Echoes in a Hollow Space

Okay, so the plot of that novel is nothing like any of my vampire novels (all 3-1/2 of them), but there are certain elements in the worldbuilding which really sounded familiar:

• A 1500-year-old vampire
• A group of powerful supernatural being overlords called the Congregation (mine was the Covenant)
• Vampires who can eat normal food but don’t, mostly because the smell is abhorrent (especially garlic)
• Vampire growth spurts, in which the vampire gets larger and more of an apex predator after being “changed” from mortal
• Other piddling things that slip my mind at the moment

Now, none of these elements are earth-shatteringly similar, but chances are that if any of my vamp novels sees some form of publication someone will surely think I’ve ripped off Ms. Harkness, even though I did this worldbuilding twenty years ago now. It no longer depresses me when this sort of stuff happens, no longer even irks me especially hard, because I have been through this same thing so many times before. Seriously, click on the “simultaneous invention” tag if you want to listen to more hardcore whining on this subject. No? Can’t say as I blame you.

The thing is, the concept of simultaneous invention is quite well-known in science. And if it’s true for the tech fields, it’s also true for creative fields. It happens all the time—to me, to my friends, to writers and artists of all sorts. It’s just the way the zeitgeist operates, propagating certain ideas into the culture when their time has arrived. Some individuals are quick to pick up on them and “get them to market,” while others (like me) are painfully slow about the whole thing or otherwise blocked from getting their version before the public eye time. As with Ms. Harkness and I, nothing sinister is involved, no one has stolen anything.

Most of the time. Ideas do get stolen. It’s happened (verifiably) to friends of mine, it’s happened to me—which is one of the reasons I decided I didn’t want to be involved with Hollywood anymore. But most of the time, I firmly believe it’s just a case of that ol’ zeitgeist playing with folks, hoping somebody will take the idea ball and run with it.

The strangest example of this for me happened about a year before Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out. I started working on this idea about a guy name Roy who was a state trooper. One night when he’s out on patrol on a lonely stretch of highway, he has a close encounter with a bunch of UFOs that radically changes his life. He loses his job, his marriage breaks up, and he spends the rest of his time obsessing about and trying to solve the mystery of these strange alien craft. Sounds familiar, huh? I never heard a word about the movie in production until I was about six months into the worldbuilding on my own idea. The thing that is really freaky to me is that both my character and the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters had the name of Roy. The zeitgeist was working overtime on that one.

So, onward. If I do publish any of the old vampire stuff, I’m sure there are many elements in my books that have been used in other (and many) books since I first came up with the concepts. They can’t help but be labeled “derivative.” I guess the answer is to just keep writing new things, to keep moving forward.

Oh, and what did I think of A Discovery of Witches? I quite loved it, despite the cliffhanger ending. Which is all I’ll say about that ending—but you have been forewarned.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

The novel has been moving along since I allowed the POV shift. I knew Ramona, the character I shifted to late in the novel, would have a great deal to say, and she does. Getting her to shut up again so I can write the climax from the original narrators' points of view will be tough. As with everything she's ever been in, she wants to take over.

Which makes me worry that once again I'm writing two climaxes and dei ex machina are blooming all over the place. Because Ramona has escaped my leash and headed off across the landscape. I'm willing to let her run a bit because she might tell me something I need to know, but this novel already feels like a Mulligan stew. I don't need any more ingredients or it's going to wind up tasting vile.

At least I've reestablished regular, daily writing sessions. This block—or whatever I've been going through—has wreaked havoc with my routines. I used to be a regular writing machine, doing my daily count day after week after month after year. They were never huge word counts, an average of three pages a day, but they were steady. Brick by brick to git 'er done.

I recently came across an old journal (I'm slowly digitizing them as well as my old files). It happened to be the one I kept in the year following my dad's death, which was also (not coincidentally, I think) when my worst writers' block ended. That block went on for nearly five years and was excruciating, but there's nothing like a crisis to remind one of the shortness of life and need to get one off one's a**. Writing became my pressure value in that terrible year. My escape, too.

I began by dabbling in occult things: rune readings, tarot, etc., listening for answers that existed inside me but that I couldn't hear through the white noise of grief and confusion. Then I began writing poetry. Next came erratic spurts of writing fanfiction for X-Files and Forever Knight, which led to long discussions with fellow members of the X-Files and Forever Knight lists I belonged to regarding the nature of vampirism. And then came The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron which opened me up to a daily routine and to giving myself permission to be whatever I needed to be, artistically speaking. After that I began to apply the things I'd been learning and doing, and started making up my own characters and universes. Next came my first vampire novel, Blood Geek. I haven't had a bad case of writers' block since.

Well, until now. But this one wasn't nearly as severe as that and may have been fed by bad body chemistry. Whatever, it seems to be thawing. I see signs of spring. Although I'm a little superstitious about stating that openly, I think it's going to stick. No fanfiction or occult readings led me through this time, but there was poetry. It's either all uphill or downhill from there, depending on your perspective.

What goes around comes around of the day:

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2229686.html

[Vampire Hunters Drive Stake Through Milosevic's Heart]

Link stolen from handworn. As he said, it was just too good not to pass on.


Odd bit of information of the day:

The word "startlement" is not in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged but it is in the OED. So I guess it's a word that exists in English, but not in Americanish.


Writingness of the day:

I so love it when my characters start talking in bad movie clichés. It makes me feel so special, especially after three plus two days of no writing. But on days when you're in a cash-in-my-chips-and-leave-the-game kind of mood, as I was yesterday, sometimes clichés are the best you can do. It's better than actually cashing in the chips, I guess. And there are rewrites. Also, after my blood sugar righted itself, my cash-in-the-chips mood went away. Sometimes you get to rewrite moods, too.

The other thing I love: when you're writing chapters that bore you, it's probably a safe bet they'll bore the readers, too. This isn't always a one-to-one correlation, but often is. If it takes me too long to get between points I get antsy—and in my first drafts that happens a lot. I spend chunks of time in rewrites cutting out the padding and reducing the clutter bridging one high point with the next. A story can't consist solely of high points and action-action-action. That gets boring too, and readers need a chance to catch their breath, but it's a delicate balancing act, parceling out the action and the breath-catchers.

I managed to do 1250 words yesterday at lunch (at last!). 250 of that had to be cut as being an unproductive tangent; another 250 turned out to be notes for events coming up in the next few chapters. That left me with a balance of 750 new and I'm-keeping-them words. Not great, but not bad. Still, as it's my only solid production for the week so far, I'm less than thrilled. But it couldn't be helped. Some weeks are just like that. (And I'm hoping to get more done today and on the weekend.)


Random quote of the day:

"Adults are just obsolete children, and the hell with them. You want to catch them before they become obsolete."

—Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

An amusing story, relayed by a friend who was having lunch with a multiply-published writer of "cosy" mysteries. Her publisher wanted to talk about what young people might want to read, that it was very important to attract younger readers. The writer is three-quarters of the way through her latest book, but the editor asked, "Could you include some vampires? Vampires are really big right now."

Hmmm.

Frustration of the day: Netscape won't let me access my flist page. I can access it all right if I use Safari, but none of the click throughs work on Netscape. Which makes no kind of sense! I can click on the individual friend, I've checked all the settings, but I can't click through to the flist page from the entry page or my blog page or the UserInfo page.

Oh, and on Safari, I can get into the flist page, but it's not displaying correctly. And although it says I'm logged in at the top, I still have to log in every time I leave a comment.

Grrr. (This is me looking like that demon-ugly dog.)

Interesting thing of the day: They featured the Magic Castle on one of the local TV programs, an exclusive membership club in Hollywood. I hope to go there for my birthday in September. One of the people I work with is a professional magician and a member there and can get us free passes. But that's some months down the road...

Most ungrammatical news story of the day: On a "Netscape News With CNN" article about Stonehenge: "From where did those bluestones comes?"

Writerly question of the day: Why rewrite The Little Mermaid (Andersen version, not Disney version) when you've covered no new territory, brought no new insights to the table, haven't changed the structure in any way? In fact, the only new element seems to be that this writer set the story in his imaginary, contemporary North American city that he's set so many stories in. I finished the story and thought, "What was the point of that?"

Of course, the whole "covering new territory" issue is one that I run up against quite a bit in my own writing.

Or at least in my current WIP and the last novel that is currently in an editorial holding pattern. I'm told over and over that it's next to impossible to write anything new about vampires; many refuse to read my stuff because they can't believe they'll find anything there for themselves. Yet when people actually do read my stuff they're often surprised, often say, "This is different." Many won't give it a chance, though.

My favorite crit along these lines was: "If I liked vampire books, I'd probably be delighted to read more."

The way I look at it is this: either a book is good or it isn't; either you enjoy reading it or you don't. Even if it's not your usual "type" of book, if you pick it up and enjoy it, why stop reading because it isn't what you usually read? It's impossible to answer that—readers do what they do; people think the way they think.

I've been guilty of it myself, but often when I violate my own reading rules, I find wonderful surprises. The loveliest surprise I've had in recent years is James Hetley's The Summer Country. When I read the blurb some years back I thought, "Not another urban retelling of Celtic myth! Blech." I'd read quite a lot of that and had a prejudice that it would be paint-by-numbers fiction. Then I read a review of the sequel, The Winter Oak, and that made me believe that perhaps there was something different going on with these books. So I bought The Summer Country and I absolutely fell in love with it. Gobbled up The Winter Oak soon after. They were both lovely surprises and now I'll read anything James Hetley puts out, even if it seems like a retelling—because even if some of the elements are familiar territory, he brings a new character gravitas to the table; he makes me see the familiar in a new way.

There's a difference in spirit between a retelling just because you can get away with it and a retelling because your writer's heart has found new value in the material. I think the reader can tell the difference, even if they can't quite put their finger on why one thing works and another doesn't. I hope I'm writing because I've found new value in the material, but I obviously don't have the perspective to judge.

The thing is, I've never perceived my stuff as vampire fiction. My stories are about people trying to cope with a disease that leaves them alienated from the human society that they crave, the love that they need, and with tough moral dilemmas that they try hard to reconcile. They are human beings, not supernatural creatures. They have values (some of them even family values!) and ethics, and try to stay on the side of morality, to show compassion, to weed out the vampires who don't. They are fallible, though, and sometimes fall from grace.

I guess that's been done before, too. But my writer's heart insists there's still value to be had there.

It's frustrating and I wish sometimes the muse hadn't insisted on taking this particular path. I've created other worlds that don't tread such familiar roads, that are not viewed with the same disdain as vampires. But for the moment, this is where my passion lies. To write a novel, I think you've got to have at least some fire in the belly for an idea. At least it's that way for me. It's such a long process that something more than "Gosh, I need to write a novel" has to push me forward. And right now, these characters are providing that burning engine. Other characters and other worlds may catch fire down the line, but for right now, this is what I have to do.

And yes, I'm whining. I'll get over myself soon.