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WriYe and Giving Up

Howdy howdy, squiders. Let’s continue with our catch-up, shall we?

July’s prompt is: When to give up on a novel/story. Do you ever?

The short answer is: yes. Yes, I do.

But I really, really don’t like to.

Since I started writing seriously in 2006, I have started many, many stories of varying types. Short stories, novels, novellas. One musical that really never made it anywhere. A couple of serial stories. (Speaking of which, Part 3 of Across Worlds with You went live yesterday.) One screenplay. A couple of children’s books. A whole series of nonfiction books.

Anyway, you get the point.

I tend to write short stories in a single sitting, but I normally outline the story in a different session before I start writing. If I can’t get the outline to work, I don’t write it. I guess that’s true across the board, actually. It’s very telling if you can’t get the basic shape of the story.

Not to say that having a complete outline will save you, in the end. In most cases, I can get to the end of a draft if I’ve outlined (and is partially why I outline, after too many stories where I had to pivot in the middle because I didn’t think things through). But not always. If you guys remember, I spent most of…2020? on that changeling novel that ended up not working at all. That was really the first time that my process had failed me, where I couldn’t get the story to fit what it needed to be.

Writing can be awful, tedious, frustrating, and depressing. (Not always! I’ve had drafts that I floated through, easy as pie.) That doesn’t necessarily mean there is something wrong with the story itself. Sometimes you can’t make time, or can’t focus, or any number of things that don’t have anything to do with a story’s viability. And sometimes a story isn’t working for you personally, not because anything is wrong with it in general.

(My mother asked me to ghostwrite a middle grade historical mystery for her, once, and I couldn’t get through it. I am not a fan of historical fiction and it turns out that no amount of money is worth it to me to write something that I dislike. Plus I didn’t–and still don’t–have experience with MG or historical fiction.)

I think over time you gain an instinct as to whether something is wrong with the story or with your process (or life generally getting in the way). I suspect all stories are ultimately fixable. But are you willing to put in the time? The effort? Is it worth it to you to fight with it to make it work?

That varies person to person and story to story. And it’s okay if the answer is no.

Probably won’t see you until next week, squiders. Happy August!

Better than the Book: Good Omens

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I don’t necessarily like a lot of Neil Gaiman’s novels. They’re excellent on worldbuilding and characters but not always the best on, well, plot. But I do like Good Omens. It’s funny, it’s witty, and it’s clever. What is not to love? An angel and a demon work together to avoid the apocalypse.

(It’s also what got me into the Discworld novels, which I am very slowly working through and enjoy quite a bit.)

When Amazon said they were going to make a miniseries of Good Omens, and that they’d secured Neil Gaiman to do the screenplay, it seemed the best possible outcome. A miniseries isn’t a movie–you can fit a lot more into it, so it’s closer to the book. And it had excellent casting with David Tennant and Michael Sheen.

If you haven’t seen the miniseries, you really should, by the way.

And I would say that the miniseries is better than the book. If you read the book, Aziraphale and Crowley are present throughout, but they’re less fleshed out, and they’re not necessarily the most…useful characters. They kind of bumble through the whole book.

The miniseries really allowed the characters and worldbuilding to flourish. Heaven and Hell are such separate and distinct aesthetics, and they make perfect sense, and, without changing the plot too much, Crowley and Aziraphale have much more agency and really step into the parts they should have had all along.

(Also, there’s a second season coming out TOMORROW. Ask me how many times I’ve watched the trailer. I’m so very excited. It looks amazing. I was a little hesitant when I heard they were going to do a second season, but I guess it’s based off of notes from a potential sequel that never got written.)

Basically, they took the book, and somehow made it even better. It truly is amazing.

Thoughts, squiders? Excited for Good Omens season 2?

WriYe and the Creative Well

Onto June’s prompt! Moving right along. Be caught up in no time at all.

June’s prompt: Non-writing hobbies that refill your creative well.

At least this one is self explanatory!

I definitely agree with having hobbies outside of writing, both creative and non-creative ones. Letting your brain focus on other things actually makes it easier to come up with solutions to problems or other issues you might run into while writing. I think we’ve probably all come up across an issue where we feel like we’re just banging our heads against it, getting nothing accomplished.

Doing something else is often the answer.

So, my hobbies.

I like to consume other media when I hit a bit of a spot. Video games, movies, TV shows, books. (Especially books.) Sometimes I’ll look at craft–how the plot is crafted, how they’re dealing with specific aspects of storytelling–but a lot of times I just consume. I tend to think about stories after I consume them, analyzing them and playing out other possibilities in my head.

One thing leads to another, the ol’ brain gears get some lubricant, and off we go.

Physical activities are also helpful–going for a walk, especially by myself, exercising, sitting and slowly eating or drinking something, etc.

Other creative things can also be useful. Traditionally I’ve done sewing (I used to do a lot of cosplay) which can be kind of repetitive and mindless in places. Nowadays I mostly draw, as you can take that anywhere with you without a lot of extra supplies. Requires a bit more concentration, but it still helps.

Well, squiders, what helps you when you get stuck? Or when you need to replenish your motivation?

Better than the Book: The Last Unicorn

Good morning, squiders! This week, in our continuing series, we’re looking at the Last Unicorn. If you’re unfamiliar with the book or the movie, the book was written by Peter S. Beagle and published in 1968, and the movie came out in 1982 and is TERRIFYING.

Seriously, what were children’s movies in the ’80s. No wonder we all grew up the way we did.

My grandmother owned the Last Unicorn on VHS, and every so often, I could convince my sister/cousins to dig it out and watch it at family events. The movie is classic Rankin/Bass (think the animated ’70s version of the Hobbit) and the Red Bull was (and is, we recently rewatched the movie) unnecessarily scary. I wasn’t ever a horse child, but this movie did get me onto the unicorn train.

(There was a children’s book series called The Secret of the Unicorn Queen that I was super into.)

The movie is definitely worth a watch if you’ve never seen it, and it’s got some pretty impressive actors on it for being from the era before A-listers were the only people who could voice an animated feature. And the music is really great.

Like Jurassic Park, except even more so, I saw the movie before reading the book. I think I was…five or six when I first saw the Last Unicorn, and I probably didn’t hunt down the book until my late teens or early 20s.

But unlike Jurassic Park, I wouldn’t say that there’s a clear winner between the movie and the book in my eyes. The book is also really good! There are aspects of it that I do like better than the movie version (character personality stuff, the way some things are explained). But there are also things that are better in the movie (again, some character personalities, some other plot points, the Red Bull).

Thoughts on the Last Unicorn, squiders? Thoughts on ’80s kids’ movies?

WriYe and Genre

Still playing catch-up, squiders! We’re doing May this week.

May’s prompt: What genre scares you the most?

So much interpretation on the prompts this year. Oh well! This one I’m going to say means what genre scares you the most to write. Like, what sounds like the hardest.

There are many genres that I don’t have any interest in writing. They’re not necessarily “scary” per se, just not interesting.

But ones that are actually scary…hmmm.

Romance is scary on some levels. I always worry that it’s coming across as silly, or that I’m not properly explaining things in a realistic manner. I mean, I’ve never had complaints, but maybe it’s only a matter of time.

Mystery is scary. I love mysteries, but they seem very hard to write. You’ve got to have enough possibilities in play that your reader can’t predict what’s going to happen, and you’ve got to know exactly how everything went down without accidentally foreshadowing things too early.

I wrote a cozy mystery a few years ago for Nanowrimo, if you’ll remember. I was pretty pleased with it–a good first try, in my opinion–but it definitely has issues. A little light in the second half on twists and whatnot. I’d love to fix it (this goes back to last week, when in my perfect year I’d be getting stories revised faster) but it’s a couple stories back on the queue.

Hmmm. Not sure anything else I write or would like to write is “scary,” in my mind.

Is that arrogant? Maybe. But part of writing is because it’s fun, and to explore things, and to try new things. If it’s scary–too scary–then what’s the point?

Better than the Book: Jurassic Park

Hey-ho, squiders! This is the start of a maybe-ongoing series. The saying goes that the book is better than the movie, but have you ever come across a story where the opposite is true? Where you liked the movie (or TV show) better than the book?

I’m sure this is all subjective, so feel free to argue with me if you want!

I read a lot of Michael Crichton when I was a teenager. Sphere, Congo, Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Lost World. Big fan.

But I love Jurassic Park the movie more than I liked the book. (The Lost World movie is a mess.)

Part of this might be because I read the book after I saw the movie.

I was 10 when the movie came out, and it was the first PG-13 movie I ever saw. And, squiders, I loved it. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, honestly. I am anxiously awaiting the time when the small, mobile ones will be old enough to watch it with me. (The bigger, mobile one is older than I am when I saw it, but he doesn’t want to. In retrospect I think it’s because when he was 2 we went to a museum with a full-sized animatronic t-rex and that was a bit traumatic.)

(The T-Rex was a surprise for us all.)

I think I may have searched out Michael Crichton’s books after the movie, so it was a while before I got to reading Jurassic Park the book.

Often the complaints about books made into movies is the amount of things that are left out–side plots, characters, entire plot points, etc., because in almost all cases it’s impossible to adapt everything from a book into a 2- or 3-hour movie. In many cases I’ve also found that characters’ personalities are changed as well, which tends to really bother me.

All those things are true here. There’s characters in the book that don’t carry over to the movie, and the ones that do are different, sometimes in arbitrary ways. Different people get eaten by dinosaurs. John Hammond’s vision is completely different, and there’s the danger of the dinosaurs escaping the island. By all rights, I should have been annoyed by the discrepancy.

(That being said, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to be more tolerant of changes in story between different mediums. A story can’t–and shouldn’t–be the same in different formats, but needs to be adapted to work in that particular form. For example, I’ve read Pillars of the Earth, watched the miniseries, and played the video game. All of them are different, but still good in their own form. And I once took a class on Coursera where each week we’d watch part of Fellowship of the Ring, read the same section in the book, and play that area in Lord of the Rings: Online. It’s actually quite fascinating.)

(Arguably where the issues arrive is when changes are made that change the core story.)

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I do truly believe that whatever form you’re first exposed to for a story (assuming you liked it) tends to be your “base” for that story. I saw the movie first, so I like it better. Maybe if I had read the book first, I’d be chalking Jurassic Park up as another example of the book being better than the movie.

(Some stories, however, seem to work great in a number of forms with a number of changes. I don’t know how many variations on the Wizard of Oz I’ve consumed over the years, but I pretty much like all of them.)

(I don’t make the rules.)

What do you think, squiders? Thoughts on Jurassic Park specifically? Thoughts on whether seeing a movie first changes your perception?

WriYe and Writing Years

Hey-o, squiders, I realized I haven’t done the WriYe blog prompts. Since March, actually. Whoops! Let’s fix that.

April’s prompt: Your best writing year ever!

I’m going to interpret this to mean “if you could have your best writing year ever, what would that look like?”

(Interesting that this was April’s prompt. Seems like a January prompt, almost, like you could manifest your best year if you put it into words.)

If I had to describe my best year ever….hmmm.

I would be super productive, first of all. Get through all the stories that have needed revising that I never seem to get to. Polish everything that needs polishing. I’d love to finally get some of the stories that seem to be lingering finally out the door and into the world.

I’m actually having a pretty good year all things considered (writing wise, not natural disaster wise). The feedback I’ve been getting the last few months has been super helpful, and I’m actually making decent progress. Not as quickly as I would like–the revision of Book 1 is at about 20K, out of somewhere between 100K and 120K–but arguably the feedback is worth the slowdown in output. Better to go slow and get it right, than rush through and have to do it again.

But yes–more things done, more things out into the world. That would be amazing.

What would be your best year, squiders?

Summer Media Thoughts

I’m starting to feel like a broken record (the revision is going well! I’m getting so much great feedback! Some natural disaster came along and tried to kill me!) so let’s talk about something else for a minute.

Reading

I’m at 23 books for the year, which is 2-3 books behind where I should be to reach my 50 book goal. I’m currently reading Havenfall by Sara Holland which is YA fantasy and takes place in Colorado. I love books that take place in Colorado! But not really. Most of them feel like they’ve been written by someone who has never even stepped foot in the state. That’s not really a issue here since this is high/portal fantasy and as such is not meant to be representative of the actual state. So far so good, about halfway through.

Movies

The smaller, mobile one and I have been watching through the kid-appropriate Studio Ghibli films recently. We watched Ponyo (still a little confused about the mechanics at the end of the movie, but overall cute), The Secret World of Arrietty (based on The Borrowers which I’ve never read and probably should), and Spirited Away (one of my very favorites). She tried to get the whole family to watch Totoro but we ended up watching Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, which was cute and a little weird. Perfect kid movie from that angle, actually.

On the adult front, we don’t get to watch a lot of adult-aimed movies at the moment (the small, mobile ones don’t go to bed until 9-ish and then we have to watch them over a couple of nights, and most of the time we’re just too tired). But we did watch Tenet last night. Man, Christopher Nolan likes his confusing scifi movies, doesn’t he? Still pondering the movie, suspect some of the plot is held together looser than at first glance. But it had lots of heist elements, and I love a good heist. Bit annoyed at the mother character, who was very much a stereotypical mother (“nothing matters but my child!”) though the actress did well with what she was given.

TV/Streaming

First of all, can I say that I am pissed off about this trend of services deleting shows/movies off to write them off as a loss? This is stupid. After many people put their time and love and energy and creativity into a project, just to axe it? And more annoyingly, these are shows that are doing well, because they make more money back if a show is going to turn a profit when they write them off.

It was bad enough when Disney did it (The Mysterious Benedict Society deserved their third season, and now you can’t watch it at all, and it was so delightfully quirky) but now Paramount has cancelled and deleted Star Trek: Prodigy (which I talked about on here earlier). As a life-long Trekkie, making a Star Trek series unwatchable is a cardinal offense, but I don’t really know what there is to be done about it. I’m just sad and frustrated.

In actual watching, we’ve been watching Muppets Mayhem on Disney+. I love the Muppets a lot, and this show is hitting a lot of the boxes on what I like about them. It’s silly but has heart, and it’s nice to focus on the Electric Mayhem since they’ve been around forever without really getting any notice. We ended up buying the vinyl that went along with the show (in transparent purple) and it’s actually really good.

What have you guys been consuming? Anything amazing I should know about?

See you next week!

The World Keeps on Turning

It’s been an interesting week, Squiders. As I said last week, we were hit by a tornado, which is, in itself, interesting, since I don’t live in a place that traditionally gets tornadoes. I mean, we had tornado drills and everything as a kid, and some of the surrounding towns do have tornado sirens, though I’ve only heard them used as tests.

I looked it up, and we’ve only gotten 15 tornadoes in the last seventy years. So.

We’re okay, our house is okay. We did lose seven trees, all except one of which were at least thirty years old and about 50 feet tall. Four of them fell over in the storm, and the other three were so badly damaged they’ll have to come down. (One of them already has.)

We’re all still cleaning up, of course. The chainsaws start bright and early, and sometimes you can’t get through the neighborhood because it’s so clogged up with trucks. One of the news stations has picked our street as their street for their coverage, so every couple of days a new video comes out that includes my neighbors. Apparently FEMA is supposed to come by some time and take a look as well.

Here’s what our view from our patio was pre-tornado:

(It’s from autumn, obviously, but I don’t normally take pictures that direction so that’s what I’ve got.)

And here’s the same view now:

My poor trees. I miss them.

Enough of that. The world doesn’t stop just because you go through something traumatic, unfortunately. And dwelling doesn’t really help either.

I did end up having to edit and re-submit Chapter 3 for the critique marathon this week, and though I was annoyed at first, I think it’s for the best. The new chapter is MUCH stronger which is only going to mean good things in the long run. And my in-person critique group on Sunday got Chapters 1 and 2, revised from the critique marathon comments. That also went really well. Getting lots of good feedback and, even better, validation.

This is how the critique process is supposed to work. I’ve been more productive lately since…I don’t remember when.

Some stories for you guys to read:

My flash story “Coming Home” was published by Wyldblood Press today!

Tomorrow, the second part of “Across Worlds with You” comes out over at Turtleduck Press. Part 1 is here, and part 2 will be here (won’t work before midday on Sat, July 1).

See you next week! Stay safe!