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Have you ever read a book that got you so jazzed to write your own work that you just couldn’t contain yourself? That’s how I feel right now. I’m on the second book in The Seven Relams series by Cinda Williams Chima and it’s so absolutely amazing and so inspiring that I want to write and read at the same time.
The only real problem I’ve ever had with high fantasy was the detachment I felt to the world I was reading. It’s hard to get engrossed in a story when your eyes are crossing because you’re trying to figure out context for new world things. One book I read used a non-standard system of measurement but never gave any context to what the measurement actually was. So when it was said, “it was X ‘measurements’ away,” it just ended and I spent the rest of the book trying to figure out how far away that something was. I shouldn’t be spending a whole book doing that.
I understand the need to develop a high fantasy world and to make it feel like a high fantasy world but really, if you have roses, call them roses. There’s no need to call them Budding Virla Blossoms when they look and smell exactly like roses, especially when you don’t give context for what the damn things are. Reference the Turkey City Lexicon for more information on that and much, much more.
So when I first read The Demon King, I felt the world was a little jilting and it took me about a chapter and a half to get settled into it but once I did, I was floored. You get the total feel of an entirely different world but at the same time it’s not so foreign or unreachable that you spend more time caring about what something is than what’s going on in the plot. I’m reading through the first manuscript of Diamond Crier now just to get pieces of my world back and I’m so glad I’m scraping about 99% of the plot itself. God, it sucked. But I think my high fantasy world was just a little too familiar. Chima struck an excellent balance between high fantasy and familiar reality.
When I get back to actually writing my manuscript, I so hope I can do it as good as her.
I’ve rewritten the first chapter of Diamond Crier and I love it. I finally love my Sabina, the action hits right there. It’s great, aside from the fact that it’s a first draft. But now I can’t carry on any further without re-reading the draft I trunked in order to remember my own world. At the end of the first chapter, Sabina’s entered the world. Thanks to my memory, I can’t remember a lot of it. And now I have 80,000 words of work to read to refresh my memory.
It’s funny because as I’m rereading this I’m looking at my writing and damn, I do write some good lines. If you remember (which you probably don’t but that’s okay, I barely do) I ended up with a major voice shift about 5 chapters or so into the original first draft. I felt that what I was writing originally was too showy, too uppity and not what I felt the story was about.
I’ve read through those those original original chapters already and I’ve just come upon the chapter where the shift happens and I have to say, it worked a hell of a lot better before the shift. It looks like I tried to insert this almost slapstick type of humor that just killed the story. Very strange. And it’s funny because I expected to cringe a lot reading this. I really wasn’t so much to start. I kind of liked what I was writing, I like the history that I wrote although the execution wasn’t too great. But it sure was a hell of a lot better than what it became and damn, am I cringing now.
Obviously I need a medium between the two. DC isn’t going to be like Earth Shatterer in that kind of snarky type of humor. While it’s not that I don’t like ES, I’m not in love with it. DC, if I end up nailing it, I’m going to love and it’s going to show. I’ve gotten nothing but form rejections with ES with no requests. I’m going to try one more tier of agents and if I get the same thing, it’s getting trunked. While I love me my snark, I don’t think sustaining it for a novel (or two) is really my strong suit. It feels like I’m still trying to find my footing in my own writing and while I’m close, I’m still not there yet. Hopefully I’ll find it with DC.
So does this make my third novel? My first was completing the original DC albeit trunking it 3/4 of the way through the first edit. But I finished it. The second was ES that’s on sub now. This DC I’m basically working on from scratch. The only basis I have are a few elements from the original world I created. Everything else is new. Because if this is my third, the third tends to be a lucky number for many a debut author. Pleasepleasepleaseplease.
I think so. The query that is. I think it just may be done. After four tries I think I got the right kind of advice (or my brain finally started listening and connected all the dots) and I was able to formulate it the way it needs to be. In reality, I could keep putting it up in Query Hell and someone will find something wrong with it every time I put it up. I need to draw a line and I think I just did. Fourth time’s a charm.
I’m also working on my synopsis which, after asking on AW if I should even write one, has already been rewritten once. Synopses aren’t too heavily critiqued in AW (they don’t have their own subsection so they get stuck in Queries and tend to get lost) so it’s hard to find something that does work. Like AW has a thread for successful queries but not for synopses. I could use Agent Kristin’s tutorial on how to write one but the standards for them vary from person to person. Bottom line is you want to sell your work. You need to strip your story down to its basic plot and give that from beginning to end only in a short story type of set-up, with more telling and little showing. Wholly contradictory to everything I’ve learned as a writer but it’s standard for synopsis writing. Fun.
Now I’m just waiting for some feedback on how to query one particular agent. When I went to my reading in San Francisco a couple years ago, I was offered representation by a reputable agent and after some discussion with her, we decided another one of her agents would work better since she reps YA and the one that offered doesn’t. I just don’t know how to send the query. Do I email the YA agent and CC the one that came directly to me? The other way around? What? After some fine tuning I might even be able to start getting some queries out on Monday.
Puke.
This Query Hell shit is killing me. This is why I put my foot down when it comes to editing stuff. I can take edits into consideration, make changes based on those edits, release it into the wild and it’ll still come back with more editing suggestions. At least this last time I posted ES’s query I knew it was too long and the people that commented on it said as much. So I chopped it down and I have something that’s more general but slightly specific (as if that isn’t confusing enough) and follows the basic plot line of the book. But I’m questioning whether to post it for a fourth time.
It’ll be a never-ending cycle that I won’t win. It just has to get to a point of good enough or where I really like it and not willing to make more changes. I’m digging the simplicity of my most recent incarnation. It still remains in Michael’s voice and gets the point across but does it need to be edited again? I don’t want to overlook something huge that I’m not seeing in my own work. At the same time I don’t want to be stuck in a vortex. I also don’t want to rush it out the door so I can just have a completed query.
Ugh. Editing. Fun times.
So the beginning will be totally unrecognizable.
So it’s now turned into a slight portal story. Just slight.
And Sabina totally doesn’t know that the DC world even exists because her parents escaped during the take-over and took her to ours, ending up in New York City in the Alphabet.
Yeah.
I had this beginning swimming around in my head for a few weeks now and I really like it. Originally she was a suburbanite with parents that totally acclimated to the suburban lifestyle but meh. This one . . .
The original usurping of the big guy (how bad is it that I have to consult my own notes to remember the world I created?) stays in, the Sickness is probably going to be eliminated altogether or at minimum grossly altered because the entire world would be destroyed if it stayed as it functions currently. At the usurping Sabina (now called Sabi) was very young (a year or two at most) and since he’s a diamond crier, her parents took her and ran. They end up in our world (haven’t figured out how yet), dead broke, homeless and destitute. Mata, Sabina’s younger sister, is born in our world not too long afterwards. Her parents end up with mediocre jobs and like in a crap apartment in Alphabet City. At least they’re not in Raydin.
Until it comes to get them. Surprise!
Sabina has personality! Yay! And not author-induced! Woohoo! I’m excited.
