November approacheth…

And that means NaNoWriMo.

You know, for years I avoided NaNoWriMo. I hated the idea, mostly, because people kept telling me to do it. I mean, damnit, I could write a book at my own pace and, by gods, I did. Ooh, the snark…

But last year, right after I left my job, I found myself with a healthy amount of time and decided well, what the hell? Did I have anything to lose? No, not really. I had never really ramped up the writing, personally, always just sort of let loose when I wanted, never wrote to a schedule, etc. I mean, part of that was due to my life. Since I graduated from high school I was either in college, graduate school, working full time, or having and raising a child (or a combination of quite a few of those).

Anyway, what I got out of NaNoWriMo certainly wasn’t that happy shiny feeling of having finished a book. When I started out I’d done that thrice (if you count a full rewrite of one book twice…) so it wasn’t that big of a deal. Plus, personally, 50K wasn’t going to ever be a complete book for me (she of the fantasy steampunk epics, etc.).

What did I get out of NaNoWriMo, then? And why am I doing it again? Mostly it taught me about my own work ethic and my creative process. It forced me to put aside time and appealed to my latent competitive side (which hasn’t seen much action since I was a kid and had a little sister to deal with). It isn’t a matter of winning; I knew I’d win hell or high water last year. I get a little obsessed about these things, I suppose. But when I looked back on it I realize that my output was really high when I just shut up and actually worked instead of a) surfed the internet b) played video games c) watched television or d) made up excuses.

So this year I’m adding another personal layer to NaNo. I’m enforcing a ban on all things “distraction” until I’ve completed my 1500 for the day. I’m even putting the kibosh on casual web surfing (I have to do some for my paid gigs because, let’s face it, I gotta work, too). But until that 1500 is done I can’t do anything else; any writing I do above and beyond that is just fine, of course.

I went back and forth a few times about the actual project, and finally decided to try my hand at a YA idea I had about a year or so ago about a young magician. Her name is Clary, and she lives in a Victorian-inspired city and… accidentally destroys the world when she disobeys her master’s orders. Or rather, she’s lazy and hears the orders wrong and ends up making the world go kablooey. She and her friends then embark on a bit of a world-skipping journey to put the pieces of her own world back together, using magic technology and their wits, all against the ticking of a clock they take with them. (It was either this, the sequel to The Aldersgate or a novella that was a steampunked version of The Song of Roland with chicks…)

At any rate, I will try to post progress here for those intrigued, and you can always friend me on NaNoWriMo if you wish (I’m Natania there)!

 

Coming out in Character

For Coming Out Day, 2009

Peter was “born” sometime in the second half of 1999, likely toward winter. I remember that first scene very vividly. I saw him wrapped in a brown cloak, his hands wrapped around a staff, a tuft of his sandy hair protruding from the hood. He was standing by enormous bronze gates, cast in the torchlight, keeping watch: yes, my first original protagonist of my first original (non-collaborative) novel, then titled, The Gatekeeper. He started out as the savior of the world and ended up its doombringer.

Yes, much about Peter has changed in ten years, and since then his world has become home to The Aldersgate and The Ward of the Rose (albeit a Great Collision and 400 years later). But as of last April, though I’d finished a (fourth… fifth?) draft of his book, Peter of Windbourne, I was not happy with it. Something was bubbling somewhere under the surface that I couldn’t root out, couldn’t figure out. And so, instead of flogging a dead horse of the manuscript, I abandoned his story for a while and moved forward in the timeline, beginning The Aldersgate.

I had honestly given up on Peter, thinking his story to be that dusty tome of a novel never meant to see the light of day. Except, as I started work on The Ward of the Rose, his story started once again to surface… in my dreams, in my writing. I realized there were questions I had left unanswered that directly related to the story of The Ward of the Rose and, to finish that book off, I had to revisit Peter again. Which meant another ground-up rewrite; which I’d done countless times already.

I won’t pretend that Peter’s story is particularly unusual. It’s heroic fantasy, though without Elves and Dwarves and “easy” magic. There are swords and prophecies, alliances and sworn enemies. It’s about family and friendship, belief and blasphemy, outside and inside. But, all that aside, the relationships in the book, the characters, are always what made the story move for me. And yet for all my writing and rewriting, there was a note off in the chord that took me years to decipher.

And then I realized part of the problem. Peter didn’t like girls at all.

I remember mulling about the house after I realized this. No, it wasn’t the first time a queer character made their way into my writing. But it was the first time that the sole-POV did. It made for some challenges but…

What struck me most clearly was how unimportant it seemed in relationship to everything else, and yet (paradoxically) how much of an impact it had on Peter as a character. As I rewrote again, the story arc didn’t change; Peter was still working in the same capacity as before. Except his motivations changed. His reasoning behind things changed. The intensity of his emotions had to change, the way he viewed other people. Once I had figured out his sexuality, a great deal more about him became more obvious to me, much of which I had abandoned in earlier drafts for a stock lead character.

The result is that the last draft of Peter of Windbourne has a very different leading man. Seeds of the same character exist, but Peter and I have a connection that even ten years of working through couldn’t account for. I finally have his entire motivation boiled down into one sentence: Peter wants love and knowledge. The shades of those two desires change throughout the course of the book, and at times, writing it has been far more emotionally draining than anything else to date. But it’s far better for it.

No, writing a gay character doesn’t give me any kind of real-world cred. It doesn’t mean I know what it’s like. But it gives me a window into a soul, however contrived, and I think it brings me closer to knowing, to imagining what it would be like. That’s the beauty of writing, isn’t it? Exploring what cannot be explored in this world. The story is more complete now that I have a full view of my character. Whether I wasn’t brave enough before to go with what was clearly there from the beginning, I don’t know. It’s a journey and, technically speaking, the longest writing journey I’ve ever been on (the island on which the story’s set technically appeared in ‘92).

But I’m glad for it. It’s the story as it should be, as it was meant to be.

Bright Star: The Beauty of Love, The Sensuality of Words

I don’t know what I was expecting in regards to Bright Star, though I suppose I thought it might irk me a bit, as biopics tend to do–especially when concerning authors. Far too often it seems directors need to sensationalize the stories, add sex and intrigue, muddle up the plot so the movie reads more like a Harlequin than a historical account. In some ways I’m one of the worst kinds of audience members to please in cases like this; I’ve read Andrew Motion’s Keats biography (upon which the film is based), I’ve read close to every Keats poem and a vast majority of his letters and criticism. I’m hard to please.

But from the opening credits–a marvelous close-up of Fanny sewing through linen–I was captivated. The performances are simply inspired, the set-design perfect. Instead of dolling up the late Georgian style, as so many films tend to do, Campion used the starkness and simplicity to draw attention to the characters and seasons. The energy between Abby Cornish (Fanny Brawne) and Ben Whishaw (Keats) practically vibrates on screen. Paul Schneider deserves credit, too, for his portrayal of Keats’s best friend, the poet Charles Armitage Brown, whose condescending and misogynist ways were enough to make me squirm in my seat and mutter darkly under my breath.

I was particularly struck by the way in which Campion allowed the conventions of the time period to add tension to the film, especially in regards to the relationships between women and men. Keats and Fanny play a dance of absolute sexual chemistry but without true release. Charles Brown is ever antagonizing Fanny because he believes she’s inconstant, flirty, and an all-around bad influence on Keats. When the three have a sort of showdown of the minds, Brown is so vicious to Fanny that she simply cannot say a word. Where Campion could have written her witty dialogue and a perfect comeback, she withdraws entirely. You can feel the pressure and panic in Fanny’s response, far more powerful than anything that could have been conveyed with words.

Yet words are truly the heart of the film. As Keats gets progressively more ill–he contracts tuberculosis, a disease that wiped out nearly his entire family–the poetry becomes just as important as Keats’s connection to Brawne. The language needs no help, as Keats, in my mind anyway, is likely one of the greatest poets to ever put words to paper. But to hear the lines recited as if for the first time, to be caught up in absolute magic of the poetry and thrill of creation, is something I’ve never seen demonstrated so well on film. As a writer and lover of poetry, those scenes alone were enough to bring tears to my eyes.

There are many more things I could say about this film–the costumes, the music, the use of light and dark–but in the end it is simply a fine film, likely the finest I’ve seen in the last five years. It kept me thinking far after I left the darkness of the movie theater, the words of Keats’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale” still flitting around my brain.