Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Just a couple of links today.

First: Bitten by Books is having an awesome contest for the Linger release: a book club kit! The prize is ten copies of both Linger and Shiver, plus a $100 Visa card to host a party with. Definitely check it out!

Second: DriveThruRPG and DriveThruComics are having a huge Christmas in July sale, and the Flames Rising store is one of the participants. There's plenty of RPG material to look through (and, perhaps, add to your collection).

I don't know what week it is. I'm beginning to think that will be a condition for the rest of my life as a mom. I do think a lot about how last year at this time, I was falling asleep for hours unintentionally and feeling sick to my stomach, and that my act of creativity was biological. Bug's "story," thus far, has been a delightful one, and I'm looking forward to her becoming a progressively bigger collaborator.

But on to my goals. I said last week: when you leave a story alone that long, is it yours any more? Is it the story you're meant to tell if you can set it down and walk away from it for a full year?

A lot of people had great things to say in the comments on that entry. jeff_duntemann's struck me as particularly poignant:

It may be less fair to ask "Is the story still mine?" in these cases than to ask, "Have I changed too much to remain its author?" Stories are not the only things that may be considered "works in progress."

This is sort of where my thought process has gone. In my questions, which are related but not intimately, I was seeing those two changing factors in two ways:

1) If I've left a story alone for a year, am I still the person who should write it? Does that story, as I would have told it, belong to the writer I am now? To echo Jeff, "Have I changed too much to write this story?"

2) If I've walked away from a story for a year, and wasn't compelled to write any more of it, it may be that the story I was trying to write isn't the one that needed me to write it. I think about that in terms of the Blackstone Academy project a lot. There are elements in that story that came from an earlier story that was also not the story I needed to write. So I think what will be best is leaving that draft, those three chapters I've already written, as scaffolding. I think I should scrap them and start over. And based on where I am in my writing goals these days (inspired largely by slwhitman and her Tu Books project and the entries about the importance of multicultural F/SF over at Genreville), I think that some of those elements will stick around, and others will go by the wayside.

Now, the quantifiables:

Reasonable goal:
* With my cowriter, finish the draft of our serial novel. (We're at chapter 10 of 20 -- halfway there!)
I finally went over lyster's chapter 11, and in response, it's now been made into chapters 11 and 12. My goal is to write chapters 13 and 14 to be ready for his review after his upcoming life event. I've already written 800 words (of the 1500 to 3000 word limit per chapter) of chapter 13, but there's a lot to accomplish in those two chapters, so I'm not sure what percentage I've actually finished. Still, progress is progress, and I revised the outline for the rest of the story, getting some good feedback from Max, so we're solidifying the awesome of here to the end.

* Write one short story.
This one is sneaking up on me fast. I want to have a solid short story ready for a submission deadline on August 1st; my short story writing tends to work in spurts, so there's still hope. I've settled on the idea that I'm going to work on, and if I can get a few hours with no other priorities, I should be able to slam something out in time to actually do revisions before the submission.

* Write multiple book reviews.
Since last week, I've written a PW review, two reviews for Mythprint, and one that will appear here at MtU&E in honor of m_stiefvater's awesome recent release, Linger. I still have more reviews on deck, but I'm actually making progress here.

* Additional contracted work that's come up has been going reasonably well, also. Lots of copyediting, but also some writing -- I finished a short essay on the Harry Potter books and will be writing four more essays this summer about various notable novels.

Extended goal:

* Write three chapters of the YA novel I'm working on.
Well, you already heard about this one above. Scrapping and starting over.

* Write three short stories (including the one above).
When I was looking at my percolating ideas, I came up with a couple that might be worth following up on, besides the one for the deadline. At least one involves giants.

* Restart the adult novel I haltingly began last year now that it's percolated and I have an idea of where it's going.
I think I'm going to reprioritize this -- meaning that I'm unprioritizing it. I'd rather see what the restart on the YA novel becomes.

* Blog at least three times a week
Ha! Well, that may actually happen this week, but I've not established any sort of pattern, have I? :)

It's easy to get a feel for how incredibly talented Maggie Steifvater is by watching the book trailer she made for Shiver. Step one, write an amazing book. Step two, create cut-paper pieces. Step three, create stop motion art with the cut-paper. Step four, oh, and write the musical score while you're at it.

I've asked Maggie on facebook if there's anything she can't do, and while she says she's no good at baking shaped cakes, I'm still sort of convinced that she actually has superpowers.

I am delighted to welcome Maggie here today as a guest of the blog, discussing the story behind Shiver. Thanks, Maggie! (Don't forget to check out Maggie's blog here on livejournal--she's m_stiefvater--and keep an eye out for her other books, Lament and Ballad, due out in October.)

--

There’s this common writing wisdom that says that there are only a handful of plots in the world and a million ways to tell each of them. I always agreed with that concept in a dry academic way, but it wasn’t until I wrote Shiver that I realized how true it was.

Because Sam’s story in Shiver is this: wolf bites boy, boy becomes wolf. And Grace’s story is: girl falls in love with werewolf.

I didn’t really think about the idea that there were a million ways that this could go until well after I wrote the novel. Interview questions started coming in and a lot of them were variations of “do you think that readers will be upset to find out this isn’t a traditional werewolf story?” and “this isn’t a traditional romance, do you think readers will be surprised?”

Because although I started Shiver with a definite plan in my head for the mood and character of the story, just looking at the plot, that was not the only way it could go. It’s odd to think about how, in the hands of another writer, Sam and Grace’s story could’ve been a horror. Had I tweaked the plot differently, it could’ve been a thriller. Or a straight romance. Heck, a comedy.

It reminds me of my other life as an artist. There are a lot of parallels between art-making and writing, but artistic style and genre is the one I’m thinking of now. One of the last things an artist acquires as they get better is a style: that distinct way of marking the canvas or paper, that unique way of seeing the world that makes a Van Gogh a Van Gogh or a Rembrandt a Rembrandt.

As an artist, first you learn how to replicate the image of a scene realistically, then you figure out how to replicate the mood of the scene instead. It’s about seeing all the details in the scene and then choosing which you keep and which you omit. Seeing all the colors but picking only the ones that further your moody agenda. Choosing which lines to reproduce faithfully and which ones to distort and exaggerate.

So five artists can paint the same scene five wildly different ways, depending on what they choose to focus on. A painting of a couple in front of the Eiffel Tower, for instance. Do you paint all of it? Focus in close on the couple? Paint it in black and white? Emphasize the scar on the man’s face? Day? Night? Blues? Golds?

It’s the same way with writing. That same image -- that same plot of wolf bites boy, boy becomes wolf -- can be done five million different ways. And has been. It all depends on which details you focus on, what you exaggerate, what you choose to leave out. When I wrote Shiver, I wanted a bittersweet love story, something poignant and deliberate and lovely. So instead of focusing on the horror, I chose only the details that supported my version of events.

It’s strange to think of my characters being written down a different road, because though there might be a handful of plots being written millions of different ways, there was only one way I could write this one.

It's been awhile.

I've been involved in sort of a big new project that's been taking up a lot of my time. It's called: being pregnant. It's very exciting for both me and my husband! That said, it's amazing how much your time management skills change when you have to sleep a much larger portion of the day. I should be back to normal in a few weeks, assuming I'm a text book example of how these things are supposed to go. (I suppose this is also practice for learning new time management skills when I have to balance being a writer and being a mother!)

Now that I've finished up a few deadlines that I was trying to balance with my new schedule over the last few weeks, I'm hoping to be back on track to blog here at MtU&E. There's a lot to talk about! We had Substrate today, which always gives me fodder for thought, I got my Callie award in the mail and will post a picture of that soon (along with the first of my weekly contests, until I run out of prizes!), and Maggie Stiefvater (m_stiefvater) has done a brilliant guest entry for this Friday. I'll get to talk about Maggie's new book, Shiver, and I've read a couple of really interesting blog posts from other folks that deserve conversation here. I've also submitted my first blog post to Flames Rising (flamesrising_lj), so I'll make a note when that goes up.

Yes, lots happening in this part of the universe, and there will be much activity here next week. It'll be good to be back.