I made a phone post over on my LiveJournal the other day ... mostly blabbering about my rewrite, but I thought some of y'all might be interested in putting a voice to the words. ;)
Aside from that ... I decided the other day to go ahead and start working on the rewrite using the Maass exercises. I'd originally written Stronger with BN principles in mind, so going over it with applicable exercises would strengthen what I already had.
So, I get to the second exercise, which asks, essentially, what my protagonist wants.
I stop dead in my tracks, about like a zombie slammed by a pickup truck. I had no idea what Cassandra wanted. None.
Okay. This is bad. But not too bad. I have notes from BN course. Fairly substantial notes, actually, though not quite as thorough as I would have liked; I'm thinking that most of the little niggling details, I'd fleshed out in IM and chat; back then, I didn't keep chat logs. I didn't trust my parents not to find them and get pissed that I was talking to people online.
I found a transcript I had saved--a filetting session. In it, I had my original idea trashed, and was told I could only have one villain, I couldn't have Cassandra be depressed, and it was a LKH ripoff.
In the original premise, I was going to have two distinct factions of the Dark Court. Alex Chandler wanted Cassandra, powerful byproduct of a forbidden union between two kreshida (psychic vampires), dead, because the last Abomination nearly destroyed their race centuries before. Eric White wanted to make her their Queen, hoping to turn her survived traumas into a tool he could use to manipulate her and reuinite their Court.
I have a much lesser version of that in the book as it stands; also, Alex decided that he didn't want to kill Cassandra, he wanted to surrender to his love for her. Like, two days before the assignment was due. *thunks*
As a result of that, I had to run with Eric as the villain, and I really hadn't done much development on him, since I'd trusted A's opinion; she'd been writing much longer than I, had taken the course the prior year, and said some of my problems were ones that she'd been thwapped upside the head for, too. So, me being inexperienced, I believed her.
To be fair, she was also a romance writer, and romance and fantasy are two very different genres. (The battered, mutilated corpse of a thing that is my first attempt at writing romance stands as testament to that fact!) I know that in romance, more than one villain can complicate the subplot, detracting from the main plot. That said, she'd also written fantasy, and gave a different reason for why you couldn't have more than one villain--it would detract from the climax and make the hero's win matter less. Which I flat-out don't agree with.
In regards to Cassandra's depression ... she's had people trying to kill her for the past few years, and striking out at those she loves. Of course she's going to be depressed. Of course she's going to be despairing. The attitude people had was that if she was depressed in any way, she wouldn't be sympathetic. I can understand that it's something that needs to be handled carefully, but I cut it all out, and I think that was a mistake.
As to "ripoff" ... yes, there are similarities. It's the same subgenre, dealing with some of the same supernatural creatures. That being said, by that logic, LKH is a ripoff of Misty Lackey's Diana Tregarde. No idea is inherently original. Everything borrows from everything else. It's how you tell the story and what you do with it that makes it original.
I have to admit, I got fairly angry reading the transcript. It probably shows with how long this post has gotten. Partly for what was said to me, and partly because I bought it and compromised what I wanted to do with the story.
Knowing what I do now... knowing it wasn't what I wanted in the beginning... even though the story is saleable with some reasonably minor rewrites ... I wouldn't be happy with it, because it's not what I wanted. So that means I've got a heftier rewrite in store for me than I'd thought.
Fortunately, I'm fairly certain I can pull it off without having to revise the entire thing. It's not like Sanctuary, Mercenary or Bridge of Faith, all of which require major rewriting before I ever let them see the light of day.
I can do this.
It's just hard. Very hard. Because ... *sighs*
Part of it is that when I first started prewriting the novel, I was best friends with my ex-fiance. He and I were both taking the course; him officially, me as an auditor, because there were only so many slots for participants. We spent a lot of time in chat and IM, brainstorming and tossing ideas back and forth. Looking through files, notes, and things, I kept finding logs, snips of chat, and ... while he was an abusive asshole to me when we were together, I miss having someone who understood my writing, what it meant to me, what I wanted to do. While I don't think he had the skill to write the kind of novel he was aiming for (that said, he never actually finished the one I thought had the best bet of being that), he understood the theory well, and could critique and make suggestions based on BN concepts and principles.
I haven't found that since. And I miss that gestalt dearly. I don't miss him, but that ... that I miss.
The book brings back a lot of memories. They're not all bad, which is almost worse in a way. Bittersweet and tragic. I had a lot going on when I was writing Stronger. I poured a lot into it. I only hope that I can prevent my feelings of the past now from contaminating the book. I don't think they will ... but it's a fear.
I'm so tired of having to fight every time I try to write something more than a short story. It seems like that's all I do anymore--fight the memories, fight past conditioning, fight fears. I feel like some whiny little bitch that can only make excuses and complain about what's been done to her. I'm sick of it, and I'm sick of fighting.
But the only alternative to fighting is to give up and give in. And I'll be fucked with a tabasco-laced cactus by Satan's lead demon and a pack of hell-hounds before I let that happen.
Onward now and on forever and onward now.
All great things to come.
We few, we lucky few.
Once more to the breach, dear friends, once more...
--VNV Nation
Nonny Blackthorne wrote at 7:43 AM
