The World Says Hello

I keep saying that I want to work on and finish the first drafts of Hibernaculum and The Juniper Bones before I do anything else, but I just keep poking at Greywater with the proverbial Great Big Stick. This is both good and bad, in that any writing is good writing, but it's feeding my bad habit of Never Finishing Aught. And I do need to work on finishing things. I suppose half the trouble here is that Greywater is simply more manageable, at least when it comes to the idea of eventual publication. The Juniper Bones is very long -- probably it's going to hover around the 300k mark, even when finished and edited -- and Hibernaculum is rather strange. None of them are easily classified, at least when it comes to their genres and whatnot, but those two certainly sit outside the norm. Argh.

With that said, I suppose it's not as if Greywater really slots easily into any category. You could call it a romance, in its way, given it deals very strongly in the strange relationship between a Major and a long-imprisoned water elemental (yeah, yeah, I have Belle and Sebastian in my head with Me and the Major, and it's irritating as hell). But I doubt I could pass it off as a true romance novel, given that a) it's written from the male protagonist's POV and b) the romance actually isn't the full point of the story. I thought it was in the beginning, actually, but I'm starting to discover that it really isn't.

Come to think of it, I'm intrigued by my POV tendencies. I'm a girl -- probably fairly obvious -- but I have a serious tendency to write from a male POV. I don't know what that says about me. Am I brainwashed by my culture, a culture that tends to say the voice of the male is the most correct and therefore ought to be the most dominant? I really haven't any idea, I just know that the stories I wanted to write were just best told from the perspective of characters who happened to be male. Maybe it's because I really came into my own writing-wise through fanfiction, and I was -- and still am -- a slash fangirl. But I suppose that's a quandary for another day. Another day when I actually have something finished and worth publishing, anyway. (Although let us note, for posterity, that Tea For Two, my first published story, is told from the wife's viewpoint. Not that this makes her particularly happy, let me assure you. But then we can count that as a nice bit of irony considering Lovecraft, the main inspiration for the piece, wasn't exactly a bra-burning feminist crusader. Ha ha ha.)

Still, the point of the entry wasn't to lament the fact that I can't even write within the boundaries of the romance genre to save my life -- it's far more traditional to be either the female or the female/male voice, and the latter still tends to be skewered to the distaff side -- it was more to talk about meeting new characters. Because although I have had the basic story of Greywater in my mind for probably a couple of years now, I've never really understood the nuances of what was going on. Basically, I knew that it was how Otho had met Círa, and explained why they were not really on speaking terms during The Neverboy. I also knew it had a lot to do with the beginning of the unravelling of Ryennkar Vassidenel, and how this would eventually ruin the heart and soul of Arosek Asfiye. What I didn't know, as it turns out, is that Greywater is actually about how a soldier deals with the way war moves in ways he cannot control, and how this affects the way he lives his life even as he struggles to keep himself alive in order to do so.

If that makes the slightest bit of sense.

This is all just relevant to me, mind, because I met Rylea yesterday. I'd known of her before now, but I'd never actually met her. She's Otho's first wife, and I knew from the beginning that she exerts undue influence on his life still -- I mean, the novel opens with him almost toppling himself out a window over an unexpected letter from her -- but I hadn't really expected the depth of it. The conversation between them that I just wrote? Hurt. And it's beginning to bleed through into his interactions with Círa, and is shaping their relationship in ways I didn't expect. It's wonderful, and frustrating, and confusing as hell. I'm also not really sure that her name is Rylea; it's sort of a placeholder right now, but there's still a reason behind the name. ...why yes, I was thinking of R'lyeh. And given how much trouble Rylea is causing me right now, it's fair enough to assume that it wasn't inaccurately given.

...I suppose I can but hope that now my mind is drifting towards the fascinations of non-Euclidian geometry, that my pet quantum mechanic Wills Penrose will speak up and get me back into The Juniper Bones before Rylea totally messes everything up. But knowing my luck, they'll just team up on me and make everything worse. I suppose that's just the hazard of the spec writer's profession...? ^_~