In an attempt to motivate myself into posting more often on this blog (even without comparisons to On The Nightstand, postage here is rather lacking), I have decided to do A Thing – an attempt at a weekly meme where I post one thing (a picture, a quote, a video, a song) that has inspired or influenced my writing/a story in one way or another.
Ned and Chuck, the central couple in the prematurely deceased TV show Pushing Daisies, helped inspire me with regards to defining a few subtle traits that help key into the personalities of Delia and Daniel (the MCs of my first novel, Blood Bound). Dee and Daniel were very much formed by the time I really got into Pushing Daisies, but when I noticed vague similarities between the two sets (tall, adorkable and able to bring people into a state of second-life-ish vs short, bubbly and very much alive) another thing became defined.
I had already instinctively started to settle them into a colour scheme (Daniel in somber colours, like Ned, and Dee is brighter ones, like Chuck), but upon noticing the deliberate colour and style schemes for characters I began to pay much closer to clothes and colours, and enhanced the difference in their personalities by looking to characters like Ned and Chuck (mostly Chuck) as ‘fashion models’ for Dee and Daniel.
It seems like such a simple thing, really, but until Pushing Daisies, I just didn’t see it. So: inspiration/influence.
Over on the YA forum at the Absolute Write Water Cooler, we’re having fun with a little game: Your WIP In One Sentence. I have already posted my four up there, but I want to share them over here. They aren’t perfect, and they miss a heck of a lot out, and sometimes they seem long-winded… but it’s still fun.
LIONHEART: After he is killed and his sister kidnapped by the same magical force, Leander finds himself the champion of the force that resurrected him – the long-dead High Mage blamed for the destruction of their glorious empire – and in a battle three centuries in the making.
BONES: When Dinah Gillespie discovers that the dying can see the dead – and that there is a ghost in her attic – she makes it her mission to do one last good thing before she dies, and set him free by solving a murder that occurred over sixty years ago.
BLOOD BOUND: The only thing that sucks more than vampire boyfriends and brothers is murder.
THE CIRCLED GREEN: A woman with a mysterious past is eight years dead, the man she loved and left behind is convinced by his domineering mother to stop grieving and remarry, and their beautiful daughter is being pursued by a dark faerie determined to have her at any cost – this is what happens after a supernatural being gives up immortality in exchange for human love.
Everywhere I go I see, in the YA sector, people going, “NO MORE VAMPIRES!” and other words to that effect.
Every time I see that, though, I just want to yell back, “BUT MINE AREN’T IN HIGH SCHOOL!”
Delia’s over eighteen for a reason people. Just as Daniel looks about twenty-five.
Definitely not in high school, y’all.
Oh, and mine also have fangs. Coz the biting is the fun bit, right? I like my vampires grey and walking penetrative sex metaphors.
When I woke up this morning, I found in my inbox an email from my beta, JK. Attached were the edited versions of the last three chapters of Blood Bound. That means the second major round of editing, and about the third or fourth round of editing altogether. This is not the rough-around-the-edges Blood Bound I had, but a much smoother, much better version of the novel.
It’s been an interesting journey for me, for the year and a half since I started seriously writing. To say I have learned a lot would be one heck of an understatement. I’ve learned about writing and publishing, discovered books and authors I otherwise would not have heard about. And most importantly of all, I’ve made friends.
It’s not all been sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, of course. I never expected it to be easy but I never appreciated how much effort it actually takes to get out the 60-80k worth of words that tells a complete story and that actually makes sense. And even then it’s not perfect first draft. I have had to learn how to deal with concrit, and while not always easy I can handle it far better than I once did. And I have had to deal with people reacting poorly to the “V word” when they ask what I am writing about. Without hearing anything beyond that word, let alone actually reading anything I have written, I have had people call me “a[nother] hack” who’s “jumping on the [vampire] bandwagon”.
The other thing I learned since starting writing Blood Bound back in April of last year and was so totally not a really interesting form of exam study procrastination is that I was not going to churn out Blood Bound, edit it quickly, find myself an agent and ta da. After a while I started pinching myself whenever I had that daydream as it was distracting me from my actual work. And somewhere along the line, in these past few months, once JK got through with this current edit of Blood Bound I was going to set it aside in its little folder next to the other novel .odt files and leave it there for the moment. In the meantime I am going to finish working on Lionheart and then, post NaNo, The Circled Green. I’ll keep working on Bones and The Superhero Diaries too, even as my brain keeps adding new levels of complexity, characters and world-building to Blood Bound.
And then I’ll come back to it with more experienced eyes. I’ll add news scenes, rewrite some old ones and maybe even cut some others out. Maybe by then I’ll have an agent or even a book published. And maybe by then vampires will have swung back into “fashion” again. Who knows? The only thing I do know is that I am not giving up on this story, or the stories that follow after it.
So until then, thanks to everyone who has been supporting me. Thanks to JK, Seanne and Rebekah – you in particular are the ones who put up with my ramblings on almost a daily basis. Thanks to all those people who have commented on my blogs regularly, or semi-regularly. And even thank you to those people who stop by randomly, read the snippets of BB and others and comment on how much you loved it and say how it has to be published so you can read the rest right now. You don’t know how much that brightens my day to find a comment like that in my inbox.
Thanks for the memories, guys. This ride’s been fun – but it’s nowhere near finished yet.
It’s not just in real life that they are not my strength.
Sometimes it takes me forever to find that perfect name for a character, and I sometimes go through different variations and stages of names to find “the perfect one”. And until then I just have placeholders.
One example would be one who has yet to have a name, or make an appearance. I’m not really in such of a hurry to give him a name as, in the world of the Blood Bound universe, he does not appear until the third book (along with the rest of the Canadian vampire embassy… yes, BB gets into the vampire politics even more from book two onwards, and three is the big one). And so, in conversation, we simply refer to him as “Canadian Lover”, “Canadian Consort”, “Rivka’s Lover” and the like. While he is definitely not defined solely by his relationship to Rivka, the queen of vampires in Canada, (his maker, his lover, his queen and more), it’s just easiest to call him that. My beta sometimes calls him “Callum”, after the actor she insists would have to play him should there be a movie.
But the real character that inspired me to write this blog entry was one from The Circled Green, my upcoming NaNo project. When we meet her, in the prologue, she is young, beautiful, and dying. For the rest of the book she is just a presence, a memory, a tie to the past that keeps the husband she left behind from remarrying even though he should, and the one that follows her daughter about, for reasons both good or bad. While the names of other characters (such as Aurora, Ciar, Duncan, Emily) came pretty easily, her name was very elusive.
Eventually we started referring to her as “Dead Mother” and then “Dead Marni” and after a while I began wishing that Marni was actually a suitable name for her, except it didn’t make sense, given her background.
But finally, after weeks and weeks of looking and wishing and referring to her as Dead Marni/Dead Mother, I found something. It fit, it was pretty, and it was perfect. She now has a name.
Sorcha. ♥
The right-inset image was brought to my attention via the Allison and Busby blog. It’s a t-shirt from CafePress with the phrase “vampires prefer brunettes” – a reference to the line said by Edward in Twilight
And it made me think, on characters, author appeal and funny.
Now, while one of my vampires (the adorkable perfumer-slash-assassin Daniel) does have a preference for brunettes, it’s more a case of a particular brunette. It’s made very clear that Charlie’s weakness is redheads, while Lauren’s current partners have leaned more towards brown/black. Rivka’s longterm lover (the one she turned) is a blond.
As for Jared and Athanasios… they’re like Captain Jack Harkness. Anything with a zip code.
But really, in the end the only colour that really matters is red… because when it comes to vampires, it’s what’s inside that counts.
Writing is one of those things that you have good days and bad days, and you can sort of describe it in terms of walking/running. Some days you can go dashing across the playing field with no problems, and the next it is difficult to put one foot in front of the other. But just because the creative juices aren’t flowing and making it easier for you doesn’t mean you don’t write at all that day. Keep going.
Sadly, I suck at taking my own advice sometimes. But sometimes I don’t, sometimes I keep pushing forward even though I am only capable of baby steps. As much as I love starting a new project (a little too much, at times) looking at my wordcount just makes me go, “Ugh, this totally sucks” and “This is going to take forever!” *whines. Up until about the 5000 word mark or so, and then it’s all, “Yeah, woohooo!” and so forth.
Well guess what? Today I moved past that wonderful first mark with Bones. 
So hooray!
Another piece of good news is that the final round of editing for Blood Bound has just reached the 2/3 complete mark with the completion of chapter twelve. Six more chapters to go, and then one big old run through once again to see if there is anything we missed or anything that needs to be added. I know that my wonderful beta, JK has one suggestion about a certain one-shot character who has decided he is now a thousand times more important in the grand scheme of things than originally planned. So that is one thing. More might pop up in the meantime.
Then it will be back to trying to write query letters. I am so looking forward to the prospect.
And on a third project update thingy, Lionheart is still very much in the early “let the idea blossom as I am walking about doing anything but writing” stage. Far, far too early to start writing things down, as I still need to do a heck of a lot of world-building first. But I love this bit, this mental scrapbooking for characters, costumes, places etc. and I am enjoying putting into practice the concept of using a wiki to organise my thoughts and world.
I’ll let you know how that goes. In the meantime keep an eye out on the progress graphs in the sidebar to see how I am going with Bones.
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.
