Reaching Out

So... on Facebook I was like "porn? romance novel? YA novel? Hmmm" and everyone was like "ALL OF THEM" except I am not suicidal and I don't think people understood that each phrase meant a completely different idea that would be difficult to overlap while still maintaining cohesion. Also it will have to be written alongside a dissertation prospectus. I aim to use NaNo for getting started on a new manuscript, not necessarily to hit the 50k wordcount (which from past experience I know is possible, even when I'm doing seminars and TA'ing at the same time, hence why I just dropped off from doing it the last couple of years... and the trouble of getting downtown to events here is a HUGE turn-off. However, there appears to be a pretty strong contingent of UCR students so I may try to rally with them instead).

So if any of you were curious as to which ideas I'm currently wrestling with, here they are ( under a cut to save your f-list )

I kinda wish my social justice nonsense wouldn't get all up in my fiction sometimes.

Lilian was just supposed to fix her boyfriend's heart by giving him a clockwork one and then there would be angst about how he's no longer quite human and has to keep replacing body parts until he's unrecognizable.

But no, instead it's become this sappy nonsense where her interactions with him bring back memories about her own impoverished childhood and so she turns her skills to helping other people which gets her in political trouble with Big Business (thus complicating her brothers' careers as politicians but I haven't thought that through) and now I just want to blow up the whole city. Which would be SO MUCH FUN.

But anyway. She has just replaced Darren's heart and he seems to be okay, so.

So I'm going to repeat myself here:

While writing today, was struck by how much I like writing about jacket lapels, and of characters holding them, touching them, and stuff.

It's like jacket lapels are the textile equivalent of labia.


There is your thought for the day.

So that's about ~2500 handwritten words today. I'm beginning to see Lilian and Darren's dynamic fleshed out a bit more, as well as the stakes involved in restoring Darren back to health.

Still not ENTIRELY sure if rocks fall everyone dies, but... who knows?

So, I appear to be writing three things for NaNo, because I can't really see them as very long projects. They're somewhere in the realm of 10k - 15k stories, and actually, a couple of them are more like, music concept albums in my brain ala Interstellar 9999, so I really don't expect to get a whole lot of them in terms of text, when I'm kind of thinking in terms of lyrics and actual sound. But I have no musical skills beyond theory I learnt as a kid, so as a musical project, the stories are useless to me.

Story #1 Lilian Memoria is a genius inventrix who has pulled her family out of poverty on her own through providing wealthy clientele with amusing automata. Her frivolous life is disturbed when she meets Darren Hayward, a schoolteacher with a fatal condition.

I've been meaning to write a short of this for a while. A lot of it comes from the desire to twist the lyrics of "Her Clockwork Heart". I think because at the time, I was also encountering a lot of stories of the "doctor tries to save dying (female) lover" variety, and the song kind of made no sense to me, like, I'm sorry, the narrator is a woman, and why the fuck couldn't it have been about an inventrix who tries to save her husband's life? Is this way too alternate for alt-history? Given the issues surrounding androids replacing sex workers, women as literal dolls, and science gendered male, I just didn't like the song as it was. Even when I hear it in my head, I always replace the lyrics to his clockwork heart instead.

Also, rocks fall, everybody dies. I think. I haven't really decided what direction to take with the ending yet.

Story #2 Ashn's lover has been kidnapped from their sea home, and Ashn has to travel as a human across a dry desert landscape, navigating dangers and the bewildering gender norms of humanity, to get Mryn back.

I made up that name on the spot. I wanted to write a lesbian-ish mermaid story that sort of talks about gender performance and appearance and reading gender on bodies.

There will be a love triangle thing, where Ashn is read as male by a human woman who resembles her lover and she is kind of sort of falling in love but can't help but remember "You're not her" (this was going to be a drawn out painful sad love duet) (because Ashn's language does not have a gender binary, I think I will use "she" by default based on Ashn's flawed understanding on how biology and gender are tied in this human world). Also, might have a kind of Wild West feel, not sure yet what kind of world this is.

Story #3 Where labourers are never taught of their city's name, only that they must work, two slaves find each other in the darkness.

Again, another musical concept. I was at the Clockwork Dolls' concert, right? And Helene has a lovely voice, but I guess I was still thinking about my "subculture is not an escape" article, so in one of the songs, the chorus goes "Fly away with me" and I was going all like "HALE NO the fuck do I want to fly away for? shit is real down here and it not gonna do anybody favours to just, you know, LEAVE. And who gets to just fly away, anyway?"

Also was reading Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, and one of the privileged characters falls in love with a working-class character, and I was thinking through class differences, and how that separates people, and what does it mean for the privileged to help the disenfranchised, using that privilege to do so? And what does it mean to live in a space you can't escape, and you have so many social ties you wouldn't want to escape it because that means leaving behind important loved ones? How do you transform this space?

Although, really started with wanting to write a song about fucking in engine rooms hiding in the darkness and the noise.

And then there's the dragon porn moniquill told me to write so I better get on that too.

So today I woke up? And realized I had nothing to do, really, besides write for NaNo. I'd already accomplished about 2k last night and I thought, I could go a couple more K today. Did I mention I'd also written two response papers last night before embarking on the novel writing?

And I kept putting it off, because I had to finish reading some of the readings. In between I wrote 1K each time. And finally culminated the evening by raiding the databases looking for secondary texts I could use for my paper for my Politics class and writing up my proposal.

I PROCRASTINATED ON MY NANOWRIMO WITH MY GRAD SCHOOL WORK YOU GUYS.

I'm going to bed tonight feeling effin's accomplished.

Also, my wordcount for the day is 4103.

Werd up.

2005: hit 52,363 on Day 13.

2009: 50,251 on Day 9.

Now to finish the actual story, and move on to another draft that desperately needs my attention.

ONLY 27K TODAY.

WTF?

Hitting 30k tomorrow. No ifs, no buts, whatever it takes.

( This is what Western literature has done to me. )

Now that I am done being depressed and teary about this fucking bullshit, I AM ANGRY.

And I am going to FINISH THIS FUCKING NOVEL FOR SURE NOW.

Back, plot bunnies, back! Confound me no more!!

I just thought it would be a fine idea to write a story whimsically called, "Deathrays and Doom". Or rather, "Deathrays and DOOM."

I also just tweeted the following:

"Deathrays! Dirigibles! Dashing daredevil damsels! Dastardly deathtraps! Deadly dominions! Dreamy dramas! Diva demigoddesses!"

Oh MAN. (I had to check thesaurus.com for the last two.) This is actually sounding good.

SOMEONE TALK ME OUT OF THIS, STAT!!!!!!