UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
So, I've heard about this "collective consciousness" of pop culture. It's what causes things like multiple movies coming out at the same time that are basically the same film but had nothing to do with each other in production. This is the first time I've ever been a victim of it in an obvious way.
I mean, my problem isn't that extreme. I didn't write a whole novel and realize it had been written already. And in fact, my problem may seem pretty superficial. I have a children's book I wrote called the Clockwork Prince. It's about 500 words, enough to fill a 32-page picture book.
There is a young adult fantasy novel, the second in a trilogy, called Clockwork Prince.
Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Fuck you, Cassandra Clare. You're fat and ginger and you ruined Jace Wayland*.
My fiancee suggested changing the title. I don't really like this because there's...honestly nothing else to call my book. It is about a prince made of glass and wax and silver clockwork. I'm not gonna say any more than that because this isn't like a novel where I can tell you the plot and there's no consequences, if I tell you the plot you can basically write the book yourself and sell it, and I don't want you to. But everyone who's read it has really liked it and said it's touching with some cool imagery. So, there's that.
Ugh. Fuck my life.
*Only one of these insults is meant with earnestness, and even then only a little, because I only read the one book. Stop googling yourself, Cassandra Clare, and please don't blacklist me from the publishing industry. I don't know what kind of voodoo powers Real Writers get.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Thursday, December 15, 2011
My Dad Will Never Be A Writer
My dad thinks it's possible to write an entire novel in your head, edit it, and have the novel finished before you put a word on a page, and that if he ever wrote a novel his first draft would be the final product. He's never tried to write a novel and he never intends to, but he's sure he could do it anyway. He does not understand writing in a serious, long-range way. You can't work out 80,000 words all in your head and have them come out perfect. You can't even picture 80,000 as a number. Try to picture 80,000 of something. See? You can't do it. I suppose you could argue that maybe he's smarter than I am, but he's not. I got my brain from him. We have the exact same level of intelligence and he's had thirty more years to kill his with pot, alcohol, cigarettes, and sundry other drugs. If the man is smarter than me in any word-related subject (I'm kindof hopeless with math) I will eat this remote.
Personally, I top out on numbers I can picture around 20. After that I start losing count and the picture keeps fluctuating. I learned this when I watched a video when I was like 15 about Rwanda, at an academic summer camp I went to. I was taking Geopolitics, and I was taking it solely because I'd signed up two weeks before camp started and that was one of like three things with spots available that I was allowed to take*. We saw this video and were told the number of people who died in the course of a couple of months in Rwanda (I can't remember the exact number now, but it's six digits. For some reason I think it's either 150,000 or 800,000). The video we saw was edited for maximum impact, but you know, we were all 15 and 16 years old, so the TA sat some of us down to talk to us about it and somehow, this led to me trying to picture that many people in my head and I realized I couldn't even get close.
The thing about writing is most of the time, at least when you're starting, you do it in a vacuum. You may have read a lot of what's in your genre, or you may not, and you've got encouragement from family and friends, but soon enough it will become extremely clear (if you're any good) that most of them aren't giving you much in the way of useful advice, and they're mostly just telling you you're the best ever. Some of them just don't think you can take real crit, but some of them think this is useful. It's not. I'm all for positive reinforcement and it works, but it takes a lot longer than "cut this shit out posthaste." Sometimes, you need someone telling you "this here? This is bad. Seriously. Fix it, right now, because it destroys the whole book." I had a flaw like that in the book I just wrote. Someone told me, I fixed it, and what looked like a derivative piece of trash is now much, much better.
Still, you're usually not getting any professional advice. You don't know what publishing really looks like from the inside. You're just a lonely writer, possibly drunk, sitting at your keyboard day after day, pounding away down a road with no idea what's at the end or whether it will give you money. I know, if you're not a writer you're now asking "who the fuck would subject themselves to this? Who does that? Are you crazy?"
...Probably. But I have to do it anyway.
*You had to qualify for this camp by taking the SAT in seventh grade and getting a score higher than the average college-bound high school senior. This is not as hardcore as it sounds, since that average senior is probably dumber than you think. I did this easily on the verbal portion, but never got the score for math, so I was only allowed to take the liberal arts sort of courses and no math or science. For the four years (and five sessions -- I went for 6 weeks one year instead of 3), I took Existentialism, Topics In Psychology, Latin 1, Geopolitics, and Etymology (study of words, specifically how they develop). This got a lot longer than I thought it would and actually feels too long to even be a footnote anymore. But you know what, I'm a rebel.
Personally, I top out on numbers I can picture around 20. After that I start losing count and the picture keeps fluctuating. I learned this when I watched a video when I was like 15 about Rwanda, at an academic summer camp I went to. I was taking Geopolitics, and I was taking it solely because I'd signed up two weeks before camp started and that was one of like three things with spots available that I was allowed to take*. We saw this video and were told the number of people who died in the course of a couple of months in Rwanda (I can't remember the exact number now, but it's six digits. For some reason I think it's either 150,000 or 800,000). The video we saw was edited for maximum impact, but you know, we were all 15 and 16 years old, so the TA sat some of us down to talk to us about it and somehow, this led to me trying to picture that many people in my head and I realized I couldn't even get close.
The thing about writing is most of the time, at least when you're starting, you do it in a vacuum. You may have read a lot of what's in your genre, or you may not, and you've got encouragement from family and friends, but soon enough it will become extremely clear (if you're any good) that most of them aren't giving you much in the way of useful advice, and they're mostly just telling you you're the best ever. Some of them just don't think you can take real crit, but some of them think this is useful. It's not. I'm all for positive reinforcement and it works, but it takes a lot longer than "cut this shit out posthaste." Sometimes, you need someone telling you "this here? This is bad. Seriously. Fix it, right now, because it destroys the whole book." I had a flaw like that in the book I just wrote. Someone told me, I fixed it, and what looked like a derivative piece of trash is now much, much better.
Still, you're usually not getting any professional advice. You don't know what publishing really looks like from the inside. You're just a lonely writer, possibly drunk, sitting at your keyboard day after day, pounding away down a road with no idea what's at the end or whether it will give you money. I know, if you're not a writer you're now asking "who the fuck would subject themselves to this? Who does that? Are you crazy?"
...Probably. But I have to do it anyway.
*You had to qualify for this camp by taking the SAT in seventh grade and getting a score higher than the average college-bound high school senior. This is not as hardcore as it sounds, since that average senior is probably dumber than you think. I did this easily on the verbal portion, but never got the score for math, so I was only allowed to take the liberal arts sort of courses and no math or science. For the four years (and five sessions -- I went for 6 weeks one year instead of 3), I took Existentialism, Topics In Psychology, Latin 1, Geopolitics, and Etymology (study of words, specifically how they develop). This got a lot longer than I thought it would and actually feels too long to even be a footnote anymore. But you know what, I'm a rebel.
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