be better off trying a “less effective” method that actually works.

Last week I began experimenting with “going to work” at the library. I even give myself an official lunch break and everything. So far this has been working so well that I’m really, really annoyed at myself for not trying this before. If I work for 3 or 4 hours, with a break between, I can average about 2,000 words. (Mind, this is on days when the writing is actually a bit slow and difficult…I could probably do more on days when I can merrily plug along.) I’ve gone from hopefully being able to finish the rough draft of Promises, Like Tears by November to thinking I might be able to finish the draft by the end of next week. (This is my current goal, since my son’s last day of school is next Friday and after that my productivity will drop dramatically.)

My other nod to being more productive is on days when I just simply cannot work on the current story, I’m making myself outline other stuff in the queue. I have finished a fairly detailed outline for Dog Prince and Free (formerly Voiceless), and am working onputting Windwaker together. I’m discovering that a lot of my stories are much less “put together” on paper than they are in my head, but hey, that’s part of the fun…right?

Still agent hunting. Got another request for a partial, which was encouraging although they ultimately passed. I seem to vacillate between really hopeful and downright discouraged. Last night I finally broke down and did a little research on how to query the publishing houses themselves. Most don’t take un-agented stuff but I was surprised to discover that a few do, especially in the sci-fi/fantasy genre. However, that process is a lot slower: most houses require an exclusive look (which means you can’t send the manuscript to anyone else while they have it), and they can take anywhere from a few months to a year to make a decision. I’ve decided that if I haven’t found an agent for Seven Shades by the time I’ve finished This Chosen Fate, I’m going to dump Hands on the editor circuit and start hawking This Chosen Fate to the agents.

I’m going to try and do NaNoWriMo this year and hopefully finish This Chosen Fate, since it’s already started and I have a very good idea of where it’s going. It will be nice to have another finished story under my belt that isn’t part of a series.

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My first inclination was to approach this from a D&D perspective, because magic in that world is cast through words and spell books. One could easily make “bookbinding” a literal thing, where you are actually magically binding a force or spell into a book.

In a completely unrelated conversation, when something I was about to say just vanished from my head (don’tcha hate that??)…I wondered aloud where all those thoughts go. Maybe there is an Aether of Lost Thoughts, where all Lost Thoughts go when they disappear from your head. Maybe this Aether is “hungry”, and at times will actually steal thoughts away before you can think them?

And then I thought, what if you could pluck these lost thoughts out of said Aether, and say, bind them into books?

But somehow you’d have to do this without actually thinking the thoughts, because…well, it’s not a Lost Thought anymore if someone thinks it, is it? Plus, maybe Lost Thoughts are also those thoughts that people push away because they’re too disturbing or awful or messed up to contemplate…like what you’d really like to do to that annoying relative or what sort of damage that really sharp knife could cause…stuff that kind of half passes through your head just before you mentally slap yourself. Those could be pretty dark. Spending too much time letting those kinds of Lost Thoughts pass through your head could drive you insane.

So perhaps the purpose of book binding is to get those thoughts out of the Aether without harming anyone in the process.

Then I liked the idea of drawing out Lost Thoughts with music. Perhaps there could be two classes of book-binding magical practitioners: Minders and Binders. Minders would be the ones trained to “listen” to the Aether, locate troublesome thoughts, and draw them out. Binders would be in charge of setting down onto paper what the Minders draw out. At first I thought about making a sort of music language, but that got too complicated. I think perhaps what the Binders would be doing is drawing, maybe something like Celtic knot work, complex patterns, fractals, etc. And because every Minder and every Binder is different, the music used to call and the drawings used to capture any given Thought will be wildly different, even if the Thoughts themselves were similar.

This gives the added advantage of these books not being “readable”, in the traditional sense. Random Villain X isn’t going to be able to come along and read a whole bunch of dark, dangerous thoughts out of these books…at least not easily.

Unless Random Villain X is a Minder. I imagine some Minders would eventually figure out not only how to draw out Lost Thoughts, but how to channel them into spells. And perhaps Binders can do other things…like transcribing a speech onto paper in such a way that the speaker and audience would both forget what they’ve just said and heard. Or changing memories by writing them down.

Perhaps a rivalry has built up between Minders and Binders over the years, despite the fact that they need each other in order to keep the Aether safe. That could be a starting background conflict for a story.

I have several story snippets that could be combined with this to make a story…but that’s a process that could take some time.

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But not all. So I went through, looked at the terrain each creature inhabited, and looked at which race lived there. I figured that, in a lot of cases, the name a certain race gave to a certain animal that lived in their home territory would be the name that stuck. In all other cases, the common language used by all the races would give the name. Vision’s “trade language” is Arader (the weasel/otter race), because the Arader are natural exploders and traders, and it was they who made the initial contact with various places, animals, and people.

(Their language is English, stripped as much as possible of words borrowed from other languages. Because any given word in any given tongue is, at its core, a description of what it represents. We call a rat a rat because the word “rat”…or rather the word “rat” evolved from, represented a gnawing sound and that’s what rats do. Native Americans have descriptive sounding names because they’ve been translated from their own tongue to English.)

I had already decided what culture and language each race would borrow from, way back when I was naming the lakes and mountains and cities. So for each creature, I looked up what it most closely resembled in the language of the race who would have named it. For example, the Feya’s tongue sounds a lot like French, so creatures in their homeland would have very French sounding names. (I discovered, in this process, that the Feya are excessively fond of seafood. Who knew?

Then I started “wearing the edges” off the names, paring them down in ways I imagined common use and exposure to different tongues would do. Sometimes I would end up rearranging the word so that it spelled the way I was instinctively pronouncing it. (For example: “yabbyervotzk”. Which is “jabberwock”, transliterated into Russian. I was mentally pronouncing it “yabber-ya-votzk” until I noticed the spelling, and decided I liked my pronunciation better. So now it’s “yabberyvotzk”). Sometimes I’d end up abandoning the native word and going with the familiar name. I didn’t want to fall into the fantasy “calling a rabbit a ‘shmearp’ simply because that sounds cooler than plain ‘rabbit’” trap. This process will continue as I work on the game.

Last week, I was thinking about the ecology of Avatar (Cameron’s version, not Airbender), and remembering how I admired the overall sense of unity that existed on that world. (Except the Na’vi, but that’s a whole different gripe…) Because what I needed for Amphiptere’s Vision was a particular trait or evolutionary connection. Partially to unify the world and partially to help fix the “shmearp” problem. What’s unique about this world?

First thing that came to mind was dragons. Well duh, most fantasy worlds have dragons, usually of the Western, winged variety. But no one ever seems to think about how unlikely such an animal is, evolutionarily speaking. A six-limbed reptile, where two of those limbs basically grow out of its back as wings? On worlds where most other creatures sport the typical two legs, two arms symmetry? Dragons in fantasy literature are like the Na’vi of Avatar. I look at the rest of the ecosystem and wonder: how in the hell did this aberration evolve, and why hasn’t anyone else noticed how weird it is?

(Dragons created by some kind of separate, magical or supernatural process, of course, are a different matter. But this is rarely explicitly the case).

So, one unique feature of the Visions world is the existence of creatures that evolved with two legs, two arms, and two wings, arranged just so. And I remembered that dragons weren’t the only six limbed creature I’d dumped into my bestiary. I had griffins. Hippogriffs. Chimeras. A four-armed ape/yeti creature. A four-winged bird, originally stolen from D&D, I think. Two of my races have wings that sprout from the back.

I Googled “dragon skeleton”, and found something interesting. About half of the depictions showed the dragon having essentially two separate sets of shoulder blades: one set for the forearms, one set a little higher up for the wings. But the other half used a sort of combination scapula, one that could accommodate both arms and wings. I liked that one better. What if every single creature in the world (except insects and octopi and the like) had such a bone inside them? What if they all had six limbs?

I modeled a combination scapula with clay so I could really get a sense of how this thing would work. Interestingly enough, I found that if I flipped the scapula upside down, I had something that could support a four-armed creature like my ape-yeti, where the lower set of arms appears to poke out of the ribcage. If I included this special shoulder blade in every creature, I would have my uniting factor…and the creativity could come from deciding how those six limbs would manifest.

I’ve also been taking each creature and picking several different animals to use as models…because then I can say with confidence that my shmearp is not just a rabbit, but rabbit + wasp, with a little squirrel thrown in (to use a made-up example). And variety makes it easier to incorporate two extra limbs. Eventually I’ll organize these drawings and notes into a D&D-like Monster Manual, although I plan to lay it out like a field guide. Maybe Spiderwick style.

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I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a short story written from Brendan’s point of view. It takes place during the span of time when Saeli is missing from Aschamon, just before she makes her reappearance. I’m planning to enter it in the Writer’s Digest contest, as well as one other (that isn’t picky about simultaneous submissions). If it places, I’m hoping it will generate interest in Hands, Like Secrets.

My other big project this last week was overhauling the bestiary of Amphitere’s Vision. I’ll talk about that in a separate post.

I have also decided to change the format of the game from computer-based to table-top. Because getting a computer game concept into the right hands is next to impossible for someone like me. If you want to create a game, you essentially have to work for a game company. There really isn’t a clear avenue of gatekeepers for ideas from outside the industry. However, if I go table-top, I will essentially be able to self-publish the concept and rules. I don’t have to worry about the look of the finished product, or about handing stuff over to a company or a programmer. I don’t have to invent every single little rule and quest and NPC and outcome for every single scenario that could possibly happen in the world, because I can leave most of that in the hands of the individual GMs who run campaigns. I think the move makes sense. And later, if someone wants to pick it up and make a computer game out of it…hey, I won’t complain

I will have to reacquaint myself with GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing System) in order to set up the dice rolling and gameplay rules. GURPS is the most straightforward and flexible system that I’m aware of (D&D is a mess and copyrighted besides, and I don’t want to have to invent a system from scratch).

I’ve changed the title of one of my stories. “Empty Eyes” is now “Dog Prince”. The sorcerers of that world have tamed these giant desert jackals, which they use both as horses and as guard dogs. The rest of the world, that hates and fears magic anyway, thus disparagingly calls anyone who can use magic a “dog”, after the jackals the sorcerers ride. Since Arav was heir to the throne before getting disowned, and then joins the sorcerers and discovers that he can use magic himself…kind of makes him a dog prince. I’ve also decided this is an adult story as opposed to a YA. Only because of tone and mood, not content!

The other major change I’ve made to the queue has to do with Windwaker. I’m…removing the main character and replacing him with a girl. Because I think there aren’t enough stories where a girl goes on a sword and wits adventure by herself. And I mean one that doesn’t end with her meeting a prince and falling in love. I want to write an adventure where a young woman takes the Hero’s Journey, not as an accessory or “helper” to a man but on her own, and becomes the Windwaker herself…not just a prince’s bride.

This is something that I struggle with as a writer. As much as I don’t want to insert an “agenda” into my stories, the more I learn from blogs and online people about privilege and minorities and other viewpoints…the less I can ignore them in my writing. Yes, I originally wanted to write Windwaker about a male, but I cannot help but realize that if I do so, I will be unconsciously reinforcing the stereotype that only boys can have adventures. And I don’t want to do that. So I will write the same story, only about a girl. Because if authors write stories about boys who have adventures that aren’t about falling in love, then they should do the same for girls. Otherwise, girls may take away the subconscious message that the greatest adventure their gender is capable of is love and marriage…and it makes the girls who find swords more fascinating than boys feel like there’s something wrong with them.

Another example of this interplay of privilege and writing is that most of the relationships in my stories tend to be heterosexual. It’s what I know. But I cannot in good conscience deny the fact that gay people exist, and I feel that ignoring them in my writing is really not much better than ignoring them in real life. So in stories where they fit, I deliberately insert gay characters or have characters deal with homosexual people, not because it’s “politically correct” or to promote a positive or negative view of homosexuality…but because homosexual people are first and foremost people, and writing is about people. I don’t get to write stories with no gay people just because I’m straight, in the same way that I don’t get to write stories with no men in them just because I’m a woman, or no people of color just because I’m white. I have to make myself write such characters because I know I don’t do it naturally…and I don’t think the fact that certain thinking doesn’t come natural to me is an excuse to not do it. Not all of my readers will share my gender, race, or orientation, and I don’t think it’s fair to pretend, intentionally or not, that they and their struggles don’t exist or aren’t worth talking about.

So, Meghan Iris McKenna was born this last weekend. She’s a drummer from a religious town and a family that doesn’t think drums are a “proper” instrument for a girl to play, and that women have no business in leadership of any kind. I’m shelving the character Quintin for now, but he’ll probably show up in a different story that calls for an introverted geek. I rather like him.

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The political situation on Caosgi, the world Saeli and Co. are currently on, has always been the most difficult and complex bit of the overall story. I’ve rethought it from the ground up at least three or four times, and in this last rewrite alone I’ve added and tweaked a number of things.

I changed the people of Gephina to look physically different from the native Teyae people. The Gephinans now resemble something like emaciated elves or dryads. I did this because I decided that while the Gephinans are native to Caosgi, the Teyae are not. Caosgi is the First World, where all immortals and spirits are born. On such a world, where spirits are simply a fact of life, it doesn’t make much sense to have a people with such an immense dislike of spirits…unless they imported it from elsewhere. So the story is that sometime in the distant past, a tribe of Teyae blundered through the Waters, found their way to Caosgi, and settled there.

They brought with them a large chunk of rock from their homeworld, which they believed had magic properties. And it does; in fact it interferes with and dampens the expression of pure energy. Which means it can repel spirits and prevent qi forms from manifesting. They shape chunks of this rock into spheres, which they attach to portable staffs carried by their shamans. I had to give the Teyae a way to hold their own against the far more powerful Gephinans and their spirits, and also to capture Saeli and the Cowls.

In the scene where the Teyae drifters, carrying Saeli and Co. prisoner, are overtaken by the Gephinans, I was always going to have the group split up…half go with the Teyae, half to Gephina. Because Raphel was going to use the Teyae and start a war between the parties as a distraction, blah, blah, blah…and I realized this was starting to sound exactly like Hands, Like Secrets. I’ve already written that book. Raphel needs to do something else this time around.

Well, Raphel decided then and there, on the Teyae ship, that there was no way in shayol they were going to split up. At that point, I had to stop writing, go back, and completely scrap the outline I’d been using up until that point because it just didn’t remotely work anymore. Wrote a new outline from that place onward, one that didn’t hinge upon a war and a split group. Now it hinges upon Raphel’s inexplicable insistence on seeing the inside of the Keeper’s grotto.

I’ve also discovered, in rewriting, how little work I’d put into Caosgi in general and Gephina in particular. What does “a city teeming with spirits” look like? How many kinds of spirits are there, how do they interact with the mortals, are they visible, what forms to they take, what exactly do they DO, etc? So far I’ve just been pulling ideas out of my arse, as it were, as I need them. Thus, Gephina needs wards…I give you guardian spirits that look and act like spiders and build ethereal webs all around the city.

Then there’s Gephina’s government. Having not really thought about it before, I gave the city a Mayor and maybe some kind of city council and let it go at that. But then I realized that every single government in Shades, on every world, is some kind of combination orligarchy/theocracy with elements of representative democracy.  Verre: Mantle city-states are autonomous, governed by a High Priestess and a Council which represent the various guilds and such. Cowl city-states: much the same. Dheu: villages are autonomous, governed by a council of spirit walkers/judges. Caosgi: various Teyae clans are governed by their individual Chiefs, who occasionally get together to make bigger decisions that affect all Teyae. Gephina: autonomous city-state with a Mayor and a Council.

But why? Well, I suppose it’s the least complicated (no voting, no term limits, little bureaucracy) and most fair (no rulers-from-birth, no dictatorships, everyone is somewhat represented) system of government one can have in a fantasy story. (Oh, and too much high fantasy seems to focus on the doings of various royalty. Blech.)

On Verre, it makes sense. Verre has two ruling deities. Two extremely visible, extremely involved deities. You don’t get to pretend the gods don’t exist on Verre; they are as real as the priests who serve them. It would make sense for said deities to appoint people to speak for them, to handle the mundane day-to-day issues…thus you get High Priests and Priestesses. However, these will never hold absolute power, because everyone knows they only rule at the behest of the gods, and that the gods could smack them down at any time if they step out of line. It would make sense for the High Priests and Priestesses to build a small, trusted group of advisers that will keep him/her informed of what’s going on with the various groups in their cities. Thus, oligarchy/theocracy.

On Dheu it makes sense because we’re only talking about a small village. And the spirit walkers don’t “rule” or even “govern” in any real sense of the word. They offer themselves as judges, arbitrators of disputes…and as they have the backing of the angels, no one really challenges that. What sort of government the Dheuans had while the three goddesses still ruled, or what sort they developed as they grew more urban…I don’t know and don’t intend to spend time on, because it’s not important to the story.

On Caosgi, though…Gephina, if it’s ruled by anyone, it’s ruled by Ge’shandris, the monsoon spirit. And spirits don’t really talk to mortals, like immortals do. Spirits commune. It’s all feelings and nudging and gut instinct. Someone, ideally someone with a particularly close connection to the spirit, has to listen and interpret what the spirit said. And it’s not nearly as obvious when that person misunderstands, or decides to exaggerate, or outright lie. Thus, you could potentially have a situation where one person speaks for the resident otherworldly power, and what that person says cannot be easily proven false.

That, to me, suggests the makings of a monarchy. Gephina’s Mayor should be a Queen. And since I also established elsewhere that Gephina has “colonies”, people that don’t live within the confines of the city itself…the Queen needs advisers. So I’ve decided she has a Chamber, which is something of a combination of a Council and a Senate. And I may even make the position of “Queen” an elected position…as the primary purpose of the position is to speak for Ge’shandris, and you need to find the most sensitive person for the job. Makes royalty-by-birth unworkable in the long run.

Geez…all this just to set up the background situation Saeli and the others find themselves in. But the shift from Mayor Adna to Queen Adna is kind of a major one, especially since Saeli comes from a world that’s never had an actual monarchy.

In other news, Nightwish’s new album Imaginaerum is glorious. Absolutely glorious. And I can’t write to it because I’m too busy listening to it. The imagery is pretty intense. However, between Two Steps From Hell and an album I just acquired by one of the composers from that project: Illusions…I have plenty of writing music.

Imaginaerum has one song that’s, IMO, all about fantasy writing:

Nightwish - Storytime

“I am the voice of Never-Never Land
the innocence, the dreams of every man
I am the empty crib of Peter Pan
a silent kite against a blue, blue sky
every chimney, every moonlit sight
I am the story that will read you real
every memory that you hold dear”

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I think that both my query letter and story are much stronger than they were at this time last year, but I suppose I’ll have to wait and see what sort of response I get.

The issue that’s going to work against me the worst, I believe, is length. Hands, Like Secrets is bloody long, both for a debut and especially for the YA market. And there’s only so far I can knock it back without compromising the story. At best…at the very, very best I can do on my own…I might could knock it back to 118,000 or so. That’s how long Twilight is. Twilight was a debut, and a YA to boot. It’s not impossible.

It just makes an already difficult job harder.

I try to tell myself that Eragon was somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 words, and it took off nonetheless. However, Eragon was originally self-published, and had something like a year to gain momentum before a publisher ever picked it up. I will self-publish Hands if I absolutely have to, but I want to exhaust all my other options first.

I’m about to get back to work on Promises, Like Tears, which has become a bit bogged down. I think there’s a lot in there that I need to go back and cut, or rearrange, and I can’t quite decide if I should do that first or just push on to the end and THEN come back. The latter is probably the better option.

Changed Shades to Seven Shades. I really have no reason other than it sounds more interesting. And the characters occasionally swear by it. The only fact I’ve established is that there are seven “shades” in shayol, and I haven’t really worked out why that’s important. Might become relevant in the last book, when Saeli is briefly taken to shayol by the Keeper of the Oath. I suppose I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I’ve also decided to attempt NaNoWriMo this year, and see if I can’t get This Chosen Fate written. It’s all plotted out; all I have to do is sit down and write it. That’s something I really need to practice: writing straight through something without going into editing mode. And this way I’ll have something besides Shades to shop around…something that isn’t as long

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Anonymous

Well.

The problem is, my productivity has been extremely spread out. I’ve gotten a little further on Promises, Like Tears. I’ve written the script for about half an episode of Grimms, and mapped out all the episodes in each season…so I have a very clear picture of where everything is going. I’ve written a better version of my query letter, and am set to revise it yet again. I discovered the most awesome epic fantasy writing music on the planet. I made some awesome Halloween costumes. Aaaaaand, I’m revising Hands, Like Secrets. Again.

I just really don’t seem to have the discipline to keep plugging away on one single project at a time. I can do it for a couple of weeks, but then it’s like I HAVE to work on something else for a little while. My system of grouping projects together (one series, one novel, one season of Grimms, specific visual projects) has been useful in keeping myself within limits, as far as what gets worked on. I really can’t decide if my multiple project mindset is something I ought to try and train myself out of, or something to harness. I mean, once I break into the business I will have to be able to work within a schedule. I won’t be able to work on whatever the hell I want when I want, you know? So maybe I need to get myself used to that now.

So, in order. I’ve kind of hit a wall in Promises, one of those “just wanna get this stupid scene DONE and move on” walls that you simply have to kind of plod through. I felt like I was losing my grip on the characters and their motivations, like everything they were doing was coming from me instead of them. Being a character-driven writer, I hate that feeling. When I get that way I just have to take a step back. That was around Halloween, too, so I was doing costumes, which always eat a lot of my time.

Also, I got a copy of Scrivener for my birthday this year, and part of what’s been eating my time in the last couple of months has been moving all my various ideas and works-in-progress over to that format. Scrivener is a writing program which basically allows you to store all your documents, photos, bits of research, anything related to your story in one place, and lets you organize it. It’s really a great tool if you, like me, find yourself creating massive folders full of story-related stuff for each novel, and get tired of having to have multiple programs open all the time just to access it all. Initially I wasn’t going bother moving Shades, since Hands, Like Secrets was done and Promises well started. But after realizing that I could put ALL of my Shades stories in one project file, including the sequel and prequel, I decided it made sense to dump it all into Scrivener. Moving all my various projects has really helped me take stock of where I am in each project, and what still needs to be done. It was this move, actually, that got me working on Grimms again.

I ended up going through the whole story and working out arcs for each character, especially when they would peak or bottom out. What I didn’t want to happen was having all eight Grimms hitting rock bottom at the same time, because then I’d have a bunch of emotionally charged episodes followed by episodes where nothing significant happened. Gave each episode a name and a general plan of action as well.

The other major thing I did was make one of the Grimms gay. When I was creating the characters initially, I set out to make the cast as racially diverse as possible (without it seeming contrived). The girls outnumber the guys, but since guys tend to be over-represented in visual fiction, I think it will actually end up feeling even. But my relationship pairings were…too perfect. Hansel/Gretel, Red/Stiltz, Cutter/Cinder, Rapunzel/Oros (a fae), and Rora was going to fall for Alan Hunter in the end. But the whole point of having a diverse cast is so that, hopefully, everyone that reads the graphic novel will have at least one character they can really relate to. One character that “represents” them. This is the strength of an ensemble. So I got to thinking, who will my LGBT readers relate to? I felt like that perspective deserved representation as much as any other.

I chose Rora, initially because she was the only “unattached” Grimm, and changing her orientation would least affect my already established story arcs. But as I began to approach her character with this new nuance in mind, something unexpected happened. She almost immediately fell for Katie, the human girl who gets placed with Mother Goose in Season 3, and it was perfect. It introduces the problem of a Grimm falling for a human, which nicely contrasts Rapunzel’s struggle (Grimm falling for a Fae). It explaines a lot about Katie’s character. It links the Grimms with Smile, the second Fae-rescue team that Katie eventually helps start. I get to address the issue of homosexuality from the perspective of someone who’s grown up in an environment entirely free from the usual associated stigma (Arcadia), and someone who is all too familiar with the stigma.

And then, just this month, I really started to reassess where I am with Hands, and my agent-hunting. Because aside from that one nibble right at the beginning of the process, I’ve only gotten form rejections and silence. I tried revising my query letter, but that hasn’t seemed to help. Therefore, I have to think that it’s the story itself, specifically the beginning (as that’s what most agents request), that’s the problem. I have actually suspected (and tried to deny) that Hands didn’t start in quite the right place, that the scene in the High Priestess’ office is too tame to kick off the story. I just couldn’t figure out how to include all the necessary backstory otherwise. But I started reading a book called Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers by Les Edgerton…and realized that a lot of that backstory is not really necessary. Interesting, perhaps, but not necessary.

What I essentially decided to do was start the book in Chapter 2. I mean, compare the strengths of the opening lines:

Chapter 1: “I’d been summoned to the High Priestess’ office that night.” Bleh.

Chapter 2: “I sank back against the wall, gripping my hands into fists to stop them from shaking.”

Yeah, the second one is a whole lot more intriguing. And that immediately segues into the battle between Raphel and the High Priestess, which makes for an awesome first chapter. I was able to add back in enough information that (I hope) the reader will be able to figure out what’s going on. (Though I will say, if you are the kind of person who likes to have all new information, definitions, words, and explanations laid out for you up front, you probably aren’t going to enjoy this book.)

And, in rewriting that beginning, I really started to straighten out Saeli’s GMC as it progresses through the story. Although the last major rewrite I did straightened out most of the major continuity errors, there was still some disconnect between various scenes, specifically in the area of how Saeli is reacting to what’s going on. The various issues were coming and going, one after another, instead of piling up to the climax. Also, Saeli’s a bit tougher and sharper this time around, and there’s a very noticeable disconnect between what she’s thinking and how she’s acting at any given moment. I think this has everything to do with where the story starts now. She’s all over the place, emotionally, in her head…but to anyone else, she probably comes across as calm, quiet, and even a little bit cold. She’s actually pretty downright harsh to Raphel at first, and overall I think she’s a better match for him this time around. I’ve found myself writing him a little bit softer and more seductive in response, and I think he actually likes her a little bit more than he did before. It means that his cruelty is all the more jarring when it surfaces, which is appropriate.

I think this will also help me push through Promises, as I have a much clearly picture of where Saeli has been.

I’ve also discovered what seems like a hundred little tiny plot holes, which is both irritating and alarming (I’ve sent this to agents? Good gods, what was I thinking??). Most are continuity gaps, emotionally getting a character from here to there. Some are logistical, like why on earth did I have Saeli and Raphel walk up an entire flight of tower stairs in the city Temple when time is of the essence and THEY CAN TELEPORT?

And the latest one: After Raphel spirits Saeli away and returns her, the High Priestess decides that it’s not safe for Saeli to leave campus until she is dedicated to Scisaxar. Saeli gets special permission to leave campus for a few hours to go to a graduation party, at Cara’s request. She walks alone to a cabstand and takes a cab. On the way, she is intercepted by Raphel.

See the problem yet?

Saeli would never have been permitted to walk out of Aschamon alone. See, the reader knows that Saeli has already thwarted this rule once, and that she is not in any physical danger from Raphel. But the High Priestess does not know that. There’s simply no way she would allow Saeli to travel to this party by herself: she would arrange for Saeli to be teleported straight there, or at the very least, assign someone to escort her.

Cara is a bit more blaze about the whole danger aspect. She’s helped Saeli sneak out once…but that was only to Main Street, and she was with her roommate the whole time. Letting Saeli travel by herself, across town, at sunset? No, I don’t buy it. Again, as far as Cara knows, there is a murderous Cowl out there just waiting to get his hands on Saeli again.

But the thing is, Saeli has to be alone for this scene to work. She has to disappear with Raphel for an hour, and then has to appear at the party with no one the wiser. (Which means Raphel can’t neutralize Saeli’s escort, or abduct her for an hour when teleportation is supposed to be near instantaneous.) Raphel also cannot go anywhere near the party, because any Anjahel there will sense him. Saeli has to start learning rashas qi onscreen, as it were, and it must happen before all the party excitement (because she won’t be in any emotional condition to do it after she’s been “abducted”). This does not leave me many options.

My best one:

#1: Cara acts as Saeli’s escort. Raphel, in the guise of “Aiden”, whom Cara has met, convinces her to let him have an hour alone with Saeli before he takes her to the party himself. Cara would probably agree to this.

Downsides: Cara has been to Valene’s house (where the party is), so there’s no good reason for her to NOT teleport her and Saeli straight there. Especially since Cara wants to give Saeli the full advantage of her limited freedom, and figures Saeli won’t want to waste time in travel. Granted, they would have to exit the school in order to teleport, but they’d only have to be outside the gates. Raphel cannot intercept them there for obvious reasons.

Possible solutions: Saeli convinces Cara to get a quick bite to eat in town before heading for the party. Maybe, if Cara can be convinced that isn’t bending the HP’s rules too much. Or, Saeli travels with a large group of girls (probably Cara’s friends) into town ahead of time to, I dunno, eat or accessorize or whatever. A group would seem safer. Problematic, in that Raphel isn’t going to want to be seen by a whole bunch of Aschamon students and risk being pegged for what he is: a Cowl. Also, it means lots of people are going to know that Saeli disappeared with a guy, which means the word is much more likely to get back to the Priestess. The Priestess would recognize Raphel from his description. Eh…sounds like I’m going with option #1. It’s the least complicated.

Least complicated being an extremely relative term. Just thinking of all the little scenes I’ll have to alter to make this change is making my head hurt. But it needs to be done.

After all that, I’ll have to do another line edit, because somehow even though I dropped an entire chapter, my word count went UP. Then I will write yet another query letter, which I think I have a better idea of how to approach that now. If all goes well, by the first of the year, I will be querying again.

Oh! Epic fantasy writing music. Discovered a group called Two Steps From Hell (via Brandon Sanderson’s Facebook, of all places), and immediately had to get both of their commercially available albums. Apparently they mostly make movie trailer music (in fact, I recognized two of their songs in the latest Twilight trailer). Which means most of what they’ve done is only available if you, you know, have lots of money and make movies. But, man. This is what I’m talking about:

Two Steps From Hell - Archangel

Anyway, here’s to getting an agent in 2012.

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Apparently one of my plugins was actually hiding all of my posts except the top one, but only if you weren’t logged in. So of course because I was logged in, I didn’t notice. Anywho, I have fixed that problem, and I’ve also gotten the audio player back up and running, so music should work now. Troubleshooting is a laborious process, involving a lot of logging in, turning features on and off, logging out, refreshing the page, checking the page, logging back in, and well, you get the idea. I posted two new posts since the Great Fatal Error and Two Week Shutdown, but because of the above problem, I don’t know if anyone has actually seen them. Was kind of wondering why they never showed up on Facebook.

The continuation of the second book in the Shades trilogy is going well. I’ve had a lot of fun incorporating snippets and elements from the first draft into unexpected places in this draft. My favorite this week is when Raphel actually takes over Naeth’s body for about three seconds, long enough to scare the crap out of Othau. How and why, you ask? The visual was taken from a scene in the first draft where Othau is taunting Saeli and Mora, saying he isn’t afraid of “their leader”, when Raphel appears in a doorway looking all awesome and scary and says something appropriately badass like “You should be afraid of me”.

In the current scene, Saeli and Mora are still trapped in a cave with Othau and his gang (see the post I wrote about that). Naeth has just showed himself, and is using Mora’s suras bond with Raphel to allow the two of them to communicate (as though they had a sorarc). They are interrupted by Othau, things escalate to a point where Othau grabs Mora’s arm…and we discover that apparently Raphel was still “on the other end of the line”, listening through Naeth’s connection. Raphel uses an intuitive combination of spirit walking, qi, and Mora’s suras bond and transfers his consciousness into Naeth long enough to possess the god’s body and knock Othau away. Then Naeth bucks him out. On the surface, after everything calms down and they make it to Caosgi, everyone kind of writes off the incident. Although Saeli and Naeth will both wonder how the hell Raphel did that, and will worry about what it means. And they are right to worry.

It’s really a very small incident, one of those things that happens in the thick of a fight that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but nobody really pays attention to because zOMGpeoplearetryingtokillmerightnow. The “how the hell”s come later, when everyone’s had time to sit down and think.

I did this primarily to foreshadow the end of Book 2. It gives Raphel a small taste of what it’s like to have an immortal’s power, and provides the motivation for his major turning point. It will tweak the nature of the quest from “I want to destroy the gods” to “I want to destroy the gods myself, and take their place”. Raphel is no longer content to simply let the Keeper take out the gods of Verre; he starts fantasizing what it would be like to take that revenge himself. It won’t be until they get to Caosgi and learn about how newborn immortals are made that Raphel begins to contemplate possessing one permanently, and the incident with Naeth gives him a very good reason to start thinking this way: “I did it once, which means I can do it again…and if I do it with a newborn, he or she won’t be able to kick me out like Naeth did.”

And it gives Naeth a very, very good reason to never trust Raphel again. He probably won’t ever confess it, but that incident will have scared the crap out of him. Just as Raphel got his split-second of immortal power, Naeth got a split-second flash of who Raphel really is on the inside. The god will probably very quickly guess Raphel’s intentions on Caosgi, and will step up his efforts to turn Saeli against Raphel.

So as you can see, my writing has been going pretty well. Which is good, because little ELSE about this process is right now. Still agent hunting, and I’m getting kind of discouraged. Aside from that first nibble right at the beginning of the hunt, I’ve gotten nothing but silence and form rejection letters. I’ve revised the query letter once, and now it looks like I’m going to have to revise it again. I’ve read that if you aren’t getting at least like 4 out of 10 requests for partials or fulls, then there’s something wrong with the letter. But I’m also a a point where I honestly do not know how to make my query any better.

It occurred to me that part of the problem may lie not in the story itself, or the query letter, but in the genre, of all things. High fantasy for YA is not “in” right now, if the shelves at Books-a-million are any indication, and it may be only wishful thinking on my part that I think it’s making a comeback. It may be that a lot of these agents I’m querying actually like my story, but they just don’t think they can sell it right now. They might love it, but if they can’t sell it, they aren’t going to take it on.

Unfortunately there isn’t much I can do about that. I can’t make Shades NOT be high fantasy without fundamentally rebulding the whole thing from the ground up. I do have a couple of other options.

I can start hawking the story as a crossover to agents that represent adult fantasy. I may have to do that anyway, as my list of agents to query grows thinner.

And/or I can revise the query letter to contain specific selling points. I’d been dedicating most of the letter to the story hook, as I felt that was Shades’ strongest suit: yeah, it’s YA and yeah, it’s fantasy, but the point is that it’s a good story. But maybe I need to spell out why I think people will like Shades despite the fact that YA high fantasy is not the “in” thing right now.

1: The fantasy elements read more like an adult fantasy. There’s a reason teenagers who read fantasy and sci-fi tend to read ADULT fantasy and sci-fi…there isn’t much of the YA variety, and the YA variety tends to be less epic, less comprehensive, less grandiose. The voice and tone are different. It’s a difficult nuance to describe in words, but as a child who grew up on adult fantasy and now reads YA, I’m telling you, it’s there. Shades will appeal to teenagers like I used to be.

2: The voice, the pacing, the environments…these are all pure YA. Young adult is quicker, more immediate. Sharper. Pain and heartbreak are tasted and smelled and felt with all their sharp edges, but not really understood. Plenty of adult fantasies star teenaged characters, but those characters tend to be, due to circumstances, practically adults in all but age. Or, if they are children, they are handled in such a way that it becomes obvious that it is nevertheless an adult who is telling the story. It blunts the immediacy, in a sense. Adults just don’t handle problems the same way teenagers do. In contrast Saeli, despite being 19, is still an adolescent. A combination of upbringing and isolation from the larger world have shaped her in such a way that she still thinks and feels and deals with things like a teenager. Her life essentially revolves around school and studying until the cute bad boy intrudes on her life. That’s a pretty typical YA plotline because it’s something your typical high schooler will relate to.

Shades will sell to teenagers who grew up on Anne McCaffry and the Wheel of Time, and are now devouring Westerfeld and Holly Black and Melissa Marr.

Now I just have to figure out how to describe all that in a sentence or two.

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The original fight was in my first draft of the whole trilogy (back before it was a trilogy), and it was one of those awesome, completely unplanned moments. The way the events had been progressing, I always assumed Raphel was going to be the one to take down Othau. He certainly wanted to. So I had this Raphel vs. Othau moment in my head literally right up until the moment Othau and Avalgo pulled knives on each other, and Raphel was occupied elsewhere. And I said, “Um, okay, apparently these two aren’t going anywhere until they have it out”. And it’s sort of appropriate that the fight should be between the two characters who are actually from Dheu…it highlights the fact that my four main characters are interlopers on a conflict that’s much bigger and much older than they are.

The theme of the fight is essentially the age-old question: Can an end justify the means taken to achieve it? If you have to become a monster to save the world, is it worth it?

And this is a theme that forms the backbone of the entire trilogy. Raphel’s goal is to save Verre from a war that is destroying both the Mantles and the Cowls…but he has to kill two gods in order to do it. Obviously he thinks it’s worth it. Of course, he’s got a major lifelong grudge against one of these gods, and the other god is actively trying to wipe out his people…so he’s not exactly the most unbiased judge of such things. Same with Mora and Kaladan. Only Saeli really has a shot at truly deciding whether the end is worth the cost. Right now, she’s on Raphel’s side…but the more time she spends around Naeth, the more she’s going to realize exactly what it would mean to kill a god.

Will she save her world? Or will she save her soul? Of course, her stake in this is all tangled up in her relationship with Raphel, and the choices he makes. Her tragedy is that she will be forced to destroy Raphel while believing in her heart that he wasn’t completely wrong. Ultimately she chooses principle over saving the world, but her circumstances will allow her to do the latter by sticking to the former. Lucky Saeli. Why am I playing it like this? Why am I giving Saeli an out?

Because I don’t know the answer to the question.

Othau believes that securing a future generation of Dheuans is worth the cost of derailing two girls’ lives. Avalgo disagrees, arguing that what good does it do to become monsters in order to survive? Each of them has a point, and I honestly do not know what I would choose, were I put in that position. On one hand, kidnapping, rape, and forced childbirth are monstrous things to inflict on anyone. On the other hand, not acting to save an entire world when you *could*, is also monstrous. It’s an unsettling place for me, not being able to decide within my own mind what a character “ought” to do. All I have to work with is what I know the character would do.

It means I can’t really resolve this fight between Othau and Avalgo. It means that Saeli can’t fully resolve it, even after Raphel betrays her so badly that she MUST stand against him. It means I have to kill off my main villain without knowing, for certain, that he deserved it.

But ultimately, I think maybe it’s a question that needs to be left up to the reader to decide. Each character will choose where they stand, and the reader gets to decide if they made the right decision or not.

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Here’s the situation. Saeli, Raphel, Mora, and Kaladan are on a world that is, due to a series of unfortunate events involving three jealous goddesses, one naive god, and a very angry angelic…well, doomed. Said goddesses created an extremely infectious disease that eventually rendered every single female on the planet unable to bear children. The last generation has reached their mid-50s or so, and they’ve essentially lost hope.

Enter Saeli and Mora, two young women of childbearing age who, due to their not being born on Dheu, are immune to this disease. You can see how this might interest certain parties. The two women get kidnapped, and are currently trapped in a cave surrounded by twenty or so men who are so desperate to not be the last generation that they’re willing to rape female strangers and force them to live out their lives on Dheu bearing children.

Saeli and Mora are both trained in the art of using their qi to do all sorts of extraordinary things, like fire and ice and wind and teleportation spells. None of the men who have captured them have any such power. (Although half of them are what they call “spirit walkers”. They can essentially thrust their spirits out of their bodies and travel about the “spirit realm”, where they receive guidance from the angelics who live there. This is, of course, of no practical use whatsoever against someone who can lob a fireball at them).

The first obvious question: how did a couple of magically inclined characters get captured by a bunch of non-magically inclined characters in the first place? Especially Mora, who, being second-in-command of Raphel Kailar’s infamous cabal, should be neigh unto impossible to capture WITH qi. The answer? The two were taken by surprise and drugged. Saeli didn’t react in time because she’s never really been in a real fight before, even though she was expecting the attack and knew what the assailants were after. Mora didn’t react in time because Saeli hadn’t yet gotten the chance to warn her what was coming.

The drug, nepthas, is one that specifically neutralizes one’s capacity to draw qi. The idea of qi-altering drugs is not new to the overall story, having been introduced in the first book. It would make sense that what the spirit walkers of Dheu and the majahel of Verre draw from the same source of energy, and that the spirit walkers of Dheu would have discovered a means to keep novices from jaunting about in the spirit realm unsupervised. In high doses, nepthas renders the victim unconscious, and can actually stop the heart if too much is given. It allows a group of non-magic wielders to knock Saeli and Mora out for several hours and spirit them away.

So now they are in a cave…the drug has worn off and both girls are awake…Raphel and some others are on their way but haven’t arrived yet…and the men, not quite desperate enough to assault female strangers while they are unconscious (although they considered it), have been waiting for this moment.

Now I have to create an impasse. I’ve given Saeli and Mora back their qi for this scene, because I can’t have the men actually assault them until the cavalry arrives. Yet I cannot have the two girls whooping up on the men and escaping just yet, either…but given their powers, it’s very difficult to imagine a scenario in which this realistically would not happen. You can’t just not have them consider using their powers because, well, it’s their primary weapon. It’d be like a trained swordsman stepping into a battle and forgetting he has a sword. Ain’t gonna happen, you know? And if they were to use their power, there’s really nothing the spirit walkers can do to stop them. So I’ve got to do something that will even the odds, at least until Raphel and Co. show up.

Even the odds #1: Reintroduce nepthas.

I had one of the spirit walkers throw a handful of nepthas leaves on the campfire. I’ve already established that nepthas is an inhaled drug (the first time they took cloths soaked in a wet mixture of the drug and slapped them over the girls’ faces)…so given that they are in a small space, it shouldn’t take too long for the tainted smoke to take effect and render Saeli and Mora helpless again.

Problems: It will still take time, several minutes at the very least. Saeli and Mora could easily escape in that amount of time. Rather than evening the odds, nepthas merely functions as a ticking clock.

Even the odds #2: Establish what can and cannot be done with qi in a small space.

The cave, while small, is nevertheless big enough to contain about twenty men and a small fire around the entrance area, and Saeli and Mora further back. (I’m going to have to assume the men stashed their horses elsewhere; perhaps in a nearby cave, with someone to guard them.) The roof is high enough for everyone to stand comfortably, although it may be *just* that high. If I wanted to be specific, I could have Mora’s head brush the roof. It is deep enough for Saeli to create what amounts to an electrified web between the two parties, where the men would actually have to approach to be zapped by it. So I’m imagining a space that is something like a crack in a wall: deeper and taller than it is wide. Let’s say at its narrowest (which is where Saeli and Mora would be)…wide enough for two or three people to stand with arms outstretched and fingers touching. Wider at the entrance.

I began to write some dialogue between Saeli and Mora, in which they each brought up and discarded various forms they could use to escape. It helped me sort of figure out in my own mind what can and cannot be done with qi, and how environment shapes that. There are basically two “methods” in which qi is used, once you’ve drawn up the appropriate elemental energy: 1) Use the energy to manipulate its physical counterpart; ie, using Air to make a breeze, using Earth to create an earthquake, etc. Easier. Faster. Or 2) Manipulate the energy itself. This is how majahel sight works, and how you create shields, like Saeli’s lightning net. Also, most anjahel skills rely on this method. Any qi form that does anything more complicated than moving matter around probably uses a combination of the two methods.

The physical element does not have to be present, but the energy does. Luckily, most latent energy sitting around contains the four basic elements, so finding sources of energy is not usually difficult. One might have a little trouble using Water in a desert, or Fire in a lake, but it would not be impossible. However, elemental energy =/= physical matter. One may be able to draw Water energy from a dry place, but unless there is an actual source of water on hand (even moisture leeched from the air), one will not be able to spontaneously create physical water. One may be able to draw Air energy, but one cannot create a breeze if there is no physical air to move. The single exception is Fire, which is why fire forms are popular among both Mantles and Cowls.

So, back to Saeli and Mora’s non-predicament. My goal was to run through every possible form and see if there was a logical reason why said form could not be employed (because that’s what any intelligent majahel would do, and I have to assume the reader will, too). Make sure there was no way someone could say, “Well, they can do ___ and ___, right? Why don’t they just  ____?” with me going *facepalm*.

I began with “put out the fire”. Saeli suggests blowing it out. Mora explains that the act of pushing all that air OUT of the cave will draw an equal amount of air back IN, along with all that tainted nepthas smoke. They’d drug themselves in the act. They discuss putting it out with water (Saeli has heard dripping water in the cave somewhere), but again, what happens when you dump water on a fire? Clouds of smoke. Putting out the fire will do no good if they render themselves helpless in the process.

Then they move on to “neutralize the men”. Blast them all out with air or water? They’d just come back in, and also, see above. If they used fire, they’d probably incinerate themselves in the process. Saeli is actually the one to suggest killing them all, but only in the context of “Gee, I’m surprised you didn’t suggest that right away, Mora”. Neither of them, especially Saeli (who knows more of the story), particularly wants to seriously hurt or kill the men…partially because they empathize with their problems, and partially because killing “cowens”, ie, non-magical people, is the moral equivalent of shooting an unarmed person with a gun.

But they could paralyze them (Snake Creeps Down). They could also freeze them (Cross the Courtyard + Water Flows Downhill). And those are forms that the reader has already seen, via Raphel’s battle with the High Priestess. They could bind them up with cords of air (also something we’ve seen Raphel do). Plus we know that Saeli knows how to put people to sleep and influence the mood of a crowd, per her anjahel abilities.

After about a page of writing, and a lot more thinking, I was forced to conclude that, while Saeli and Mora’s environment limits their options some, it was not enough to realistically keep them from escaping. So…now what? How do I contain two magic users who have a very, very good reason to want to escape, now? (The nepthas on the fire effectively eliminates the weak but semi-plausible “oh, let’s just wait for Raphel, we don’t want to hurt these guys and they can’t do anything to us in the meantime” solution).

Then I remembered a chapter from the first draft, one I’d planned to eliminate, where Saeli and Mora are being guarded by a dark angelic that the spirit walkers had summoned. Random tidbit about Dheuan spirit walkers (that only I know): they have the ability to summon angelics, just like Verre anjahel. They can enter the spirit realm at will, after all. However, since their whole society is built around conversing with, learning from, and building relationships with angelics, summoning is very much a forbidden practice. It’d be like treating your teacher with respect, but ordering his children or servants around like animals; it just isn’t done.

That doesn’t, of course, mean that no one does it. As it happens, Othau and a few others have learned how in secret. So it would make sense that, faced with a couple of magic users that they need to subdue (but not hurt), they’d summon up an angelic as backup. I decided upon a marilith, since it’s 1) the only other dark angelic besides vrock that have been mentioned by name so far in the trilogy and 2) they are bigger, scarier, and much more intelligent than vrock. Inadvertently, this beings a whole new dimension of problems, because marilith are difficult to control. Mora senses, correctly, that the spirit walkers don’t really know what they are doing (or they would have chosen a more suitable angelic!), and thus, their control over the marilith they summon is tenuous.

Even the odds #3: Introduce a marilith.

And this finally does it. Because now Saeli and Mora cannot afford to do anything that is going to hurt or even distract the summoner, for fear of loosing the dark angelic from his control. Now they even have to worry about what will happen when Raphel does show up…because if he charges in with qi blazing, he could cause as much damage as either of the girls. Also, having a dark angelic around will give our other angelic friend Isharyel something to do besides stand there and be all wise and stuff.

So that was the process I went through, more or less, to make this scene work. I guess the lesson here is, when you have to put magical characters in a perilous situation, there are two things you can do. Introduce limits to their magic, and make the environment play to those limits. If that fails, introduce a second magical force to oppose them.

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