Onward

New chapter of Shades up.  And it hasn’t even been a month since the last one!

There’s a saying, attributed to Ray Bradbury, that you have to write a million words of crap before you get to the good stuff. Someone mentioned it the other day, and since I was running short of other ways to procrastinate, I got out the calculator.

295,000 words for Eve
60,000 in Donte’s book
83,000 Taro
113,000 Rafe
64,000 Keen
51,000 Damsel
61,000 Joss
37,000 Xmas
17,000 on miscellaneous stories

780,000 words in Eve’s galaxy. Not counting notes or false starts or cut scenes. But don’t be disappointed yet. Flame is 38,000 words. Fidelis is 6,000. Melissa…I dunno, forty some pages not in the computer. And somewhere back there is Natalia (I will find her again!) and Shelly (thankfully buried.) Both at least a hundred pages long (Shelly more probably two hundred…) Manes, complete at sixty pages and so good, but sadly lost…

But let’s forget those. If I don’t have the words in my computer, they don’t count. How about that.

Think that will keep me from my million words? Than let’s go ahead and add in my fanfiction. All 186,000 words of it.

780,000
186,000
038,000
006,000

1,010,000

And before you point out that the wording is “a million words of crap” before turning out good stuff–I’d like to point out that at least 500,000 words of first drafts are not in this count. I’m not afraid to revise.

And my stuff is not crap. ^_^

Nineteen days to edit Joss and write the ending I didn’t manage the first time around. I still have to plug all the changes into the document (I edit on paper because Holly Lisle says so and she seems to be right), but it’s done.

And it’s awesome. I’d dance around the room, but it’s almost 0100, and I really need to go to bed.

After I read those last scenes one more time.

Not mine. Someone far braver. (and yes, I’m going to call her that.)

Sometime in the last couple months, writing friends were discussing Lazy Writing that Pissed Us Off. (my name for it.) Stuff like Generic Viking Culture!, Generic Chivalry!, and Fantasy Quests Must Touch Every Country For Pretty Much No Reason. At times we went off on particular popular writers who consistently drove us nuts with the same issues book after book.

One author we talked about is Mercedes Lackey, and one friend said something along the lines of, “And please! Why are all her main characters so tortured?” And KD looked at her own writing and thought, “???”

Uh oh.

Eve’s mother abandoned her days after her birth; she was ignored by her father and her much-older brother raised her as one of the lab animals.

Other than losing his father very young, Ben had a safe and nurturing childhood–then his first brush with just how bad life could get shattered him.

Donte was used by slavers whose only purpose was to break him. And they did. Taro grew up an orphan in a gang, used for begging when he was a toddler, then trained as a pickpocket. Rafe was trained to be an expensive prostitute. Keen’s entire family was murdered.

From Elizabeth Bear’s LJ, just stumbled upon today:

And that’s why my characters are almost all trauma survivors, because that’s who I know. (I am trying to write some undamaged people now, to stretch myself. It’s hard. I don’t know how people who don’t trigger react to stress. People who do trigger are predictable: once you know our triggers, you know when and how we will react.)

Umm…yeah. What she said.

Don’t get me wrong. My story isn’t a tale of horror, it’s more a misadventure, a farce–a long and rambling tale of KD being stupid at just the wrong moments (wrong being when no one smarter was looking out for me) and getting drastically hurt because of it.

What I do know, is that on the rare occasions I share the details, I get a HELL of a lot of “omg, me too!” I think there was one friend I ever told who didn’t react that way, in fact. I called her my normal friend–but often in late night conversations, I’d go looking for the flaw. Were her parents insane in any way? No? How about older brother? Hmm…never got cornered by a pushy cousin? No neglect, no trauma, no twisty sneaky mental abuse anywhere? Perhaps it’s not surprising that as much I loved her, we lost touch. What did we really have to talk about? She wore me out in her wonderful, joyous normalcy.

The friends who have stuck are the (pardon my adjective, beloved friends) the twisted ones. The ones who have lived through the shadow and the pain and pushed upwards, weathering the wind and storms like those few trees that survive just at the tree-line on a mountain, roots twisted deep into a cliff, leaning over a precipice they can’t quite escape.

Or, as a roommate long ago put it when I had a two-bedroom apartment that friends were rotating through at need, “What does it say about you that the people you get on with best are the crazy ones?” (she was one of a multiple collection)

Maybe I’m finally getting over stuff enough I can have those normal friends. Because I certainly cherish the one who made that comment. (and zomg, I bet she laughs when she sees I called her normal…) (as long as she doesn’t think I’m belittling her trials, which I sure as hell ain’t. Her soul-searing stuff isn’t trivial–it’s just not the same as mine. Not what I’m posting here about.)

God, my head hurts.

Wow, looks like my disclaimer in that first line no longer applies.

Okay, well, I didn’t start out searching my own soul. And I sure as hell didn’t mean to.

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Douglas Adams
English humorist & science fiction novelist (1952 - 2001)

He was right.

Go get hold of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Not the movie, either.

Well, go on!  Why are you still here?  *wanders off to study physics, philosophy, and human nature while laughing her butt off*