zonkered.net

After the initial panic and rage upon learning that I had to take a four day work week and make do on $600 less a month, I decided that I was going to EMBRACE this opportunity and, you know, write.  Possibly finish the story I wrote in class last year and submit it (probably fruitlessly) for publication.  And I have kept to that – I’ve written something most of my off days in the month of January.

The thing is what I’ve written has all been, um, fanfiction.  For Merlin.

So my goal for Friday is to open up “Gameplay,” flesh out the dance scene, edit the hell out of it, and start looking for magazines that accept genre short fiction – easier said than done, if I’m remembering my initial flip through the Fiction Writer’s Market correctly.

This is, of course, if I don’t get another plot bunny.  If that happens then I foresee this getting pushed back to February.

There’s a certain freedom/liberty to not bothering to sign up for the annual insanity that is NaNoWriMo.  I didn’t even consider it this year, and now I am free from attempting to come up with an idea that will work as a novel, and I’m free of the inevitable guilt that comes from quitting in the second week.  Which I always do.

I don’t think I’m cut out to be a novelist.  I’m much better in the short form.

I went through a period after college where I read nothing but translated manga and Terry Pratchett novels until I burned out on it and picked up real books again. I’m picking up manga again, starting with Saiyuki, by Minekura Kazuya.

Saiyuki and I go way back. I first watched the anime in college after a bunch of us discovered a site that sold entire subtitled series! For cheap! I picked up Saiyuki, Yami no Matsuei, and Fruits Basket this way for a fraction of the licensed cost. Furuba, Yami no Matsuei and the first season of Saiyuki were badly translated but at least decipherable; to this day I have no idea what the hell was going on in the second season of Saiyuki. It’s been out on dvd in the US for awhile now, and eventually I may shell out for it just to relieve my curiosity.

But anyway, the manga. It’s split into three titles thanks in part to Minekura changing publisher’s mid stream – the first 9 volumes were entitled Gensomaden Saiyuki, subsequent ones were titled Saiyuki Reload, and there are also three prequel volumes called Saiyuki Gaiden. I’ve been reading the Tokyopop version of Saiyuki and scanlations of Reload, and its as cool as I remember it.

Cho Hakkai and his relationship with Sha Gojyo is still my favorite, no surprise there. There are certain types of characters I will always like, and so many of my favorite characters fall into this category – and Hakkai is probably the archetype, even though Tezuka Shinobu from Here is Greenwood was the first I identified. He’s very polite and well-mannered, quiet, but that’s only the surface; underneath he’s ruthless. Like I said, all of my favorite characters have this – Shinobu, Yanagi Renji from Prince of Tennis, Kigai Yuuto from X – but Hakkai is the most extreme, and he’s the most complicated. He’s the kind of character that makes me want to write fanfiction.

As for Gojyo, on the surface he’s like a foil to Hakkai – flamboyant and womanizing – but he’s definitely got his own issues, and he and Hakkai lend each other strength. I can’t write about one without involving the other.

Anyway, I read the first two volumes of Gensomaden this morning, and have the next four on order from Barnes & Noble. I’m also about to get to the Hakkai/Gojyo sections of the Burial Arc in Reload (an arc entirely about the pasts of the main characters) so there will probably be more about Saiyuki in the future.

I have never submitted anything for publication. Mostly this is because I generally write fanfiction which, by its very nature, is unpublishable, but its also because I always assumed my original writing wasn’t ready yet. (this despite the fact that I have more than once wanted to go through a book with an editing pen and clean up the writing)

Anyway, I took a writing class back in October when my working life was intensely crappy and I decided to see if there was any possible way that I could theoretically make a living writing romance novels. I then proceeded to instead write a kind of stylized espionage genre story instead. Read some in class one day, the response was terrific, and the teacher told me to start submitting.

I bought a copy of Writer’s Market months ago intending to do just that, and then stuck it in a box when work and other stuff kept me from doing any writing whatsoever, let alone finishing the story I started back then. Picked it up again last night and skimmed through it looking for appropriate lit magazines to submit to. There aren’t very many. Most literary magazines, it seems, and even the general interest magazines all want modern lit. The higher-brow stuff. The ones that cater towards genre are usually for fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, maybe romance.

Me? I decided to write in the genre that’s published in about six publications, mostly online, mostly with offbeat names like Toasted Cheese (I can just hear that conversation with my mother now: “Hey, Mom! I’ve been published!” “Where? Esquire? Atlantic Monthly?” “Um. It’s an online journal. Called Toasted Cheese.” “….”).  I’m kind of disappointed that the pickings are so slim.

That doesn’t mean I won’t submit it.  I can send it to all of them pretty easily now is all.   Also, I still I have to rewrite it before it’s going anywhere.

I finished a story today while I ate breakfast at Atlanta Bread. It was something I’d started months ago – in October, when I was taking a writing class – but had been sitting in a perpetual state of almost-done ever since. I cleaned it up a little shortly before Christmas, intending to finish it when I was home for the holiday, but it didn’t happen. Then I changed jobs at the beginning of January, so it still didn’t happen.

Mostly, though, it wasn’t done because endings suck, and I can never find a satisfactory conclusion for a story. I’m not even entirely sure the one I ended up with is really a satisfactory ending, though its definitely better than what I had. This is the story of my (writing) life: I have a precise picture in my head of the beginning, and I breeze through the middle, but when it comes to the end I have no idea what to do. It’s frustrating, and easily the worst part of writing for me, followed closely by coming up with titles.

I think the problem is that I’m not really a plot-driven writer. I mean, this particular story is kind of plot-driven, it’s a spy short story sort of in the style of either James Bond or Alias, but I invented the plot for a character I already had in my head, Alex Woo (fun fact: Alex Woo’s original name was Kermit Woo, an awesome name I came across when deleting spam out of my email, but my beta reader found it jarring so I renamed him the more conventional Alexander).

That’s how I write – a character starts to develop in my head, and after I’ve daydreamed them into full realization, I build a story for them.  The beginning and middle is easy for me because it’s partially about building the relationships between the characters, but the endings are hell because I don’t know where to leave these relationships.  Often the story is left hanging.  It’s definitely my weak point as a writer, and I’m not entirely sure how to fix it.  It’s probably something I’ll always struggle with.

Randomly, the comment box for this layout was inexplicably in Italian.  Since I don’t read Italian and I doubt the rest of you do either, I’ve fixed that now.