Arrant Nonsense

The Ways of Magic anthology is out today, featuring my story "Of Were-Critters, Widow Women, and Water Rights." It's a weird western with a werewolf protagonist (because I am That Werewolf Writer, after all). You all know it as the "Steampunk Werewolf Western," and now you can actually read it.

The folks at Deepwood are terrific to work with, and James Tallett, the editor, is lovely.

Go forth! Download! Read!

GUYS. The steampunk werewolf western has found a home in the Ways of Magic antho!

DO THE DANCE OF JOY WITH ME.

NanoPals on Twitter today asked, "How does religion play into your worlds? Do you allow your personal beliefs to flavour your work? Wha do your characters believe? What kind of book do you prefer to read - one that heavily includes personal faith or one that shies away from a characters viewpoints. Do pious characters bother you if they stray too far from what you personally believe?"

I'll duplicate my comment there and expand on it. It's not like I'm doing anything else, like editing, right now anyway.

Depends on what I'm writing, really. I write mainly short stories, and I've done five (out of 27) that have overtly religious characters. Three of them have recognizably Biblical angels and demons as major characters. And, yeah, that's my own Christianity bleeding into my fiction, but I still try to make them their own and not my mouthpiece. Preachiness is annoying, and so these characters are still PEOPLE in their own right with their own opinions, shaped by their experiences and their own beliefs--beliefs that don't necessarily line up with my own.

I also realize going in that these stories are hard sells in any market. They're too Christian for the secular market and not Christian enough for the Christian market (because of subject matter and some salty language)--and two of them are over 15K words and under 20K words long, and the third LOOKS like a standard "guy sells soul to devil" story, even though it's not--so they're stuck in a kind of limbo of unsaleableness.

But the beauty of the current system is that, once I've exhausted the paying markets, I can self-pub them and maybe they'll find their own market, you know?

I have also written stories where the internal theology in no way reflects my own, and many, many where religion isn't even a thing except for the occasional startled or mournful "Oh, God." It really depends on what the story needs more than anything else.

When reading, I'm fine with characters and worldviews that don't reflect my own beliefs, as long as the story is internally consistent and tells a good tale. The trope I despise above all else, however, is the one-note Stupid/Evil/Stupidly Evil Christian Character. It's boring, it's lazy, and I do my level best to subvert it on a regular basis by writing good-guy religious characters when the story calls for something like that.

( And this is stupidly long, so under the cut it goes. )

So, yeah, the 7th outline is not coming and... may never. I have no idea what to do with that idea and so it's being back-burnered, although "Alex tries to cure brain cancer and causes the zombie apocalypse instead" would be... horrifyingly apropos. I may go with that, but honestly, I don't think I'll need it for my NaNo project, so I'm not too bovvered.

Which is not to say I'm sitting back and doing nothing. I had a meeting with my Writing Buddy tonight, and after we spent an hour geeking out over our mutual interests, we got to the crit on the steampunk werewolf western.

Understand that the thing is over 15,300 words long right now. WotF caps their entries at 17,000 words. This means I have roughly 1700 words to play with to beat this thing into some semblance of shape. By the 31st, because that is the deadline.

Understand also that I'm a spare writer at the best of times and this sometimes manifests in a story seeming rushed. This is crit I'm constantly getting. In order to un-rush it, I'm going to have to add more words. I just don't know if I can keep this thing within the word count and still tell the story I want to tell.

Well. *cracks knuckles* I guess we'll see, won't we. At least it has a title now.

On the steampunk werewolf western. I realized last night that I hadn't described my protag's love interest at all, other than the fact that she's tiny and tough. So I put a dress on her and added some hair, and now we've at least got some idea of what she looks like.

And I read it aloud to the Hubby, and he pointed out that I sort of glossed over the whole "witchcraft" aspect of it, which is certainly true. I managed to repair that with a couple of lines where it's taken note of, so that's fixed.

And we've spent the last hour installing a bluray system in our family room. Our friend thought it would take twenty minutes. HA. No, we're not done yet. I've changed into shorts and a sports bra.

And I'm getting the first outline for my NaNo project set up in my head.

The Horrible Paragraph of Clunky Awfulness has been pared down, rearranged, and mashed into something of fewer words that doesn't suck. My second round of edits is done. This makes me a happy camper.

And the publication I sent the Cow story off to likes it, but they publish several different magazines and so the owner-dude wants to pass it to a different editor because he thinks it's a better fit there. After apologizing for taking so long--which, you know, five weeks where there's two holidays involved doesn't seem like that long, especially when I've waited eleven months for some places to get back to me.

Naturally I told him I'd be delighted if he passed it to a better-fitting editor, and I hope they like it as much as he did and will finally take the poor thing off my hands. It's one of my very favorite stories and I'd love for it to find a home at a pay rate it deserves.

So, yes. I'm feeling better about things today. It helps that the Period Headache has abated for now and I actually fit into these damn pants this morning when I didn't the other day. Stupid hormones.

I'm feeling better today. I guess. I plowed through 18 pages of a 23-page edit yesterday, and hopefully I'll get the rest of it done today. And perhaps I'll let the Usual Suspects have at it once that's finished. I should also email my Writing Buddy and see what he's up to, since I actually (finally) have something for him to read.

I've decided that, for the paragraph that's bothering me, I'm going to copy and paste that into a new doc so I'll have it in front of me, and then basically rewrite it from scratch.

Also, my pal Larry Correia is running a book bomb for my other pal Dan Willis today. A book bomb, for those unaware of this phenomenon, is when a lot of people get together on one day and buy a certain book. This makes its rank go up on Amazon, it gets more recommendations, and, of course, it puts coin in a writer's pocket. If you like steampunk, check out The Flux Engine, and if it looks like something you'd enjoy, then blow six bucks on it and help out a super-nice guy.

Also, if you click through that link and buy anything else, that also helps Larry. Conservatives on my flist, if you haven't heard of him, you will love him.

Welp. I've done an editing pass through the steampunk werewolf western.

I don't hate it. I guess that's good.

I need to get a timeframe in the first paragraph or so. That would set my scene better. I suck at setting scenes.

I'm not sure if I actually need more on my preacher's Dark Secret. It's hinted at but never really stated outright, and he's onscreen for such a short period of time that I'm not sure that what it was is all that important to the story so much as the fact that he has one and feels as if he's redeemed himself at his death.

And there's the issue of the way I use language in the thing. I'm not sure if I've gone overboard in dropping the g's from "ing" words in the narrative or not. It's first person, so it's his voice, you know? Maybe I'll take another pass through it tomorrow, or read it out loud, and see how it sounds, before I make a decision on that one.

I haven't looked at the tattoo story yet. I suppose that should be next on my plate.

So, I've had my Epic Bear Battle. The villains are vanquished, my good guys saved the day, huzzah!

And I have now realized that the Falling Action going down to the Conclusion consists of a ginormous friggin' infodump.

I hate infodumps.

Someone just shoot me.

Write or Die is a fantastic tool and I use it a lot. I used it tonight, in fact, to scribble my Climactic Battle Scene.

And I completely forgot that one of my characters was there and was supposed to play a key role in it. This is what happens when you go two days tearing out your hair instead of sitting down and writing. You forget who your players are.

So now I have to go back and write his part in.

Awesome.

I'm revising my estimated wordcount up to 16,000.