writing – Then They Kissed

Coffee

Do you have any idea how difficult it was to get a stock photo of black coffee instead of some sort of latte? I had to scroll, my loves. It might as well have been on the second page of Google results.

Now, when Past Michelle prompted Present Michelle to write about coffee, I do not know that they had in mind, because that was, frankly forever ago. Nonetheless, I will do my best to to right by their intentions, and we will all just have to get through this together, like adults.

But first!

I have finished the rough draft of Depth Rose, the fourth and final book in the Stone and Sky quartet, and I want to talk about that. It is probably the only thing that I want to talk about more than I want to talk about coffee.

I was trying to keep the draft under 100,000 words, but I was not successful and it currently sits at 125,000 words. The vast majority of my notes are things that I want to add, and my drafts almost never get shorter, but we’ll have to make an exception, because I really don’t want it to be much longer than it is right now. A lot happens, but more importantly, a lot resolves.

Thing is, I finished the first book, Faces of the Moon, in December, and I started querying it in late December*, and the number one tip that people give querying others when it comes to tolerating the uncertainty and waiting and anxiety of the querying process** is to write more.

So being, honestly, several elves short of a functioning workshop, I picked up some dangling threads from Faces and started writing Coming of Rage, which is a direct sequel only in the sense that it happens after Faces. Rage has almost entirely new characters, it’s set halfway across the country, and doesn’t directly pick up the main plot from anywhere.

Partly because I didn’t yet know what the main plot was. Hazards of being a pure, dyed in the wool, undiluted pantser.

But now I had a second pillar to play with. Rage fleshes out the magic, introduces some new groups of shifters, dabbles in some political background, and adds my favorite MMC of the whole quartet. I expanded on some things that I only gave a single sentence to in Faces, and I liked what I saw.

A vague picture started to form about where things were going, and I knew that I’d need two more books to do it. That’s when I started calling it a closed quartet.

I finished Rage in late March. I had started book 3, Fall from Grays*** on my phone in early March, so by the time I was done with Rage, it was already at about 30,000 words. I still don’t outline, but now I had a direction, and I kept this one focused on the end point, which had crystalized in my mind into one idea: American folklore was colonized just like the people were, and this really should be a bigger deal than it is.

I finished Grays in late April, and started Depth Rose in May. Yesterday, July 21st, I typed THE END on that manuscript. This one is rougher than my other drafts have been. Still no placeholders, except for things like [eye color] and [number] that I fixed on my first readthrough, but it does have some plot threads that I decided on halfway through at the beginning, and some things that I dropped that I’ll need to either finish cutting, or add to the end.

Nothing dealbreaking; it works just fine, but some amount of smoothing will be required. At my usual pace, probably a week, maybe two.

So while I’ve been querying**** one book, I have written three others. At the very least, I can promise that no one is getting Rothfussed.

I’m deeply proud of these books, and one way or another, they will see print. I am fully aware that they would probably be better if I had the funding to hire a real editor, but alas, it will probably just be me, editing all four books together into one cohesive thing.

Faces has been frozen, spared my usual, constant tinkering, since an agent asked for the full manuscript, but my list of edits that I want to make is ever-growing, in addition to the things that will make it a better Book 1, in addition to being a better book.

As soon as there is no more material out to agents, I will bring Faces back into the editing fold, and I’m so, so excited about it. I’ve written four other books***** but none that I’ve really just wanted to chase people around with. My friends are probably entirely over it, but their toleration of me and my nonsense is why we get to stay friends.

So what then? What am I writing while I wait, now that I’ve finished the Stone & Sky quartet?

The Bookbinder’s Guild

Gaslamp fantasy romance with the slowest of burns******, The Bookbinder’s Guild: Book Binding follows Charlie as she starts work in the library, and just as she’s gotten her feet under her, she is working on a book from the prison wing, which tells of a man unjustly imprisoned within its pages. Updates will go in the usual place.

It is possible that I will finish the first book before I’m done querying Faces, given the disparity between my pace of production and the pace of publishing. I have no idea what the etiquette is querying two projects simultaneously. If it comes to that, I’ll look into it.

It will be fun for all of us, I’m sure.

Now I’ve had 1200 words to ponder what it is that Past Michelle intended for us to talk about, and I have no clue, which is a lesson I should probably learn******* about balancing my responsibilities and allowing myself to hyperfocus on finishing a project.

Probably something about ritual. Right? That sounds like something I’d find interesting.

Recent Writing

I know, I know that it sounds stupid and overwrought and ridiculous, but saying less about how I feel about you didn’t do the trick, so I’m trying something else now, because I don’t know why you can’t believe me, but I will make sure that you can’t doubt me, and if I get bored or lax or stupid at some point in the future it will be because I fell short, not because you did

Next time I’ll talk about my whole sitting-down-to-write ritual. It does include coffee.

Do good, friends.

*Do not come at me about the timeline, just trust me; I edited it. My first drafts are very clean, and I have a reasonable handle on what I want it to be, and further, my budget is zero dollars. My goal is traditional publishing, in part, because then I don’t have to find, vet, or pay out of pocket for an editor, I just have to take their notes. If any editors out there will work in exchange for some glorious handknits, I will make you any sweater you pick out from Ravelry (as long as the pattern is still available) for each book you dev edit.

**You know, the part where we run around baring our souls to strangers and hoping they find them marketable.

***In addition to being fun puns, the titles are thematically relevant, because I’m a literary genius.

****Still the worst way to get a job anyone has yet invented, save, perhaps, for the press gang.

*****One of those books might be resurrectable. I still like the idea, but it’s something I’d want to co-write. Any dark fantasy peeps interested in a real enemies to lovers situation wanna hmu? My insta DMs are open.

******I’ve got it all figured out in a nebulous, pantsery sort of way, but they’re not even going to meet until book 2.

*******but won’t

On the Docket

I’m sure there’s folks who do just fine with one project at a time, and I love that for them. And for you, if you’re one of those folks. But for myself, in writing as with my knitting, I like to refer to myself as monogamous+. It’s the subscription version, you see.

I will have one main project that I work on like 80% of the time, and then I have something else that fills another need that I keep kicking around for times when the main project isn’t appropriate.

So I am working on Stephen West’s Painting Bricks shawl right now, but I also have a Celestarium that I only work on at knitting group, and a plain sock that is my walking-around knitting.

I’m re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo, but it’s a heckin’ chonker, so I also have an audiobook of Windburn, and a digital ARC of Corvus and the Broken God*.

I’m drafting the fourth Stone and Sky book, and that’s my laptop writing, the important one, the one that absorbs most of my time. But it’s also some pretty heavy intellectual and creative work right now, since it contains both the new main couple, and, as necessary for the over-arching plot, POVs from the main characters of the previous three books. Each couple has a bonus minor conflict and resolution, and there’s the whole rest of the plot. So it’s a lot. Just hit 70k words, and things are picking up, but I’ve still got a lot to wrap up, so it’s Work to write right now.

Now, I’m really excited about it, I’m motivated to finish it, and I put at least an hour into it a day, which is between 400 and 1200 words, depending on how much choreography is happening in those words.

But, being Important Writing for the Big Screen, similar to the way one does not make major purchases such as airline tickets from their phone, Stone & Sky 4 is confined to the laptop, which is a bit of a problem for me.

I’m trying to manage my scrolling habit, you see. So I downloaded Novelist** on my phone, and that’s where I’m writing the Bookbinder’s Guild Book 1***. It will be a trilogy. I’m not sure that it prevents me from scrolling, but I do manage an additional 500 to 2000 words a day on it, depending on how long the gremlin wants to stay in the bath. I’m fantastically excited about it, I’ve shared some early chapters with some folks and I have at least one person in my DMs, white-knuckling their phone for more.

However, it’s gaslamp fantasy****, which requires considerably more worldbuilding than hidden-world paranormal does, so I do take frequent breaks to figure out things like what the days of the week are called and why. Did I name them after gods? Of course. Did I then have to build a pantheon? Of course. Does doing that necessarily define what’s important in this society? Naturally. It was a two-day detour.

The remaining gaps are filled by the ideas doc, highlights of which include, but are not limited to, a Romeo & Juliet romance about two people who can only meet at dawn and twilight; Stuart Little, witch hunter, who goes to a support group for people who’ve been turned into animals; a coven of urban witches who use fiber arts to fight mental illness; and a romantic thriller about a second-chance romance between a couple rebuilding their relationship after hardship.

Will any of these see the light of day? No idea, but when The Bookbinder’s Guild becomes Big Screen Writing because I’m done with Stone & Sky, maybe I’ll pick the three I’m the most excited about and let the internet decide.

Recent Writing

“So,” Tony frowned at the floor. “You don’t hate me?”

“Nope.” She shook her head. “Never did. I don’t really hate anybody, I just have Resting Bitch Whole Body, so people make some assumptions.”

Next time let’s talk about coffee.

Do good, friends.

*Which is stellar, by the way, I closed out the bar reading it the other night.

**Not a sponsor, but I’m not opposed. HMU, Novelist.

***Think The Count of Monte Cristo meets Divine Rivals. Something that has always bothered me about TCoMC adaptations is that they skip the middle part, the part where Edmond investigates his arrest and imprisonment, and rewards those who tried to help him. This is the part that turns him into the Count, and it always, always, gets skipped. Hence the trilogy. Book 1 is a heist with a slowburn romantic subplot because I can’t not. Book 2 is a detective book with romantic conflict. Book 3 is another, more vengeful heist, and contains the HEA. Romance beats distributed among all three books. I’d do it as one, but unless Stone & Sky succeeds beyond my wildest dreams, there’s no way anyone is publishing a 1200 page book.

****Gaslamp fantasy is industrial, as opposed to classic fantasy, which is medieval.

The Reclamation of Meaning

I’ve always been a linguistic descriptivist, which is to say, I was entirely unbothered when literally gained a new definition. The fact that said new definition is opposite to its existing definition did not bother me, I was delighted with the addition of a new contranym to my lexicon.

The sturm and drang of complaints and general irritation did get old, especially because the venn diagram of people griping about how words have meanings, and people who say “I could care less,” is a circle. Words are for communication, and they mean what we understand them to mean when we use them between ourselves. The potential complexity of that is a beautiful thing.

One of my favorite authors, Lois McMaster Bujold, will straight up make up a word to describe very particular feelings and it’s always done very naturally, the sort of effortless that people spend hours refining. Between context and the bouba/kiki effect, I’ve never had any trouble assigning meaning to those words, and it doesn’t slow me down at all.

Of course, socially, this does mean that words can attain unintended meanings, especially when one side of the conversation has a different understanding of the word than the other.

This is what happened to me with the word smut.

I’ve always felt that it was a fun, playful word, used to describe books that contain sexual content for the purpose (not necessarily the sole purpose) of titillation. This book has sex in it, and it’s fun! It’s smut!

I did not participate in online book discourse until very recently. Like… five months ago recently. The Milo Winter thing popped up on my YouTube and I got sucked in. My Instagram? Started in like February. I was approximately aware of BookTok, but I pronounce it like your grandma reading the word over her bifocals at arms length.

So when I casually described my books as smut and was promptly dumped into several conversations with very strong opinions about the word, I almost hopping my happy ass right back off of social media to continue being happy. The “Smut is valid” camp and the “Smut is porn” camp were both entirely predictable, and not really a problem. You can’t make art and be precious about it, so they didn’t bother me.

What snuck up on me with a club and a burlap sack was the romance -> smut -> erotica continuum.

Now, I’ve pieced this together like an anthropologist, so for the love of everything, do not take me as an authoritative source on the subject, but there is a very loud contingent of folks who keep crossing my feed who seem to feel that using the word smut is dismissive of sexual content in books, by assigning it a cutesy little word, and that for a book to contain smut, the sexual content needs to have no value within the story.

And, to me, that sounds an awful lot like the folks who were so upset about the new definition of literally.

Because personally, I like smut, both the word, and the content. I think it’s a fun, descriptive word, and can be as important to the overall work of fiction as any other scene.

And I’m not terribly interested in the rest of the discourse.

Recent Writing

He missed a step, was away from his body for a moment, and then was back and struck, as though by a fist, that she had asked him a question and he was supposed to say something, answer her, anything, but all he was capable of was admiring her eyes. And, eventually, breathing, he was capable of breathing. Not much, but it would have to do.

You even get a snippet from a smutty bit. Took me a minute to find one from my most recent writing session that wouldn’t violate any terms and conditions.

Next time, let’s talk about my current projects.

Do good friends.

Building Characters

See, I have already lied to you, but you knew that because you’re very astute.

I don’t build characters, I discover them.

I have been playing D&D and TTRPGs for my entire life. I’m not exaggerating; my parents met at a D&D game, I don’t remember not having dice in the house, and I mispronounced “Paladin”* until my mother had a meltdown over hearing my siblings and I say “puh-LAY-din” when I was twelve.

That game was my first exposure to storytelling. Before I had Animorphs and Sabriel and Alanna the Lioness, I had Gary Gygax, Ed Greenwood, and Peter Adkison.

And I loved making characters. I had binders of characters**, the vast majority of whom never got to see a table.

I got a truly disproportionate number of hours of entertainment out of rolling their stats and writing out their backstories, and imagining them in situations and how they would respond.

So what happened? How did the little girl who built meticulous characters with thousands of words of backstory turn into the taller-than-average NB who throws vague silhouette’s into situations to see how they turn out?

Maybe you’ve had this issue, if you play TTRPGs. Or maybe you’ve had this issue, if you’re a writer. But somehow, no matter how thorough I was, those characterizations never survived contact with the table. Not once did someone remain how I’d built them.

They went different ways, not always slowly morphing into the same person****, but they never turned out to be the person I intended for them to be when I wrote them.

Being a person who takes direction well*****, I took the prevailing advice from my community — which consisted of the only D&D game in my microscopic home town, populated by men in their 30s who also primarily played self-inserts — and I wrote Even More Backstory ™. It got to the point where I was basically writing novellas for each and every characters.

And you know what? It didn’t help.

None of the other advice helped, either. Interviews, wounds, fears, coping mechanisms, it didn’t matter what I made before I put them on the table, it all went out the window as soon as I pulled the character sheet out of its protective plastic sheath.

And then, the first time I went to college******, I took an improv class.

We did all the things, the “Yes, and,” discussion, “Things from a hat” and every other game you’ve seen played on Whose Line is It Anyway?.******* I had the privilege of watching some truly, profoundly talented folks act, and listen to them discuss and dissect scenes and reactions. Doc would stop scenes mid-flow to talk to the actors and to the class about what happened, let people think through or talk about why they made particular decisions, and discuss the effects of those decisions on the audience and the direction of the scene.

I loved it. It was like watching Behind the Scenes footage.

Now, I’m not great at live improv, and I never was. I do okay among casuals, but I’m under no illusions that I could be any level of professional.

But the D&D table has so much less pressure than a stage. Those people have already agreed to do weird stuff for fun, they’re not expecting, nay, demanding, entertainment from me.

And my characters got so much better.

I learned to build characters backwards, to make a decision in the moment, and to incorporate that into the future, rather than deliberately reaching into the character’s past for reasons and justification. To let inconsistencies ride, and examine them with curiosity, looking for differences that might explain why things are different in this situation than they were in the last one.

I don’t build characters. I discover them.

Like an archeologist, or a nature documentarian, I feel like I’m following my characters around, making observations about them and trying to build that into a cohesive picture. “Oh, the barbarian is illiterate, but knows that her friends are following her and she will be deviating from the planned path. How does she communicate this to them?”

In the moment, chalk with an arrow and a little doodle of the landmark she was going towards.

But then what does that tell us about her? She bothered to communicate it at all, so she’s team-oriented. She respects her party enough to try to share that information. She’s not patient enough to just wait for them. All of that informs future decisions, and the character remains cohesive, despite not knowing her favorite color or how she’d respond if offered life-changing wealth.

When I start a book, I have no idea who my characters are. I give them a name, and I chuck them into a situation, and I watch them and see what they do.

There are some rules to this that I’ve found give me the best results, but they’re vague and formless. Stuff like, Someone in the scene has to react differently from the majority. And, If a reaction will cause conflict, then someone has to do that thing. But even these are kind of vibes-based.

Now, does this mean that the characters I was writing at the beginning of the book are a bit bland? YES. Yes, it does. But since nothing is inconsistent, that’s simple to fix in the first pass edit, which I do right after typing END********. I know the prevailing advice is to let the draft rest, but you gotta do what works for you, and I need to homogenize the characterization while it’s all fresh in my brain. I also go through and add any description that I missed in the rough draft. Then I let it rest and convince myself that it’s crap so that when I open it again I can safely reassure myself that actually, it’s not that bad.

Recent Writing

“And what, exactly,” Aubrey whispered, “is the difference between saying ‘I’m fine’ and saying ‘I’ll be fine in a minute when I have a chance to come to terms with the fact that I’m not dead’? Seems pretty close to me.”

Wayne shook his head slowly, eyes closed in dramatic disapproval. “The honest one is also saying ‘I’m vulnerable right now.'”

Next time, let’s talk about smut.

Do good, friends.

*It’s PAL-uh-din, in case you were wondering. Or at least it is in standard American vernacular. I make no claims to understand British or Australian pronunciations; I know which side of the Alumin(i)um Line I live on.

**Mostly women***, but not all.

***This is a joke for those of us who survived the 2012 American Presidential Election. Don’t worry about it, it’s not a load-bearing joke.

****I’m not going to pretend that a significant chunk of my characters weren’t self-inserts with weird eyes and unnatural hair colors, but that was a phase that went from the ages of 13 to 22, and I got better.

*****This is also a lie. Good catch.

******I have made eight attempts at college, and have zero degrees. I’m starting to think that formal education just isn’t for me.

*******Punctuation nerds, tell me how I’m doing here, if I haven’t already scared you off with my concerning level of footnotes.

********Also a lie. I type END, crack open a frosty ginger beer, and then I make a copy of the rough draft doc and start the first pass edit.

Under Advisement

Since I’ve joined the public writing space, I’ve had a huge variety of writing related content forced onto my feed by Big Algorithm. I am not on social media very much; my tolerance for the shenanigans is low, and my bandwidth is also low, so I just don’t spend much time there. As a consequence, I spent my first two months on Instagram being extremely down about everything.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’m not terribly aesthetic. I missed some fundamental Millennial education, and have only a remedial understanding of how things work, and I’m also awfully trusting as a person. So, the beautiful pictures and neat homes and polished videos really did get to me. I’m fully aware that the vast majority of folks my age went through something similar about ten years ago, but I’m doing it now, and I had to limit my Instagram time to twenty minutes a day because it was giving me a bad case of The Sads.

Seriously. I went into the parental controls on my phone and set a timer.

I had my “Get of my lawn” moments where I wondered what ever happened to Authenticity, and then I decided that those were dumb thoughts and tried my best to move on.

The sort of posts that had the biggest effects on my mental health? The writing advice.

Every single post that started with “Your conflict is weak and I know why!” or “Here’s what’s wrong with your pacing!” or “Your characters all sound the same and I can help you fix it!” planted a little seed of unhappiness.

Not doubt. I like what I write.* I think it’s good; I have people who love it (and I love them for loving it because I’m a simple creature).

I have a mixed relationship with advice, especially broad advice like I see in those sorts of posts. The sort of advice that gets put in a book that then gets recommended as required reading for anyone who wants to write fiction. You know the ones.

It’s not that it’s bad advice; in fact, I can’t think of much that is, in my opinion, detrimental or harmful.

It’s the very broadness of it that gets under my skin.

Part of it is defensive, and I’ll cop to that. How dare you come onto my algorithmically defined scroll and tell me that my characters are flat? You haven’t even read my book!

Part of it is conflation of credentials with competence. I’m very happy for your seventy five years of writing experience and four hundred NYT Bestsellers, I am, but that doesn’t mean that your goals align with mine. Even when it’s commercialized, writing is art, and you can get a Bestseller by writing something that happens to hit at the right cultural moment, just like you can by writing something beautiful and timeless. And if you’ve ever received parenting advice, you know that people can spend a lot of time doing something and still not be someone you’d take advice from.

Reddit is my primary social media, and on there, I see a ton of people trying to apply the broad advice they’ve seen from posts like that, and getting profoundly frustrated. “Show don’t tell” is probably the most infamous example. Yes, yes, the moonlight glints on the broken glass, but sometimes other things take priority. Pacing, for example. In most things with specific choreography (fights, for example), I want the language to be invisible, to fall away and leave me with an intuitive understanding of the scene.

Which is why mentorship and peer groups are the superior forms of self-improvement when it comes to the arts.**

When you’re first learning anything, you have to actually do the thing so you can look at it and go “Man, I suck.”

When I was learning to cook, my first few meals were… not inedible, but it took some fortitude. But the concrete knowledge that the attempts provided were invaluable when it comes to improvement.

When I first learned to play the flute, the first few weeks were rough on everyone in the house.*** But the specific knowledge gained was absolutely crucial for improvement.

Writing something, anything, and then showing it to people and finding out the hard way whether or not you have successfully done what you set out to do is infinitely more instructive than any number of books on plot construction. Failure, or, even better, near success, is a wildly effective teacher.

So, if you’re interested in irony, here’s how I go about deciding what advice**** to take, and what to ignore.

Evaluate the person. Do we share goals? Are they working in a related field? Have they actually done the thing, or is their business ‘helping others do the thing’? Are they yelling at me because something something engagement?
Consider the content. How close is their area of expertise to my goals? If they’re a writer, but they write for television, and I write romance novels, then there’s probably something useful there, but I’m not going to take their word blindly for everything.
Applicability. Can I think of something I’ve written that I can apply this advice to right now? If I did apply it, would I like what I wrote less? There are degrees to this one. I’ve seen several Instagram reels where, when I compare the advice to things I’ve written, I can see that I’m already doing that, but it’s a matter of degrees and I can put more emphasis on it.

And also, vibes. If I see some writing advice or a set of reels, or something and I come away feeling vaguely bad, then I don’t take it. I usually mute that person and move on. I think that it’s easy to feel pressured by time, to try to improve as much as possible, as fast as possible, especially when you are (like I am) trying to turn writing into a job but you’re not there yet.

Nobody out here is unique. Not me, and not the guy on Instagram who is constantly yelling at me about my writing. There is someone else who is delivering the same material in a way that is more compatible with my mental health, and I’ll find them.

I don’t think there’s much point in becoming The Best unless you’re becoming The Best For You. That’s the subjectivity part of it.

Recent Writing

Thinking of the way she shifted, the natural ease of it, her fine control over each pinion and bone, Aubrey reached for the wind again, and this time, she didn’t ask it.

And it dipped, brushing the surface of the water and rising again, white with moisture.

Next time, I’ll share how I build characters, how does that sound?

Do good, friends.

*In an attempt to ensure that I am not misunderstood: I am under no illusions that my writing is perfect. I do not think that I have nothing to learn. I understand that there is room for improvement. There are a great many authors I admire and study in an attempt to improve my work.

**In my opinion.

***My sister learned the clarinet, and my brother the saxophone. They terrorized the block, not just the household.

****This is specifically for generalized advice or craft books, not for the feedback you get from readers or editors. That is a completely different thing that I approach very differently.

Waiting

I think that writing a book might be the slowest way to go about getting a job.

The economic feasibility of said job aside (we all know that authors don’t really write because it’s fun or lucrative), it is an astoundingly slow process. Now, I write fairly quickly* and I’m still knocking out a full length draft in about three months. Self-editing until I’m happy with it takes a couple of weeks, beta readers take a week to a month depending on what’s going on in their lives,** and then there’s the entire rest of the process.

I have chosen to pursue traditional publishing, a famously nimble and responsive industry, because I’m aware of my weaknesses and I would do much better with someone else to handle 90% of the extrovert parts so that I might emerge from my cave with a new manuscript and then take my edit notes and scuttle back into the darkness. If I must do things that require either going places, or talking to people, I will require a very specific list of objectives, someone to ask exhaustive questions of before hand, and some degree of head pats afterwards.***

But the pursuit of traditional publishing means wading into the querying process, which I have come to understand over the last six months, is all of the least pleasant parts of job hunting, plus all of the least pleasant parts of online dating, combined into one activity where the average response time is six to sixteen**** weeks. Oh, and some people might not get back to you, ever.

I’m not going to try and claim that I’ve gotten better at waiting over the last six months; you don’t spend your entire life being bad at waiting and then suddenly git gud just because you sent your soul to internet strangers and are waiting to find out if they think it’s commercially viable.

The thing is, I handle waiting by doing stuff. My “stuff” of choice? Writing.

That’s how I got into this situation in the first place.

So now I’ve written two and a half more books while I wait.

They happen to be sequels to the one I am currently querying, and once the quartet is done, I’m finished with this particular world for a bit, so it’s not like I’ve got a backlog of things to query, but what if I did? What if they were all standalones? The stress of this hypothetical is upsetting, and it doesn’t even apply to me.

If someone does, eventually, decide they like me and my writing enough to work with me, when do I tell them about the looming tidal wave of other stuff I’ve written in the meantime? If the one I sent out today gets back to me in sixteen weeks, I’ll be well into writing The Bookbinder’s Guild at that point.

My choices are 1) continue writing and hope that no one accuses me of using AI***** and 2) idk, explode, maybe?

If no one has written a dystopia about how excruciatingly slow pipelines for artistic validation test the population for resiliency so they can resist the cyborg takeover, you should do that.

It’ll be at least a year before I can get to it, anyway.

Recent Writing

Wayne waved a hand down his body. “I’m not an outdoorsy guy. I’m an indoorsy guy.”

Aubrey smiled at the ground. “Well, thanks. I appreciate you braving the wilds on my behalf.”

“No problem,” he said cheerfully, stepping past her to continue down the track, one hand against the hillside. “I don’t mind visiting the outside. It’s just not my preference, is all. And I don’t have to be all that brave.” Wayne glanced back up the hill at her. “I’ve got you for that.”

What should we talk about next time? Let’s go with… writing advice. Yeah. That will no have no consequences, I’m sure.

Do good, friends.

*Or so I gather from the expressions on the faces of the people I have spoken to about it. The sharp intake of breath and the muttered “Oh, shit,” imply Some Things ™.

**They’re volunteers, as much as I want to loom over their shoulder like an SAT proctor, I’m not a monster, so I don’t do that.

***I can provide my own head pats, I am an adult, after all.

****Before this very day, twelve was the longest I’d seen in a confirmation receipt. I saw the sixteen and sighed. I have no idea what these poor peoples’s inboxes look like, but it must be hellish. When I went back to work after maternity leave, I just deleted my entire inbox; I wonder if that’s ever tempting to agents. Since I’m probably in some of those inboxes, I hope not.

*****Gun to my head, I’m not sure I could figure out what ChatGPT is, exactly. Is it an app? Is it a website? I’ve never been clear on that. I’m the wrong kind of autistic to be good at computers; that’s why I blog like it’s 2005.

Peanuts for Birds

There’s a lot of great things about living in Washington that I will never quite get over. For one, the water is actually blue here. If that sentence made you scoff, then you didn’t grow up next to a river called Big Muddy, and I love that for you. Every summer I go to Indianapolis on a business trip, and every time I get back and drive over the Sound, or the Columbia, or some random river or oxbow lake, I tear up a little bit because it’s so pretty.

For two, the number of crows — which I affectionately call “The Murder Rate” — is unreal. Those lil guys hang out everywhere. And like every good millennial, I aspire to a certain level of witchiness, and honestly, what could be better than befriending the local murder?

My office — this is going to sound unrelated, but it’s not, roll with it — is in one of those wedge-shaped rooms on the top floor of a house with one and half floors, and the window overlooks the porch roof. If I were younger, dumber, or had better health insurance, I could see myself spreading a blanket on the roof and hanging out there more; it’s got a slight slope, but nothing life threatening, even for my 30+ year old knees and budding back problems.

While I was sitting here, typing away at my lil werewolf stories, I noticed that there were a couple of crows — only attempted murder 😥 — who would hang out on the gutter, and I decided that this was my chance, and after copious internet research, I bought some bulk peanuts in their shells, uncooked, and every day I put a handful on the roof, on a wire cooling rack so they don’t roll straight into the gutter.

They were disappearing at a moderate rate, so I was hopeful that success was imminent, but the crafty creatures waited until I was not in my office to consume my tribute, and I wanted to make sure it was the crows before I decided what my next steps should be.

Alas, ’twasn’t the crows.

‘Twas the mountain jays.

If you’re not familiar, mountain jays are like blue jays that wear executioner hoods over their sick mohawks. Naturally, I love them.

Now, they are corvids, so this is not a failure, but they don’t really flock like crows do, so I shall have to scale my witchy aspirations appropriately. Jays are the sort of birds that hang out in pairs and divebomb anyone they think is an asshole, or anyone who gets too close to their nest, and they will take on anyone, of any size, with no regard for their personal safety, which I think is aspirational, personally.

I’m sure there’s room for some sort of urban witch with an unconventional pet flock, and perhaps, one day, that’ll be me. Stay tuned.

Recent Writing

“This will be war.”

Lucas sucked on his teeth and gave a disappointed shake of his head. “That’s a real shame; we’re so much better at war than you are.”

Next time I’ll talk about my tenuous relationship with audiobooks.

Do good, friends.

The Great ReWrite

As promised, let’s talk about the book, huh?

So when I wrote the first book, the one I am now querying, I hadn’t really planned anything for it. I had an idea, I wrote it, and that was that.

Except that there were just a few too many loose threads for me, you know? I had introduced several things that didn’t get satisfying resolutions, and I wanted to follow up on them.

So instead of writing a direct sequel, I took a side character who was in one chapter, and I wrote her story. Also a romance, but it introduced a lot more about the world, the magic, the hows of things, not just the whats. And when I got to the epilogue, I wrote in a hook that leads to the same place as the epilogue in the first book.

But I wasn’t ready to write that story yet, I needed to fill in some gaps, which meant a third book, to connect the dots from “I need a favor.” to “How do you feel about regicide?” so I snagged another minor character from book one, and wrote book three. Also a romance. It fleshed out the overarching conflict, the thing in the background of the first two books that was the root cause of the things that were happening.

These books are all a continuous story, but it’s happening in different places, and follows different characters. Book four brings them all together in one place.

Now, I wanted book four to be a romance, too, which meant centering one relationship. And I happily wrote the first 48k words, having a grand old time, and then I came to a chapter that was POV one of the main characters and I just wilted, because I had decentered that relationship from about chapter 3 onward.

Writing the characters from the previous books was like wearing comfy shoes and the new shoes are nice, and I love them, but man, once those boots are properly broken in, it sure is hard to justify wearing anything else, you know?

So I wasn’t writing a romance anymore, and I wanted to be.

And that meant that I had to go back from the beginning, and look at every chapter and see if I could rewrite it from the perspective of one of the mains. The main doc gained 4k words. My scraps doc now sits at 12k.

It sucked. There’s a lot in the scraps doc that I’m very proud of. Some of it has made its way back into the main doc in one form or another, but most of it is tucked away like a backstory. And that’s fine. The main conflict is between these two idiots, so what the rest of the cast is doing in the background can be implied, for the most part. I’ve kept POV chapters from the mains of the previous books where either 1) the events were too plot-crucial to leave out and neither of the mains were present, or 2) the POV character’s perspective is adding to the interpersonal conflict between the mains.

Of course, I’ve complicated this by needing to resolve the dangling conflict between each of the first three couples, and I’d really like it to end up shorter than 100k. There are other things I can do in this world, but this story needs to be done.

Mostly because I’m super duper over it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love all of my babies, and I want them to be happy (and they will be! Looking at YOU, S&S!), but I’ve got a gaslamp fantasy slow-burn romance about justice and revenge lurking just around the corner and I want to get to it.

A recent writing

Katie smiled almost fondly at the memory. “It was scary shit. You know, you can’t put an IV in shifters unless you also dose us with silver or aconite, and those aren’t long term solutions because of the toxicity, which meant that we were dosing her on the half hour to keep things level, and even then, the first few times she woke up already on fire.”

Next time, I’ll tell you about my attempts to make friends with the local corvid population.

Do good, friends.

Welcome!

Suppose you’re the sort of person who started writing romance novels because you turn to art whenever your life is unhappy or otherwise upset. Suppose you got fired eight months ago and found yourself with considerably more time to write. Suppose you finished your first book six months ago and started querying it. Suppose that querying is a slow, demoralizing process with contradictory rules, unclear expectations, and inconsistent feedback. Suppose you finish two more books while you are waiting and are working on the fourth of the quartet. Suppose that you are still waiting.

Further suppose that you joined a writing server that was randomly suggested on Reddit. Suppose that you met your best writing friend (who has the shockingly poor taste to live across an ocean from you, stunning siren that she is), and with her support, started a writing Instagram. Suppose that you are autistic, and never developed an organic understanding of social media, and yearn for the old school days of posting blocks of text into the void instead.

That was a lot of work, supposing all that. I’m proud of you.

Anyway, here we are, with an honest to goodness blog, here in the big year of [current year]. Welcome.

I am the sort of chaotic millennial who has tried literally every form of scheduling ever developed (do not @ me, bujo people. I’ve tried. Yes I’ve tried the Ryder Carroll method), so I cannot promise you a consistent posting schedule. Nor can I promise you consistent content. The presence or absence of any aesthetic on my part will be up for debate. Not by me, but please, feel free.

I can promise you connection. I can promise you honesty. And I can promise you updates. I hope that’s enough.

You wanna end with something I wrote recently? Too bad, my blog, my rules.

“You will not apologize to anyone for not knowing something you haven’t been taught.”

Next time I’ll tell you about my new piano.

Do good, friends.