The Beginnings of a Novel

The outline for the new book is going very slowly …

Let me explain the general idea of the book. This is in the Archetype series, none of which has gone to developmental edit yet. A little background: Archetypes are near-immortal beings who are tasked with holding humanity’s cultural memories. If the Archetype for an ethnicity dies, all of the people whose patterns they hold die, so that an entire ethnic group (and, more likely, a large group of people of mixed ethnicity that includes that group) die. This is why Archetypes have been held apart from humans and each other.

My series covers the interactions between one particular renegade family (unique in that Archetypes don’t generally have family bonds) and humans. The humans have their own uniqueness in that they have been gifted with abilities by (depending on who you ask) Gaia, the Maker of the Archetypes, God, or genetic enhancement.

The story I’m writing, tentatively called Gods’ Seeds, involves two threads that will come together as the story develops. But here’s a first attempt at synopsis:

The Council of the Oldest, the ruling body of the Archetypes, has announced that humans’ genetic and cultural memories will be gradually divested back to their humans, as humans have been found fit to retain them. Meanwhile, a young woman on Earth named Leah Inhofer sees horrific visions of Archetypes battling each other, with thousands of human casualties resulting. The Archetypes grow restless, knowing that their reason for existence is being taken away, and they will take desperate measures to keep this from happening. The conflict draws battle lines between Archetype and Archetype, and Leah must find the strength to stand between the two — or watch the decimation of humanity.

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There’s a lot of writing in-between this paragraph and a novel. There’s character, there’s subplots, there’s relationships between characters. And there’s a lot of words — about 80,000 words on average. That’s why I’m going to write an outline, to help me find my way through the plot of the novel.

Wish me luck, and let me know if you’d read this novel!

Wrestling with my Problem Child, part 2

Through a series of edits and rewrites, the novel Gaia’s Hands (about 90,000 words) has been reduced to a tight novella with a feeling of impending doom — and impending resurrection.

I do not know where that novella came from, except that I think it was lurking at the edges of the novel I wrote, with the symbolism pointing in that direction, but my not having the guts to go there. I think there’s a tinge of my mood in the middle of Trump’s presidency and its unrestrained pro-business stance. My story has become in many ways dystopian, where fear and threats rule the day for those who are different.

The source material is almost five years old. I’ve been struggling with it for years — as my first novel, it probably lacked voice. After some serious, intense editing and a painful and beautiful ending, I don’t know if it has its own identity yet. But it’s a lot tighter, a lot more poignant, and I hope it’s a good story.

The World Needs Your Novel

Are you familiar with NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short) is an annual writing contest where there are no prizes but a certificate and the only one you’re competing against is yourself. The name comes from a contraction of “National Novel Writing Month” but has grown far beyond its bounds, with international reach.

Every November, thousands of writers and aspiring writers unite over the Web for NaNo. Each will write toward a goal of a written work of 50,000 words. In October 2016 (the last year for which data is available), almost 400,000 participants worldwide participated, with 34,000 people finishing the 50,000 word goal (Office of Letters and Light, 2016). The NaNo website provides blurbs of advice from writers, encouragement emails, and forums where people can ask for advice, seek information, and at times lament lack of progress.

The motto of NaNo is “The World Needs Your Novel”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the world needs your novel to be published. With Google making research easy and the boom in potential writers, those who seek an agent may never get one and those who self-publish may find their works mouldering in a corner of the Internet. Nowadays, having your work read may be more a matter of search engine optimization than the quality of your writing.

I struggle with this all the time. I do not write for the market; I write from my heart, which is deep and quirky. My heroes are pacifists and horticulturists. Nobody has rippling muscles; my sexiest hero is androgynous. I persist, however, in writing and posting some of my works on Wattpad and sending manuscripts to agents who tell me “It’s not you, it’s me”.

I persevere because, deep down, I believe the world needs my novel. Not in a way that makes me famous (Fame actually makes me nervous). But in a way that makes people take a deep breath and think. And feel. And look at things like pacifism, environmentalism. and love differently than before. All I need to do is get my writing into their hands.

And there we are — back to the hard part.

Office of Letters and Light (2017). Press release 2017. Available: https://nanowrimo.org/press. [April 14, 2018].