editing novel 2

While editing Don’t Worry About It, I was so invested in wrapping up Wren and Ashley’s relationship arc that I dropped the ball on the actual plot climax. While reading it back, I came to the conclusion that, unfortunately, I had to rewrite it. The first draft barely even had a climax, to be honest. In the first draft, Wren never goes on Brighton’s talk show. The article goes live while she’s still at home with Ashley after they hook up and Ashley sees it on her phone and shows it to Wren. That was it. In a story that focuses largely on how Wren (and Ashley) are perceived by fans and the general public, and how that is at odds with who they actually are, it made almost no sense to focus a climax on an intimate moment between the two of them. As dictated by the story, in order to have a relevant and meaningful ending, Wren needed to get her ass handed to her in public. Sorry, Wren. Needs must.

For novel 2, I did it again. Like, to a weirdly specific extent. I was too lost in the sauce on the resolution of the main pairing to give the actual plot an actual ending that justifies what came before. Just like with Don’t Worry About It, I spent a few weeks being like, nooo, it’s fine, it’s fine the way it is, I definitely don’t have to do any major rewrites, it’s not even like this one is as good or literary as Don’t Worry, remember that one lesbian romance you read years ago that still haunts you because of how bad it was and THAT one still got published, somehow? It’s fine, it’s fine…

Turns out, it is NOT fine. And now I have to rewrite the ending. And a bunch of other fiddly little pieces. And that’s really just how editing works, that’s the whole point, but man, there is just something that grates when it’s not perfect the first time. I suppose because the first draft feels the most “pure”, in the sense that it’s the most authentic expression of my vision for the story. I had an idea and I put it on paper, and that’s art. Isn’t there a legend in the writing world that Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road in three days? (No, there isn’t, I just looked this up lol). Isn’t that how ART works?! You think it, create it, and it’s done?

My approach to editing in this way is definitely tied to my experiences writing fanfiction. In fanfiction world, it rarely matters how good or cohesive the writing is. If it depicts the main pairing in a way that is pleasing to the reader, then it’s deemed good (note I didn’t say this depiction was necessarily accurate). The accolades you receive for writing imperfect fanfiction can easily lull one into a false sense of security that there is little more to “good” writing than getting the most vociferous reader feedback. If people claim to be frothing at the mouth over your writing, then it follows that colours how you approach the art of writing original fiction. If I could just be a bit funny and a bit cheeky and a bit silly and a bit when is a monster not a monster in my Dean/Castiel or Wangxian fanfiction, then it was enough.

In real writing world, despite the onslaught of terrible novels that keep getting published, that’s just not true. Even for my self-proclaimed not-as-good-as-the-first second novel. Unfortunately, I owe a decent edit to the story and the characters I spent months creating. They deserve better, and because they are me, I deserve better, too.

Which is just a bloated and pretentious way of saying I have to keep editing this fucking manuscript, UGH. I have to make more stuff up after I’ve already made it up! Editing is so deeply inefficient, like, why couldn’t I just do it right the first time? If I had to back into a parking spot this many times to get between the lines, they wouldn’t have given me my driver’s license.

I highly doubt every writer feels this way, but for me, I find it incredibly difficult to pull at the seams of my story, which is often something you have to do during the editing process. A lot of the time, like I lament above, my mindset is, “Well, if it was supposed to be there, I would’ve put in the first time!” In fact, multiple times over the course of my writing “career”, I have been in editing mode, added some small detail to a paragraph (we’re talking something about a smile, a sensory detail, an errant thought, that kind of thing), only to run into the exact same thing a paragraph or two later. I really am on the same page as myself a lot of the time, which is overall a good thing, I think, except then, alas, the seams.

From my end, adding things into subsequent drafts is akin to adding a neon sign above it that screams, “SHE ADDED THIS AFTER THE FACT! IT’S NOT ORIGINAL TO THE STORY!!!” Which is an absurd way to look at editing, and I’m not sure why I feel this way. Maybe I get too caught up in other forms of art that require less editing. For example, a painter can only paint over so much before the canvas itself becomes unworkable. From a numbers standpoint, there just isn’t as much to edit when it comes to a poem or a painting or a piece of pottery. Not saying those artists don’t sweat the details or “edit” in their own way— I’m just saying it’s a different, and objectively more voluminous beast when you’re staring down 75,000 words and expected to make it all work together.

Maybe it’s because, to me, editing is not writing. It’s admin. It’s necessary, but boring busywork. Awkward sentences, incorrect dialogue tags, a paragraph that works better here, not there, all of that to me is boring as hell. In my writing brain, I just want to gesture to the story as a whole and say, “But, like, you get where I’m coming from, right?”

I’ve discussed this before, but I don’t write on a sentence-by-sentence basis. I would never consider myself someone who “constructs” sentences. I don’t sit down and agonize over paragraph structure. I do spend a fair amount of time hunting down words, but only because I only vaguely remember the definition, or forgot a word entirely, or need to laterally think my way into a synonym. If I contemplated every single word I wrote, I would never write anything. If I assigned the same level of importance to every sentence, I would still be in chapter four of Don’t Worry. I might have the wrong impression of this because that’s the most common way for media to depict the art of writing. A character types out a sentence… second-guesses it… deletes it… re-writes… deletes… on and on. I’m not saying I’ve never done that— I absolutely have— but I am saying that’s not all there is to it. So much of my writing just happens. Thinking is secondary. There is a goal in my head, and everything that’s happening on the page is a means to an end. The finished product already exists in the ether of my mind, my only responsibility to it after that is to get it on paper. Writing, taken down to the studs, is a way to communicate ideas, and that is the baseline for my own creative process. I’m communicating a fully realized idea— not a sentence, or piece of grammar, or any singular image, but a whole that is meant to be taken that way. I suspect, were you to break Don’t Worry, or any of my subsequent works down into separate categories (syntax, grammar, imagery, prose, etc), they would not fit together 100% correctly, like they would for some other writers.

For novel two, the pacing was very off. My timelines were wrong, things either felt like they happened too quickly or not quickly enough, and the back third or so of the novel all takes place within the course of a week, while the first two-thirds of the story take place over the course of a number of months. It’s an interesting conundrum, because I like the idea of tightening up a story near the end as opposed to broadening its scope. As you wrap up plot points, you are whittling down your story to its core tenet, its reason for being. When writing Don’t Worry, that process involved snipping every social tether Wren had to other people, like plucking leaves off an already scant branch. A bit evil of me, sure, but eventually, she was on her own, and alone with herself, and breaking her down to the studs was the whole point of Don’t Worry. However, the end of Don’t Worry broadened its scope in the sense that time sped up, a decision I am still not fully sold on. The last chapter skips ahead by a year or so, whereas for novel two, everything slows down at the end and happens in a week. Technically, the latter option offers a much more intimate look at the payoff. With Don’t Worry, I was confident enough in my set-up that I could deploy a year time skip. With novel two, do I hold the same confidence in my set-up, that it can handle the extreme scrutiny that a week long climax brings? With the pacing originally so off… no. With some more tweaks? With a new, more relevant plot wrap-up and adjustments to the timeline that make more sense and give the story more time to breathe? … maybe.

I said this one was a romcom. That was a lie. I said this one was an attempt at writing a generic romance that would be more likely to cater to the broadest possible audience that is interested in lesbian fiction. That… also might have been a lie. Thinking back, even during my fanfiction years, I’m not sure that romance was ever my first priority. Which sounds nuts, because I exclusively wrote Dean/Castiel and Wangxian, and their relationship was almost always center stage. But at the same time, thinking about the worthwhile fanfiction I wrote for both pairings, none of them ever easily fell into the romance genre. Romance was always at the forefront, much like in Don’t Worry, but never the main thrust of the story. Hell, even Rat on a Horse, goofy 30k lesbian erotica I just put out, was more about the protagonist coming to terms with what she really wanted out of life. There was sex, and her love interest was fun, and it was silly and goofy and an enjoyable little piece, but even that, man, I don’t know. Maybe I’m being precious. Maybe this is one of those things that’s so obvious it’s unspoken, and I’ve just badly misread how others approach this topic. But I just can’t seem to crack whatever code it is that allows people to write broadly enjoyable romance. I kept telling myself I could definitely do it. Then, one day in the Homesense book section (yes they have one of those), I cracked open one of those cell-shaded romance covers that’s like, “She’s a klutzy goof and he’s a hunky hockey player, can they make it work? Read the #steamy #romcom that #Booktok can’t stop #tokking about!” and I paged through it for a few minutes, and I was like… I don’t actually think I can do this. This sounds like I’m being a huge asshole, like this is something so bad that I could never reach such a level of… bad. And, like, yes, the book is bad. But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about. I literally do not think I could write a book like that. I thought I could, and I have been humbled quite resoundingly. I will just never be able to write a book that appeals broadly enough to an audience, or maybe even an agent, and my writing can be worthwhile and funny and interesting and… still not be worth anything— monetarily. It is entirely possible no one will ever lay eyes on my work, and think there is value in it, and reliably tell me that, yes, there is a living to be made, here.

It’s sad. It’s a tough pill to swallow. I don’t know how long I can create “art” that no one wants (I know a few people read my original work, and fewer read this blog, and I hope I don’t have to explain what I mean by “no one” in this particularly mopey instance). I don’t want to fully psyche myself out— it is entirely possible no one will want book 2, but you never know. Maybe someone takes a chance. Maybe someone uses the right hashtag. Maybe I can embark on a path in life that allows me to feel like I am actually contributing to society with my art, instead of relying on the goodwill of internet strangers who read my Destiel fanfiction in 2017.

I’ve thought about quitting writing. I don’t have any plans to do so— but I’ve thought about it. I’ve often thought about what would be left if I left behind all the parts of me I wanted to sell. I was always fascinated by the romance of the random internet personalities who just up and left one day. “Where is she now? I’m sure she’s busy, out there enjoying her life in the real world!” Or that one friend from middle school who you only think about once every five years. Or the neighbour down the street whose lost dog you found in your yard and returned, and that was the only time you ever spoke to each other. The fantasy of what happens when people disappear from your life is exactly that— a fantasy. You can even see my fascination with this in Don’t Worry— after Wren hightails it from LA at the end, she overhears people gossiping about her whereabouts. Where could she have gone? Where did she go?! Well, she went to starve in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, and then she was just in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, is where she went. Probably not near as glamorous as any rumours made it seem.

In the real world, though, those people, like, just keep on trucking. They go to work. They go home. Unless they’re Wren, they eat dinner. I used to think the same about random fanfiction writers— where is she? What’s her life like? It must be sooo cool and awesome since she’s such a cool and awesome writer!! Let me put it this way. A handful of people, in a very specific corner of the internet, thought that I was a cool and awesome writer at one point, and occasionally wondered as to my whereabouts. While they wondered such things, I was likely at my shitty job, or curled up on the couch in the fetal position in my apartment because I hated that couch and that apartment, or smoking weed or drinking or overeating or whatever I felt like I needed to do at the time because I was so miserable. Small victories, but I’m finally rid of that couch and that apartment, and smoking weed or drinking in this economy? Please.

I was driving home tonight and I realized I wrote novel 2 about the most boring character in it. This must be a holdover from writing Lan Wangji POV. This isn’t really something editing can fix, and frankly, I don’t think it needs to. I think it is very, very funny. Chaos erupting all around and inside her and the protagonist is like, good thing I’m well adjusted and this barely rocks me! I mean, it does rock her, but it doesn’t. I feel great affection for both her and her love interest, despite the fact the story they exist in is not particularly inspired. There’s some verisimilitude for you. Sometimes life, even the exciting falling in love bits, are just a bit boring. I won’t be leading my query letter with that, but, you know. One woman’s boring is another woman’s most scintillating fantasy, maybe.

Finishing projects is difficult for me. Not in a literal sense— usually, the emotional shape of an ending becomes clear to me before I reach it— but in an existential one. It’s funny of me to say, because usually by the time I’ve mentally finished the novel—the emotional arc is complete and I know where I’m going, it’s just a matter of getting there— I’m already looking forward to the next one. The next character I can sink my gnarled little claws into and shake between my teeth for a bit. But at the same time, losing the emotional weight of a story I spent months on, regardless of quality, is really hard. It’s hard to let go, and it’s hard to prettily package and try to sell off wrapped in whatever the current trendy buzzwords are in the publishing industry, and it’s hard to accept that no one might want it, and it’s hard to accept that other people’s acceptance is what designates “art” from “something I wrote for fun”.

I’m almost exactly halfway through editing this novel. It’s going okay. I left myself a fair bit of room in the word count that the story has a bit of room to grow, whereas with Don’t Worry, I was constantly looking for places to trim. I’m going very slowly, which is both good, because I don’t burn out, and bad, because it can be hard to get back into the editing headspace once I leave it. The problematic pacing will likely remain as such, even as I approach something resembling a final draft. I suspect once I pull the disparate threads a little tighter and iron over the seams a little hotter, I will feel better. I think getting an outside perspective, which so far I haven’t had with this story, will help. I’ve had a number of small breakthroughs during the editing process so far, which pleases me, and I hope to have more as I move along and get to the meatier parts of the story. Or maybe, I’ll just feel better knowing I reinforced the base of the narrative enough to withstand everything else I piled on top of it. Much like I hope anyone who reads my stories feels, I’m curious to see how it all turns out.

the ballad of lilian and ratricia

This blog post is about the writing of this “novella” I just posted on AO3.

First off, I hope you enjoyed it! It was meant to be fun and dumb and hot and I think I covered my bases pretty well. As I mentioned in the author’s note on AO3, I wrote this to help me keep my distance from the completed first draft of my second novel, as I wanted to give it (and me) some breathing room before I came back for revisions and edits. Also, I hate editing. Also, the closer I get to a finished product, the closer I get to having to query again, and that makes me shrivel up inside like a raisin.

Writing Rat on a Horse was probably the most fun I’ve had writing in… years. I wrote it in just under three weeks. I’m not trying to sell it or impress anyone. I’m really embodying my old fanfiction mindset of “write what you want because no one can write what you want better than you”. There was so little planning and so much “teehee, wouldn’t it be funny if Lily tried to climb out the window” or “why shouldn’t Gardenia be a Royalist freak for no reason other than it’s goofy”. Rat’s name is Patricia because “Ratricia” is the funniest joke I’ve ever told.

At the end of the day, Rat on a Horse is fun lesbian erotica, not meant to light the world on fire. However, in the name of fun, I am going to talk about what I do think it has to offer; goofiness, lesbian sex, and dynamic characters.

GOOFINESS

More women should be goofy. There are goofy women out there, but there should be more. The reasons why more women aren’t goofy make me sad. When I am not mentally unwell, I would consider myself a fairly goofy woman. Thinking about the “goofy” people in my life growing up is also sobering, because they were all men. We all have the funny uncle, right? The one who’s just a big kid himself, and all the adult women in the family roll their eyes at him but, like, in a good natured way? How many people have a goofy aunt? We are not socially conditioned to allow women to be goofy, because they’re the ones who have to mind the goofy men. Women aren’t allowed to be goofy, because they’re busy, like, taking care of their families and houses and smashing the glass ceiling and stuff. Even when women are goofy, they’re seen as cringeworthy and embarrassing. I would know, because I often think that way about those kinds of women. It’s so deeply entrenched it almost feels biological. When I was a kid, I told my mom I thought women just weren’t as funny as men. It’s so ingrained into us I am still constantly fighting my preconceptions and picking apart my motivations when it comes to judging other women. You see a lot of lukewarm discussions about the double standards between women and men, but so many of them are painful to watch #girlboss moments lacking even the slightest semblance of nuance that it feels like they never really discussed anything at all (“You think a girl can’t shoot? Well, mr sir, I grew up with TWENTY-SIX brothers” bangbangbang bullseye and damn she’s still so sexy!!). Maybe I am just soft like clay and everyone else is impervious to this and I’m just emotionally weak and susceptible to outside influence and also a raging misogynist.

The funny thing is, after a lot (some might say too much) self reflection, I realized that being terminally goofy myself had started to make me feel like I was unable to take myself, my work, or my feelings seriously whatsoever. Like I had to brush everything off, nothing was allowed to cut too close, and that became dehumanizing and dissociative in its own way, as if I was more of a one dimensional character than an actual human being. It sucks, too, because I say this knowing that at the same time, goofball men are still taken seriously when it’s time to be serious. There’s nothing eating away at them, warning them that they’re trying to run away from themselves and all of their complicated feelings because they like to play little pranks or make stupid jokes or honk their girlfriends’ boobs or whatever. It’s really hard to gauge how gendered this phenomenon is versus how I, as a human, am lacking in general.

All that to say, I like writing goofy women. I like giving them airtime in my stories. I feel like I have a pretty good goofy baseline from the fandom world, along with my to-the-beat-of-my-own drum sense of humour. I liked writing Rat because she’s cool, but I really liked writing Rat because she’s an annoying goofball who enjoys trolling her loved ones. I’m not sure cool people actually exist, but if they do, they’re probably quite one dimensional and boring.

LESBIAN SEX

I enjoyed writing that phrase in Header 1 all caps. I was going to just put in this section, “need I say more?” but it’s me, so I will. I enjoy exploring the different types of sex and turn-ons and attraction and libido women can have/feel. Despite all the supposed “empowering” sex tips out there for women, the landscape of female humans getting down together often still feels weirdly barren and unsexy and lacking tension. Not saying I’m out here to educate or write the most true-to-life lesbian sex. Just cause it’s two women having it (doing it?) doesn’t mean it’ll be good, unfortunately. In erotica-world, though, bad sex (generally with someone else first) is just a precursor for GREAT SEX between the main couple later on. That wasn’t actually the case with Ratricia and Lilian, because Rat’s sex life prior to Lily isn’t mentioned and Lily is a loser virgin <3. But again, that’s kind of the point. The likelihood of sex with a twenty-five year old lesbian virgin who’s never even jerked off being mindblowingly good the entire time is like, mmmmmmm, okay, not SUPER likely. But at the same time, isn’t it fun to imagine a world where being so super into each other (even when one half of you doesn’t realize it) and both of you going off like rockets in the back of your car in the parking lot of an auto insurance broker is possible? And doesn’t result in an indecent exposure charge?

I also really enjoy exploring romance/fanfiction tropes between female characters. You see so little of it in general that it’s fun to play with those expectations in an environment both steeped in and deeply resistant to the socialized and gendered life of women. For example, playing with the trope of “character doesn’t know they’re gay,” is a very different experience if the character is female or male. Personality-dependent, absolutely, but also sex-dependent. Dean Winchester’s relationship to masculinity is not the same as, say, Ashley Bonnie’s relationship to femininity (does anyone even remember that’s Ashley’s last name? No? That’s okay, it’s mentioned literally once in Don’t Worry, I forgive you). But also, IT IS! Both of them are characters who are quite married to the gendered expectations they grew up swimming in. But but also also, those same gendered expectations and how they impact a person are very different. I really enjoyed exploring that relationship while writing m/m fanfiction, so I suppose it only makes sense that I feel similarly exploring the same themes with f/f. Even though Rat on a Horse is just goofin around, you can still see this theme play out, in Lily’s character especially. She has quite specific ideas about shaving and how men/women should do it, all based on what she’s been told by the world around her, while also barely adhering to her own rules. Her expectations of “proper” society are essentially arbitrary, tied up in the media she consumed growing up and her own difficult, homegrown personality. Even very cool very sexy Rat doesn’t escape unscathed, when she talks about growing up as a tomboy who decided chores were for girly girls, and then Ms Arbitrary Lily and her should-be-shaved-but-isn’t pussy shows up to remind Rat that the gendered division of labour means very little in a single-sex household.

Anyway. I thought it was fun. I like riding the line between “realistic” sex and “fanfiction” sex, I guess. Adds a little verisimilitude without fully watering down the fantasy. Like, for example, the fact that shower sex really does mess with lubrication and having sex in a gym shower is SOOOOOOOOO GROSS. Oh my God, especially Rat pushing Lily up against the wall. Disgusting. Disgusting! Good for them.

DYNAMIC CHARACTERS

I like Lily and Rat and I think they’re both weird and interesting, even for the scant thirty-thousand word world in which they live. Heck, I think the same of Gardenia and Gina. One expectation of the romance genre I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to succumb to is the blank slate protagonist for the reader to project onto. Maybe it’s because in the fanfiction world, characters come with built-in personalities, so it kind of forces your hand into working with characters with at least some semblance of depth. Obviously, one of the mainstays of fandom is misinterpreting the characters so badly that by the time the tumblr machine is done with them, they’re barely more than a name and an archetype and a catch phrase, but I’m speaking only for myself, as someone who really enjoyed having the dollhouse pre-built so I could come in and start throwing wrenches into things immediately. I like a character I can sink my teeth into. I like that Lily, with her oddness and her peculiar way of speaking and her hypocrisy and her tetchiness, is not a blank slate. I like that Rat is hiding a very goofy, silly, and earnest personality beneath her gym bro cool lesbian exterior. “Dynamic” doesn’t necessarily mean a character is the complete opposite inside as they are outside, just that they are interesting, active, and stand out on the page. It also doesn’t mean they aren’t relatable in any way— I actually find Lily quite relatable in some ways. Distressingly so, one might say. I also share some characteristics with Rat. Sometimes, I think it’s good to make characters contradictory. It’s another way of adding verisimilitude to a story, because most people, including myself, are contradictory and hypocritical in some ways. It’s all part of the complex and annoying soup of humanity.

RANDOM POINTS OF POTENTIAL INTEREST

Sometimes I write something that is such a blatant personal fantasy of mine I can only laugh. Living in a quaint (PAID OFF!!) cottage in the woods with a whimsical golden bedroom and a beautiful garden and a cozy nook and a well-stocked kitchen full of hearty homemade meals in a town known for its natural beauty, and also your wife-to-be is a hot firefighter. And you drive a civic. What more could you ask for???

There was no reason Rat on a Horse was set in Smithers besides the fact that I had heard of it before and wanted a relatively rural setting. The people of Smithers are called Smithereens, which is hilarious, and I wish I had gotten a chance to work it into the story. If I ever had the chance, I would absolutely visit, it looks like a beautiful place and Lily definitely doesn’t do it justice during her guided tour. There is really an ICBC on Murray Street, though. And, not on Murray Street, a Safeway. And a Subway. But no Walmart! I actually checked because I was going to send Lily there for her gym clothes, but alas, t’was not to be. Not that it would have mattered if I conjured a Walmart into the fictional version of Smithers, but for no good reason, I often stalk Google Maps while writing and am always checking if this or that is “realistic” or not. That habit is a holdover from my Supernatural days when I would constantly be mapping out the road trips and travel times of the Winchesters. I mostly got a break in Wangxian fandom for obvious reasons. Even for Don’t Worry I was skulking around on Maps, especially to help me visualize LA, a place I would rather die before visiting. I also used a lot of Google Maps for novel 2, as the protagonist travels often for work (how else could I accurately describe what it’s like driving on the I-5!!!!!!). It’s especially funny when I realize how little I pay attention to geography/travel time as a reader. Unless you’re a weird internet detective or Game of Thrones post season-5, literally no one cares how accurate your fictional travel time is, or if you said a Walmart existed where it doesn’t.

I also wrote in past tense for the first time in… YEARS. All my fanfiction was in present tense. Even in university I was constantly writing in present tense because of my screenwriting specialty. I remember my terrifying first/second year fiction instructor telling us how people always thought writing in the present tense made things feel more urgent, but actually, the real use-case for present tense was…

I forget the end of her argument, lol. Sad. All I can say is, I wrote in present tense because that’s just how most fanfiction is written. I wrote Don’t Worry in present tense because it was what I was used to. I wrote novel 2 in present tense for the same reason. I thought it would be a good chance to dust off the cobwebs with Lily and Rat, and figured if I missed a tense or two it wasn’t the end of the world. Though someone did mention in the comments I typo’d “barely” as “barley” which is such a me-mistake, but also a good reminder to watch your wiggle words. If I torched the majority of my adverbs like I should’ve, I probably would’ve been safe. A terrifying thought, but one of my most-formed and most-likely-to-be-written-next ideas is in FIRST PERSON. Mama mia.

No more drawing it out. Ending the blog post now because Rat on a Horse has to be done so I can return to book 2 and try to churn out some editing juice. Can’t afford that early 2000s Civic on an ao3 writer’s salary!!

beleaguered by horror novels

Note: In this blog post I talk about a horror novel that involves childhood sexual assault

Okay, I had other plans for the next blog post, but it’s Halloweek so I’m talking about horror (novels) instead. This post also brought to you by the fact that I’m reading yet another horror novel that isn’t good. Quelle surprise.

Before I make an example of Devil’s Creek by Todd Keisling, I would like to say: the cover is sick. Perfect font choice. Colours and art are great. It’s also textured in a way that makes it nice to hold. Thumbs up on the design!

For transparency’s sake, as I write this, I’m about 75% of the way through the novel. I doubt my opinion of it will get better, but it’s definitely possible it will get worse (update: not all the way done yet, but it’s getting worse).

Quick recap: Devil’s Creek is a supernatural horror novel set in the present day in the uber religious town of Stauford, Kentucky. It follows six half-siblings who share a father. Said father was a Christian preacher-turned-satanic cult leader in the 80s who convinced his congregation to worship the devil, and the six protagonists were the offspring he conceived with different women in said congregation. The main plot follows his resurrection and subsequent return to Devil’s Creek.

If you’re familiar with the horror genre at all, you’ll recognize the “haunted town” trope. If you’ve read IT, you have a pretty good handle on the general framework. If you don’t, novels like this almost always have multiple third person POVs and very short chapters, with a huge cast of characters to draw the reader into the town’s story. The villains are often cosmic/supernatural in nature, as a human killer is a lot less able to support the goal of narratives like this: take a lovely town, flip it upside down, expose it (and, subsequently, humanity’s) dark underbelly. In theory (!) I like stories like these. However, a common stumbling block they face is how deeply characterization suffers due to the breadth of the subject matter. You could argue the town is the true protagonist of stories like these, but that doesn’t change the fact that the pillars holding it up are paper-thin and archetypical characters with no nuance or complexity. It makes it very difficult to emotionally invest in a story whose characters are no more than, say: Tortured Artist, Every Man, Nympho Lady, Cool Girl, School Bully, Slimy Mayor, etc.

Speaking of IT, one of my most pressing issue with horror novels in general: why are we all trying to be Stephen King? Money, fame, fortune, I know. But Stephen King is already Stephen King. The position has been filled! I can’t count how many horror novels I’ve read that are blatant King ripoffs. Maybe it’s a pop fiction thing in general, but the blandly descriptive conversational tone of his prose is something I immediately clock when someone else decides to ape it. It’s not a particularly unique style, but he’s famous and prolific enough that any horror author who tries it is going to suffer comparisons. More specifically, the way the villain in Devil’s Creek contacts/possesses/speaks to his victims is so reminiscent of Pennywise in IT that it’s almost laughable. Like, man, way to steal your schtick from an interdimensional alien clown. I’m someone who strongly encourages artists to steal what they love from other artists and use it in their own work, but when we get into the “Can I copy your homework?” / “Yeah just get a few wrong on purpose so it’s not exact” type exchanges I think that’s where some creative reevaluation may be called for.

Something I found very interesting about Devil’s Creek was the content warning at the beginning, something you rarely see in traditional publishing. This novel, unlike many others (GRRRRRR), has an in-depth summary on the back. This novel is also not pretending to be anything other than a horror novel. So, why, exactly, it has a content warning escapes me. If you examine the exterior of the book, it’s pretty clear what you’re in for, even if you don’t know specifics. The content warning, however, almost reads like a breathlessly overdone A03 tags list. The author seems to take pleasure from informing the reader how icky and yucky and horrifying the novel’s contents are, while simultaneously patting himself on the back for his unflinching portrayal of the darkness lurking within us. It’s a strange mix of wanting to have your cake and eat it, too. You get the shock factor of portraying societal taboos like incest and childhood sexual assault without any of the potential backlash, because you pre-empted your novel with a hand-wringing “Don’t like, don’t read” warning. Maybe it’s my years of severely misplaced stress and anxiety over tagging my own fanfiction properly to ensure I don’t cause a single person anywhere ever a single second of disquiet, but I feel compelled to remind readers that when they pick up a novel, they are assuming a certain amount of risk that they will come across content that upsets them. Everything we do involves risk assessment, including consuming art.

I read a lot of horror. I know what I like and what I don’t. If I make an error in judgement and read something I don’t like, that’s on me. I’m not going to go wag my finger at the author and demand restitution (though I may write a rude blog post about them, as is my RIGHT). However, in our current cultural climate, people seem to take perverse pleasure in doing exactly that (which I’m guessing is what prompted Devil’s Creek’s content warning, along with the general cultural cache of being such a Good Guy that you tagged your horror novel as “horror”). Not horror related, but I once got in hot water because I dared to not tag “Alcohol used as a coping mechanism” and “recreational drug use” (separate instances) on Dean Winchester Beat Sheet. I don’t think the commenters actually gave two shits about the story, they just wanted to call me out for not tagging miniscule things because in their eyes, I was doing crimes and they were tripping over themselves to give me a citation. I bent to the alcohol tag (still a bit absurd, frankly, considering the contents of the source material where Dean drinks like a fish), but couldn’t bring myself to content warn for college students smoking the devil’s lettuce. I’m sure you understand.

So in that sense, I understand a horror author wanting to cover their ass. People make a hobby out of cherry picking you and offering up worst-faith interpretations of everything you write without any interest in the actual content of your work. I’ve been there. I get it. But I think doing such a thing in a horror novel is a bit goofy. You can’t claim you’re writing with unbridled edginess (the author does make a point to say he went balls-out on this one and didn’t pull any punches) and in the same breath sheepishly dig the toe of your shoe into the dirt while aw-shuksing about what a nasty bad boy you are. Own your work or don’t, dude.

The funniest thing about this is that the book isn’t even that spo0o0o0o0oky. Like most “Dead Dove: Don’t Eat” fanfiction, a lot of horror authors think that just checking off the full list of sex/murder/sacrilegious taboos is enough to count as scary, when really, they’re just unpleasant, and not in a fun or interesting way. A lot of horror is edgy but not scary, offering up a whole lot of talking points and phrases that kneejerk generate outrage and upset without any of the necessary substance. For example, the six half-siblings in Devil’s Creek were molested as children while they were still in the cult. Obviously, that’s something that can cause severe emotional issues. The fact that they went to therapy is brought up a few times, but to be honest, it mostly just reads as texture. Just a checkbox to ensure the reader knows how evil and terrible the cult is, without any real care or thoughtfulness dedicated to what happened and how it emotionally affected the children beyond: wasn’t that soooo fucked up! And then my next line of thinking is: okay, then why include it as all? It would have been just as spooky to have the kids not be assaulted— all the other creepy cult stuff was still going on. But then, the author couldn’t have included how one of the female kids grew up to be a slutty incestuous nympho who “seduced” her brother when they were teenagers and can’t wait for daddy to come back from the dead and fuck her! Another funny thing about the trigger warning: the author self-importantly warns the reader about a lot of the disturbing content, but not the deeply misogynistic choices he himself made as a writer regarding many of the female characters. What an interesting oversight.

For fun, I would like to share some of the funniest parts of this novel with you. No, this novel is not meant to be funny. That did not stop me from laughing out loud, multiple times, while reading:

“Tyler had everything he wanted, or so he thought— until the day this beautiful silver-haired queen walked into his life.”

“Tyler tried not to stare but found he couldn’t look away. Even with the imperfections, the wrinkles, sagging flesh, and darkened spots of age, she was beautiful in his eyes… Twenty years ago, the look would’ve set him on fire. Even now, it set his heart ablaze, but this old machine was nearly out of gas.” (This is an especially funny passage because the woman in question is a few months out from dying of aggressive pancreatic cancer, so, like, she’s not looking so good on account of the CANCER, but this guy still somehow manages to make it about how yucky old women are in general with their (!!!) wrinkles (!!!).

“He wasn’t going to fuck this up, no sir, but he still needed to know if he was on his own.” (One of MANY examples of the King-isms that are just fucking rife through the whole novel. Not only that, but more than one character POV uses this quirk of prose, and it’s so distracting, like, yeah, you can be voice-y, but this novel is already a LOT, please, have mercy.)

The phonetic southern accents are a lot. I’m not against all phonetic accents, I think there are ways to do it, but the amount of “darlin’” and “ya”s present are… a lot. And do not convey a particularly “authentic” southern experience, says the very non-southern non-American who definitely knows all about an authentic southern experience.

“Satisfied Genie’s grandson wouldn’t die on his watch, Tyler turned his attention to the bleeding bitch [Genie’s daughter] on the other side of the basement.”

There are sections from a character’s journal, which include newspaper/academic articles, photos, drawings, etc. For some reason, the character who wrote the journal… signed some of her entries. She signed… her own journal entries. Almost as if she was a character in a novel who expected them to be used as a storytelling device… hmm…

“‘Go spread the gospel as you once spread your legs, child.’” (This one really got me, I well and truly LOL’d. The overuse of the word “child” in this novel to refer to religious congregants is so trite and embarrassing, it’s like an actual child trying to write their version of a Grown Up story).

The religious jargon. I sleep. Lamb, hallelujah, amen, son, virtue, flock, sin, lord, suffer, prophet, atone, child, blah blah blahhhhhhhhhhhh none of it means anythinggggggggggggg. I don’t even know if annoying fictional preachers need more or less thesauruses. If I thought the author was using this endless snooze-fest proselytizing to satirize how empty religious doctrine actually is, I would be on board. As it stands, every line of dialogue spoken by the bad guy is just those words shaken around in a hat and plucked out at random. None of it means shit, amen 🙏

This novel was nominated for the Bram Stoker award, if you were curious.

The edginess vs spookiness is one of the reasons I gravitate toward ghosts/the supernatural over other subgenres. Even if the novel sucks, it doesn’t lend itself to edginess in the same way religious/gore/serial killer subgenres do. Kind of the whole point of ghosts is that they’re old and out of touch— the opposite of edgy. That doesn’t mean there aren’t goofballs writing supernatural horror— just that their goofballery is harder to display. Actually, this discussion brings to mind another terrible “haunted town” religious horror novel called Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky (yes, that Stephen Chbosky). The only time I ever wish I still had my Goodreads account is so I can revisit how much I hated a certain book, and YES SIR, I hated that one, too. I should probably quit while I’m behind on this subgenre.

My problem is I really believe that good, hard-hitting “haunted town” horror should be a thing. I keep trying to will it into existence. It’s not a forgiving genre, for some of the reasons described above, and countless others. Placing an identity onto an entire town makes no logical sense. You only have to go to one trendy microbrewery in one trendy city or suburb to know they’re all the same. No matter how quirky the local artisans try to convince you otherwise, Williamsburg is no different than Scmilliamsburg halfway across the Midwest. I feel very similarly to Canada and its desperately crafted national identity— say all you want about Canadians being polite and Tim Hortons and hockey and lumberjacks, Schmanada is never far behind. Also, from someone who’s lived here her whole life, don’t believe it. Canadians are assholes and Tim Horton’s is not worth your money.

I also rebel against the idea that these narratives often push, of darkness lurking just beneath the surface of every person. It’s just not that simple, and this is coming from a certified misanthrope who thinks everyone sucks. What’s funny about these narratives is at the same time, they often suggest that corrupting influences are entirely external (possession, something in the water, some kind of spiritual influence or magic, etc), and have nothing to do with the individual person. Like “bad” is a switch we can flip inside us… just like the vampires on the hit CW show, The Vampire Diaries (but only sometimes, it’s complicated, or just inconsistent, hush).

Horror novels so often rush to brand themselves as adult content due to their graphic nature, when in reality, their perception of the world is entirely without nuance, rendering them deeply immature and uninteresting. Religious novels especially seem so deeply unwilling to engage with the complexities and personal nature of spirituality that it’s like… what’s the point, dude? Devil’s Creek is convinced it has something to say because the majority of the townsfolk are very religious and conservative, and they hate anyone different than them (classic Us vs The Other). This is explored through two main channels: racism (the town has a history of KKK activity) and… being a punk. I don’t think I need to explain the impact of the racism part. Being a punk, however… well, there actually is a lot of pain in a world where you grow up as an emo goth myspace loser in a square town. I’m making light of the concept, while at the same time acknowledging that with the right story and author, a teenage punk feeling confused and out of place in a world defined by rigid social roles who rebels against them as a result is a compelling narrative, if done right. Any narrative can be compelling… if done right... if ya write it good. Devil’s Creek just reads like prose written by a fully grown adult who got teased because he wore a shirt with a skull on it to math class when he was fifteen.

I haven’t written a lot of horror, but I’ve written some. It can be a powerful genre to write, and powerfully cathartic. It’s like a good rant or a good journaling session or finally plucking out a bad splinter. It feels good to get the bad out. Unburdening yourself like that does not leave a lot of room for nuance, not when you’re so lost in the sauce and exorcising the demons of your past (or present). Am I going to be even-headed when unloading years of nightmares and traumatic experiences into a Word doc, or am I going to puke it up in one great heave like I just overindulged on deeply discounted November 1st Halloween candy? To me, it’s going to look like a Van Gogh; all that pain, that I am intimately familiar with and have spent years nursing, on display! But, vomit is vomit. And if your agent/editor doesn’t have your back? Or if your target audience has terrible taste? Finger meet uvula, here we go again.

(Speaking of editors, the editing in this novel is terrible. I don’t know what the hell is going on in publishing the last few years, but, much like a haunted town horror novel, SOMETHING must be in the water, because so many editors absolutely suck at their jobs. This novel alone forgot italics multiple times, has incredibly repetitive sentences, is way overlong and samey, and in one memorable instance, left a random, stray letter ‘z’ at the end of a chapter, like someone sneezed while they had the final draft open and accidentally hit it.)

I’ve written before about my own journey on overwrought emotionality and the concept of Muchness. As I allude to in that post, this concept has proven very important to me in my understanding of the horror genre. More of something— more blood, more gore, more murder, more sex, more general nastiness— is not always good. It’s not a simple equation where “1 blood + 1 blood = 2 bloods and > blood = > scary”. It’s not necessarily scarier for a character to get murdered with ten axe swings as opposed to two.

If I may, (and I will, because I can), allow me a comparison. In Devil’s Creek, after all the “apostles” (townspeople) are forcibly infected by the devil’s goo (ichor? sludge? who cares), they parade in the street, get naked, and start bangin! They do other stuff, too (infect others with the devil’s gooichorsludge), but a great deal of attention is paid to the fact that full grown adults are, like, having sex. Some of it is rape-y, but at the same time it’s confusing because they’re also all in evil rapture about it? It’s weird in the sense that when you think about it, the book is basically saying… sex between adults is bad? I get you don’t want to see adults having sex in public, and you certainly don’t want to see non-consensual acts being performed in public. But sex, on its own, is just sex. Also, the devil preacher calling women sluts and whores, but also condoning incest and public orgies (and homosexuality, weirdly enough? The devil doesn’t mind if you’re gay, but if you’re a woman? Fuck You.). I’m confused. I think the trick is as long as you hate women, you’re clear? What the cult actually believes in this novel is incredibly ill-defined, especially for how much page space gets wasted on marshmellow-mouthed religious mumbo jumbo.

In a moment on the lips (the anti-famous MDZS horror fic I wrote a few years ago), sex also plays a huge role. I would argue that sex playing a huge role has a reason beyond “sex bad” or “sex societal taboo”. Wei Wuxian has had very specific sexual experiences in that fanfiction that haunt, and, well, bedevil him a bit, and drive much of the plot. His trauma from his time in the Burial Mounds is explored, lending depth and meaning to his actions after he finally emerges, manifesting as hypersexuality, misogyny, disordered eating, etc. Obviously, those are generally modern concepts to apply to a story that takes place in a fantasy period of far-flung history, but I like to think I did an okay job melding everything together regardless. I was very intrigued by the idea of writing something hard and unpleasant, but not without merit. Not to fluff myself up too much, but a lot of horror misses the “merit” part of that.

I also find the baldness of horror quite interesting. You see it in other genres, but I think it rears its shiny head in unique ways in the horror space. Writing plainly may seem exactly that, but it’s not that simple. Barren, stark prose has its place. It’s punchy, meaningful, rustic. Bluntly writing something like:

“‘You should drug me so I can’t move at all. So that I’m barely conscious. And you just fuck me. Is that your plan? I couldn’t escape or say no. You just rape me so hard, and I have to take it. Because I’m weak and you’ve kidnapped me.’”

Was a very specific stylistic choice I made for Wei Wuxian in this story. On the face of it, this isn’t so different than, “Go spread the gospel as you once spread your legs, child,”. Dialogue so blunt you can only laugh. However, I would say the main difference here is how this baldness is paid off. Wei Wuxian’s endless stream of nastiness is a) a spin on how he runs his mouth in canon, b) a product of his trauma, and perhaps most importantly, c) a projection of his trauma, as much of the reason he speaks like this to Lan Wangji is a result of hallucinations/experiences he had with an evil facsimile of Lan Wangji while he lived in the Burial Mounds (the existence of which Lan Wangji isn’t even aware of… aw). Preacher Go Spread is just like… a bad guy. He’s just a bad guy swanning around being bad, hating god, loving the devil. Depth of a teaspoon, that one, just like the rest of the characters.

There’s more to writing than good characters. There’s more to writing than complexity. According to the pull quotes on the Devil’s Creek covers, this book is the scariest book you’ll ever read. According to the little awards emblem on the front, this book was good enough to get nominated for a fairly prestigious genre award. Sometimes… I just don’t know, man. Maybe I’m a born hater. But I do like some things! And a lot of the things I like aren’t even objectively (or subjectively, lol) that good. Maybe the truth of the matter is I’m just really, really good at working myself into a tizzy over random things that don’t matter, and then mediocre novels like Devil’s Creek just happen to be in my line of sight at the time.

Or maybe, unlike the characters in Devil’s Creek, I’m a complex person who can’t be summarized by my character archetype alone.  

***

Hey, happy Halloweek! In honor of the season, it’s time for some drive-by horror movie recommendations. These are specifically geared toward scaring the shit out of yourself, so if that’s not your preferred type of scare, KEEP OUT!!!!!

• Insidious

• The Conjuring

• Ouija: Origin of Evil (I know, trust me)

• Grave Encounters

• 1408

• Hell House LLC

• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (if you want to feel deeply unsettled and bad inside)

• The Poughkeepsie Tapes (also if you want to feel deeply unsettled and bad inside)

Despite my grave existential misgivings about the genre as a whole, I do love horror. There is something incredibly delicious about going to see a horror movie in theaters, sitting through the previews, and the moment the opening credits start, sinking down into my seat and asking myself, why… have I done this. Just to feel something, anything at all? Maybe. No need to interrogate it too much.

I don’t tend to celebrate Halloween beyond watching scary movies, and I will proudly be continuing that tradition this year, but it’s actually more like I’m doing nothing special at all because I can’t bring myself to scrape the bottom of the horror barrel anymore. The amount of half-watched z-level horror movies in my various “continue watching” lists… there’s the true scare of the season. I have rewatched Grave Encounters and the Hell House LLC series already this year, but I haven’t watched 1408 and daydreamed about having the same job as John Cusack’s character in a while…

anyway. I have three more horror novels in my stack from the library, so I guess cross your fingers for me? They won’t be good, because they never are, but they might not be so bad they fill me with the wrong kind of despair! Tyler’s life may have been changed by a silver haired queen, but he’s got nothing on my silver linings.

HALFWAY TO BOOK 2, time to kill the momentum and navel-gaze

Last week, I had a cold. Very interesting stuff.

The past few days, I’ve been feeling… a bit off. I’m thinking… maybe it’s the last vestiges of the cold? Maybe it’s my iron deficiency? Or the weather cooling off? Have my final, fleeting tendrils tethering me to sanity finally snapped? I’ve been cooking a lot— maybe my leftovers spoiled.

Yesterday-ish, something strange happened while I was writing BOOK 2. Like a shaken can of Coke… it popped off.

I’m sure I had moments like this while writing Don’t Worry and certain pieces of fanfiction. I don’t remember them exactly, I never catalogued them, but this almost jubilant, detached-from-reality, anxiety-adjacent fluttering in my stomach and my head is not a new sensation to me, though I certainly haven’t felt it in a while.

I’m on the record (multiple times) stating how frustrating I find it that, despite being a hearty skeptic in every other aspect of life, I am graveyard-level spiritual when it comes to writing. It’s woo woo up the wazoo in here on how I get a story from my brain onto the page. It jumbles and tumbles its way into Microsoft Word, and somehow, THERE IT IS. It makes me mad just having to admit this (again). Why did I go to school for 4+ years when I could’ve played a $20 ouija board for the same result?? I say, spirits, tell me how to write, and they say, have you considered waking from a fugue state to a completed manuscript?

Back to Coke. I’m over halfway through the book. Along with the spiritual journey described above, I am also getting nervous, because the more I write this book, the more I like this book, and historically, the more I like what I write, the less chance I have of making any money off it. Ah, the webs we weave.

That being said… progress is progress. I can barely even keep up with my fingers, even though my outline has mostly petered out by this point/is no longer relevant. The rest of the story is in my head. I can feel it like an egg yolk still in the shell. The pieces aren’t all in the right place, but that’s immaterial. The protagonist and the love interest are fighting and snapping and colliding and flirting and desperate and absolutely panting for each other but can’t do anything about it because of how books work (still got about twenty thousand words to go, ladies <3), and god, it’s so hard to invest in your own world and words and characters, and it took me almost forty thousand words to get to this point, but now I’m here, and it’s like, hello, I am pulling back the velvet rope, you have entered the special VIP club of my heart, the legendary Fifth Chamber that my original female characters call home.

Is it, like, good? Mmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnnyeeeeeeeeaaaaahh idunno. In my head it’s delicious, and until I have to start sending it out to agents begging for representation, that’s all that matters.

Is it a regular romance like I originally threatened? Mmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnnyeeeeeeeeaaaaahh idunno either. I can never admit this to anyone except my lovely empty yellow stadium (great acoustics), but I have no idea. I don’t know anything about traditionally published romances. I’ve read maybe two in the last ten years? All I really know about the genre is how OTT annoyed i get when I see those ugly-ass cartoony cell shaded generic romance covers that look like the graphics on a tech giant’s self-serve help page.

Are there actually interesting, complex characters in romance novels? Are they all supposed to be trope-y? That’s what I was going for, but then I made them interesting, and interesting begets interesting and then it all kind of snowballed from there. Not bragging. Between me and someone who writes stuff people actually want to read, I know which one of us is making the kind of money that can influence elections.

But then how do I sell it if I can’t say it’s about Type A and the Party Girl (a very early description of the main pairing)?! Are romance characters allowed to be deeply flawed in a way that isn’t also sexy? Are they allowed to be wrong about things that aren’t just how much they don’t actually totally hate their hot academic rival, or whatever?

A story can be anything. A story that sells cannot.

This lightheaded gentle-uneasy euphoria is good, in a way. It’s an indicator that the good juices are flowing, not just the regular ones. That the part of my writing I would call ME and not just writing (generic) is finally seeing the light of day. Creatively and personally, that means a lot. Financially, it’s anxious crickets.

The specter of unfulfilling yet gainful employment looms over my head. Not going to lie, I think that helped light the fire under my ass. I need to sell a story that leads to selling more stories, because if I don’t, I am going to spend the rest of my life working low-level office jobs and barely being able to afford to support myself. It’s not all about money, except for when it is. Art for art’s sake doesn’t pay the bills.

I just read a non-fiction book that chronicled the history of class in the US*. Kindly, I would call it a soporific tome. At the same time, it helped me clarify a lot about my two main characters and their relationship to their own class and class backgrounds (the timing ended up being a happy coincidence, I never meant to read it as research). Not only that, but it got me thinking about my own relationship to class (despite being Canadian, but Canada is nothing if not the US’ annoying younger sibling who both wants to assert its independence while also following in America’s footsteps as much as is humanely possible, ASK ME ABOUT THE CANADIANS WHO FLY CONFEDERATE FLAGS).

At the end of the day, if working low-level office jobs is what allows me to live on my own, even if the budget is tight, who am I to complain or move above my station? Why is a life lived with access to healthcare and food and shelter not enough? I don’t deserve more or less than the next person who works low-level office jobs that allow them access to healthcare and food and shelter. The “more” I imagine for myself is no different than the “more” anyone else in my position dreams of.

Knowing this does not change the fact that I do want more for myself. This is a class issue, but it’s also an existential issue. Sometimes, I imagine a life path for myself in which I write THE book of the year, decade, century, whatever. I get every single thing I have sworn will visit Ultimate Happiness upon me. I contribute to society. I live in a beautiful home with enough room for my family and friends to comfortably visit. I have an incredible relationship and friend group. I have hobbies that I enjoy and I am in good health. I have more money than I know what to do with, and the rest gets distributed to family, friends, community, and charity.

Maybe the true existential crisis is my bone-deep certainty that even in a world where all of that is true, it will never be enough. There will always be an ambiguous, amorphous “more” that is missing. There will always be an undefinable and unfillable hole somewhere within me. I wish I didn’t believe that some of us were just born unfixably sad, but I do. I can move the goalposts for my own personal happiness as much as I want— “I will only be happy when X happens,” and so on. Maybe I’m just saving myself from the ultimate disappointment by setting goals so unattainable they can never be reached. Because on the off-chance I achieve them, well, then, “I will only be happy when Y happens”. If I achieve that impossible goal? Well, the latin alphabet may end with Z, but there are other alphabets.

Once I learned how to write with more depth than a teaspoon, I think my outlook on life became obvious in my stories. Something that set my fanfiction apart (for good or ill) was that all joy was tempered by the knowledge that happiness is fleeting while life itself is an infinite struggle. Very Sisyphean of me.

This will seem so hilariously small in comparison, but all those years I spent convinced fictional characters Dean Winchester and Castiel falling in love onscreen, becoming canon, whatever, was the equivalent of happiness for me, a real person in the real world, is a perfect example of this. Pinning my dreams of fulfillment on something that is literally fake (and, talk about setting unrealistic goals, lol) as opposed to anything tangible represents such a damning microcosm of this exhausting mindset. So, I ask myself, I’ll finally be happy when the fictional men kiss? There is no greater plan for me (ME, real ME, the one and only ME) than the two guys on TV locking lips?

What kills me is I knew this. Somewhere in the worst, most realistic part of my mind, I knew it was horseshit. Why else was all my fanfiction undermining itself by wagging its finger at the reader and reminding them that the pursuit of happiness is nothing more than a cage we enclose ourselves in!? I knew it, and still, I persisted in the delusion, because what else could I do? The cognitive dissonance in my life at the time— in my relationship, in my friend group, in my job, in my belief that forever-happiness was waiting for me, somewhere out there, if I could just find it— was immense. And damaging. And a product of my own fevered brain that I do not think is something that can be medicated or therapized away.

My inability to believe in uncomplicated happiness might be what kills this book deal. My refusal to write characters who are easy and fixable and palatable is not compatible with the romance genre. I should’ve written horror, but get this, I hate how dour and misanthropic the genre as a whole is. Go figure. I tried my hand at literary fiction— crickets. Guess what genre I’m returning to for book three? News at 11: dumbass tries writing literary fiction again.

Maybe thriller/mystery is my calling. So much of what I read is trash, the closest you can get to AI that’s still written by a human. But there are diamonds in the rough. There are Tana French’s and Gillian Flynn’s. I’m no French or Flynn, but I am pretty grim and dark without being the much maligned grimdark. I like to think those darker sensibilities might make it a place I could carve out a lil niche for myself. For now, at least, I am steadfastly ignoring the depressing lesbian vampire romance that has been lurking in the dusty corners of my mind for ages. Maybe if BOOK 2 ever moves, depressing vampire romance will be next. If BOOK 2 doesn’t move, well, guess it’s back to the drawing board. I have two lesbian domestic thriller concepts that have been percolating for a while in isolation. We’ll see.

Maybe the problem is the lesbians. No comment 🙂

So much of this is just straight whining. I am not even convinced keeping a blog where I endlessly yell into the void is even good for me. Giving me a platform, even one as small as this, plays on my ego, which already got puffed up enough during my time writing fanfiction. I come onto the blog, spin out and navel gaze for a few paragraphs, then disappear again until I need another brain dump. I don’t know. Lots of people blog. Surely they don’t overthink it to this degree? It’s hard to know when ruminating on your life and your choices and being responsible, accountable, and self-aware crosses the line into needless and pedantic narcissism. WHO THINKS ABOUT THEMSELF THIS MUCH?

And yet, if I don’t, who will? A hard life lesson I am still swallowing is that no one is ever going to care about me most, except me. Which is how it should be. Only me is me. Only you is you. You will only ever truly know yourself and have your own best interests at heart. No one else can be to you what you are to you. At the risk of sounding like a moody teenager, it’s agonizing to know that no one will ever truly understand me. I can never invite someone else into my head (not that I would, given the absolute STATE of it), and they can never invite me into theirs. We are all an island. My dismay over this axiom goes a long way to explaining why fiction and fanfiction has proven such an escape for me over the years. What a relief to be able to get into someone else’s head. To know someone else like real people can’t. To know there are other people like me, or even to know there are other people who aren’t like me. People who think like me and people who don’t. Fiction builds us the boat we use to visit each other’s islands. All this time and we’ve failed to understand that life… is like Animal Crossing New Horizons. —oh my god wait, you fly to other islands there. Never mind. You know what I mean. Simile cancelled.

I don’t know. I don’t think I ever will. If there’s one thing I do know for sure about other people, it’s that no one knows what they’re doing. Some people, the well adjusted ones, have made peace with this. The rest of us live like we are on the perpetually sinking Titanic.

My best solution so far is externalizing. Getting out of my own head (aka the opposite of writing blog posts about it). Focusing on writing helps. Physical activity/exercise REALLY helps. God knows how annoyed I was when I discovered the crunchy losers who told me going outside would make me feel better were actually right. Pricks. I’m playing local sports. I go on lots of walks. I love hiking. I’ve been cooking up a storm. I’ve been crafting and doing puzzles and even trying to watch movies all the way through without looking at my phone (yes, the bar is on the floor). Anything that forces me to interact with the world that actually exists versus the evil shadow version of the world that lives in my head (writing being the obvious exception, lol, at least that is a DIFFERENT shadow version of the world) is something worth exploring.

Another facet of externalizing: I’ve almost written another full ass novel! Regardless of the publishing status or quality or accompanying existential dread, that’s awesome and I’m proud of myself. And when it feels like my island is shrinking and I’m almost submerged, one of the few things I can cling to is that every word I write gets me one step closer to a fully functioning boat.

*Book was White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg. Great if you’re interested in the subject matter. Even better if you need to incapacitate a home invader.

blue curtains & the textural indulgence of seasons

When I was in university, I took a class about nature writing. If you asked me any specifics about this course, I couldn’t tell you. I think there was a lot of poetry, which is not a great start, because I don’t care for poetry. After glancing through some old Google Docs, I’ve been able to put a few more of the pieces together: we talked a lot about indigenous relationships to the land, travel writing by non-Canadians in their home countries, and environmentalism. Overall, it was a pretty neat class outside my comfort zone (hence, poetry) that introduced me to a new way of writing and new (to me) way of how humans catalogue and consider the world around them through nature.

While I may not have taken exactly what the professor wanted me to take from that class (poetry…), it encouraged me to think a lot about my own writing and the worlds it takes place in. This was less the consideration of my characters’ relationship to the land around them than it was even just my own consideration of the world around them. For anyone who’s spent any amount of time reading fan fiction, think about how often characters and their actions are described versus the setting. Or dialogue versus description. You know those visual artists who loudly proclaim how much they abhor drawing backgrounds? That pretty succinctly describes most fan fiction, including my own older work.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal. Fan fiction is character-driven and always will be. However, I would be remiss not to concede how much better my writing got once I realized the characters were not the only living, breathing, and interesting part of my stories. It sounds almost high school-esque to say, “Sometimes, things have symbolic meaning.” Remember that tumblr post that suggested symbolism was stupid and all of us 15 year olds on the site lost our minds thinking how clever and funny it was to suggest that the curtains were blue not for some deep, symbolic reason but simply because the author liked blue? Of course now I can’t find the original post, but I sure can find the well-deserved backlash. Or even to say something as pedestrian as, ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ sets the mood for the story going forward. Weather being (often heavy-handedly) thematic is storytelling 101, and yet actually internalizing it and intentionally including it in my work going forward has really upped the quality of my storytelling.

My understanding of the principle of enriching your entire world and not just your characters in the foreground manifested seasonally, which makes perfect sense for a few reasons. One, I’m very affected by seasons in real life, both in terms of mental health and more generally— I strongly associate scents, colours, foods, decor, and even moods with the various seasons. I’m extremely picky about what constitutes an autumn scent versus a spring scent versus a winter scent versus a summer scent. I don’t even look at a pumpkin if it’s not between September 1st - October 31st. Christmas decorations come down on December 26th, no compromises. If I wear fall colours outside of autumn, I turn myself into the local authorities. Two, seasonal changes are extremely visual. I come from a screenwriting background and my internal world while writing is very visual, and I want my readers to experience that as well. Seasons are fantastic at setting the mood (whether congruent with each other or not) and give a more streamlined feeling to the passage of time (which I always prefer over non-chronological narratives). Three… seasons are just lush. They’re so fun to write about, even the problem child summer. They’re fantastic imagery, they add texture and interest, and they help to ground your story.

There are two ideas jockeying for position in my head on this topic, and they’re mutually exclusive. They cannot be true at the same time (maybe), and yet, here I am entertaining them both.

For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ's birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles—breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.

The above from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes showcases my first idea: The curtains are blue because they’re blue. There are few authors I would put above Bradbury when it comes to making the curtains blue simply because they like the colour. Note how a few paragraphs ago I didn’t give the author grief for making the curtains blue just because they wanted to, but the idea behind the post, mocking the concept of symbolism in storytelling at all. If an author makes the curtains blue because they want to, I don’t actually care. Sure, there’s a line to be drawn between over-describing and just throwing in something for fun, but that line is arbitrary and depends on so many factors that there’s no point in trying to draw one at all. I throw little goofy or enjoyable-to-me tidbits into my writing all the time, just because. I over-described outfits to a hilarious extent in The Dean Winchester Beat Sheet, and kept up that proud tradition in Don’t Worry About It. I can give symbolic reasons for both, sure, but I mostly did it because it was funny (Beat Sheet) or hot (Don’t Worry).

From The October Country, a Bradbury short story collection:

That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.

Also from The October Country:

Martin knew it was autumn again, for Dog ran into the house bringing wind and frost and a smell of apples turned to cider under trees. In dark clock-springs of hair, Dog fetched goldenrod, dust of farewell-summer, acorn-husk, hair of squirrel, feather of departed robin, sawdust from fresh-cut cordwood, and leaves like charcoals shaken from a blaze of maple trees. Dog jumped. Showers of brittle fern, blackberry vine, marsh-grass sprang over the bed where Martin shouted. No doubt, no doubt of it at all, this incredible beast was October!

The problem with Ray Bradbury is that as purple and eye roll-worthy as some of his prose can be, every once in a while he nails it. In fact, if you have ever noticed a proliferation of hyphenated phrases in my writing where you’re like, okay, that’s a little much, it’s probably due to his influence. The annoying thing about over-hyphenated writing like this is that sometimes, regardless of how little sense it makes, it just works. It evokes a feeling, a memory, a tug in your chest, and that’s all it takes. It’s pathos all the way, baby. Not an ethos or logos in sight. Considering Something Wicked follows the adventures of two kids, this makes perfect sense. Does that excuse him of similar crimes in books with adult protagonists? Does it excuse mine? Readers choice.

I’m not a Bradbury scholar, though I’ve read a number of his novels and, for the most part, enjoy his work. To be honest, my take on his use of symbolism is minimal. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe his work is a well of deep symbolism I’m too much of a dummy to catch, but speaking only for myself as a reader, I doubt it. And that’s fine. There is nothing inherently better or worse than writing with an eye toward texture instead of meaning.

That being said, my second idea: hey man, like, what’s the point?

It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Unless an aborted attempt at reading Romeo and Juliet when I was 14 or a CliffsNotes study of The Merchant of Venice in grade 11 English counts, I am also no Shakespeare scholar. The amount to which that makes me an uneducated pleb in the eyes of stuffy academics is unimportant to me. However, the above, from Macbeth, has stuck with me since I first heard it. First it was as it related to Wei Wuxian in The Untamed. After, as it relates to my own writing and this specific debate. How many endlessly lush descriptions of your world without saying anything significant can one read before it starts to feel like empty calories? Like someone getting up on a soapbox and speaking for twenty minutes, only to say nothing at all?

Years ago when it came out, I watched Mike Flanagan’s Haunting of Hill House. I enjoyed the actual horror aspect of it, but the writing… whew. It took a few episodes for me to put my finger on it, but when I did, I became unable to unsee it: this man LOVES listing things. For what it’s worth, I also love lists. I make them all the time. But I’m also not writing a horror novel, unless my increasingly desperate cover letters to prospective employers count. In Hill House, the music swells, the camera swings around, and someone starts to speechify, and in place of actual substance, they’re just abusing semicolons (and thesauruses, because a lot of what’s being said is just repeating the same thing with different phrasing). Once I caught onto that, Hill House totally lost me. I lost whatever respect I had for it, because that’s a lazy way for a professional writer to approach a story and fill runtime.

And the thing is, what’s so different from Hill House saying, “Ghosts are guilt, ghosts are secrets, ghosts are regrets and failings. But most times a ghost is a wish. Like a marriage is a wish. A marriage can be like a house and a marriage can be haunted, and I let that happen to us,” and Ray Bradbury saying in Something Wicked, “Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.” Lists, lists, lists, lists of the same thing but slightly different. Why does A GHOST IS A WISH make me want to tear my hair out but “a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness,” is a little much, but doesn’t come close to the agony of Hill House dialogue? Am I comparing apples to oranges? Maybe I’m being unfair, pitting a visual medium against a textual one? But then again, A GHOST IS A WISH is funny regardless of medium, so I dunno.

What it comes down to, I think, is my practical, objective-focused side versus my magpie-esque pleasure button side. In my writing I try to blend the two for the best of both worlds, but like I said earlier, this is no easy task. Indulgence for indulgence’s sake is the point of, uh, indulging, so adding in deeper, more resonant elements becomes very difficult without losing the delicious texture of, “beetle-scurrying, creeping, threading, filtering, motioning, making all moons sullen, and surely clouding all clear-run waters.” Because if and when it doesn’t make sense, evoking only feeling, only pathos, you lose ethos and, as a result, your audience’s belief in your authority as storyteller. You lose logos, too, your argument for your story’s existence, your plot, your ability to lead your audience from one point to the next. Texture is great, but that’s all it is. Without the surrounding context, it’s just a ghost-wish.

While I was hunting down some seasonal quotes to pull for this post, I came across the following from Helen Bevington’s When Found, Make a Verse of:

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

Funny that it’s about poets, given my stated distaste for the genre (keeping in mind that just because it’s not for me doesn’t mean I think it’s a worthless medium!). Putting that aside, this observation makes the important point that texture and indulgence are vital to the human creative process. Whether it’s seasonal, sensory, or circadian rhythm-related, these seemingly shallow and mundane facets of our daily lives play a huge role in our ability to write and create. This texture, on a meta level, is more relevant than anything Ray Bradbury can put to paper, because without it, there would be nothing to write (woe be the man who keeps me from my odorous rotten apples…). And then imbuing that texture into the worlds of your work is just one of many ways that authors observe the world around them, condense and refine it as necessary, and turn it into a story.

This debate that I am having with myself reeks of semantics, of who cares’. You write how you write, and what you write is what you write, and what you write might be that ghosts are wishes. I guess what I think is relevant and worth taking away from this post is that both approaches have merit, and, as with so many other elements of writing, are context and genre-dependent.

Something I’ve thought about a lot over the years is, despite a four-year writing education, I never really learned how to write on a macro level. No instructor ever stood at the front of our classroom and said, “this is how you write a story”. Which is wild and, judging by my alma mater’s tuition fees, financially vexing. It haunts me, a bit, that you can’t learn to write like you can learn a math equation, the laws of thermodynamics, or how to… do… other STEM-related procedures I have no understanding of. That seemingly unteachable gap of how to actually write a story (preferably a good one) hovers over so many of my granular, hair-splitting arguments I document here about writing that there must be some sort of connection. That anyone who writes any kind of story is, in a way, in a never ending freefall. That some of the most important elements of writing and creating will always resist being pinned to a corkboard. And that is something I will surely be talking about in the future, because I find it fascinating, confusing, and even a bit alarming? But also freeing, and scary, and help, I’m Flanaganing…

I pulled a bunch of quotes for this post and only ended up using the Bradbury ones because his absurd prose proved an excellent case study for this discussion, so I’ll put the remainder I grabbed below so you can enjoy them like I did.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.

― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

— Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard’s Egg

'Is the spring coming?' he said. 'What is it like?'

'It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…'

— Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations 

Spring drew on...and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.

― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

― Andrew Wyeth (Listen, I can’t find the actual source for this quote but I love Andrew Wyeth’s work so it’s staying here anyway)

But now she loved winter. Winter was beautiful "up back" - almost intolerably beautiful. Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were like cups of glamour - the purest vintage of winter's wine. Nights with their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrises. Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the Blue Castle. Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings - torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jewelled, barbaric hills. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white Mistawis. Ice-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cosy living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats, seemed cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revelation and wonder.

― L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle

And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bed-sheets around corners.

— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats.
Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows' Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked.

— Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree

A GHOST IS A WISH YOUR HEART MAKES

For what it’s worth, Oculus is a great horror movie