Living As A Moon

So, the last few entries I've talked a bit about the workshops I've been to recently, and it brought to mind one Owen Marshall. I went to a couple of workshops with him back in...oh, it must have been 2009, as I remember I had planned only to do the one on the Saturday, but it was so fantastic I spent the night frantically sorting out my packing and travel arrangements and turned up on Sunday, too; then on Monday I got up at five in the morning and flew to Japan for two weeks. Good times! I think some of my original reticience had arisen because although Owen Marshall is a very well-known New Zealand author, I had never encountered him either at high school or university (in fact, I did almost no study of New Zealand works during my proper education; Heavenly Creatures and Broken English are as close as we got; both, incidentally, are films well worth the watching). The only time I'd read one of his stories was during a slightly infamous SIT pilot course in...2008, it must have been, because I think it was that course that inspired me to enrol as an extramural student at Massey in 2009. But yes, I didn't much enjoy this course, and that in turn slightly coloured my impressions of Owen Marshall's work.

Then I met him, and promptly fell in love.

...I should probably explain that by adding that I fall in love with people like this on a regular basis. I mean, when I was ten years old I went to see Jurassic Park with my form one class and I'm in love with Sam Neill to this day. (Yes, occasionally I lean on the breakwall around Lake Wakatipu and wonder why he can't just appear at that moment, like in a movie. Not that I'd even talk to him, I'd just stare and giggle and generally act like I'd just escaped from Charenton, or something.) But Owen Marshall was just...wonderful. He inspired me greatly, and was generally an all around awesome guy, so...I went out and bought one of his books. Living As A Moon. And I am deeply ashamed to admit that I only decided to actually read it the other day.

Reading this book proves to me again his general awesomeness, it must be said, but I'm finding that reading these short stories? Makes me think again about my own. I was planning to spend this weekend working on the first three chapters of Greywater so I could finally start sharing the story with people (most of the really complete draft stuff is from about chapter four onwards, unfortunately), but instead I've been messing about with short stories. One of them was my own damn fault; Becs asked me to act as a pinch-hitter for a group project of the Southern Scribes, as I haven't been going to the meetings regularly enough to have been a part of it in the first instance. It's a fascinating little experiment, which I'll tell you about another day when I've actually read the end result of the first draft (which is currently sitting in my inbox, along with half a dozen other things I really ought to read/reply to). But I had dragged my heels on it a bit, and at the dinner on Thursday I promised her profusely I'd email her my contribution either late Friday or early Saturday. Some drama later, it was sent by 2pm on Saturday afternoon. We're talking about a piece of flash fiction less than a thousand words long, here. My usual modus operandi rarely permits me to drop below ten thousand. Maybe that was the problem? Oh, well, at any rate Owen Marshall sustained me through my struggles. ...did I already tell you that this man is bloody awesome? ^_~

So, you'd figure that after this, I could go back to the novel. Apparently not. I'd been chatting via deviantart to one of the wonderful artists I've been commissioning, and she'd asked me about Ryenn and Arosek. I decided, rather than explaining some of their complicated history, I'd just show her by giving her a draft of The Simple Story. But then I realised this "short" story (it's far closer to a novella, at 22k) wasn't really in a fit state, so I spent yesterday putting it back together. And I ended up fascinated by those two all over again, and so today I returned to poking at the story I started in Australia last month. Just...what even is this thing. O_o It's not finished yet, but it's getting there. I'm going to work on it a little more in a bit, but...yeah. Gah. I'm also feeling the urge to return to the story I had intended last year to write for the long-since published anthology A Foreign Country, but I never finished the damn thing. It still fascinates me to this day, and...yeah. There's also the fact I should start writing properly for both the Dan Davin and Katherine Mansfield short story competitions, and...here I am, obsessing dreadfully over two characters who just make me horribly, horribly sad.

I've always had a habit of being cruel to my characters, I have to admit, but these two remind me of my overall reaction to the anime Death Note. I won't go into detail, because it's a long story best viewed on your own terms, but essentially the end result of the actions of the various protagonists is just...waste. Terrible, horrible, pointless waste. I once saw an AMV made of the show to Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek, and it summed it up perfectly for me. Just...so much pride, and so far to fall. I get that same feeling with Arosek and Ryenn, in that Ryenn just wasted Arosek's life. But with that said, Arosek chose that path just as much as Ryenn guided him towards it, and...I don't know. It just makes me cry.

It's interesting, though, because I've wandered back into reading histories of Alexander the Great again. Partially it's because I need to drum up interest in military history in order to make sense of Otho's position as a Major in the Sarinian army, but it was Alexander and then reading novels along the lines of The Other Boleyn Girl that first led me to develop these characters. It's that sense of never knowing what really happened, you know? We can imagine what Mary Boleyn did in the last days of her more famous sister, and we can draw conclusions about the relationship of Alexander and Hephastion from the ancient sources that remain, but we'll never know. And that's why I created Arosek and Ryenn. No-one knows why they did what they did.

...well, except for them. And now, as I dig deeper into their minds and hearts and pasts, I'm starting to see why too. And it's breaking my heart. Ah, stories, why can't I quit you? ;_;

Evolution

For someone who was absolutely convinced she was going to do some serious editing this weekend, I have done...very little editing. Ha. Which isn't to say I haven't done any, because I went through the first three chapters of Neverboy. The first two are nothing to be excited about, as they've previously been edited anyway; aside from a latter snip about Kit's first meeting with the infamous Magistrate-General, the first two chapters are the only parts of the novel I've shown to people. One of my local writing groups -- Scribes -- had expressed interest in seeing more beyond the second chapter, but I never got to it because the third chapter is a bit clunky and I wasn't really sure what was going on. I knew it had to be changed. And yesterday I finally made some of those changes, so while I still don't like it, exactly, it fits better with the story as a whole. And it means I can start sharing it again, ha. Only twenty-two more chapters to go...? With that said, some of those chapters are ridiculously over-long and need to be broken up differently. That's going to be fun...

So, if I wasn't editing, what was I doing? Being December, I've been distracted by the auspices of Real Life; I ended up having to work for a couple of hours, I needed to do some shopping, I had to wrap gifts, and I got a bee in my bonnet about vacuuming (mostly thanks to the glitter all over the floor). Today promises Adventures In Glue-Gunning. But if I am to make anything of this writing malarkey, I need to make time for writing. I think I said the other day that Scribes is having their last meeting for the year on Wednesday, and it involves writing a Christmas story. I'm not so hot with those. I think I've written three that I can remember? One was just a sob-fest because it was written the Christmas Day that followed the Christmas Eve when my grandfather died; it makes no real sense, it was just catharsis. Another one was about D'Arcy and Wills spending an odd Christmas with Elaine and Damien; I honestly don't remember well, which likely means it was crap. The other one I know of was about D'Arcy and Tess a year and a half after Wills' death, and was...ambitious? Ha. I don't even know anymore. I quite liked it, but I'm not sure anyone else ever did...

At any rate, I wrote a Christmas story yesterday -- I aimed for three thousand words, got almost four. Oops. But considering I started with no actual plot, just the idea of "Luchandra and Kavaan talk about the Nylurean winter holiday," it came out...rather nicely? I'm not sure. But yeah, it's certainly no traditional Christmas story. It was probably more a world-building exercise, than anything else. I'm not really built for short stories, but when I was in high school I learned to write them with a friend of mine; she lived in the States, I lived in New Zealand, and we were writing a massive pseudo-fanfiction epic monster THING. The cast of (mostly original) characters got way out of hand, and we ended up writing lots of short stories sent in the past, the present and the future in order to get background and perspective on each of them. Ever since then, I've kept the habit, as I find it useful for both character and world development. So the point of this story, for me, was finding out a little something about Nylurean culture, as opposed to Sarinian (as Luchandra and Kavaan at this point live in Deseran, an academic city in the Sarinian province of Lonan).

The thing is, though, I ended up learning a bit more about Kavaan, too. And that's where the idea of evolution comes into this entry. Some of my characters have been in my head for a long time. The other day, actually, I was commissioning a drawing of Luchandra and Zurin, and it occured to me that I've known them both since I was fourteen. That's...over half my life, just. Which is a bit scary, and just a little bit wonderful too. But while Luchandra and Zurin have stayed pretty much the same, Kavaan? Kavaan keeps evolving. He's the third apex of their love triangle. When I first drew this triangle I assumed that Luchandra and Zurin were The One True Pairing and that Kavaan was just a bump on the road, but these days...I just can't work that one out. Luchandra and Zurin are certainly the Star Crossed Lovers trope, but does that entitle them to be the One True Pairing? I think I've finally come to realise that one does not necessarily equal the other. And so, that brings me to Kavaan.

He actually did the bulk of his evolving last year, during NaNo 2009 when I wrote fifty thousand words on the Hibernaculum draft that still languishes unfinished on my harddrive. Back when I was fourteen years old Kavaan was the stereotypical elf archer warrior thing, and when he developed a personality he became...a bit of a dick, in all honesty. He loved Luchandra, but it was a possessive love that led to him murdering one incarnation of Zurin and raping a girl for reasons I still don't understand (!). I think it was a teen angst thing on my part, I don't know; certainly these days the Rape Is Love trope really pisses me off whenever I see it (because of course the girl he "raped" was in love with him anyway, wtf). I suppose I should just be glad I got it out of my system when I did? But...yeah. When I began to reimagine the story of Hibernaculum in order to put it in the history of this entire world -- because all my stories are linked to one another -- Kavaan really started to change quite dramatically. Some things are the same, sure. But instead of an arrogant possessive SOB, he's become a mildly clumsy, eternally cheerful diplomat with a talent for both music and conversational callisthenics. He's just...a much happier person, though in some ways he's less confident and...more submissive, almost. But then he's not really submissive, he's just more...thoughtful, I guess? Actually, I really liked something that came to Luchandra while I was writing What The Fire Said, the Christmas story for next week:

She had to love him for that. While others might have thought from his ridiculous conversational habits that he had no idea of what went on around him, she knew he was very observant. In fact, he was intuitive to a fault. Sometimes she thought that was why he talked so much. Perhaps he just hoped that the sound of his external voice would drown out all that he didn’t want to hear from the internal.

 So...yes. When I was NaNo-ing last year, I fell in love with the newly evolved Kavaan. I hadn't really written much of him since, but now...I am falling in love with him all over again. And wondering. I often find that my characters do what they want, especially when it comes to love (I learned in Mexico that Eliot and Morgan, certainly, have very odd ideas both about each other and then love in general). It's a little bit scary to think that when it comes to the Zurin-Luchandra-Kavaan love triangle that I really don't know what's actually going to result from it. But then, I suppose that's half the fun...

Slash and Burn

For those of you interested in such things, unfortunately the title is not referring to slash fiction. ^_~ No, I'm going to complain a little bit about editing, mostly as a means of procrastinating from doing that very thing. Although with that said, I've been having little fits of GLEE all week because I commissioned a lovely English girl to do me a little drawing of Araben and Aleksandr, and she's been sending me sketches and whatnot and...yes. Niiiiice, is all I have to say for myself. <3

But the fact that I am speaking of editing at all means that yes, I finished the first draft of The Neverboy on Wednesday night. It's almost been a little anti-climatic, but that's likely because I've been away from it for a while now and therefore the thought of going back and rereading from the beginning properly isn't at all anaethema to me right now. In fact, I will be doing that shortly, as I need to really start tidying up the story in order to have it sing the way I know it can. It stumbles along fine the way it is, of course, but...it could be so much more.

But yes, it's quite odd, having something semi-finished that I can now seriously consider in a more critical light. I mean, with The Juniper Bones, even when I have a first draft I have no real belief that anyone would ever publish it. I have a similar problem with For What We Drown, though it is more palatable; it's just set in New Zealand, which seems to kill a story dead when it comes to the international market. And Hibernaculum is a pseudo-fantasy story without all the things most fantasy writers seem to want, so...I don't know. I can't write anything anyone would want to publish. The Neverboy is probably the closest thing I have to a "marketable" manuscript, so...editing it? It's a giddying, sobering, and terrifying thought.

It did strike me, though, that it's almost like writing an essay. I've always been an intuitive writer, essays or otherwise, but most of the other stories I've finished over the years were pretty solid the way they were. My writings these days...aren't. I don't know if it's that I am a worse writer (which I doubt) or if things are just more complex, but...looking at The Neverboy, I know that I have to go back over my introductory stages in order to strengthen the end, I have to cut out the chaff and emphasise the main points in the body chapters, and then I have to really sum things up and end with a bang at the end. The elements of all these things are there, I just...have to start smoothing out the rough edges. I'm not quite sure how this is going to work, but I'm actually excited about it instead of just terrified, so I figure that's what sane people would call "progress."

I also need to start communicating more with other writers. One of my fellow local writers is all for accountability week by week, which I think would be fantastic. I need to start swapping chapters with another writer again. And I need to spend more time getting involved on the CompuServe forums. And somehow, in amongst all that, I have to write. Ha.

In the meantime, my other local writing group is having a Christmas gathering on Wednesday night and I need to write a tiny Christmas story to share aloud. Being contrary, I now want to write something about the equivalent holiday in Nylurea. But told by Kavaan, who would be living at that point with Luchandra in Sarin. It's going to be so complicated, particularly as I decided to limit myself to three thousand words (!). How I am going to achieve anything in that space, I have no idea. But then...slashing and burning a manuscript means one needs to be concise and selective. I suppose there's no time like the present to get started...