This entry was originally posted at Working Title on February 26, 2009.
I started writing my first novel back in the middle of 2000. It was called Never Trust A Hybrid and it was a girl who discovered that her father wasn’t dead… he was undead. What was planned was a journey of self-discovery, acceptance of one’s self and role in life, and internal debate on the nature of good and evil and whether it is nature or nurture that shapes you.
Not bad for a thirteen year old, I think. Unfortunately my thirteen year old self did not have the dedication to see the story through and even if I did I suspect it wouldn’t be as good as Blood Bound is today. Eight or nine years was good for me in that respect.
However Never Trust A Hybrid is not lost: it still leaves traces of influence on Blood Bound. One character survived from Hybrid and now is firmly settled into the BB universe. He is mentioned throughout BB, makes his first appearance in the sequel and was last seen shaking his fist at the sun.
Of course, Athanasios has changed since Hybrid: he is no longer the protagonist’s father (Delia: “Thank God!). His name is no longer Marcus/Mars and he was no longer identified with the god of the same name (in fact, he’s gone slipping down the Roman social ladder, all the way down to “slave”). On the flipside, he is still seen by some as a stupid radical for changing the way things have been done for centuries. He still has a surprisingly warm and fatherly demenour. He still has a fondness for modern technology.
Characters and stories evolve within themselves as well as from older, deceased works. I first came up with the concept of The Superhero Diaries back in 2006. Since I resurrected the idea there have been a number of changes.
- The overall plot has changed, while the opening sequence is still very similar in events.
- In the 2006 version, Gaia was called “Diana”. Now she is “Georgie”.
- The German superhero (whose civilian name is) “Aylin” was called “Sabine”. Now Sabine is someone else, although connected to Aylin.
- “Diana” lived with her parents and two younger brothers, aged 7 and 10. “Georgie” lives with her mother, stepfather and twin stepbrothers (aged 13).
Many things remain the same as stories evolve but some things do change. I can see how my own writing has evolved, just as The Superhero Diaries has evolved from its 2006 idea into the 2009 draft. Characters change and grow, new ideas are added and entire planned scenes are dropped (I learned this in BB when I had to cut some scenes because they didn’t fit anymore – I am still sad that the vampire macarena scene between Charlie and Jared is not mentioned in-text now).
They evolve.
I have invented a machine that makes you hear the title of this post in the voice of Professor Farnsworth from Futurama.
No, wait. That’s not it.
The good news is that my computer has been resurrected as a zombie. No, not as a vampire, which is a case of being both cursed with awesome and blessed with suck, a zombie. Instead of gaining immortality and superior strength and senses etc. my computer has come back only to slowly rot and fall apart. I have taken to calling my laptop Owen, partially because of the state the computer is in, and also due to the eventual replacement being called Torchwood Three.
Insert your own “turn on Torchwood” jokes here. It’s all right – it’s one of the reasons I chose the name. 
Anyway, to celebrate the return of my laptop I have been able to finish the design I started a little while ago. I hope you like it.
And now I can go back to The Superhero Diaries. 
Well, it’s finally happened. After about five years of slave-labour loyal service (and one year on top of that as a showroom display), my laptop seems to have finally given up the ghost. It’s been a long time coming – the CD/DVD drive somehow became just a DVD drive sometime early last year, the original power pack exploded (with a bang!) earlier this year, and it would scream in protest if I try to open filezilla while already having firefox and photoshop open already – so now the whole thing seems to have finally died.
I am writing this from the family’s desktop, which only reminds me of how much I miss having a computer in my room, with all my programs and files and everything. I miss my firefox install, with its bookmarks and addons and British-English spellcheck.
Don’t worry if the laptop takes my novels with it: the most recent versions of Blood Bound are with my wonderful beta, and the beginning fragments of Bones and The Superhero Diaries can be pieced together from stuff I have in various emails/from my notebook. I will have to do some extra typing and re-do a few things, but it could have been far, far worse.
In a way, this is a good thing, as I have been wanting a new laptop for some time now. The bad side, on the other hand, is that I cannot afford a new laptop right now, and it will take me about a month until I have saved enough money for the replacement I have got my eye on. So I am trying to look on the bright side in the meantime: being online less will mean less online distractions, so I can write my novels by hand in my notebook; I have noticed that when I type things up online from handwritten notes things get expanded, and my word count increases. So hooray for that.
So don’t worry about me if I am not online as much as usual. I’m still around, still writing… and looking for things that I need to get rid of anyway, and figure how much they’d be worth on TradeMe. It seems that not only am I trying to trim the fat on my body, but everywhere else now, too.
On GoodReads? Feel free to check out my account then. For future reference, my GoodReads account is linked below with the rest of the “friend and follow” links.
One of the things I love most about writing – apart from creating the characters I am writing about – is creating the world that the story takes place in. While it may be the case that the story is set in the “real” world, a world that is set and has its own rules, I still have know the rules for the “unreal” creature I write about dwelling in it.
These are not the rules of the society – the ones that characters can change. These are the rules of nature, the ones defining their very existence. They’re the limitations on each species. The limits of the world.
One example would be for Blood Bound and having to decide the rules for my vampires. There are so many attributes attached to vampires, especially in modern fiction, that you can pick and choose when making your “breed”. Vampires tend to face the same “problems”, it’s just they can (or don’t) handle it differently. Some of the questions I had to ask myself were:
- What does sunlight do to them? Kill them? Hurt them? Weaken them slightly? Nothing?
Make them sparkle?
- How can you kill them? A stake to the heart? Chop of the head? Expose them to sunlight (see above)? Make them listen to Hannah Montana over and over?
- What other weaknesses do they have? Silver? Garlic? Holy water? Crosses or will any religious object do? Disco?
- What about their strengths? Are they stronger than humans? Faster? Do they have better senses? What about special powers?
- What kind of blood can they drink? Human-only, and has to be straight from the source? Human-only, but can be swiped from a blood-bank? Can they have a diet that is mostly animal, but they have to top it up with human blood every so often? Or can they go solely on animal blood? Or are they psi-vampires?
Those are some of the questions I had to ask and answer myself while setting up the rules for Blood Bound. I have had to do that with all my other ideas too: superheroes for The Superhero Diaries, ghosts for Bones… the list goes on.
You can break the “standard” rules set up by other fictional works or even myth, so long as you explain it. If you do it with the rules you set up, well… anyone remember the backlash for Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn? One of the major complaints by fans was that it broke all the rules, and in manners that made no sense. Imagine if JK Rowling had ended Harry Potter with it suddenly being discovered that you could bring the dead back to life, and everyone who was good came back and it was all sunshine and kittens and marshmallows, despite it being clearly and repeatedly stated that no magic can truly bring back the dead? Yeah… no.
For some people, setting up the rules at the beginning (if they do consciously do it) is one of the less enjoyable aspects of writing. I, on the other hand, love it. It’s probably one of the reasons I enjoyed setting up RPGs more than actively maintaining them. That rush, that explosion of creativity is one of my favourite parts of writing. Starting a novel is easy. Finishing it is hard.
And finishing a novel is a law I really do have to lay down for myself.
I shouldn’t have to explain to you what LiveJournal is, but just in case you have been living under an internet rock: LiveJournal is a large blogging community (and also the name of the software that powers it). Even if people blog elsewhere many have an LJ for the community aspect. I use a plugin to crosspost the entries made here to my LJ, and also have a link in this site’s sidebar.
Although in recent years LJ has been producing more and more better-looking standard themes that hasn’t stopped some (very talented… and not so talented) users creating and sharing CSS modifications for these standard themes. Here are five that I consider to make great themes, with three example images each – if you are interested in the layout shown in the examples, simply click on the image to be taken directly to the code and instructions.
The Fulcrum
http://community.livejournal.com/thefulcrum/
Minty Apple
http://community.livejournal.com/mintyapple/
Appleleaf
http://community.livejournal.com/appleleaf/
NoveltyBox
http://community.livejournal.com/noveltybox/
Thrash Metal
http://community.livejournal.com/thrashmetal/
The one thing I dislike about starting a new blog is the emptiness of it all. I’m keeping both Disdainful-Soul.net and Working Title up for various reasons, such as archival purposes and the many subdomains I have on those domains (like On The Nightstand, my book review blog).
The writing page now actually has little blurbs on each of my current projects – ranging from Blood Bound, which is currently in the final stages of editing before I start querying, to Bones and The Superhero Diaries. All the little excerpts that were on Working Title are now up there, with the addition of the Bones stuff. I’ll soon be transferring over the short fiction and putting it under some category or other, but right now it is not a priority.
Some of you may have noticed a change in the header and navigation. I like this a lot better as it streamlines the whole thing, plus it is easier to change the navigation (add/subtract/edit) than when it is just straight images. Plus it changes on hover, which is always fun.
Everything else is pretty much minor, really: I fixed a typo in the last.fm link, and made the contact page link very visible. I also finally set up the feedburner feed, so if you want to follow the blog you can add the C-H.com feed to your RSS reader.
Don’t know what RSS and RSS readers are all about? Start with the wiki entry and go from there. The reader I use is Google Reader.
I do have a “real” post planned and I will get on with writing it asap. I just wanted to update you on this first.
I think the title pretty much sums up my thoughts for the moment.
I’ve been meaning to turn Catherine-Haines.com, my name domain, into a proper little site for a while now, but I just lacked either the motivation or the inspiration or whatever to do something with it. It was, after all, quite content to just sit there and be a little portal to all my other sites.
And then, as is so often the case, I got hit with a flash of genius. Unfortunately, as is also so often, it didn’t work out quite as well as it did in my head. I may have something to do with being midnight, but other factors might be involved as well.
But a goodnight sleep later and a good proper think about things the idea developed and a design created that actually worked. That design is the one you see here, all blue and floral and with all sorts of little touches around the edges. There are probably a few little tweaks and additions that could be made, but other than that it’s pretty much all systems are go!
It’s highly unlikely that a wheel will fall of, or anything even more drastic than that.
So, let’s see what we have:
- Charts showing my progress with my other projects, Bones and The Superhero Diaries
- Links to all my social networking sites. Thanks to the lovely Mimi for the little pixels.
- A writing page with info about Blood Bound and The Superhero Diaries, complete with extracts. Bones needs to have that done and I know it – no need to remind me on that one.
- A links page that is slowly growing. There are many authors etc. to add so if you don’t see yourselves on the list just drop me a line – I didn’t intend to lose you in the transfer, I promise!
And, if all goes well, not only should this post appear on my Twitter account, but also on my MySpace.
And here we go…
