Blog – Kit Campbell Books

More Broken Mirrors, and Other Musings

Howdy, squiders, did you miss me? I wasn’t gone, I’ve just been sitting on this post for two days.

Oh, yeah.

June books: 6/9 (The Poison Season and The Productivity Project)

Can we read three books in the next three days? Maybe! I’m in the middle of four, so it’s not completely unreasonable (though I’m less than half way through all four, so).

I finished reading through the draft of Broken Mirrors that I’d found yesterday and oof. It’s kind of a mess. Kudos to me for putting it out into the world, I guess. The confidence of youth.

Anyway, now that we’ve looked at what Broken Mirrors is, it’s time to brainstorm what it could be. I don’t think we need to keep much if any of the original plot, and hence I find myself at a crossroad.

The original idea for BM was a witch and a princess who were best friends. (In one of my writing communities at the time, there was a user with the name princesswitch, and that’s where the spark came from.)

BM has a LOT of viewpoints (five, I think), which is more than any other novel I’ve ever written, and unfortunately a couple of those are only once or twice and mostly serve to infodump various plot points. I definitely don’t need to keep some of those (and arguably, maybe not even one of the characters, depending on where we land).

The problem now is, if I don’t keep the original plotline (and I don’t think I do, it’s very silly, and badly executed), I could do…whatever. Whatever I want.

The main character is Winnie, who I told you about on Tuesday, I believe, and her familiar Igor. Right now Kayleigh, the princess, is the other major viewpoint, but she is actually quite useless throughout the story. Kayleigh’s brother William serves as a third viewpoint, and then King Matthias (Kayleigh’s father) and Queen Gaea (the antagonist) also have a chapter here and there.

Winnie’s not going anywhere. I love Winnie.

BUT I could make William the second main viewpoint and focus on a romance subplot. Or I could keep the princess/witch best friend angle, keep Kayleigh as a second main viewpoint (but do some major character work on her), and stay closer to the original plotline as it exists today.

I’ve thought a bit about doing viewpoints for all three of them, but I can’t think of any examples where you have two viewpoints with a romance subplot plus a “third wheel” viewpoint. I’ve seen multiple viewpoint works where a single character out of however many is going through a romance, but you don’t normally get both sides at the same time (or everyone has some sort of romance arc going).

(If you know of examples, please let me know!)

I really don’t know which way I want to go. I did find the notes I made about a potential sequel, but the storyline in there is different than what I was remembering, so I don’t know how helpful they’re going to be. I may just need to go through my idea files and pick out things that seem appropriate, and then throw things at the wall to see what sticks.

Or, I could, I don’t know, go do something else. This is supposed to be just one of the things I’m poking while waiting for the World’s Edge feedback.

(I did do my quarterly RaTs on Thursday, and I finished my New Mexico sketch journal last night, so things are happening elsewhere. But not quickly.)

(Oh, and SkillShare is driving me up the wall again, so once again I find myself wondering if it’s worth it to continue creating content there instead of focusing on other things, or if I should pull the classes off SkillShare and put them somewhere else. YouTube maybe? I’m obviously not inspired to make video content on a regular basis, so maybe I should just give up on the whole thing. Retire the classes and my SkillShare account.)

(Or maybe I need to focus more on it, so it’s hitting the algorithms better, but that doesn’t sound like fun and I don’t know that I’m much motivated.)

(At least they didn’t delete the classes this time.)

Does anyone have any experience with SkillShare or online classes in general? Thoughts and/or tips?

Anyway. General plan is to keep on keeping on. Brainstorm where we can. Summer is a nightmare.

Hope you’re having a lovely weekend, squider!

Delving In

Evening, squiders. Last week, with your lovely help (it’s amazing what I can work through as I write things out here on the blog), I decided to leave off the World’s Edge revision until the critique marathon is over and use it like a beta reader, and then come back to the revision in August.

In the meantime, I made a list of things to do:

Outline at least 5 short stories that take place in the same world as the Trilogy and World’s Edge
Write said shorts
Finish the SkillShare class I started in October
Potentially start a new SkillShare class (or consider their new digital products and 1-on-1 options)
Catch up on my trip sketchbook
Outline a rewrite of Broken Mirrors
Outline the sequel to Drifting

And because it’s the hardest thing on this list, I promptly decided to work on Broken Mirrors.

We talked briefly about BM before I started the World’s Edge revision, as it is the only other YA fantasy project currently floating around in my backlog. I wrote BM a million years ago (like, 2006 or 2007) and I actually queried it back in the 2011-2012 time frame (with some requests) and entered some contests with it (which I think is why I stopped querying, because the contest feedback was pretty brutal).

It has a lot of issues, the biggest of which is that it’s supposed to be YA, but has the complexity and tone of a MG novel. Also, it just doesn’t make sense in some places. There’s incomplete worldbuilding, I wrote it before I started outlining so some things come out of nowhere, and things along those lines. Pacing issues out the wazoo. I’m reading back through it right now, and I’m five chapters in and have already found two chapters that are pacing disasters.

Basically, though, it’s the story of two best friends, a witch and a princess, who are not supposed to be friends at all. There are a lot of things I like about this story, though! Winnie, the witch, is one of my all-time favorite main characters (Kayleigh, the princess, is a tad annoying, though that is perhaps to be expected), and I love her familiar, Igor, who is a cockatiel. Why? Why not?

Also her Great Aunt Gertrude lives in a gingerbread house in the middle of the forest.

BM has a lot of nods to fairy tales (and also the Wizard of Oz, as one of Winnie’s relatives was melted), and I’m not sure I can maintain that if I move it toward more of a YA tone. For some reason, you don’t really get humorous/silly fantasy in the YA sphere. In the MG sphere, absolutely, and again in the adult sphere. Not sure why things for teenagers need to be so serious.

So there’s a lot of work to be done.

How do we keep the fairy tale references but tone them for YA?
How do we add complexity into the story so it’s appropriate for a YA audience (I planned a sequel, and I think I might be able to grab the majority of that and put it into this story instead, which will help)
The worldbuilding is piecemeal and doesn’t make sense, and finalizing that (why are the royal families tied to their lands? how are they? why do some people have magic and how does it work?) will be hugely beneficial toward not only the worldbuilding issues but the plot issues.

Right now I’m reading through the current draft (except I’m not actually sure it is, because I had to pull it out of my email) and making notes, and then the idea is to see if I can’t brainstorm some answers into place. And outline it.

But not write it. We cannot continue to switch novel projects every two months. That way lies madness, and nothing will ever get done.

Should we work on one of the easier projects first? Probably!

But will we?

Apparently not.

Hope your Tuesday is going well! Mine is weirdly chill.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Hey ho, squiders. I did sit down and do some thinking, and it doesn’t make sense to continue with the World’s Edge revision in its current state. So I’m going to treat the critique marathon (and my in-person critique group) like beta readers (and, to be fair, I never had anyone beta this story) and gather data, and start on a more in-depth revision in, say, August.

I’m frustrated with myself, but it doesn’t make sense to do a half-ass revision only to do a full revision later. So here we are.

But that does make two failed revision attempts for the year, which is. Well. I’m annoyed at myself and my poor planning.

That does mean that my writing time can be rerouted to something else for the next six-ish weeks (I mean, I still need to do my critiques for the marathon, but other than that), and I think I’m going to focus on my side goals. I’m not going to go into another revision for another project because that’s madness.

And my side goals haven’t really been getting done, so.

I may also outline a few new projects which we may or may not get to writing.

But let’s not talk about that anymore.

Let’s talk about…personalized license plates.

These are fairly common here in Colorado. Not sure about other states/countries, but I see at least a few each day, and they’re always a little distracting because most of them you have to decipher.

For example, yesterday I saw one that said “4E4EVER.” ??? And also “LITTLE1” on a decidedly midsized SUV. Both a mystery.

When I was 16-ish, my dad got me a car (he did not buy me a car, but he did drive to my grandmother’s house in Washington state to get her old car), and as part of that he bought me a new aftermarket stereo system with a CD drive (the original one had a cassette player) and a personalized plate, which I think was, like, $60 or something. Or maybe now they’re $60. I don’t know.

I was (and still am, to some extent) super into Star Trek as a kid/teenager, and I very much wanted a Star Trek license plate. Something like “NCC1701” or “WERBORG” or along those lines. My father hated all my ideas. We fought about this for weeks, and in the end, he put in a submission for what he wanted, which was “KITSKAR.”

Ew. I still hate it. The k for car. The putting of my name on my car, which is not necessarily safe when you are a teenage girl. The complete lack of anything clever about it.

And, squider, do you know what?

The plates never came.

And I don’t know if I just never told my dad, or what, but we never did anything about it. Which was great, because I would have hated those plates forever, and I really, really liked the car. It was an ancient Ford Escort that I affectionately named Bob (because it had the personality of a grouchy old man, and he hated my friend Eli, which is still funny to this day).

Bob, wherever you are, I hope you are still kicking ass and taking names.

Oh, and that stereo system my dad bought me? Shorted out the electrical systems in the car. I would carry a box of fuses around with me to replace them when they invariably blew, which was in shorter and shorter increments each time.

Poor Dad. 0 for 2.

Do you have personalized license plates where you live, squider? Any you particularly like? Able to help me interpret the ones I saw yesterday?

Flaily Flaily Flail

June Books: Still 4/9 (oh no)

Hey ho, squiders, how are you? It is a million degrees here and only getting hotter, god I hate summer and also climate change.

Still not making much progress on my revision, and feeling very wishy washy about the whole thing. I did sit and ponder for a bit this afternoon about why this might be, and I suspect it’s something like I really enjoyed it when I read through it, and then running it through the critique gauntlet has unleashed a whole bunch of issues I didn’t see, and now I don’t quite know what to do with myself.

And, I bet you, the reason why a whole bunch of issues I didn’t see is coming up is because I didn’t do my normal revision prep because I felt really good about its state.

(I went and looked at what revision prep I did, and it was basically my plot sentence and a list of problems I noted when reading, almost all of which are continuity errors.)

The revision prep is A Lot. I feel like, for Book 1, it took me almost six months to get through. It involves systematically going through all aspects of the story–characters, worldbuilding, items, theme, pacing–as well as looking at each individual scene and determining what its point is, if it’s important to the story, what the conflict is, etc.–and then re-outlining based on all the crap you’ve gone through and looked at.

It’s very thorough, and it takes a hot minute, but I don’t tend to need to do another revision after the fact (aside from line edits).

So, of course, it’s a large undertaking, and sometimes it can be very…overwhelming to get into. And I think, with starting the revision process with my scifi horror and finding myself not really feeling the story, the thought of going through it again (especially when it felt like the story was working!) was not appealing and so I just…didn’t.

But what do I do now? Is it worth it to continue doing what I’m doing when I’m getting mixed feedback from my in-person group and the critique marathon? If I stop I will probably miss the rest of the marathon, which is not ideal, but getting feedback on a draft that needs work may not be the best use of anyone’s time either.

I mean, arguably, continuing with the current draft will put additional eyes on the problems, which may mean that when I do the full revision it will be more complete.

But even by that logic, the revision I have been doing, which involves fixing continuity errors, cleaning up filtering and word overuse, and working on the pacing, is basically for naught. I should maybe just run the existing draft through the marathon and give up on the current rewrite.

And then I work on the revision prep while getting feedback on the first draft? But does that make sense? Some of the prep may change based on feedback.

So run the first draft through the critique marathon/critique group and…do something else?

Good grief.

At least the morning pages are fun.

How are you, squider? Getting things done in a less frustrating manner than some of us, I hope.

Morning Pages Twelve Days In (and More Floundering)

June books: 4/9

(The Ministry of Time and The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen)

It’s Friday, squiders. Unlike many people, I am not a Yay Weekend person; weekends tend to be stuffed full of activities and not terribly relaxing, so the approach of the weekend does not fill me with relief.

Alas.

This has been the first week both kids have been out of school for the summer and home (last week my oldest was at Sea Base and my youngest had a day camp) and it has been trying for all involved. That may be why we’re not getting anywhere on the revision, because I honestly haven’t had time to sit down and think about anything. Or think, in general.

Do flounders flounder? They’re weirdly flat.

Sorry, stray thought.

(You know what’s a really big flatfish? Halibut. They’re, like, freakishly large.)

(I saw one try to eat a diver at an aquarium last summer and now they haunt my nightmares.)

(I suspect halibut are filter feeders and can’t actually do any damage, but seeing an eight-foot fish lunge at a diver is still frightening.)

(Sorry. I suspect I have ADHD and that is part of all my problems in life.)

ANYWAY.

I took the kids to the coffee shop with me today, which turned out to be a terrible idea, because the oldest’s computers (yes, multiple) wouldn’t connect to the Internet which was A Problem that I had to deal with, and the youngest was playing a wedding design game and kept wanting my input.

Every so often I have to take the kids to the coffee shop with me in the hopes that they are finally old enough to work on their own while I work. We are not there yet. But it could happen at any point.

And then my laptop’s battery died, and I had gotten nothing done, so here we are. Not revising.

I did do my morning pages though. Not at the coffee shop, once I got home. At like 2 in the afternoon. In general the morning pages are great! I’m really enjoying the exercise of just writing for 10 minutes on whatever.

The morning part continues to be a misnomer. I think of the 12 days I’ve been working on them (I didn’t get them done on the 10th, which we shall just ignore), only 3 days have been first thing in the morning, which is kind of the point–to do them before anything else.

It’s a combo of things, from not being a morning person to trying to get everyone coordinated first thing and running out of time. Oftentimes I’m getting up and rushing out and about, and don’t have time to sit down and do anything, let alone write.

The logical thing would be to figure out a time when I can reliably do them, but I’m not sure that exists. So maybe just doing them whenever I get to them is the right option. Except, like Tuesday, that might mean that they occasionally get skipped. (I went to the Coldplay concert, so, you know, trade-offs.)

I would like to do them first thing. Start the day off on a good foot, tap into early morning creativity before the weight of the day catches up with you. But it may not be, and I don’t feel like they’re harder to do at other times. I actually really liked what I had this afternoon.

The experiment continues. I suppose I might get my life together and start doing them first thing consistently. Weirder things have happened.

Hope your week and projects are going well! See you next week!

Floundering

Books Read for June: 2/9

(The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 and Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old)

(Still in the middle of 3 books, and doing that thing where I’m reading a little bit of all of them as opposed to just reading one through. This is ill-advised.)

(Also I have a few other books out from the library and the urge to start one or both is unbearable but thus far we persevere.)

I have not gotten a lot done on my revision, Squiders.

I felt so good after my writing retreat! But the first person who did the critique marathon last week threw off my groove, and then I had my in-person critique on Sunday which also went…confusingly.

Like, the story is working for some people and not for others. About half and half.

And, of course, you can’t please everybody and you will always have people who aren’t jiving with what you’re doing, but it’s weird to have it be so even in the critique stage, because my experience has been that the critiquers tend to be more uniform in their feedback. Things are working, or they aren’t.

Like, with my in-person group, which is currently me and two other people, one of the guys loved the level of detail I went into in Chapter 4, but it was too deep for the other one.

Do I even it out to make it more attractive to the person who didn’t gel with the detail to the deterrent of the person who enjoyed it as is?

And questions along those lines. So far I’m running into this sort of issue with both Cpt 1 and Cpt 4, and I don’t know what to do about them because it’s hard to tell if they’re actually issues or not.

(The critique marathon has Cpt 4 this week, so maybe that will clarify at least that issue? Or not. Slim pickings on the critique marathon as well. Right now there’s only 3 of us and it’s normally between 5 and 8 people. So if those two people continue to be divided I continue to be confused.)

So part of me wants to go back and fix things, but I don’t have clear direction on what needs fixing, and part of me wants to continue ahead (I need Cpt 5 and 6 revised before next week) but it feels weird continuing forward when there’s potential changes to be made.

And so I am doing nothing.

One of the many books I’m in the middle of is a productivity book. I listened to the author on a podcast and liked what he was saying about work/life balance and thought I might give his book to my spouse, but for some reason I picked up his first book instead of the newest one, and reading it I see why his latest book is about work/life balance, because this other one is like a recipe on how to burn out. I think I’m continuing to read out of morbid curiosity.

But he mentions that it’s much easier to get things done if you know your next steps, and that’s where the process is breaking down for me. The next step isn’t clear. Do I go back and poke Cpt 1? Do I move on to Cpt 5? Do I give up on writing and turn to octopus husbandry?

Unclear.

See you Thursday, squiders, where I shall hopefully have made some progress somewhere.

Morning Pages Four Days In (Also Submission is a Drag and Comparison is the Theft of Joy)

Afternoon, squiders. I have written in all sorts of new places this week. (Well, done writing-adjacent things. Submitted queries. Wrote this and Tuesday’s blog posts. Did my critiques for the marathon. No actual writing.)

Right now I am at a library that I occasionally visited as a kid (it was the main branch of the library system my home library was in, so sometimes we had to travel afield) which is a bit weird, as I haven’t been here in decades, but it’s apparently five minutes from my office. There is something that looks suspiciously like microfiche or a card catalog in the back corner, and I am going to have to go look at it for my own curiosity here in a minute.

But I’ve also tried two new coffee shops. (Also near work, because my youngest is in camp around there and it doesn’t make sense to go home and then come back between when I get off and when camp gets out.) Generally I work at the same coffee shop, but I think I may actually work better in new places. Wonder why.

ANYWAY.

On Tuesday we talked about the idea of morning pages. We’re on day 4 of that, and we’ve already failed the “morning” part of the idea. Yesterday I did them at, like, 10 pm, because I’d slept extremely poorly the night before and didn’t get up early enough to do them before we had to leave. Today I think I was catching up on sleep, so again I didn’t get up early enough. (I did them here at the library.)

I’ve been working through the same scene for the past three days, which I also suspect is Not the Point, but also these are for me and I should do with them what I want, but I did want to, you know, experiment. Focus on specific things such as tone or mood. Maybe try some poetry because I’m awful at it unless it’s like, a limerick.

So I am annoyed that I am falling into my same shenanigans. But the month is still early, and on we persevere.

Speaking of persevering, God, submission can be a drag. Also critique. I thought I’d dodged my “why did I become a writer again?” depression when the retreat went so well, but I had two queries rejected within hours yesterday, and the one critique I got on the marathon thus far hated my first chapters even though my in-person group had liked them.

(I revised between the two, so now I’m wondering if I ruined something. Also a bad feeling. I sent the revised chapter back to the in-person group with the note that if they have the time/inclination could they please tell me if I changed something for the worse or if this is a subjective thing. We’re meeting on Sunday anyway.)

I wonder if it ever gets easier. I’ve been writing and submitting for a long time, so in general I don’t spiral about rejections, but every now and then they still hit hard. But I wonder if there’s a point where you’re successful enough that you can just brush it off all the time.

But on we go, writing our silly little worlds with our silly little characters. The writing itself is still fun, despite everything else.

I hope you have a lovely weekend, squider, and I’ll see you next week!

Writing Retreat Aftermath, Revision Thoughts, and Morning Pages

Happy Tuesday, squiders! I can’t believe it’s already June. Holy crapola.

(Also, I did my book tracker for the month this morning, and I need to read nine books this month to be on track, so that’s a problem.)

(I am in the middle of five, though, which is helping nothing.)

My retreat was great! None of the negative feelings I was worried about. I didn’t feel excluded socially (and was actually present for the beginning of the Lore, which was fun) and I strengthened some connections from last year and made some new friends.

I only went to one workshop, which was on setting (historically one of my weaker areas) but it was actually re-affirming, because I was already doing everything she recommended in World’s Edge.

Oh, and I got 13.5K words into the World’s Edge revision, which puts me about halfway through Chapter 4.

(Chapter 4 is more of a mess than I’d originally noted. Holly Lisle had a metaphor she used in one of her classes. Something like, as a writer, you need to do an elephant’s worth of research, but when you write you only put in a berry’s worth at a time. Because readers can’t eat an elephant, but they can eat berries. Or something more eloquent than that.

Anyway, Chapter 4 is definitely more on the elephant side. There’s a section at the end that I think has to come out–the MC never uses what she learns again, and it’s mostly an excuse to get her in a particular place, but she’s in said place earlier in the chapter. So I’ve got to move the plot important stuff to the earlier time and cut the end.

Also it’s a mess in terms of character movement. I’ve mentioned before that the captain’s cabin keeps moving between two decks in the original draft, and there’s a whole lot of movement in Cpt 4 that doesn’t make sense if the captain’s cabin goes into the right spot. I may have to draw out the new movement so I can make sure it makes sense.)

So the revision is on! I did procrastinate it for a good 12 hours of the retreat (I got there about 3 pm on Thursday, and probably didn’t actually start writing until 10:30 am on Friday) during which I went for a walk, read part of a book, chatted with other people, but I think maybe I may have needed to, mentally, after birthdays and the kids being out of school and Memorial Day and everything that was shoved into last week. But I feel good about what I got done, and the critique marathon started yesterday, so I can get feedback almost immediately on whether or not things are working.

And I’ve got my in-person critique this weekend! I want to get Chapter 4 done today, and then I’ll send it and chapter 5 (and maybe 6, depending on length, but if I’m remembering correctly 6 is really long and needs to be broken up) along.

A new thing I’m trying for June is morning pages. I’ve run into morning pages a couple of times in various writing books and things along those lines, but they’ve always seemed a little silly because most of the sources I’ve seen present them more of a journaling exercise.

But I’m reading this book now called Writing Down the Bones (or something along those lines) because I felt like I should read a writing book at the writing retreat. It’s from 1986 or something, so it’s definitely one I inherited from my mother, probably in her latest culling of her writing books.

Anyway, she frames the morning pages as a writing exercise–like, actually write poems, or bits of story, or practice your wording or invoking tones and moods, things along those lines.

Sometimes, when I’m drafting, I can get thrown by my wording. Like, if my sentences feel too stilted, or if my sentence structure feels weird or repetitive. So I feel like maybe practicing actual writing, just 10 minutes each morning, will help when I’m writing new things.

So I’ve decided that every day for the month of June (well, 29 days of June and 1 of July, because I decided this at the retreat and I didn’t have a notebook with me) I’m going to give it a try. Go through the things I’ve saved in my idea file or on Pinterest or on the bingo card I made and have done nothing with, and just write for 10 minutes, and see what we end up with. And then we’ll reevaluate at the end of the 30 days and see how we felt about the whole thing.

We’re 2 for 2 thus far, so go us.

How was your weekend, squider? Any big plans for June?

Writing Retreat Ahoy

(Nautical joke, to go with World’s Edge’s setting.)

Well, squiders, I’m off to my writing retreat tomorrow. I am mostly excited–I got a ton done last year, and it was relaxing, and I did yoga and walked the labyrinth and read a couple of books as well.

But there was also an element of…hm, how to describe it. Like, when we first got there, everyone was super welcoming and excited and the energy was super great.

But throughout the weekend I started to feel left out? But, like, not really. Definitely in my own head. I didn’t connect with anyone that well, and I started to get that feeling I sometimes get at writing conferences, where it feels like I’m not getting anywhere that fast and everyone else is passing me by.

(Like, everyone was super nice, and I sat with different groups and chatted at meals, and I’ve run into a few people since last year’s retreat and they all said hi and chatted and so forth. So I am aware that this is a Me Problem.)

It would be nice if I had something substantial to show since last year, but querying is a slow and frustrating process, and with Turtleduck Press’s demise, I no longer have an outlet for shorter works on a more regular basis.

But I also realize that the retreat is for me, and the point is to get my head in the game and really focus, and to maybe do some networking, and no one is going to be judging me, no matter where I am in my journey.

But recognizing that something is a Me Problem and knowing the solution so I don’t get all weird and mope-y are two different things.

Something for me to figure out.

(Maybe I’ll make some friends this year, and that might alleviate some of this.)

Between now and then, however, is going to be a little manic. I’ve still got to pack, plus I need to go to work for a bit, and I’ve got to take care of some things for the family, and I’m not 100% sure how I’m stuffing everything in. It’s an hour drive and it starts at 1 in the afternoon.

Main project is to work on the World’s Edge revision, of course. The critique marathon starts on Monday, and I’ve got an in-person critique meeting in a week, so the hope is to get a good lead on those. It’s unlikely I’ll get through the whole story during the marathon, but I should be able to get halfway, assuming I’m not getting a lot of substantial comments.

I don’t really foresee myself working on anything else, but I shall bring stuff for short stories and whatnot in case inspiration strikes.

So! Excited with a hint of trepidation, but it shall be what it shall be, and fingers crossed that I got a lot done.

See you next week, squiders, with the aftermath.

The Same But Different

Hi squiders! Happy Friday! School is out, so I hope everyone is up for two months of chaos.

My youngest asked if she could give her teacher (the one who had me in for the outlining talk) a copy of Hidden Worlds, so I hunted one down from my MileHiCon stash. And then I was like, oh, hey, I haven’t read this in a hot minute, and I should do so.

(It’s 170 pages, and it took me about an hour and a half.)

Hidden Worlds is interesting – I wrote it for my friends in one of my writing communities, so there’s a lot of in-jokes and cameos, but also I was writing it serially whenever I felt like it, and I think I may have pantsed the whole thing. I cleaned it up and published it for said friends, and it’s just kind of random that it’s also been well-received by people unrelated to the Spork Room and that middle grade readers in general seem to really like it.

(There’s rather more sex-adjacent jokes than I remember. I think they probably generally go over the kids’ heads, but now I am wondering what my youngest’s teacher is going to think.)

(She thanked me for it today and said she’d probably start it tonight. So, uh, I guess we’ll know soon. Or I’ll never talk to her again and it will all be left to my imagination.)

It’s an interesting look into the heyday of the Spork Room, which is one of my first writing communities. Writing communities, I have found, have a shelf life of about 5 years during which they are super active, and then they kind of fade away. TSR’s was probably 2006-2012ish, and HW was written 2008, 2009ish, so it’s right in the middle. There are a lot of community aspects in the book that frankly I’d forgotten about.

(TSR still exists, but the message board where it really thrived is mostly dead. We have a Discord server now.)

But what really hit me was Hidden Worlds’ connection to World’s Edge.

Now, of course, I know the stories are connected. I just work on things long enough that sometimes that connection gets fuzzy. Or I forget cuz I’ve moved on.

Now, I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this story before, but I had this story idea about a pirate queen that wanted to raise her dead lover. And I could not get this story to do anything. So when I wrote HW (whose main character is a teenage writer working on her first story), I gave Margery (said MC) this story idea. HW’s setting is the Spork Room, except in the book it is a magical, physical location where writers from all over the world can come to work, and they have the Door, through which all stories come true, and the sporkers can go into the Door to see happen when they get stuck. So said pirate queen (named Cass) is also one of the main characters of the story, though the overall story has nothing really do with the dead lover plotline at all.

And then about five years later, the story finally solidified itself, resulting in World’s Edge.

When Cass first showed up in my re-read yesterday, it really threw me. Because she’s Rae (the captain in WE), and vice versa.

Now, in retrospect, this makes perfect sense. They are two versions of the same character. And if you look closer, they’re actually fairly different. But they have that same core.

Maybe I haven’t re-read Hidden Worlds since I wrote the first draft of World’s Edge. Who knows.

It added a weird dimension to my re-read, though. Rae is no longer a pirate queen, though she’s still captain, and she’s definitely less of a stereotype, though Cass evolves through the story as well. Cass has some problematic coping mechanisms that I unfortunately probably thought were funny at the time. They’re both physically similar.

But while they have the same genesis, I did develop them differently. Rae’s story is not the same as Cass’s, and their personalities are not the same. But every now and then, Cass would say or do something that felt very Rae.

It’s really my own fault, returning to a story idea I’d already used to some extent. But an interesting look at taking the same idea and doing two different things with it, and also looking at how my writing/plotting skills have evolved over the years.

Got the official notice for the start of the summer critique marathon, so I’m looking forward to delving into World’s Edge and hopefully making it the best version of itself.

Happy Memorial Day weekend to my American squiders, and happy weekend to everyone else!

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Books by Kit Campbell