Revision Thoughts

As I trundle along on the revision of Warrior and Witch, I find myself reflecting in certain ways that I was less inclined to, back when I wasn't actually paid to do this stuff.

It's easier to get scared, these days. I know people are going to read this. In the past, if I botched a work (and yes, I did, more than once, the most painful example being the first draft of Sunlight and Storm), then I could shelve it for a while until I knew how to make it better. More to the point, I was more willing to gamble in those days, because if I aimed high and missed, no one had to know.

To put it quite bluntly, I got very ambitious with certain aspects of Warrior and Witch, and a few of them blew up in my face. Now I'm sorting through the pieces, deciding which ones I can attack again and thereby make work, and which ones need to be excised as failed experiments, things I'm not ready to pull off just yet. I'm learning many valuable lessons in the process, of course. Spent some time tonight doing statistical analysis, since one of the gripes was that a particular character was getting too much screen time over another. Turns out to not be true, not by a long shot (the supposedly neglected character's getting more than half again as much wordage, in terms of pov scenes, than the supposedly excessive character), but from this I learn that (duh) wordcount isn't everything. So now I'm experimenting whether I can, through jiggery-pokery, bump up the prominence of the "neglected" character without actually ripping out half the "excessive" character's scenes. I might have been better off agreeing to a third book, and splitting the plot of this one so it spanned two volumes, but I'm still glad of the decision I made; I fear my enthusiasm for this project wouldn't have sustained me through a third book.

The problem is, there's an easy way out of the problem: stop being so ambitious. I wouldn't be in this situation if I hadn't tried to write a sequel that would be noticeably larger in scope and complexity than its predecessor. And honestly, there are plenty of authors who do exactly that, and sell well, and have fans, and sometimes I myself am on of those fans. I can enjoy more of the same, if it's competently done.

But I wasn't willing to take that way out. And let me state here and now -- since, in my own personal psychological calendar, January is the month I dedicate to ambition (in place of New Year's Resolutions) -- that I vow never to give up on ambition. Even if it means I find myself choking on indigestible tangles of political intrigue the day I decide finally to tackle The Iron Rose, I'll still give it a shot.

Because I refuse to settle for just treading water, however comfortable it may be.

Inspiration Has Its Own Timetable

Ah, the beloved and detested tendency of inspiration to strike when I really don't have time for it.

In less than twenty-four hours, I've gone from revisiting the thought that I should rip out the Changeling-specific and Earth-specific aspects of the Central American stuff I cooked up for the Changeling game and use it as the basis for some kind of fiction, straight to two hundred some-odd words of a story that really, really wants to get out of my head RIGHT NOW. Nevermind, of course, that I'm working on Warrior and Witch, and really need to be focusing on that, not questions like how many Nahuatl terms I can get away with before my readers will quit in despair. The point is, having passed very rapidly through the stage of "well, I've got a setting, sure, but no particular story ideas," I'm having to push at this bitchy little tz'ite in my head (huh, should I go on using the term tz'ite, or find something else? NO NO NOT TIME FOR THAT RIGHT NOW) to get her to shut up.

This will only encourage her, but I figured I'd share the beginning of the story.

Sitting alone in the green heat of the forest, far from the road and any observing eyes, Neniza began to craft her mask of flesh.

She began with her toes, for the face would be the hardest part. She would have dearly loved to shape herself into the slender, delicate form of an amanatl, but it would never work. Oh, she could take the form easy enough, but the amanah were not common caste, and she could never hope to mimic the ways of court folk well enough to pass. Instead she crafted for herself the petite, pretty form of a young alux peasant. The lord took his amusements often enough with such. It would suffice.

Her father had taught her this work, their art, after her horrified mother saw what she had birthed and left it in the woods. He would have preferred a son, Neniza knew. Daughters were dangerous things. She had not told him where she was going, what she intended to do. He believed they should stay out of sight, accept their exile to the forests -- nevermind that he himself went to town all too often, to court the women of other castes and sire more children for them to fear. It was all right for him.

But not for her. She was too dangerous.

That means I'm powerful, Neniza thought, and began to work on her face.

Now I'm going to put her away and go back to work on the novel at hand.