Return of the Complainer

Sweet Jesus on a plaid donkey! That was a long hiatus!

I return to you on the eve of February bringing glad tidings: one, I am, in fact, not dead.

Two, I’m still writing, of course.

Three, I finished my Nano with time to spare in November and came out of it with a first draft. Now, have I edited that draft? Of course not. But that’s only because I’ve been busy writing elsewhere. I have a short story coming out in New South here in a few months — the project was delayed by COVID, go figure — and luckily for all of us, some of my old magazine contracts are coming up on their end. You know what that means! Rights revert back to me and I can post them so you, the people, can enjoy them.

So that got me thinking. I should make a haven or hub for my writing. And so I’ve done it. If you feel like reading some of my work — currently working on a story called Come, Thou Almighty! , posted chapter by chapter — or just supporting me, you can head over to my kofi below. Just click that black button. There you’ll find stories, OSTs for stories, some of my more audacious writing tips, et al.

That being said, I will return to writing here as well! With a more regular schedule. Seasonal depression will not defeat me. The show must go on.

New Story Alert

Hello, hello! We are due to get back on schedule here in a minute. Upcoming, the next in the Hintlord series will be on characters who are not you, and how to craft them! A request from a regular reader! So look forward to that. But before that:

Click here to read my new story over at Crack the Spine.

Impossibly Tender by yours truly is about a man who negotiates fatherhood in the worst possible way. :)

Summer Update

The summer is GRUELING. Beat after beat of sun on my poor body. I mostly stay inside, these days.

Rather than complain about my sequestering during Corona — as I am wont to do — I will list the good things of this week:

1. I finished my MS and sent it off to my agent. (!!)

2. I have a short story coming out next week here.

3. My dog got a bath and he smells like a toasted marshmallow.

Things aren’t always as bad as they seem. In other news, I’m vastly cutting down my involvement with social media, and soon I will be deleting my Twitter account. I never really use it anyway and the amount of bullshit discourse I see on there only makes me angry. You can’t fight everyone, I’ve learned. You can only put a box over your head and pretend they don’t exist.

In other other news, I’m continuing with my Hintlord series, so if there’s something writerly you’d like me to discuss, hit me up in the contacts!

Another MS Bites the Dust

Remember the manuscript-in-progress I mentioned here? Well, today it took the leap off the cliff. That’s right! My agent sent it on its way to some unsuspecting and no doubt terrified editors.

It’s one of those feelings that’s a five in one. I’m happy, of course, and relieved this version is done with, excited to see what people might think, scared out of my fucking mind that no one will like it and also just like WELP DEAL WITH IT.

Usually now I’d like to take a break to… just be without any characters taking up space in my head but alas. I have to be searching for something else to write, because it would be… a misstep to just not write during the time it’s being submitted. At least I can say my stuff is out there somewhere, and not just this book but about twenty-five short story submissions as well. All I know is some eyes better be reading my work at any given moment of the day. READ ME, dammit. Love me or hate me, I do take up space in one’s head.

But there’s another feeling too, and that’s one of longing.

It’s stupid, probably, and pretentious on some level, but I miss my characters from that last book. I can’t dwell forever and with any luck I’ll get to revisit them with some edits but they’re largely gone and I know that. I faced such hurdles with it. Having such a hard time with the initial birth and facing a Great Depression in the middle where I stopped work on it for months. It’s literally a tiny miracle I managed to finish at all and I’m so fucking proud of doing that, come hell or high water. It’s so me it almost hurts.

Now, turning towards the future…

So, how I normally get ideas is getting beaned. I’ve mentioned this before — maybe briefly — but beaning is essentially walking about your day as normal and then experiencing a baseball to the back of the head. It comes out of nowhere, with no reason or origin behind it: the perfect idea, nearly fully formed. That’s how it’s always worked. But I’ve recently come to understand that maybe I have to have the ability to drive myself into writing something, powered by… imagination?

The fuck is that about?

But I digress.

So I’ll be actively looking for something to turn into my next book. I’m a little… fearful. And confused. And worried. I’ve never had much luck in forcing it. But I know I can’t just rely on the sky to produce something for me. In these uncertain times, I turn towards my manual for writing, Misery by our lord and savior, Stephen King. Paul Sheldon struggled with having an idea to jumpstart the revival of Misery book, one that would satisfy Annie. He knew trying to have an idea in the middle of books was common but was unsure if trying to have an idea for the start of a book would work. In the end, he was able to do it through a combination of beaning and being open to the universe. But I feel there was something inside Paul, the great Can You?er, that made that necessary. I was a good Can You?er once upon a time.

If there was ever something in me that had the power to produce on command, now would be a great fucking time for it to announce itself.

A Female Deer

So I did have a request to talk about my latest (definitely) and greatest (hopefully) project.

For obvious reasons I cannot post a snippet, but I can post an elongated blurb that allows me to do three things at once: 1. procrastinate; 2. explore my feelings on it; 3. post the moodboard.

Here we go!

Picture it, kids: The lowlands of Tennessee. An autumn. A darkness more felt than seen. Mid-to-late-’90s when Walkmans were clipped to everybody’s hip and the cool kids listened to AFI. And nine high school boys all arrive by caravan to the mouth of the wildlife management area to begin the Doe Hunt of their generation.

The story follows Farley West, a 15-year-old long dismissed and regarded as less masculine than his peers. He’s ready to prove himself a real Young Buck to his friends, his dad, and, above all, his uncle who has been there for him since childhood. But when the Doe Hunt starts, his friends immediately turn on him and from the way they salivate and call him, "Doe," with those sugar-choked voices, Farley has a feeling that they aren't exactly looking to shoot him.

Here’s my glorious moodboard for it; it’s really hot so bring a cold Gatorade.

I have a lot of love for feminized boys/men; how their society tells them what they are because they seem to fit into a certain category by either personality or body type (twinks, for example), and how the guy himself responds to that. Is it easy to wear other people’s expectations when you’re conventionally attractive and you’re rewarded for fitting into the box? Is it heavy? Is it both at once and what does that mean for him? And does he ever resent being placed on a pedestal? How much is he thankful to the pedestal when he sees others struggling in the mud down below?

Because of all those things buzzing through me when I wrote this, they’re pretty prevalent themes in the manuscript. The amount of violence in this isn’t new or special for me, because I’ve done a lot of it before, but I think the speed at which it happens is rather novel for me specifically. The events in the main storyline happen over a weekend, and there’s a second stream that takes place throughout Farley’s life growing up in Red Creek.

My first novel took place in White Hill, which is the sister town of Red Creek, both separated by about fifteen miles of turnpike. If anyone starts a rumor that I want to build a world around these two towns a la Derry and Castle Rock, you let them know THEY’RE RIGHT.

I like familiarity, I like to have already been oriented in a story when I start writing it, and this is the best way for me. One of the main characters in this novel is also a satellite character in the first novel, which is nothing if not fun. I just want to get back to enjoying my goddamn writing life for once.

If I ever had a class of kids who asked me if I would recommend becoming a writer, I’d tell them fuck no. It’s awful and lonely and sad and you lose your innocent love for it. You gain a forced love for it, like a marriage you know you can’t exit, like one from the old days before women could divorce. You stew in it and have to live with it because if you don’t, people will say, “Well, what was it all for?”

So then you look around the room of your own and you see a little love. Something you can hold in your hand. You cup it carefully to try and keep the wind from blowing it out. It warms your face. And you remember the roaring firestorm of your youth and think, This will do. For now.

That’s this novel.

The Irrelevance of Irredeemability, or: No One Cares About Your Feelings, Becky

Here’s a secret about yours truly: I’m kind of a shy writer. Not like the “No, I can’t bear for anyone to look at my work!” way but more the “Maybe other writers won’t like me so I’ll just kinda sit over here,” way. I’m a lurker. I’m a creepy perverted lurker and I’m in your forums, judging you and keeping myself out of it. So I’ve been creeping and lurking, as I do, and the thing that really has come to my attention is this new obsession with redeemable characters.

More secrets about me.

Ugh. And who knows if it really is a new obsession; it could be I’m just behind the times which happens more often that I’d care to admit. But I’m seeing this from people who don’t write a lot, like maybe they only do it at Nano or they’re working on their first stab at a book or something like that. They seem to get caught up in asking people, “Is this character still redeemable?”

And people (of the same type) have the nerve to tell them, “No!”

No?!

Okay, first of all, I’ve seen this asked about the villain, which, if you want your villain to pal up with the hero at the end after many a hardship and battle (channeling Pokemon, I suppose) then… okay, that can be hot too, I guess, but then these aren’t typically the villains/rivals who are mass murdering people or setting off on raping sprees or hurting animals. Typically they steal something or like, I dunno, call the hero a naughty name.

Villains, real villains, don’t need to be redeemed. The best book villains I can think of off the top of my head: King Haggard, Humbert Humbert, Patrick Bateman, Leland Gaunt, Annie Wilkes, none of them needed redeeming to be satisfying, and two of those are also protagonists and this brings me to my next point!

If you’re asking if your protagonist is redeemable, this tells me two things:

1. Your protagonist has done maybe some bad things while also trying to make his way in the world and get what he wants in the novel, which makes him cool and hopefully well-rounded and go you, babe, go you.

2. But you’re trying to nuke him by possibly watering him down the first time some person who may not even be your prospective audience tosses a bitch fit.

(Sidenote: Yes, your prospective audience matters. Your stories are not for everyone. Mine certainly are not. Nor should they be. When you pick people to look at your story for mishaps and pink gaping holes, you have to pick someone who’s aesthetic lines up at least a bit with your own or else they might tell you to lose necessary parts for the story you want to tell. At the end of the day, who are you telling this story for? Who are you telling it to?)

So, your protagonist has done some nasty shit, but haven’t we all? Haven’t the people who’re looking down their noses at your protag in the forums? But, okay, for the sake of exploration, let’s give this some leeway.

Your character is irredeemable.

To who?

There’s only two answers; he could either be deemed irredeemable by the characters in his story or by the reader. If it’s the characters, that sounds like it has branches. His best friend can’t forgive him for fucking his grandmother? For quitting his job, ditching responsibilities just as the economy collapses, and joining a tribe in Papua New Guinea? For stealing his winning lottery ticket? Sounds good to me. Then if you want them to fix their friendship by the end, how does he make up for being a colossal douche? Or if you want them to go separate ways and live to be terrorized by the memory of what happened, that’s great too. You could do almost anything with characters who can’t or won’t forgive or want to forgive but don’t really know how.

If he can’t be redeemed by the reader… uh. SO?!

I mean really, who gives a fuck? As long as the reader is entertained and moved in some way, who cares if it doesn’t fall into this hippy-dippy we-are-the-world redeemable and everyone lives happily ever after schlock? I’ve had it! Officially!

…

Zen.

Okay, okay, okay. Look, here’s the thing. I just get so worried. In a forum the other day, I saw a girl describe her main character, and he was a total dick. He was a blond twink dick who thought the world owed him everything and was a bit ditsy to boot. And that sounded magnificent. I was literally salivating. But then you have these people popping up who are literally just random assholes telling her, “I dunno, he may be too unlikable.” Or, “Well, okay, but how’s he going to be redeemed at the end?” Filling this young girl’s head with NONSENSE.

And I wished I could take her aside and tell her her story is good and her character is boss and as long as she writes well, as long as each sentence makes me want to read the next, and as long as her blond dick of a protagonist fights like hell to get whatever his spoiled little heart desires, then those people in the forums can redeem this dick.