My Write Hand

I’m writing again.

That in itself is a huge deal. When I was fifteen, I wrote a 421 page novel called Unforeseen, about the gayest straight girl in the history of the universe who learns that she’s actually heir to a kingdom that hasn’t been a kingdom for 500 years, and that only she has the power to stop the evil that threatens to engulf the world…I promise, it’s not as lame/derivative as it sounds. It’s actually not a bad novel, just…well, I wrote it when I was fifteen. I’ve been editing it ever since, but the core comes from when I was fifteen. And for anyone who’s ever read Eragon, or anything else by Christopher Paolini, well, you know that just because a fifteen-year-old wrote a book doesn’t mean it should be published.

But I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I’ve known that since I was six. I’ve loved books ever since I started being able to read them, and one of my earliest memories is of looking at an author’s name on the spine of a book and thinking that I couldn’t imagine anything finer than seeing my name there, on the spine of my very own novel. I’ve been drawn to fantasy from an early age, but I’ve been developing my taste in that area for a while, ever since I was turned onto Limyael’s rants. I’d say that that, and learning how not to write fantasy from reading Eragon, did the most of anything to develop my writing and my taste. I learned what tropes were common and what had been done to death. I began to recognize what was fresh and new and what I just liked because it was recycled, with barely a hint of fresh writing, from my old favorites. I learned that it’s ok to gank the old ideas from your favorites just so long as you’ve got a new, fresh way to spin them, something that makes them seem old again.

When I wrote Unforeseen, I was a deeply unhappy kid. I had few friends, and I was waiting for something—anything really—to be my ticket to a better life. I saw Unforeseen, the product of my intellect and my burning ambition, as that ticket: it was going to be a blockbuster, I was going to get rich, I was going to get famous, and all the people who’d teased me or ignored me or laughed at me were going to feel really, really stupid. Everyone would want to be my best friend. Some handsome boy was going to ask me out (HAHA!).

Well, that hasn’t happened.

I even wrote the sequel, Exile, and that hasn’t happened. To be fair, I haven’t tried very hard to have them published—one editing agency rejected my cover letter—but while trying to write Darkling, the final book in the Alarian Saga (as I call the trilogy), I realized that my heart just wasn’t in it. It still isn’t. I think a lot of it has to do with my being queer, but I’ve also developed quite a few changes in my mindset. For one thing, I realize that I need people now. I need them to make me happy, I need them to pick me up when I’m sad, and I need to be around them. When I was fifteen, I was the most introverted misanthrope in the history of the universe, and my writing showed that. It was all about individuals doing great things, achieving great heights, gaining great power. There was maybe a love interest allowed into the equation, but that was about it. Everybody else was a lackey or a secondary character.

Now, well…I’ve learned how important friendships are, and how much the vast majority of us need them to keep us afloat. I thought it was the depression that originally killed my writing, and while I think that was part of it, I also think it was because I needed an attitude adjustment, and a big one. I treat people better now, because I know that to lose them might kill me. Literally. That’s one of those things depression taught me.

And then there’s also teh gayness that has come over me ever since. Ty—the main character—was a font of female masculinity, with a lean, hard body and a short, shaggy, alternative haircut. Her body was everything I wanted from mine. A couple of readers told me that they couldn’t tell which gender Ty was (ahahahahaha) until they were told outright in the text. That should have clued me in on something, but it didn’t; I just got annoyed. But there’s also the fact that Ty is resolutely straight. She loves straight sex, and she loves straight guys. I wrote this from a time when I had absolutely no experience of sex of any kind, just a very powerful and very frustrated sex drive. Now…well…I have to bow to the inevitable and realize that she can continue living a lie, or she can give into the very strong crush she should have on Morgyn, the captain of one of the other Guard units, and they can ride off into the sunset together. Sigh…but I wrote the first two books straight, and I should finish them straight. I just find it difficult to write convincing straight relationships when I am occasionally attracted to guys sexually, but think I would tear all my hair out within the first week of trying to have a relationship with one.

So that’s where I am on Darkling: disconnected from my MC, trying to write straight when I’m very, very gay, and in a different place mentally than I ever was. But now I’m writing again, albeit on a different project: the Dragonlord Quintet. In this one, the main character (yet to be named, because I have to change her name for certain reasons) IS very, very gay—sort of a soft butch type, a la Shane McCutcheon, but able to go femme when she needs to. She lives in a kingdom embroiled in a very, very long war with another kingdom over a disputed territory of 100 leagues, called the Hundred Leagues’ War. And while a lot of the fighting is done by Middle Ages-type ground troops, there’s also an aerial war going on, fought by dragons.

The riders of those dragons are called dragonlords, and they form a kind of animal and mental bond with their dragons, carefully cultivated from the time of hatching. But my MC is the niece of a socially climbing, somewhat wealthy merchant (her parents died of plague when she was fourteen), and by all rights she should have nothing to do with dragons or dragonlords. Until, that is, her uncle attempts to secure a fat little lordling from a nearby town as a business partner, and he brings his cousin along with him. That cousin just happens to be a dragonlord, who intends to use my MC’s town as a place to convalesce.

Of course my MC, being the curious, meddling type, is intensely interested in the dragon and actually manages to form a kind of animalistic bond with it, by which I mean it doesn’t try to roast her on sight. However, before she can progress any further her uncle reveals that the final clause in his deal with the lordling means that she’s going to have to marry him. The lordling tries to rape her, and she escapes…to the dragon, who protects her.  The dragonlord then agrees to take her on as his boy, a candidate for receiving a dragon if she performs well enough in the examination, which is six months away…and most of the other kids get 2 years.

Sound interesting? I think it does. I wrote a whole chapter on Tuesday and three pages yesterday, and I look forward to writing more tonight. I might post particularly good snippets of it up here, but…

I’m writing again!

You have no idea. Being a writer was my primary identity for so many years, as in: “Hi, I’m Jackson, and I’m a writer.” To not be writing felt like…I don’t know, like my arm was removed. I could still function without it, but it was different, and harder, and worse, and it still itched and ached sometimes, but it was gone. I feel like I’ve been given my arm back, and I feel the familiar ache in my right (write, haha) hand, and it’s like I’m back again. Or part of me is. Except that part of me is now part of a different me, and…

I’m writing again. That’s all that matters.

Upon having been raised as a boy (or, my masculinity, part 2)

Oh, don’t get me wrong- my gender was always firmly assigned as “F.” The clothes I was given were always from the girls’ section; if I was lucky my shoes were unisex but they were usually from the same place. But as I look back, someone was doing some gender subverting in my raising, and—hint—it wasn’t the feminist in the family.

It was my dad.

While I was always his little girl, and he still relates to me as that little girl no matter what (and I kind of like it, because I don’t get treated like a little girl very much anymore), he sorta kinda raised me as the son he never had. Instead of Barney, we watched old Japanese Godzilla movies together, and he bought me a mountain of definitively un-girly Godzilla toys. The same with my obsessions with knights, Lord of the Rings, Captain Hook , The Call of the Wild, and various other “boyish” subjects: I was always fitted out with the accoutrements  proper to my favorite games and imaginary pursuits. To be fair, my mother was usually the one who provided the costuming, and once she collaborated with my grandfather to make what was and still is my favorite toy ever: a four-harness miniature dogsled (she made the leather harnesses, he made the sled) that I could hitch my stuffed wolves and dogs to and pull around the house.

But my dad was the one who took me shooting for the first time when I was eight, propping the smooth, beautiful .22 rifle on a pile of sandbags, teaching me with care how to hold it, how to handle it, how to sight my target, how the squeeze the trigger in a smooth, unhurried motion rather than jerking it and throwing off the aim. He also taught my sister and me safety exhaustively, and once, when my sister ventured under the partition between the standing areas and the range to look for particularly shiny pieces of brass, he became furious, yelled at her, and took us home immediately, because she had violated one of his primary tenets: NEVER go beyond the firing line while the range is hot. We weren’t shooting at the time, but we hadn’t called a cold range.

Shooting became one of our “male” bonding activities, and it was often accompanied by Dunkin Donuts and avoiding church—in a manner of speaking, because we often referred to our trips to the range as attending the “First Church of the Bang-Bang.” But throughout my entire experience, safety was tantamount. It was more than technique, more than speed, more than aim—it was everything, because our safety was everything. It was eyes on, ears on, wear a hat so that hot brass doesn’t fly onto your head and burn your scalp. It was ALL GUNS ARE LOADED and must be treated as such, even if you have just removed any possible ammunition from a gun yourself. You must also never point a gun at something you don’t intend to destroy. When I was younger, he had me pretend that there was an invisible laser beam emanating from the barrel of all guns at all times that would destroy anything it was pointed at.

It wasn’t just guns, though that was a big part of it. In general, I was expected to be a boy. I was given boy chores: unloading and loading the dishwasher, mowing the lawn, doing yardwork. If I fell down and skinned my knee, I was allowed to cry but not bawl. When I got into fights at school, it was somewhat expected of me—I had always shown a warlike disposition as a kid, and while they didn’t say “boys will be boys,” they said “Jackie will be Jackie.” For most of my childhood years, at least with my dad, I was an incurable tomboy—and he liked it.

When puberty started, however, and my long war with my mother over my femininity, or lack thereof, began, my dad became…bewildered, I think, is the best word for it. I remember reading in S. Bear Bergman’s Butch Is A Noun about what hir father wanted for hir as a woman, to be strong but feminine too, equally capable of changing a tire and choosing the right outfit for the right boy for the right date. I know those women; I’m dating one of them, and my mother is one of them. I am not, however, one of them; the femininity is lacking. I can fix my tire pressure or mow a lawn in under an hour, but put me in a dress and I look like a drag queen who’s not making much of an effort to pass.

And that is what bewilders my dad, I think. He looks at people like my mom or my girlfriend and sees what he thought he was raising me to be. He doesn’t understand what got lost in translation, and indeed it seems like, these days, we’re speaking two different languages. And it’s painful, this language barrier where none used to exist. We used to speak the same timeless language of fathers and sons, relating to one another in few words but many actions that displayed our care, our enjoyment of each other’s company. And I feel as though I’m still speaking that language, but it’s not being recognized; there’s an error of computation somewhere in there, and just when I need my dad to be Daddy he can’t understand what I’m saying, because it’s coming out of the mouth of someone who should be a girl.

I want to ask him about girls, about how to tell if a girl is mad at you and what to do about that. I want to talk about clothes; I want him to take me out shopping for ties and dress shirts and dress pants and dress shoes, and eventually my first suit (which I am not looking forward to paying for all by myself, but such are the pains of being a butch). I want him to nod and smile at me in approval when I come out of my room, dressed to the nines, everything polished and buttoned and tied properly. I want to find Godzilla cufflinks (like he has) in my stocking come Christmas, and have him smile in the way that lets me know they were all his idea. I want his ideas on the perfect gifts for the women in my life, because if there’s anyone who can lay claim to being the Master of Gift-giving it’s him: I’d say his crowning achievement is tickets to the Metropolitan Opera for him and my mother (and bear in mind, he HATES opera) and an utterly gorgeous dress to go with them. I want him to help me put the finishing touches on my tux on my wedding day, and he can even walk me down the aisle if he wants to. I am 99.9% sure that this hypothetical wedding will be gender non-conforming after all; why stop with just the bride and the “groom?”

But all of these things are in a far-distant future, if they’re possible at all. Because we’re still working with that gap in communication, and right now it seems a gulf too impassable to even think about.

But I’m working on it.

Elegant Disappointment: A Review of The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

I greatly enjoyed Patrick Rothfuss' first novel, The Name of the Wind. It featured a highly developed world, a well-thought-out and interesting magic system, a plot like a Thoroughbred racehorse, and a clever, engaging main character (if slightly Mary Sue*) in the form of Kvothe. The writing was gamy but altogether taut, with little frippery or choppy sentences. Best of all, it fit together like a clever puzzle: every word, every action, every tiny detail was like a stone thrown into a river, whose ripples caused a tsunami at its other end.

The Wise Man's Fear features what at first glance appears to be the same cast of characters, the same settings (with a few added in), the same clever tricks. But the first thing that struck me was the writing. The sentences are stilted and chunky, and not even, in some cases, fully formed- and not in an artistic manner, but in the sense of someone who doesn't know how to formulate a complete sentence ("The night was dark. Like a cave"). Similarly, even the sentences that are complete are lackluster, the metaphors and similes hackneyed (which is deadly for characterization, considering that Kvothe is supposed to have written songs that make the minstrels weep." They made me weep, but for a different reason than I think the author intended. Form has completely fallen to function, fulfilling the worst stereotypes of fantasy, and while it is still a capable carrier for the plot, its is no longer a streamlined carriage, but a humpy buckwagon.

And the plot is no longer a Thoroughbred, but something far less fleet and prone to long dalliance where the rider (reader?) is thrown and the steed stops a while to crop grass and pontificate. Where in The Name of the Wind there was never a dull moment, The Wise Man's Fear bears all the hallmarks of a blocked writer struggling to live up to his own length and deadline (see: George R. R. Martin). It also reads like the book's editor didn't have nearly as much time as he or she wanted, because I could stand to see the book lose a couple hundred pages, such as the dalliances with Denna: once sweet, but now boring and cloying. Also the longwinded, tiresome descriptions of paging uselessly through books in the library. This wasn't exciting for Kvothe; why would Rothfuss assume it would be interesting to the reader?

Now, after unleashing the venom on my tongue, what's good? The introduction of new, non-University environs was welcome, especially the foreign, interesting political system of Vintas and the seductive, alluring glimpses of Faery. The Cthaeh was suitably chilling, and the advent of Kvothe's real, Taborlin the Great-type magic was highly exciting. But all these moments lacked a sense of purpose, as though Rothfuss weren't slowly revealing more pieces of the puzzle that is Kvothe but simply filling in the blanks of the abstract we were given at the beginning of his narrative: "learned name of wind: check. Spent night w/Felurian and stayed sane: check."

I did greatly enjoy Kvothe's time with the Adem, and it was refreshing to see him try his hand at something he wasn't actually automatically good at. It was also fun (and necessary) to see him get some humility knocked into him, and recognize that he's not the best at everything just because he can kick the shit out of spoiled lordlings whenever he wants to. It's also a necessary step towards minimizing his Mary Sue content.

Altogether, however, the book- well, it was not quite lackluster, per se, but it had a good deal less of the luster of the first. It's sort of a Wizard-of-Oz reveal for me: the man behind the curtain is revealed as just a man, and this is just a fantasy book. I guess I'm just disappointed because I was hoping it'd be, you know, a new epic or something.


*Mary Sue: fanfic word for a character who is often a stand-in for the author, but is always well above average in practically any category. Frequently characterized as precocious, the best in everything (at such a young age!), and, worst of all, perfect as so few (if any) people are.