I'm a fantasy and young adult fiction writer. Here, you'll find book reviews, writing tips, personal opinions, and updates on my work. New posts every Friday.
I’ve written/edited every day this past week, because deadlines are still the only thing that can really force me into full gear. Unfortunately, that means I don’t have much a post to offer, because I need to finish this round of editing by Sunday. I worked all night a few days ago and then went for a pre-dawn ramble with the pups, which is always weirdly refreshing. The market is a little weird before all the people arrive, but my batman beast loves it there, and will put her entire twenty pounds into pulling me up the hill so she can trot around, sniff everything, and eat god-knows-what off the ground.
Toci’s happy place. You can’t see it, but the fish stall is up ahead and she was very intent on getting closer to those buckets and boxes. Her brother is behind me wishing that he was still at home under his blankies.Yeah, it’s basically as creepy as it looks, but at least there were friendly fruit vendors setting up shop nearby.
Rainy morning vibes. Weather is nicer when I’m safely inside with my sweetie and a delicious breakfast.
Book update: Obviously, my goal to have Somnolence published this year was impractical, but I’m glad that I gave it my best try. It will be published in 2018, and is going back to the editor in January. It was supposed to have been line edited by now, but I choked and couldn’t get it together.
I’m really looking forward to getting cover art made, and my plan is to use Damonza for that. They were recommended by Kristen Martin, and I loved her covers. So, hopefully, I’ll have some pretty and professional art to share soon.
Personal update: I’m writing this on my way home from a yummy dinner at my mother in law’s while listening to the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend soundtrack, which is endlessly brilliant. I’m now, after almost two years in Seattle, starting to feel kinda almost normal about driving home to this city. Still, I’m super excited about the fact that I’m going to see my family in California for christmas.
I have recently achieved new levels of sleep deprivation, even for me, but I’ve also been hitting my writing goals much more consistently, which is exciting. It’s pretty self-defeating to try to improve all the different areas of life that need work at once, so I’m resigning myself to the fact that really improving my writing and discipline means neglecting other things. Priorities are a pain.
What I’m thankful for: My awesome partners, my family and friends, puppies in general, and the fact that abusive men in various creative fields are being sort-of held accountable by the public, at least enough to shame them for their appalling behavior instead of ignoring the issue completely. Hooray! That’s a clear improvement, so I’ll take it. Maybe someday, instead of terrible men, we’ll have artists and actors of all genders and races who actually deserve their success and didn’t earn it by destroying those with more talent and less leverage. I’d say that’s the american dream, but the american dream was more about taking land, enslaving people, enforcing freedom of exactly one religion, and claiming that god said you could do all that ’cause you’re his favorite. We should probably just let that phrase die. It’s a mess.
Writing wasn’t my dream career. I didn’t start as a kid like a lot of authors, and I don’t have any cute snippets of childhood fiction to share, sadly.
I started writing in 2011, when I was 22. At first I just did some journaling to cope with my depression. I’ve always loved to read fantasy, and an idea for a fantasy story had been rattling around in the back of my head for a while. I think the stream-of-consciousness journaling that I was already doing helped loosen me up enough that I just started writing it down.
I pounded out a few chapters, then slowed to a crawl as I ran out of the bits I had already figured out, struggled through a few more, and then stopped. I knew I didn’t have the skill to write that story the way I wanted to, so I quit. But then, I did something totally normal and healthy that was nonetheless a big deal for me. I decided to get better at writing so I could come back to that story and tell it really well. I started writing little short stories when I had ideas, just ’cause, and that was fun. They weren’t great, but I could finish them in a few sittings, and finishing anything felt really good.
I switched to a second novel project for Nanowrimo in 2012, and figured I could just do it all in one go because it was supposed to be a shorter and less complex story. I was very wrong, and I didn’t win. I hadn’t plotted either of those attempts, and even though that story was simpler in concept, I had allowed it to ramble again and gotten totally lost. I kept working at it, but I was pretty frustrated, and effective practice was still totally foreign to me. I was just flailing around and trying to make this huge thing without a plan.
Looking back at it now, I see that the drafts for those two stories actually add up to a pretty impressive amount of output for a beginner. I wasn’t tracking my progress very well at the time, and I counted all discarded work as basically wasted time and effort even though I was actually learning from it.
The idea for Somnolence came to me in a dream. I hate myself a teensy bit just for writing that ridiculously pretentious sentence, but it’s basically true. In 2013, I had a dream that was just the climax battle of a fantasy story. It felt super epic and compelling, and when I woke up I wrote it all down in my journal and started making up more backstory for it. I really liked it, and it had the potential to draw from a lot of the emotional crap I was going through at the time. In a spectacular act of self-sabotage, I switched projects again. I kept feeling like I needed a clean slate because the other projects had gotten so messy. In reality, I needed to learn to plot properly, but that didn’t really occur to me till I had written about half of Somnolence.
I slogged on, working mostly when I felt inspired and wasn’t too depressed to move my fingers on the keyboard, and it took for-fucking-ever to finish the first draft. I declared it finished, just barely, on New Year’s Eve right before I moved from California to Seattle in 2016. That really was a huge milestone, although it immediately paled in the face of what I wanted to do next. I wanted to edit it properly and actually publish it, and I had no idea how to make that happen. Fortunately, by then I was just barely starting to grasp the practice thing and I’ve always been really stubborn. I’ve been researching, reading, joining writing groups, watching youtube videos, blogging, and practicing writing craft.
I don’t know what it is about writing that drives me to improve. I find it satisfying in a way that I don’t really understand. I love to draw, but I never felt the need to practice enough to polish my skills or make a career out of it. I’m usually pleased with what I can produce, but I’m perfectly content to do it as a hobby. Writing comes less easily to me. I’m often not at all pleased with my initial results, but it’s still where my energy goes, and I’m happy with the progress that I do make. Working toward the goal of being a published author has helped me change my life in a whole bunch of positive ways and improved my self-esteem. It wasn’t my dream growing up, but it is now.
Me at my favorite hiking spot, just after pulling an all-nighter to finish that first draft.
I touched a really big spider by accident while walking up some stairs. I’m not super arachnaphobic. (I’m actually friends with a very polite tarantula named Twilight Sparkle.) Surprise spider contact still makes me all shuddery, though. The spider seemed equally shocked, which was fair. He was quite decent about it all, and didn’t bite me.
My new acquaintance.
We finally got air conditioning since Seattle has apparently been relocated to the surface of the sun. The air quality has been terrible, too, because everything is on fire. So, we had the choice of roasting in a stuffy apartment or breathing smoke and roasting slightly less. We kept expecting the heat to break, but we broke first.
Our creative solution to the strange window design in our apartment building. Plus, a peek at my cute snek suit.
With regards to writing, and everything else since it all affects my ability to write, I’m working really hard right now on knowing my limits and planning my energy use so that I don’t break down halfway through a day, but it’s not easy for me. I’ve spent way too long trying and failing and being pissed at myself to be able to turn around now and objectively evaluate my capacity for work in a given day. I’ve tried in the past, but feeling guilty about not doing more has always pushed me to schedule way too much, which is overwhelming and makes it harder to get anything done at all, much less all of it. Very few things on my list ever feel not-urgent. I always feel like that there’s something more I *should* be doing. This makes me sound like an overachiever, but I run out of go really damn fast most days. I’m a little scared to be honest about that with myself, because if I’m not just lazy then I might be kinda sick. I handle stress by being mean to my body, which isn’t so great. I’m tired all the frickin’ time, no matter how many stimulants I pour into me, and I can sleep for eleven or twelve hours and wake up exhausted. It’s hard to get to sleep in the first place because of the aforementioned guilt and constant feeling that I’m shirking something. Oh, and I actually feel OK at night. I’m tired all day, and then my mind clears up for a while every night and I feel better and more alert and I want to do all the things. It’s basically an absurd cycle, and I am literally sick of it.
So, in the interest of not making it worse, I’m gonna go to bed now and post this in the morning. Well, later in the morning than it is now.
Ps. I started reading A Throne of Glass. So far it’s fairly engaging.
Seventeen year old Orane has been given a mission by her royal parents: to travel to Castle Destare and convince her reclusive uncle to leave his estate to her family. With only her new lady in waiting for companionship, and steadfast Captain Felix and his men for protection, Orane sets out for the northern mountains.
After a harrowing attack on the road, Castle Destare is a welcome sight, but it is nothing like Orane expected. Her uncle and his caretakers are strange and withdrawn, and the great stronghold itself seems to be slowly surrendering to the elements. Worse, Orane can’t help feeling that the decay is creeping into her mind. With unnatural creatures prowling the woods, escape seems impossible, but it might be just as dangerous to stay.
Will Orane be able to open her heart and uncover the terrible secret that haunts the castle, or is it already too late?
So, I had a professional photoshoot today, which is a really weird thing for me to say. The last time I had a photographer take my picture, I was getting married, but I’m gonna need some better quality pictures for various book purposes than I can take myself, so that’s what I did today. It was actually pretty fun, and the photographer was very nice and helpful. As were the people in the friendly neighborhood Starbucks, because it turned out that the library in my building that I had planned to use as our location has been closed for remodeling. Fortunately, I buy an obscene amount of chai from them, so they let us take some pictures in a comfy corner.
I’ll post some of the results when I’ve got them back, but here’s a selfie for now. I actually went outside properly for the first time this week, yaaay… My dogs were very happy about this. According to them, I am super boring when I work, although I seem to make an acceptable pillow.
(I got a haircut today, too, but you totally can’t tell unless you know how ragged the ends were before.)
I saw Wonder Woman, because of course I did. I’m not gonna go into detail, so there are no spoilers to follow, but I’m not as excited about it as I kinda wish I could be. The thing is, it’s only revolutionary compared to the bulk of really fantastically sexist crap up to now. It’s still good to see, and it’s a step in the right direction, but they could have gone a lot farther. I enjoyed the fight scenes as much as the next person, but there were a lot of points where I wished for a little (or a lot) more boldness and awareness. I feel oddly uncomfortable with the amount of praise it’s getting, even though I understand why it is, because treating a female superhero like a male one shouldn’t be anything other than normal. They still played into the born sexy yesterday trope, so they didn’t even quite treat her like a male superhero, but even if they had. That’s what we should expect every single time, from every single movie. That’s not something we should have to celebrate, and we shouldn’t have to ignore any problematic elements to encourage them to make more. I’m glad I saw it, but I’m sad that basic non-shitty storytelling isn’t common enough that we can just shrug and call it a decent superhero movie with some issues.
I’ll say this again and again. Sexism, racism, ableism, etc are all elements of bad storytelling. We shouldn’t be saying “well, it was a great movie except their female characters were all basically cardboard cutouts with boobs, and the only people of color were evil, as fucking usual.” We should call that a bad movie, because it is both incredibly lazy and harmful to rely on the same offensive stereotypes and narratives. Normalizing equality is important, and while it’s totally understandable that we treat anything that gets even a little bit close as exceptional, it’s still a serious sign of how messed up things are that Wonder Woman is such a huge goddamn deal.
On that uplifting note, I’m still in the midst of revisions, and I’m hoping to be done with them by the end of June so I can stay on track and get Somnolence off to be line edited. We’ll see how realistic that is, but I’m pretty sure that if I give myself more time I’ll get complacent and slack off.
I’m also preparing to buy some ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers.) That’s a whole thing. You need a different ISBN for every version of the book to be published, and the pricing scheme is kind of bizarre. At the moment, one number costs $125 and a batch of 1000 numbers costs… $1500. Bowker is the only source for these numbers in the US, so I guess they can basically do whatever they want. There are also some midrange options, which I’ll be taking advantage of, but the scale is still a bit startling.
Do you ever find yourself reading a Terry Pratchett book and just getting annoyed because he says things you never knew you wanted to say, and says them in such a casually clever way that it’s almost insulting? That’s been happening to me a lot. The more I write, the more I notice really excellent chunks of writing that beautifully and humorously communicate a complicated idea or feeling. Of course, coupled with that is the awareness of how freaking hard those are to produce and how much my own work falls short, but that’s just how it is.
I got my manuscript back from the editor this week! I’ve been reading through her comments, and we have a call scheduled for next week to discuss her recommendations. It’s pretty cool.
In other news, procrastination is a scary powerful force. I meant to spend a few minutes prettying up my blog page last night, but instead I spent half the night glaring at my screen because nothing is quite right, damnit. It’s still not right, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna spend another minute on it right now. It’s just going to have to sit for a while and think about what it’s done.
I went out and got some fresh air instead. Soon I will go out and get some fresh caffeine, which is even better.
Jasmine Collins 