Writing again, despite fatigue and lack of time!

I've been going nuts for months now with inspiration for new stories and ideas for the WiPs (mainly the third Raud Grima book, tentatively titled Masks in the Glow). And up until the winter break I just couldn't find the time or the energy, except for occasionally rereading already written passages of Masks and tinkering with them. Then over winter break we got me a new laptop (the kids smashed the old one) and I carved out two chunks of time for writing. Since then, I've managed to write several more times, mainly in the evenings while dinner's cooking and for a little while after. Historically evenings have never been my writing time. Too tired out by the day for any kind of good concentration. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

So I'm very slowly making progress on Masks, which may end up not being called Masks because it's looking like it's going to be upwards of 200K words and therefore will have to be split into two. If that's how it works out (I'm not sure because I devised a way to shortcut the story and I haven't decided whether I want to go that route or not) then probably the fourth and last book will get the Masks title and book three will have to go by something else.

This series is definitely shaking out to be weird in a lot of ways. First just going with the dystopian decopunk angle, which you don't run into very much. And certainly not often with the Fritz Lang inspiration so central. So there's that, to begin with. I mean from the start I've run into people who just scratch their heads at the whole concept of robots in an art deco city.

I chose from the beginning to challenge myself to write scenes that make me uncomfortable. I address one of my greatest fears in the book--the loss of a child--which probably doesn't weird anyone out. But I also pushed myself to write sex scenes, which is not something I'm generally comfortable with. And I wanted them to be real, with heat and in some cases disturbing elements. So yeah, that has certainly colored both The City Darkens and After the Fall and based on the few reviews I've gotten, people either appreciate what I was trying to do or are really put off by all the sex.

Then, in After the Fall, I switch narrators. I knew that was unconventional and would probably put people off. It's not like it's never been done before or anything, but it's a risky thing to do. I did it because I couldn't figure out what to do with Myadar. I wanted to keep talking about this city that's going through a revolution and there was no good reason for Myadar to get in the middle of that. At least, not right away. So I thought about what I wanted to talk about--I wanted to have the books progress a bit like the decades that comprise dieselpunk--City was the 1920s, Fall was the 1930s (sort of--certainly with a look towards what was happening in China at the time), and Masks would be the 40s. In no way am I trying to tell a history of America or even Earth, though. I just want parts of the setting, the events, the things people do, to resonate, like, "Oh, I see what she's doing there!" Anyway, so Fall was going to be about survival, first and foremost. How does an ordinary person survive a cataclysm in her city? What would that survival look like? Who threatens it? I thought of my graduate professor of African history talking about the role of young men, packs of violent young men, in unstable environments. And since I was also reading about grimdark at the time, and the ways people were (perhaps) mishandling violence in fiction, particularly sexual violence, I wanted to try my hand at that, and see if I could pull it off in a way I could live with. And I allowed Ginna to embody my own struggle with the necessity of violence. To top it off, I believe that the second installment in a trilogy (which is what I intended this series to be) should end badly. So the result was a novel that's really not very satisfying to some readers.

And now, Masks will be different yet again. For one thing, it has four POVs. For another, so far, no sex. And in it I'm trying to resolve both my conflicted feelings about using violence in fiction and Ginna's conflicted feelings about using violence to win the war. I am also really focused on characters that are not inherently good (Ginna is, though). Plus my original idea was to go very dark and flirt with atompunk, and though I may still have an element of that (inspired, perhaps, by Akira), the aesthetics of light decopunk like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow are still really appealing to me. So I've revisited what one of the big threats will be and I've reimagined it, and it's probably going to strike people as even weirder than robots in a deco city. I guess we'll see.

Masks is already 100K words and even if I do the shortcut I mentioned, I'm probably looking at at least another 40K. So I'm leaning towards writing the long version, seeing how many words it is, and deciding based on that whether to split it.

If you were reading a series, would you rather that the last book be very long, or that what you thought would be the last book ends in a cliff hanger and you have to read yet another book to finally get the resolution?

Does it bother you when books in a series have different POVs?

Would you be frustrated if the first books had several sex scenes and the last had few to none?

What do you think of violence in fiction?

Wrangling Fictional Characters

I've begun to write the sequel to The City Darkens, and I won't say very much about that specifically, since it is one my rules never to talk about a story before it's finished. But what I will say is that I decided to go with a different narrator than Myadar. Ginna has lived most of her life in the Undergrunnsby--I felt like Myadar's story really only showed one perspective on the city, and that I needed to have the next story flip that and look at it from a completely different angle. So this has presented two unexpected challenges.

First, Ginna has a distinct voice, which is great, in a distinct dialect, which I can hear clearly in my head most of the time. At first, I had a real struggle because Ginna kept insisting on switching tenses and telling her story sometimes in present tense and sometimes in past tense. Eventually I figured out how to handle this: she'd tell the events of the story in past tense, and anything she considered to be a constant truth she'd tell in present tense. Now the only trouble I'm having is with some of her to-be verbs, which I can't seem to find a consistent way of conjugating. I'm going to have to study up on existing dialects. The nice thing about creating your own fantasy world is that you can take liberties when you invent a dialect. You're not required to represent how real people talk in a certain region of the real world. But you do have to be consistent.

The second unexpected challenge is that Ginna is such a strong personality right from the get-go. I feel like she's just using me to get her story out. (Stephen King attributed an idea to Native Americans--I don't think he was specific about the tribe and I don't remember where I read this--that stories stalk the writer until the writer is ready to tell them, or some such. It's like that.) Actually, a few times it's been like she slapped me upside the head and said, "Hey! What kind of ninny do you think I am? I'm doing this instead." And sometimes I don't really like what she does, but there's no way around it. She's going to do things that way, because that's who she is. For one thing she can be incredibly and remorselessly violent. Not all of the time, but basically she's got a lot of rage from some of the experiences she's been through. I've written before about violence, and how ambivalent I am about representing it in fiction. I look at George R. R. Martin's stories, which granted I've only experienced through the show, Game of Thrones, and I think he goes too far. Don't get me wrong, I'm addicted to the show. But I really could do without some of the images it has put in my head, and it disturbs me when people come to the defense of its violence with reasons like, "It's historically accurate." Westeros doesn't exist, people. It never did. There can be no historical accuracy there. And if you're referring to a depiction of medieval England, let me tell you that the ways in which GoT is historically inaccurate far outweigh the ways in which is may be accurate--for instance, there's no Catholic Church, and you really can't talk about the history of England without including the Catholic Church.

Not exactly a Catholic priest.

Okay, end history-nerd side rant.

Anyway, the point I was actually trying to get to is that since I've begun dealing with Ginna, it's caused me to wonder if GRRM might actually not have really planned to be quite so brutal when he started writing. Maybe his characters slapped him upside the head and said, "HEY. WE ARE JUST THAT EVIL." Or something. Then again, one of the people I watch GoT with claims that when GRRM was a kid, he had pet turtles, and used to write stories about the turtles torturing each other and plotting to murder each other. So quite possibly he's just that much of a sadist. Who knows?

I'm actually not complaining about Ginna's domination over the story. It's quite wonderful when characters take over and the story grows from them. I'm a pantser, though. I can see how if you had a whole outline written, characters slapping you upside the head and demanding that the story go in a direction you never intended might become a problem. You'd get quite lost without your map.

Have you ever experienced a character running loose from your control? What was that like for you? Did you enjoy it, or were they a royal pain in the ass? How did that story turn out?

Grimdark and Violence in Fantasy

Recently I was checking my stats on this blog and saw that someone came here after they did a search for "sophia grimdark martin." Which isn't quite as weird as it sounds, since about a month ago, I think, I went on a minor Twitter monologue about grimdark, and so it would seem that someone out there noticed.

What, you ask, is grimdark?

It's term, apparently originating from the description of a tabletop RPG, Warhammer 40K, set in a future which is "grim" and "dark," and in which everything is war.* I read a very interesting article discussing grimdark in fantasy here, but I wanted to go into a bit myself, because of my ambivalence about it.

As I understand it, grimdark has become a term for dark fantasy that takes violence to a really gruesome level. One of the articles I read about it (might be the one above, I'm not sure) talked about how the genre of horror basically died in the 90s, and was reborn as "dark fantasy." So what has become common, apparently, is for fantasy novels to show ever-more graphic depictions of violence, especially sexual assault and torture. This starts, more or less, with George R. R. Martin's series that I've only experienced as the TV show Game of Thrones (love it, am hooked, often can't take the violence). But from what I read, GRRM is a beginner compared to some of the grimdark stuff that's come out since. And it has also, apparently, become the expectation that fantasy authors write this sort of violence in their novels, and each one seeks to top the one before.

I actually don't know about this first hand, I'm just summarizing the articles I read.

I initially started reading about the grimdark trend because I was worried The City Darkens might be grimdark, and I'd just read about it briefly in an article on TVtropes.org which made it sound like it was generally viewed as a bad thing. However, despite the fact that these articles were critical of it, the authors of these articles were reacting to the trend and its popularity. Apparently, a lot of people like grimdark fiction.

As an aside, The City Darkens isn't grimdark. Not by a longshot, from what I can tell. Yes, there's violence in it. Just not nearly that level of violence. To quote the same article I linked above, "Ringil [in Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains] remembers being gang-raped at a boys’ private school, where all the kids take turns gang-raping each other as part of being hazed." This sort of thing is never going to happen in my books. There's a couple of reasons for that, which I'll get into.

1) I don't read novels with this level of violence, and if a novel contains a sexual assault, it had better be essential to the plot. Even Mélusine, which I reviewed here, and gave five stars to on Goodreads, has a sexual assault scene early on that I could have happily done without. When I don't like reading something, the likelihood of my writing it is very, very low. I have a similar thing with harming animals in fiction. I don't like it as a plot device. I think it's manipulative, because as they've pointed out (here and even better, here) on TVtropes, people get way more upset about an animal or child getting hurt or killed than adult humans. I also cannot stand it if the harming of an animal is in any way supposed to be funny or entertaining. Animals are not here to amuse us with their suffering, folks. The world is hard enough on them already without that.

2) I have a really hard time writing violence of any kind, because ever since I became a mom, all my emotional armor has become swiss cheese. I kid you not. I was never a fan of violence, you understand. I totally freaked my students out the first year I taught American history when I had to ask one of them to take over reading a letter by Michele de Cuneo because I burst into tears (it, too, involves sexual assault). But having my son just destroyed any level of desensitization I formerly built up. I cannot watch suffering dispassionately, and when I write it... yeesh. It's like I'm pulling out my own nails. Which doesn't mean I won't do it. As I mentioned, The City Darkens has violence, and I believe it's important to convey the consequences of things like war, so the violence is, in my opinion at least, fairly realistic. The big difference is, I don't slather on the details.

In fact, I can't imagine writing a story without violence. This is where my ambivalence comes in. I've tried, folks. Remember the plot-bunnies I mentioned about an Edwardian romance? I thought writing romance might be a good idea for me, so I could avoid violence. Well, it doesn't work for me. I love reading Edwardian romance, but when it comes to writing, it seems I cannot escape violence. In Broken Ones, there's domestic violence. In my Veronica series, there are murders and arson and plane crashes and other violent situations. And in The City Darkens there's still more violence.

I like to say I write to preserve my sanity, and that is true. I do go through seasons where I don't write, and that's okay, but when I'm in a writing phase, not writing very quickly makes me antsy, irritable... it makes PMS and pregnancy hormones look like a joke, people. While I often enjoy writing most when it's acting as an escape for me, it's also a form of therapy, in reality. There's a part of Myadar's Snare that is incredibly painful for me to write and to reread. Whenever I revise it, I just hate that part. It's because I gave myself this challenge, to write one of my greatest fears. So rereading it means going through that fear again. Ultimately, I hope it makes the story more authentic, but man. So unfun.

It brings to mind two (very different) authors. Nalo Hopkinson used to participate on a feminist sci fi and fantasy listserv I belonged to for a while. We read Brown Girl in the Ring for a book of the month. There's a scene where a character gets flayed alive, and someone on the listserv talked about how awful it was to read. Nalo Hopskinson responded that it also had been incredibly hard to write, which surprised the woman who had posted originally. She said she had never thought about whether a scene had been hard for an author to write. That really stuck with me, because I was already writing back then, but I hadn't really ever written anything that was that hard for me. In fact, I'd say that the first time I truly did that was in Myadar's Snare. It happens again later in The City Darkens, too. But up until then, I did write scenes that were hard scenes, but they were almost always fueled by anger, not tapping into fear or pain so much. Certainly not recent, raw pain or the way I imagine I would feel if something I am currently very afraid of would come to pass. I'd be more likely to draw on old fears or old pain, if that makes sense.

The other author is Stephen King. I'm not sure where I read this; probably Danse Macabre because I'm pretty sure it predated On Writing. He said he didn't really have a choice about what he wrote. He used a metaphor, which I'll paraphrase, but just be aware I'm probably getting it wrong... He said writing is like a strainer in your mind. All this muck passes through it, and some stuff says in it, and that's what you write about. He said that if he had a choice, he'd write like Amy Tan.

So violence is part of the muck in my strainer, I guess. And as such, I can't out-and-out condemn grimdark, because it's just taking that same muck to a much more extreme level, after all. I think, and this was pointed out in some of the articles that I read, that the real problem with grimdark is that it's violence for violence's sake a lot of the time, and that just seems like someone needs a better editor. Violence in novels and any other fiction medium really needs to have a purpose. It's like my issues with animal harm in fiction. That can really be applied more broadly to all violence. Violence can be used in a really cheaply manipulative way, and if that's why it's there, it's no bueno. Violence should exist in stories only when its absence would make a story impossible to tell.

How about you, do you have "muck" in your "strainer" that you have ambivalent feelings about? Have you pushed yourself to write something that is unpleasant for you to reread?
How do you feel about violence in fiction?

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*The hashtag #grimdark apparently has some sort of My Little Pony connection I find... disturbing.