It is done!
Now for a word of explanation to my null set of fans:
I had attempted a pseudo-NaNoWriMo novel. I call it pseudo, because I started in mid-October, but planned not to work on the weekends, for a total of around thirty days. I say attempted, because the story shrunk in the telling until it was under 25k words at the finish. In any case, I finished a day early, though there’s some editing needed.
This is actually the expansion of a short story I had written a while back, which I had submitted once upon a time to Tuscany Press. Unwisely, I had written it for a religious publisher specifically, down to the ending, so I couldn’t submit it anywhere else when it was rejected. (protip: don’t do this.) Thus, I was stuck with an unpublishable manuscript (which had several other issues, mind you, small ones like not having an actual plot.)
I was trying to pull it into a novelette when NaNoWriMo came along, which I decided to attempt (sorta). Originally I was going to do the first book of The War Against the Gods, but after hashing out the novelette with my Mom it seemed the more logical to do that instead.
I was also going to submit the revamped, and significantly different, version again to Tuscany Press and another religious publisher, this time as a young adult novel, but real life intervened. The other publisher decided not to reopen submissions, and the end manuscript is too small for Tuscany Press. That, and it might be tacky to resubmit, but who knows?
Thus, I now have a finished first draft of a manuscript, which I intend eventually to self-publish (or indie publish or whatever the cool kids call it these days). My rabid fanbase of relatives and imaginary friends can expect it sometime in April. We’ll see.
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What’s it about, I hear you ask? It’s about an immortal prince, an antimatter factory, and doing the right thing, even if it costs you your life. More to come, later.
The Taste for Realism
I have seen, and admittedly indulged in that fan activity I will call the Fact Checking Game. It goes like this: First, you take some work of fiction, particularly a popular one, and you find some fascinating idea or claim it has. Then you deconstruct it with real world logic, checking all the facts and invariably coming up with an unrealistic or at least implausible conclusion. At this point, bemoaning that the creator did not think of this may commence. As a sequel, you can find some plausible counterpoint, and argue with the proponents of the former conclusion until the cows come home.
This is not, in itself, a bad thing.
Philosophical Diversity in Fiction
No, this is not a post about the culture war. Chill.
This post is about writing other cultures such that they are believable–not as middle-class Westerners wearing funny hats, but as fundamentally different worlds.
On Gratuitous Rape
This is not a happy-go-lucky post. If this subject matter disturbs you, I suggest reading something else, or perhaps waiting a few days–I plan to blog more frequently in the future.
The taste of the modern public has been, as of late, for dark and “gritty” fiction. Whether or not said fiction actually is is a subject for someone else’s post, but consider: The Hunger Games. Game of Thrones. The Malazan Book of the Fallen. The Witcher. Actually, I could rattle off a whole list of popular, dark, fiction, and invariably most of them are going to contain rape.
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