Some Things I Don’t Get About the Literary World

1. Erotica: It isn’t erotica itself as a genre that I don’t get. It’s popular, I can totally see why people read it. What I don’t get about erotica is why people are trying to defend it as something more than literary porn. It has a story? Okay. So does a lot of visual porn, like hentai, for one thing. Can we just get rid of this idea that erotica somehow has a higher status than porn simply because it’s the written word? There is no shame in reading erotica, but trying to elevate it above visual porn is something that I don’t get. I don’t read erotica, but I’ve seen enough bad blurbs (and god-awful covers) to know that it’s not something I want to read, and that it’s just sex, sex, story, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, story is in here somewhere, and more sex. Maybe I just don’t get it because I don’t read it. But I have no interest in reading it because I’m the type of reader that wants to take something meaningful away from a book. I don’t read purely for entertainment, which there is nothing wrong with doing.
2. New Adult: Okay, so I get its existence because college-aged kids don’t have any books for them. But I feel like all the genre is right now is sexed-up YA, which is what it’s currently being described as. Isn’t the genre something more, or is it really just all sexed-up YA romance books? Because that’s all I’m seeing in the genre so far. I see no one really trying to push the boundaries of NA and make it into something more meaningful. I suppose I could be that writer, but I’m not interested in writing college stories. They don’t appeal to me.
3. Writing males and females: Why do we worry so much about how to write male and female characters? Why don’t we just write people? Not all boys fit into the stereotypical boy box, just as not all girls fit into the stereotypical girl box. In my current book, the main character is a boy, but I am not worrying about how to write him as a boy. I am worrying about writing him as a person because he is an individual with his own personality. Like I don’t get it when people write reviews about boys that read like girls. What do girls even read like? For that matter, what do boys read like? The best writers tend to not differentiate, I think.
4. Brand: There is this obsession with branding authors so that authors inevitably force themselves into a box. There is nothing wrong with wanting to write only one genre, but it becomes problematic for someone like me who goes from paranormal romance to contemporary fantasy to someone who really does want to write just a contemporary book but is afraid to confuse her readers because people who stand by branding claim writing outside of genres will screw you over. Libba Bray did it. Why can’t I?
5. Literary fiction: I seriously don’t get what makes a book literary and what makes a book commercial. John Green is apparently a literary author but has commercial appeal. I’ll admit I want to make my current book have more literary elements, but the more I think about it, the more I don’t quite know what I mean. I have heard that literary books have more meaning than commercial, but I have read commercial books with just as much depth. So I really don’t get it.

 

Is there anything you don’t get? Anything you can help me get?

 

 

On Writing Despair (The Dancing Writer Edition)

I know I said I’d blog every other day, but since tomorrow’s post is planned and this one was too good to pass up, I just have to do it today. I already finished revising chapter thirteen of Stolentime during the time I’m usually doing my blogging, so it doesn’t hurt for me to blog today. I suppose I should revise another chapter, but I’m a one a day girl. My brain has to be fresh and ripe for the plucking to do any type of revising. Once it starts to slow down, those revisions are not going to be as superb as they would be with a fresh brain. I should also probably be editing for my client, but I’ll get to it after this.

Libba Bray, my favorite author of all time, wrote an intense blog post. Currently she is struggling with book #2 in her Diviners series–struggling really bad, like so bad it would make a newbie writer wonder why they’re not struggling as bad. But here’s her post: On Writing Despair (Juicebox Mix). At least skim her post. It’s a delicious little thing.

The gist of her post is that she writes by the seat of her pants, and because she does, it makes revising more difficult for her. But she also can’t outline, so she feels like she’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. She has tried outlining. She mentions she has ten different outlines for book #2, but she can’t complete any of them.

I think all of us can relate to Bray. All of us. Each and every one of us who has ever sat down and began writing some form of a story. When Stars Rise, without an outline, was a terror to write. Georgia McBride edited each chapter as I wrote, and I ran into a roadblock with chapter three. I had to re-write it FIVE times to eventually find the heart of it. But even then, things grew more difficult. I finished half the book, sent it off to McBride, and it came back with hardly any editing. You would think this would be a good thing, but the less ink, the more work. My story had completely de-railed, so there was nothing she could say about it because a de-railed story is a de-railed story. It lost its heart. It veered away, and I was left doubting myself and wondering if McBride was suddenly doubting me because she loved my project so much in the beginning. But I had a conversation with her, and she mentioned that I needed to outline.

So I did.

I had Megan Curd edit the half that I changed, and she had no content comments–just line edits.

But, unfortunately, my gut was still going all over the place. There was too much information packed into the first half of the book. While Curd may have been able to keep track of all that, that didn’t mean other readers could, so I knew I had to shelve When Stars Rise. I had to bring out When Stars Die to make all the information in the first half work.

I took McBride’s edits from the sequel and applied them to the first book. I outlined. I wrote. I didn’t struggle. I re-wrote. I outlined against. I re-did scenes. I added scenes. And thus was born When Stars Die.

But I have to outline. My mind can’t be cluttered. While my surroundings can be a cluttered mess with shoes nailed to the wall, I cannot have shoes nailed to the wall of my mind or else I’ll flip.

Currently the revisions for Stolentime are going smoothly. I’m having no problem deleting scenes or adding scenes or getting rid of characters or better developing them. In fact, while I have a revision outline, I’m still making changes to the outline. I’m combining some chapters, getting rid of others, adding things to scenes, deleting scenes, and coming up with more things as I progress. I love the story, but I don’t fall into that romantic trap of being IN LOVE with the story.

But everything could change by the time I get to line edits. I plan to spend a week away from Stolentime to let it bake before going back to it. Then I’ll do line edits, then I’ll have somebody read it purely for content before I tackle more line edits or proofreading. During the week I’m going to spend away from Stolentime, I am going to do revision outlines for When Stars Rise because the way it’s currently written doesn’t match up well with When Stars Die, so things are going to need to be changed yet again. The sequel may still bring me grief because sequels aren’t easy. They have to be better than the first, and that can be extremely hard to do.

Heck, right now, I’m struggling with trying to come up with new book ideas, because what am I going to do after the third book in the Stars trilogy? I don’t know, but I know in order to maintain a solid career, I’m going to have to come up with something, right?

Book Giveaway Poll

Since all of you have been such loyal followers, I’m going to let you choose the book to be given away this week! Results will be tallied by the end of the day, and the new book giveaway will be posted tomorrow. Here are the five books: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray, Wither by Laruen DeStefano, 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher, Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones, and The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor. Here are the descriptions for each book:

A Great and Terrible Beauty: It’s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is
shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school
in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have
an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma’s reception there is a chilly one.
To make things worse, she’s been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a
man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her
entanglement with Spence’s most powerful girls—and their foray into the
spiritual world—lead to?
Wither:

By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males born with a lifespan of 25 years, and females a lifespan of 20 years–leaving the world in a state of panic. Geneticists seek a miracle antidote to restore the human race, desperate orphans crowd the population, crime and poverty have skyrocketed, and young girls are being kidnapped and sold as polygamous brides to bear more children.

When Rhine is sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. Yet her husband, Linden, is hopelessly in love with her, and Rhine can’t bring herself to hate him as much as she’d like to. He opens her to a magical world of wealth and illusion she never thought existed, and it almost makes it possible to ignore the clock ticking away her short life. But Rhine quickly learns that not everything in her new husband’s strange world is what it seems. Her father-in-law, an eccentric doctor bent on finding the antidote, is hoarding corpses in the basement; her fellow sister wives are to be trusted one day and feared the next; and Rhine has no way to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive.

Together with one of Linden’s servants, Gabriel, Rhine attempts to escape just before her seventeenth birthday. But in a world that continues to spiral into anarchy, is there any hope for freedom?

13 Reasons Why: Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on
it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by
Hannah Baker – his classmate and crush – who committed suicide two weeks
earlier. Hannah’s voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she
decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he’ll find out why.
Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He
becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah’s pain, and learns the truth about
himself-a truth he never wanted to face.
Charmed Life:  A bewitching comic fantasy by a master of the supernatural

Cat doesn’t mind living in the shadow of his sister, Gwendolen, the most promising young witch ever seen on Coven Street. But trouble starts brewing the moment the two orphans are summoned to live in Chrestomanci Castle. Frustrated that the witches of the castle refuse to acknowledge her talents, Gwendolen conjures up a scheme that could throw whole worlds out of whack.

The Looking Glass Wars: The Myth: Alice was an ordinary girl who stepped through the looking glass and entered a fairy-tale world invented by Lewis Carroll in his famous storybook. The Truth: Wonderland is real. Alyss Heart is the heir to the throne, until her murderous aunt Redd steals the crown and kills Alyss? parents. To escape Redd, Alyss and her bodyguard, Hatter Madigan, must flee to our world through the Pool of Tears. But in the pool Alyss and Hatter are separated. Lost and alone in Victorian London, Alyss is befriended by an aspiring author to whom she tells the violent, heartbreaking story of her young life. Yet he gets the story all wrong. Hatter Madigan knows the truth only too well, and he is searching every corner of our world to find the lost princess and return her to Wonderland so she may battle Redd for her rightful place as the Queen of Hearts.

All descriptions come from Amazon.

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My POV Preference

Gemma Doyle from ‘A Great and Terrible Beauty.’ First person present POV.

I was going through my author information packet, which was like a glorified interview, and I stumbled across an interesting question: What is your style of writing? I had no idea how to answer that. Should I put Faulkner? I did one of those writing things with When Stars Die and it claimed I write like Faulkner. It wasn’t until I looked it up did I have an answer: I am an emotional, expressive writer. That is my style.

I began to think even more on what it meant to be an emotional, expressive writer, and suddenly my freelance editor’s past advice sprang to mind: “This would read much better in first person present.” I kept wondering why third person didn’t work, and now I understand.

I am a very emotional writer. I am very sense oriented, especially when it comes to characters’ feelings. As you will derive from reading When Stars Die, I delve heavily into my characters feelings and how she feels about what is going on around her. First person makes sense for me because first person is a very personal narrative. In order to be very emotional and expressive, one has to step inside the character’s head in order to tap that emotional vulnerability. And my MC, Amelia, is very emotionally vulnerable. She’s as sensitive as I am, and so first person present works great for her.

I prefer writing in first person present above all else because not only does the present establish a sense of immediacy and urgency, but I have always loved writing with feelings in mind. My favorite books involve characters’ whose emotions are at the forefront of everything they do.

Gemma Doyle is my most favorite YA heroine and character ever. Libba Bray does an amazing job shaping her character through first person present. Gemma’s every action is heavily based on emotion, and so first person present fits with her so well. In fact, now that I think about it, a lot of the first person present books I have read are very emotion based.

I have no POV preferences for what I like to read, of course. I’ll read all POVs because every author has a different style. Not all authors write with emotions in mind. Some of them want more distance, which is where third person works perfectly. If the POV works, I will enjoy the book just as much as a first person present tense. I myself just prefer to write in first person present.