A Change of Course (or what I've been up to since Christmas)

So, as you may have noticed, there's been a dreadful lack of knitting content lately. Or any content lately. Now, I did finish the fargyle socks I was making for Jon and have yet to post about them, but that's a product of my inherent laziness and my inability to find my camera. And I'm working on a nice brown sweater with a really kickass nickline (it's all floppy and asymmetrical), but it's at that stage where you have to pay attention because you need to separate the stitches for the sleeves and join the body peices together and I just have been able to muster the attention for it. But I will. Because that neckline is the shit. You will see. What I mean to say is that I haven't given up knitting entirely, I've just cooled on it a bit.

And the reason for that is that all that time I used to use cranking out socks (or blogging about them once they were done) I now use to write fantasy fiction about elves. Usually gay elves. I don't really know why all my protagonists end up being male gay elves, but they do. And this is quite shocking to me (the writing part, not the gay elf part, that is perhaps not all that surprising).

See, I've always been a reader. I didn't really have a choice in the matter, I went straight from Red Fish, Blue Fish to Beowulf. I am so not kidding about that at all. My dad was a bit of a literature pusher, so I was the dorky kid reading The Mysterious Stranger and Canterbury Tales and Dune in, like, the fifth grade. Blessing and a curse. Anyway, to make a long story short, like most voracious readers I kind of secretly wanted to be a writer when I grew up. So, when I was seven or eight or so, I tried my hand at writing some short stories of my own. One, I remember, was set from the perspective of a robot. It was ver HAL 9000, or it would have been if I could get more than five pages of it out. Another one was about a group of anthropologists who unearth a robot (by the way, my robot fetish remains strong to this day). That one, too, went nowhere. I just couldn't ever seem to get anything to happen in them and there always seemed to be too many characters and not enough space for them. So I gave up, and for the next 15 years thought of myself as decidedly not a fiction writer. Just didn't have a knack for it. And that was that.

But then, Jon started the whole Jarthen thing and I pushed him, kind of hoping to live the glorious life of a fiction writer vicariously through him. I outlined with him, and made him do some worldbuilding, and edited the stuff he wrote. The worldbuilding I found I really enjoyed - check out the Jarthenpedia for proof. Over a hundred posts, all thoroughly categorized and linked up with each other. Jon was all "check it, you're creative!" And I was all "nah, I'm just a mega-dork making the Silmarillion to your Lord of the Rings and nobody really ever reads the Silmarillion except for those dudes who speak Elvish, do they?" And I thought that was that.

But then, I started writing Jarthen, too. And I sucked at it at first. Like, so so bad. All of my parts came out like a script -- a line about where the characters were and then endless, unadorned dialogue. But whatever, I kept churning it out and making Jon fill in the holes. But it was his story and the end result was his. No biggie. Still not a writer, really just a producer-of-dialogue-templates.

And things kept chugging along like that right up until last Thanksgiving when Jon and I decided that two of our relatively minor characters were going to hook up near the end of Book I (and I'd love to tell you who, but it hasn't been posted yet). And something inside me just sort of latched onto it - there was this moment that popped into my head when he said it, a scene so clearly drawn and totally visualized that it could have come straight out a movie and I couldn't shake it. Something about those two characters ending up together just made them so real all of a sudden, it revealed all these tensions and all these possibilities and all I wanted to do was write that scene right then.

I didn't though, because I couldn't bring myself to write anything out of order (I have since abandoned this). Instead, I used that week I had off for Christmas (remember? Back when I was a hermit?) and churned out 30-odd paged single spaced in order to get to it. Characters died without warning - Tlin was never supposed to die, he just did and I couldn't see to stop it - other characters made mush and still others got their little hearts broken all so I could get to this scene. And the scene was awesome. Well, it was alright, but I still love it and it was totally kickass to write it.

Anyway, something happened during my hermitage. It was like a switch flipped. Before that, writing had always been this incredibly slow, deliberate process guided by a ridiculously long outline. And after, it was this easy, effortless thing. Words just flew out of their own accord (not necessarily always good words, but words nonetheless). I finished my part of Book I within a month, and Jon did not. So, I sat around, frustrated and irritable, and started something else. Just a short story, I thought, about one of the gay dudes from that kickass scene that started all this off to begin with.

And then the strangest thing happened. The short story ended up being 213 pages long. It went from "oh, I think I'll just work on a little story" to "you know what, I think this really works better as a novella" to "fuck, this is a novel. What the hell?" Yeah, within ten days I'd churned out 113,491 words about those two gay elf dudes. After it was done, I wasn't really sure what to do with myself. Jon still wasn't even close to done with his half of Book I.

So I started something else. There's a character that's just about to be introduced in the Jarthen blog, he's only in two scenes, but he was one of those characters that just came out so fully formed that I kind of became infatuated with him. So I decided to write something about him - a novella that detailed his culture (he was not, in fact, gay or an elf) and his perspective on some of the scenes in the book. Luckily, it remained a novella. But his novella spawned another novella, and that one spawned another novella. And the three of them together, according to Wikipedia which at this point I would trust with my life, make up a novita. And by the end of February, there was another 160 pages in the can.

Jon was still not done with Book I. I was shocked at this point with my apparent unfettered prodcutivity. The seven-year-old inside me kept scowling and pointing out that all 373 pages I'd managed to write must be utter shit since I couldn't get out 5 way back in the day. I told this to Jon, who in his infinite, unflappable wisdom just shrugged and said maybe I just wasn't a short story writer.

I spent March compiling Book I (or what we had of it) into a manuscript and tidying up the blogs. Until I was struck by a scene for Book 2. A set of scenes for Book 2. A delicious storyline for Book 2 featuring (prepare yourself) gay elves! So I wrote a bit of that. But how much can you really write of that before you take over the book and it's no longer collaborative? So I put it down and twiddled my thumbs for a while. I started playing Warhammer Online. I became really obsessed with TV blogs. But I was, like, fiending for the writing. I was all nervous and twitchy, I practically had the shakes. I really, really needed to start something new.

But what? I wanted to write something that was in the Jarthenverse but not actually related to Jarthen. Both the things I'd written so far had overlapped to some degree with Book I, so I couldn't really get started on editing them until we finished not just Book I but Books II and III, as well. And I kind of wanted to do something we could possibly serialize in the inevitable gap between the end of posting for Book I and the start of posting for Book II. So I thought "Aha! I will write an interrelated set of short stories taking place in the City of Mages, because it's a cool place and we haven't really done much with it. And maybe if I do it all Martian Chronicles style I'll trick myself into actually getting out a short story!"

I started jotting down these ideas for plots and characters and places. And then some of the characters got a little clearer and I drew pictures of them and wrote out these overly elaborate backstories and I had ten or so within two weeks. And another ten or so after another week along with a map of the City (I'm sure at some point some or all of this will make it onto the blog). And a few days after that I started writing out these little scenes, a few pages here and there. Sometimes one character, sometimes another. No real direction or anything.

I honestly thought they'd work as short stories until the characters started popping up in each others' scenes and the storylines turned out not to be all that distinct after all. Yeah, so now I have a 190 page novel about assasins and identity crises and more gay elves.

Finally, Jon finished the book! So I edited the bejesus out of it really fast and Jon edited the bejesus of it much much slower and I was left bored and twitchy again. And now I have a novella that is essentially a prequel for the 190 page novel and 3/4 of a novella based on characters from that novel a good deal later down the line and about 30 odd pages of scenes that will likely become a sequel to it that has something to do with pirates. In the desert. Yeah, we'll see how that goes.

So, that's why I haven't been knitting so much. And I still can't bring myself to think of myself as a writer - it just feels wrong and off and patently untrue, kind of like I'm wearing a blue shirt backwards and telling you it's a white one. But I have been writing like it's the end of days. And as you can tell from this, I write at some length¹.

Bottom line is, I'll be blogging again but probably more about gay elves and cat people and typologies of magic than about socks and yarn and needle sizes. And this is mostly because otherwise it's all I talk about with Jon anymore and I think he's about to shoot himself if he hears me talk about so-and-so's difficulty accepting his sexuality because he's having problems integrating the warring cultural identities that come with being half-human and half-elf. He's a nice boy and I think he deserves a break. And blogs don't have feelings.
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¹This post is about four pages long single spaced.

I will post again soon

But for now I'm trapped in the Kingdom of Rust.

It is possibly the best album ever. I'm in a Doves coma.

My apologies.