The Time to Write Your Novel is Now

For four years I have cared for my hibiscus, pictured here. I water it when we're in a drought, I give it plant food at the beginning of the season, I pick the dead flowers off, I keep the bugs away, and I love it. From May to June I watch it grow strong shoots and wait anxiously for that first bud to burst open--and often worry that it won't, even though I know I just have to be patient. Then July comes and the heat index hits 90 or so and Bam! All at once, I'm hit with one perfect bloom and the next day, three! Soon enough I've got seven blooms a day and the whole thing looks genuinely gorgeous.

I love waking up to see my hibiscus covered in large, open flowers, but by the next day, those blooms are gone. A hibiscus flower only lasts about a day, maybe two, but by then it's drooping and starting to discolour. You have to savour the beauty while it lasts, the day it's available.

Free time, too, is a beautiful thing. You realize that it's there, wake up to its presence, but you choose to ignore it for the moment because you've got a TV show to catch up on or some errands to run. You get home at the end of the night and you realize your free time is dwindling and will soon be gone. You ignored its beauty, you didn't take advantage of it when you could.

The time to write your novel is now, while you've got the time. Don't wait until the flowers are gone, appreciate the beauty while it's still here. Fall and winter are coming, you may not have the chance after today.

Rags to Riches: Where's My Dénouement?

I don't always post my writings here, but here's a short narrative I came up with earlier, in lieu of my recently crushing financial problems.

Rags to Riches, by Jez Layman
Whoever penned my story got it wrong. I was supposed to be rags to riches. I spent my first years in the trailer park, only they called it a mobile home community; it sounded nicer. Now we have a house. It's lovely, if you don't get too close. Just stay on the street, never mind the cracked siding and peeling paint, stay away from the faded door, the messy hallways and imperfections. Inside we've tried to make it look nice, but it's nothing compared to you and your house. I'm sorry, we did the best we could, really. But look at it from the street, from far off, it's smart, it's quaint. It's our dream. It's not much, but it's a house, that's all we wanted and maybe it's not perfect, but it's ours.

A house meant we were moving up, out of the trailer park and on with our lives, but, it didn't, not really. My story got messed up somewhere along the way. Someone put in one too many conflicts and added catastrophe instead of a dénouement. Things were supposed to get better, not worse. We were supposed to be able to live in the house, it was supposed to be pretty. The days were supposed to be filled with successes and happiness, not struggle and mountains of bills. I was supposed to escape everything when I left, when we got a house, but someone penned it wrong. Where's my rising action, where's my turning point? Where's my brilliant love story, my heroic adventure, my long-lost relative to leave behind a fortune? Where's my happy ending?

Money Issues in YA vs Adult Literature

Note: This piece is one I originally posted on 21 May 09 on my other blog, Typeset World. It is reproduced here because I've been struggling with the same issue lately and felt it was worth reposting.

Generally, I believe that children's literature (including Young Adult) holds more positive qualities than adult literature does, but this isn't the case in all areas. The biggest thing for me, lately, is that in regards to money, adult books seem more realistic. There's a simple reason for this: adults worry about money more. Because they spend their lives working for that money, and they have to pay the bills for water, heat, electricity, medical, insurance, etc etc etc. Then they have to buy groceries and toilet paper and rubber bands. Whatever. The point is, adults are constantly aware of how much money is going in, and how much money is going out. This is reflected in book catered to the adult audience. We see many issues of money in this genre: characters needing to pay rent, or trying to get a raise, worrying about how they'll pay their medical bills whenever something goes wrong.

In children's books, you don't see this. First off, because children don't pay their own expenses, they rely on their parents. This doesn't mean that children don't worry about money. When do we get to read the stories about the child who hides in the bathroom for the first ten minutes of lunch period so they can be at the end of the food line so that no one is around to hear them when they tell the lunch lady they get a free lunch? The story of the kid who has to buy all their clothes at the second-hand store and purchase all their shoes a size or two larger because they can't afford new things all the time? The kid who doesn't go to birthday parties just so they don't have to show up without a gift because the family couldn't afford one?
We don't read these stories very often. I think the main reason of this is that children who are reading the books don't want to read about those problems all the time--especially if they're living them. They might just want to escape the problem, put themselves in place of the main character, and live like royalty for a few hours. That's totally understandable.

With YA however, I see it a little differently. Young adults are no longer children, but not yet adults. They're somewhere in the middle, age-wise, and in this issue as well. Or, at least, in my opinion, they should be. That doesn't mean that they are. This is the age, especially in the later teens, that one gets their first job and starts to pay some things on their own. Sure, these things may just be movie tickets or new cds (assuming they even buy hard copies anymore), but it's their own money, and they need to keep track of it. Even still, you don't see this as much as you would expect. Yes, in John Green's Looking For Alaska this issue is tackled through The Colonel, who is always having Pudge pay for his cigarettes because he can't afford them. We go to his trailer even. But the thing is, the Colonel, much as I love him, is not the main character here. He's not the narrator either. It's all Pudge, and Pudge has the money to pay for cigarettes for both of them, to pay for McDonald's, and his family can easily afford the private school. Generally, the main characters have money. This may also go back to how poverty-stricken children want to escape their money issues through literature, but it may just be a way to make things easier on the author. Things are so much easier to get going if the character can afford them.

Still, there are books that address these issues, I'm not saying there aren't. Suite Scarlett by Maureen Johnson is a great example. The family is having financial troubles and are barely keeping their head above water at the point where the story begins. The hotel is beginning to fall into disrepair and we see the ways this impacts the family members. It's great, and more than that, it's believable. It's something that some of us can relate to. So why aren't there more books out there like this one? Why do our main characters always have to be upper middle class with spare cash and cars (even if they're not new)? Will books featuring a few money issues (even small ones) become more popular in our current economic situation, or will we see rise to more books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where the poor boy finds the golden ticket--a way to rise above the current situation? I'd love to hear your thoughts on anything mentioned. Leave them in the comments.

My Book is Not About Me

I have attended enough presentations and met with enough authors to know that a question that constantly pops up for writers is "Is this book about you?" Or "Is this character based on someone you know?" "Your character is gay, does that mean you are?" "Your parents are divorced, so are the ones in your book, is this about your life?"

The answer, usually, is no. My book is not about me. Yes, there will always be parts of the author in their book, because the book is a part of the author and it's impossible to completely separate the two, but on the whole, most novels are not the thinly veiled autobiographies readers expect them to be.

J.K. Rowling writes about wizards, but that doesn't mean she knows magic (though it would be awesome if she did). I am not a hermaphrodite, but that doesn't mean I can't write about one. And for any members of the secret service reading my blog, I do think our government could make a few chances, but I am not about to head up a coup.

Making up stories and creating truly believable fictional characters, though, that's what makes an author great. Give the author a little credit and believe in the power of their imagination and skill, because if they really did write all of their books about themselves, there would be no variation in characters, nor difference in plot. Things could get boring very quickly.

PS: If you ever do find yourself transported in real life to another dimension, world, or time via wardrobe, TARDIS, or hole in space, please do write your autobiography, I'd love to read it.

Writing Like Yourself

Today multiple friends linked me to this website which will take a piece of your text and tell you which famous author you write like. About the third time it showed up on my feed, I tried it.

Chapter 8 (my favourite) of Zenith resulted with Dan Brown. So did chapter 1 and chapter 41. Apparently Zenith is written in a style scarily similar to Dan Brown.
My current WIP (which desperately needs a better working title) is similar to Margaret Atwood. Now, I can see the cynical angle here, but I had no idea Margaret Atwood was that sarcastic.
The first chapter of The Conqueror gave me, surprise surprise, Dan Brown. I don't know what it is with me and that guy, I guess I'll have to read one of his books to find out. Strangely enough, though, the second chapter resulted in Douglas Adams. I'm still trying to figure that one out. Don't get me wrong, I'm flattered, just terribly confused.

Here's the thing, though, you will never write like Chuck Palahniuk or Stephen King. I will never write like Dan Brown no matter how many times I receive that result. Every author is uniquely different than all the others, even if they use similar vocabularies or sentence structures, even if they write on the same topics. You could write the same scenes with the same characters and still you will never write the exact same book as anyone else. That's a good thing! Work it! Find your personal authorial voice and expand upon it! Go forth and create something new, not just a copy of something already available.

But hey, if you do have the ability to copy someone else's style, look into ghost writing, you could make a killing.

There are No Vacations from Being a Writer

On Wednesday night I completed my edits/rewrite of Zenith, packaged it up pretty & sent it off to be printed. What I didn't know is that CreateSpace, the website I had a free code for, requires 1-2 days processing, so it looks like I'll be paying for my copy after all. It only costs about $5, so I don't mind, I suppose. After all that work, I plan on rewarding myself with a copy.

Additionally, because I finished my edits, I also sent off a PDF of my novel to seven willing volunteers for beta-reading. I haven't received anything definite from anyone yet––it's only been two days––but so far the feedback has been good. However, none of them have reached the completely sucky last few chapters, so I'm not holding my breath.

Yesterday I could have relaxed from writing (and probably should have, considering I work a 12 hour split shift), but I couldn't. I've mentioned it before, but writing is not a job you drive to, clock in, do your work, clock out, go home, & forget about until the next morning; writing is a whole life process. Even as I drove to work yesterday, my mind was already trying to choose which project to begin on next. I wanted to do something with time travel that reflects my personal beliefs about the way time travel should be; I wanted a character with a particularly nice moustache; I wanted to try romance, since I've never successfully pulled that off. Before bed I ended up writing a 500 word drabble about two characters for a friend, just so I could write something (a need I rarely have when a deadline approaches, sadly). There are just no vacation time available for a writer.

This morning I woke up from a strange dream that ended up being the inspiration for my next project and immediately I began brainstorming and researching, picking out names. I need an androgynous name that can be mistaken as a male name, but is also not uncommon for females, but cannot be a diminutive of a different name. Currently I am leaning towards Sky with Cameron as my backup. This idea differs entirely from anything I've ever written and I am so excited about it.

Which brings me to my last topic of the day: all writers are lunatics. I've told you all this before and it's the title of my blog, so this really shouldn't be much of a surprise. After I created my list of possible character names I asked twitter & some friends which androgynous names they could think of, to gauge the connotations of each name. I received a lot of responses, for which I am thankful, but no one asked what the names were for. Even after I started hinting that I had a new story, no one asked what it was about. Like the lunatic writer I am, I went into this whiny state of Nobody Loves Me before finally texting Secret Agent Casye my idea. I could have just told everybody, I know, but I'm a lunatic, remember?

[Next up, research! I'm heading to the library later today to pick up some books, including Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.]