An author's collection of thoughts and stories
Drive to the dentist
And coax my kid’s mouth open
To look at her teeth
Walk in the hot sun
To play at an awesome park
Water’s gone — head home
The sound of water
Flowing over many rocks
This river smells weird
A yellow jacket
It came to investigate
We fled in terror
Raiding the grapevine
They aren’t remotely ripe yet
Sour through and through
Maybe I shouldn’t admit to this, but one of the reasons why I struggle so much with writing normal characters is because I feel like I’m mocking them.
My thought process goes something like, “I have heard multiple people say this sentence, so I’m going to have this normal character also say it.”
Then I feel like I delved into every single bad stereotype known to mankind.
Though it’s not my fault that so many real life people say the exact same things. Word for word.
What is up with that anyway?
As a romance author, I keep an eye on the trends for relationship/marriage advice. Most of it comes from Christian sources.
I once listened into a social audio conversation that was ostensibly about secular marriage, but the general consensus of the group was that, if you truly loved someone, you would go away so they could focus on their career. If I had a smarmy salesperson personality, I would have taken the opportunity to pitch my novels to them as romantic escapism, because that is some hardcore dedication to loneliness.
Anyway
I have a unique perspective, because while I grew up Christian, I married as a Pagan.
The overwhelming impression that I get from Christian sources is that the women are too picky when it comes to men. I guess they aren’t getting hitched because no one is good enough.
Once upon a time, during my early days of marriage, someone pulled out his Bible and read a lot of verses about the sort of wife I was supposed to be. Heck if I can remember much about it, but by the time he started reading about how I was supposed to earn extra money to help with the household finances, I knew beyond a doubt that I would have to develop a serious cocaine habit in order to have that much energy. I have never come close to being a perfect biblical wife.
Thank god I don’t believe in the Bible. (har har)
But lets go back even farther, to when I was a Christian teenager. This was when I really began to shine as a misfit, because when my church leaders advised me to date around a lot and aim to marry as close to perfect as I could, but I was more like, “Husbands are human beings, and marriage isn’t like buying a car.”
Yeah, I was bullied rather badly in church. Can’t imagine why /sarcasm.
But apparently, plenty of other women took that sort of advice to heart, and now the Christians are moaning that they aren’t getting married at all.
I think my husband is pretty great. I won’t go into slathering specifics, but he’s wickedly smart, he helps take care of me, and he plays with the kids — I can’t imagine wanting to be married to anyone else. He also doesn’t fit any of those bullet point lists that I was given in church during my teen years.
He cusses, he loves a good whisky, and he doesn’t believe in God.
Oh no!
But I fall short, too.
I go to bed with dirty dishes still in the sink. 😀
So we’re a couple of heathens who take our children to the park on Sunday instead of church. We’re happy.
Marriage isn’t shopping for a car, and you shouldn’t go out with a list of requirements, make comparisons, then pick the one with the most cup holders. Marriage is building a deep bond with another human being. A connection between souls.
And stop blaming women for being what you raised them to be.
I caught a sore throat. As in the, “wake up at 5am unable to speak or swallow because of the agonizing pain” variety.
And, at 5am, my husband made me a potent cup of honey and lemon tea, which helped quite a bit. He’s told me in the past that cussing really does help numb pain, so the first thing I said after regaining my voice was an expletive. 😀
I’ve been listlessly wallowing for about three days now. It’s not strep — just very swollen and raw — so all I can do is wait it out with ibuprofen.
Which led me to browsing through the old pictures I had uploaded to my blog, when I came across the quote above.
Here is the post with my original thoughts about it.
My opinion hasn’t changed, but I figure that I can elaborate some more.
The advice to “write from experience,” doesn’t mean to tell about the time you accidentally shoplifted Road Warrior at the mall. It means to write about the broader themes that you are familiar with. Like friendship, loneliness, romance, betrayal, etc.
For example, I have six kids irl, and I write a lot about pregnancy and motherhood in my stories. None of my fiction is autobiographical, but the themes are reflective of my real world experiences.
A few years back I read an article written by a woman who began her career as a midwife before she had her first baby, and how experiencing natural childbirth firsthand changed the way she interacted with her clients. As I recall, she hadn’t expected it to be so different on the other side, and personally understanding what other women were going through helped her be a better midwife.
You can’t simply empathize with natural childbirth to know what its like; you have to experience it.
You can’t empathize your way through writing about things like love, betrayal, fear, hope, etc, and produce a story that’s relatable to people who have experienced it. You need to know what the heck you’re talking about.
And if your experiences are so limited that you can only produce one book from them, then maybe you should put down the electronic devices and go live a little.
I had intended to post 1000-word installments of The Scions every other week, which seemed like an easy goal.
As it turns out, my life is currently a little too hectic to pull that off.
I’m not even averaging a 100 words a day.
More like, “I wrote a sentence and fixed up some word choices today.”
But that’s how it currently is. I don’t mind — it always feels like one of the largest miscommunications that I’m always struggling with is that other people don’t understand how much I love the journey. Life is too interesting for me to complain about how I don’t have the time or energy to write much these days. Besides, this is basically the reason why I don’t do deadlines.
The story is still very much on my mind, and I have no intention of abandoning it (not than anyone wants to read it anyway), it’s just coming more at a drip than a steady flow.
Despite being a self-described “hopeless romantic,” I also have a hopeless pragmatic streak as well — don’t be afraid to settle for Good Enough. Because face it, there’s no such thing as perfect.
Good Enough is hard to come by in this modern age.
For starters, finding someone who isn’t going to up and bail on you in a society that actively encourages breakups and divorces is a feat in and of itself. Consider yourself lucky.
Honestly, that was one aspect of marriage that I didn’t expect. When my husband and I hit financial difficulties, people I barely knew started telling me to leave him — as if somehow the job market was going to magically embrace me with a lucrative career as the result. Uhhh, no. That was 2011. Everything was burning. And I liked having someone to endure with.
Don’t discredit how much it means to have someone you can always count on, no matter what.
So, at this point, you’re probably wondering what inspired me to write this. Is there trouble in paradise? Dark secrets behind the scenes?
Always. 😉
I don’t frequently watch youtube videos, but I do occasionally read over the recommended titles when I venture over to the site in my search of knowledge. Some people kill brain cells by huffing aerosols, but I do it by peaking at what the mainstream is doing.
I saw this:
At this point, I’m pretty convinced that therapists consider a no-strings-attached booty call to be the only “healthy” relationship, but that’s a different topic.
I chortled when I saw that recommended video, because I know that all of my fictional couples would be labeled with things like, “toxic,” or “codependent.” Heck, I’m currently working on a story that begins with an unapologetic kidnapping, so clearly, appealing to modern values is not something I concern myself with much (they’re all Christian-based anyway, and I’m not Christian). Rather, I don’t think that the path to happiness is so straight and narrow as we were led to believe.
I write my own philosophies.
Writing a dark story is turning out to be more of a challenge than I expected.
I have an idealist inside of me that tries to insert insights and epiphanies that would prevent the Traumatic Climax from happening, so I have to pull back and rewrite. The result is that the characters keep coming oh-so-close to redeeming themselves, then turning away and clinging to their dysfunctions.
It’s realistic enough; I’ve watched plenty of people do that in real life.
I’m not the sort of writer than deliberately sets out to manipulate the emotions of readers. The only reason why I’m writing this story at all is because it’s stuck in my head too badly to be ignored, and the only person intended to ride this roller coaster is me. There is no sadistic glee happening behind the scenes.
Perhaps this is a concept that’s difficult to grasp in our society, but I don’t write for money or popularity. I write for me. I write because I gained knowledge too heavy for me to bear, and my childhood hobby became my vessel of expression. I need it to remain artistically pure for the sake of my sanity. That’s why I always pull away from online groups and self-advertising — anything that could influence my writing away from what I need it to be.
Is there anyone out there capable of understanding?
So here I sit, feeling bad that Hartmann is too caught up in self-pity to realize what he’s doing, that Carol’s personality is too weak to resist, and that Lambert’s too checked out to notice. All it takes is one sentence to turn everything around, but I can’t let myself write it until it’s too late.
If this story wasn’t pounding at my head, I wouldn’t be writing it at all.
I was comparison shopping yarn and browsing through reviews, when I came across someone complaining that 100% wool yarn smelled weird when wet.
Well, yeah … being wool and all, it does smell like it came from an animal — especially when wet.
So
Last year I made inquiries about different self-publishing avenues, and was warned that I needed to be careful about the sort of readership I catered to. I’m not talking about “target audience,” but rather something more specific that has popped up with the rise of social media.
For example, the general consensus was that people who wanted to read books for free, were also the most entitled, demanding, and critical. So, while it might be easier to get readers, the “fans” were abusive enough to make you regret it.
To get back to the beginning, the review complaining about the wool yarn made me think about self publishing.
On the surface, you might think that “crafty yarn people” counts as a specific group, but once you dig deeper, you discover that some of them can’t stand things like inconsistent thickness, knots in the yarn, or the smell of animals fibers. Others, like me, prefer the unique personalities of handspun yarns, don’t mind working around knots, and enjoy the characteristics of natural fibers. The two groups might fit under the same crafty umbrella, but the sort of yarn they want is completely different.
Self-publishers need to think about more than a general target audience. Metaphorically speaking, trying to sell handspun wool or acrylic yarns to the wrong subgroup is going to end miserably.
And frankly, with something like writing, authors need to be mindful about where they go searching for their readers. No one wants to get sucked into catering to an audience that kills all the joy out of writing.
My big complaint about CR1515 is that I feel like I’m only writing half the story.
So far, Talon exists as a prop. He’s there for the first few paragraphs, then vanishes forever — something that’s driving me batty. I want him to exist as a character, and to establish a solid foundation that helps the reader understand Aurora’s emotional conflict over the situation she finds herself in.
When I talked with my husband about the troubles I’m having with this story, he suggested that I change the first chapter to focus on Talon’s perspective, and end it with the sinking realization that his girlfriend has vanished. It’s a brilliant idea, and I love it.
But it also puts me in the same position I am in with The Scion Suit; I currently can’t maintain a masculine frame of mind for the life of me.
I adore masculine characters, so I don’t want to phone it in or force it. They need to flow naturally and keep consistent personalities.
Writing hasn’t been going all that smoothly with this pregnancy anyway; at this point I feel like waiting it out isn’t going to make much of a difference. Everything I’ve written is very likely going to need to be rewritten anyway.
In the vein of, “Everyone else is doing it,” I tried thinking of some books where I enjoyed the romance/couples/literally-anything-emotional, and I came up with nothing.
OMG I am so cranky.
At which point I realized that I actually have ZERO interest in the idea of ‘love’ for its own sake; might as well read about someone and their anime body pillow for all the difference it makes. Throw in the fact that everyone writes female characters as psychotic self-absorbed bitches, and you basically have the reason why I can’t name any romance novels that I like enough to recommend.
So there you have it: Don’t bother reading books. They all suck.
LOL
The thing is, I often feel like a hopeless romantic trapped in a world where romance has been deliberately slaughtered — of course I don’t enjoy it. Why would I? It’s all just pointless nihilism because nobody knows how to genuinely connect with another human being anymore.
For now, I’m content to sit inside my own little bubble, occasionally sending out the message, “It doesn’t have to be like this,” with the knowledge that even a butterfly’s wings can have a huge impact on the world.
By Autumn Rain 