chapter six: bloody hands
I like this chapter so far. It’s been slow going– I had wanted to have 30,000 words written by today. Instead I have just over 26,000. But this chapter has good pacing, and the plot is finally starting to show signs of life. Things are happening, and the characters are finally attaining the active role I’d wanted for them! The first forty pages felt as though life was just throwing itself at Rylan, who struggled to keep on the surface of things. Now one thing is leading to another, and the characters are partially responsible for that.
It’s a good feeling. What concerns me now is why this hasn’t happened for the first five chapters. They certainly weren’t dull. I’ll have to address that after I finish this draft, hand it off to my test-readers, and hear what they think.
dead, dead, dead
I’ve decided on starting ‘Blue Crystal’ that no character was going to be safe. My first chapter starts with a dead character, and two more die in a gang-style fight on the way up to the surface. There’s talk of a plague that had killed a percentage of the working class population, and at the end of the second chapter my main character comes close to dying of the same plague.
I’ve just finished the end of the fifth chapter of my first draft, and I’ve killed the first of my important characters. Funny thing was, I wasn’t expecting it. In the 0-draft he made it through to the end and wasn’t particularly important.
grey, by jon armstrong
There are probably a dozen things I love and admire about this novel, so I’d thought I’d take a moment to share some of my thoughts on the book.
The contrast is lovely. It’s everywhere you look around the book: the main characters wear gray (grey?) in an over-garish, over-sexed, obscene, vulgar world that feels like an embellishment of Hollywood-weirdness, and there’s a definite fight for modesty and good taste against their culture. It marks the dividing line between the protagonists and antagonists. Similarly, in a world where having sex in public is actively indulged in, lauded, the main characters have a real love without ever having touched each other. The novel makes a huge distinction between love and lust, and the understated intimacy is deeply romantic. It drives the story.
The plot is gripping. There’s no down-time, no wasted speech, no preaching. Each scene is a logical follow-up of the last, and I never struggled through any passages. Everything that happened seemed logical and sequential. It is, however, highly stylized. I can understand if the narrative isn’t for everyone– for instance, characters and places tend to be described by fashions because that’s what the hero notices. He’s very speculative, and he likes imagery, and though sometimes the magazine he loves seems overly ‘artistic’ and full of hidden meanings, again the contrast with the rest of the culture really does make it sound appealing.
My favorite stories are the ones that make me think. They leave me mulling over the events afterward like a fine dinner in a nice restaurant. This one accomplished that, and though I found this as a free downloadable e-book, I’m eager to buy it so it can find a nice home on my shelf. I’ll see if I can order it from my bookstore. If that fails, Nightshadebooks.com has it, and I’m no stranger to buying books online.
It’s also given me several ideas about how to better convey culture in my own writing. Color me inspired.
craft
I spent a good part of the afternoon reading Steve Malley’s blog, Full Throttle and F**k It, and I’m really impressed by some of his thoughts on craft. It’s given me a lot to think about, including whether I have as good of a grip on my protagonist as I thought I did.
i think that we’ll be good friends
I meant today to introduce an NPC to take a message for a character that was being called on. Said NPC performed wonderfully, but felt that it would be rude to offer a message without making an introduction, and named himself Maeche (“Mye-sh”) Mersii, brother to an already established character. Rylan, my protagonist, likes him already and is now inquiring as to why he can’t have a social life, because he’d love to go to the arena with this guy…
I still haven’t figured out why minor characters plant their feet so strongly sometimes. Even so, I think that I’ll keep him.
the great commercial
One of my ideas for marketing my book once it nears publication is to (as well as doing the usual book signings, ads, internet banners) is to make use of my training in computer media and art to make a commercial for my novel and put it up on YouTube. I’ve seen this done before with varying degrees of effectiveness. Some use classical music and images from the public domain. One was sped up video of a woman writing the title of her book with a long, loopy handwriting. Another (very effective) took this compelling music and selected pieces of the cover art to great effect. I’m brainstorming with myself how to make something exceptional so that it will be easily passed around.
This is my current plan. Keep it short, first– I think I’ll aim for forty five seconds. Thirty five of that will be for animation, and the last ten will be for the title, author, cover art, and release. Blue crystal is a dark book, and one of my ideas is to use a combination of simple drawn animation (white lines on black), 3d graphics, and photoshop paintings. That way I can do nifty things like model part of a scene, animate the camera moving down dim the render, and transition to the animation in black and white. Every once in a while I can do a detailed photoshop painting, and scatter the piece with moments of detailed art. Rylan will fight his tiger in the arena. Police with elaborate silver demon masks will look intimidating. Wyrren will walk through walls.
the monthly writer’s meeting
I came to the first meeting with these people in January. I wanted to be involved in a writing group that wasn’t online, and when my NaNo regional leader passed out the link of one of these meetings, I packed up my notebook and headed over. Almost all the people involved were elderly or middle aged women, and I was promptly dubbed ‘the baby’, and when I mentioned that I had already written several (terrible) books eyebrows raised around the table.
Two meetings later and we’re in the middle of discussing query letters, and I seem to be getting a reputation (mostly for working too hard and not sleeping). The leader of the group seemed impressed by the sample letter that I brought in, and mentioned more than once that she was interested in Blue Crystal. I love that people three times my age are taking me seriously in this field. It’s incredibly uplifting.
sub-genre
In an attempt to distract myself from work (or clock-watching– it was almost lunch) I did a quick search on fantasy sub-genres to see where Blue Crystal fit in.
Low Fantasy: (grabbed from wikipedia) downplaying of epic or dramatic aspects; includes de-emphasizing magic; real-world settings; favoring of realism, cynical storytelling; and dark fantasy.
That… fits in with what I’m doing almost perfectly. Normally I’m not this happy to tag my work, but… it works.
climactic ending
I had some thoughts about endings while I was driving home from work last night. To warn you now, I was listening to Metallica’s ‘King Nothing’ as I pondered.
In my 0-draft I had an semi-decent idea for a climax, but the setting was nondescript and it lacked the drama that I was seeking. It came to me that if this was a movie, if I was really shooting for a visual effect, what I should do is to set it in a place where the characters have been before instead of just another tunnel in the city. And instead of the main character ‘knowing’ that what he does is going to break the villain later down the road (and out of sight of the camera, which is perhaps a little more realistic) I ought to move elements around so that all parts of the confrontation happen at once.
The applicable part of all this is that I should reconsider the imagery of the scenery and manipulate it to include more interesting elements, not exactly the ‘logical’ elements. I’m used to sculpture, but novels are so movable, so fluid, that it seems strangely rigid to confine fantasy to a perfectly realistic straight-lines style when you can give important scenes more meaning by tweaking the lines just a bit. Perhaps this is an argument why making maps isn’t always helpful, because once you create them you feel bound to what you’ve filled in.
writer’s blogs
I’ve come across a post on E. E. Knight’s journal that happens to mention the urls of a number of other working fantasy authors’ blogs. So I’ve taken down the names, added them to the rss feeds that I’ll be following for a bit, and I’ll keep or delete them as I go through the list.
This is what I generally look for when I browse writer’s blogs: craft tips, but not ones that smack of a lecture– I hate hard-and-fast rules (the words Show, Don’t Tell make me twitch); experiences though the publication process, what to expect, what to look out for; personal struggles with specific craft/character/plot problems while working on a book, because it makes me feel as though I’m not alone and because I like to see how people work through these problems. I suppose that when you add all these up, what I’m looking for is a virtual mentor, someone who will neither preach at me nor whine for attention. Someone who I’d actually read, and admire at least one aspect of their style. I haven’t actually gotten to picking out E. E. Knight’s books, but his page has a nice, approachable tone to it, he’ll reply back to commenters, and he actually has a number of posts on craft that can make me stop and consider what he has to say, even if I don’t always agree completely.
Here’s hoping for the next batch of journals. I’ll keep things posted.
