Really, I just want to be awesome.

[brightrosefox]

So, I found this meme. And I started trying to answer the questions. And then suddenly I froze and started crying. I'm attributing that to the depressive episode borne out of that postictal state. Or something. Maybe the migraine too.
I may try again tomorrow.

***

What is the working title for your book?

Stormfall.

Where did the idea for the book come from?

During my third year in college (SUNY Purchase), I was at my best friend's house; we were sitting on her bed reading books quietly. Suddenly, very randomly, I fell asleep (I now realize this was an epileptic seizure) and had... a vision. A dream. Something. Crawling naked through the woods away from a burning building. Moving through a cave in a psychic vision. Actually being psychic and doing psychic things. When I woke up, feeling exhausted and funny, I said, "I just had this amazing dream" and my friend looked at me with this very knowing look. Because, you know, she and I had been having psychic dreams and such for a while. I described the dream And I turned it into several scenes in the first chapter. And the rest of the chapter formed around that vision. And suddenly I was writing more chapters, and then I had a novel happening.

What genre does your book fall under?

Future fantasy. Or is it futuristic fantasy now? A sort of science fantasy. It takes place almost two centuries from now, close enough to have streamlined versions of current technologies, far enough to not be anywhere near now. But there is more magic than science, magic in the form of psychic powers, psionics. Lots of it. Very character driven, to the point where I barely have the world around the characters really built.

What is the synopsis or blurb for this book?

Oh gods, I hate trying to do this.
[*deep breath*] In a future world where mild psychic powers have become common, four of the most powerful psychics in the world will test the limits of their powers and the bonds of their love when a fifth powerful psionic seeks to destroy and rebuild reality - but he needs the help of one of the four to do so. When she refuses and he captures her, she finds herself fighting for her life, her friends, and for all existence.

What actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I have no clue. Since it will probably be years and years before a film gets made ... maybe Dana could be played by a red-haired Chloe Moretz or Elle Fanning or Ariana Grande or Tiffany Thornton or Sara Paxton or Alexa Vega or Bella Thorne, with hazel contact lenses? Maybe Kara could be played by Selena Gomez or Victoria Justice or Camilla Belle or Ashley Greene or Elizabeth Gillies or Ariel Winter or Jodelle Ferland, with light blue contact lenses? For Ian and Alex, since they are fraternal twins and have different coloring, perhaps Dave Franco or Jeremy Sumpter or Cody Linley or Drew Roy or Max Theriot or Sean Faris or Johnny Pacar or Nicholas Hoult, with blue-green contact lenses and brown contact lenses? Jeremy could be played by one of those guys, with dark blue contact lenses. *shrug*

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Agency, I hope. If they like me enough.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

First draft? I finished that after college, then ripped apart the whole thing. The ending has been missing for ten years while I put the rest back together. I mean, I have the ending. It's just not put in yet.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I've had such a lifelong love and obsession with psionic/psychic powers and superhumans that I'd been writing such stories since my pre-teens. I suppose that has come out of my being born disabled and wishing I could be more than I was. And also really really loving superhero/superhuman stories. I've loved Marvel's X-Men comics since childhood. Perhaps all the stories I write are allegories for being born with disabilities. Just something you live with. What you choose to do with it is your choice and yours alone. It can boost you and cripple you at the same time.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Um. Any book where the main characters have really strong psychic powers? I guess? Like, telekinesis and telepathy and all the subcategories thereof?

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Fuck, I don't know. The superpowers? The future world? The fact that all my characters are pagan, that polytheism is really really common and running neck and neck with monotheism? Psychic abilities of various levels? Character interaction? A villian who isn't truly a villian but a person who feels wronged and wants to make things right in his own way by destroying the world? A main female character who is disabled but it isn't made obvious? Three other main characters who have mental illnesses that are not made obvious?

(Also, I feel bad that I don't have many POC characters (Kara has heritage that is Navajo, Korean, Welsh. Dana's heritage is Russian, Columbian, Gaelic, Greek. Ian and Alex have heritage that is Celtic, Welsh, Greek. Jeremy has heritage that is Italian, Spanish, Scottish, Belgian)... and many POC characters are tertiary. But, you know, the main characters that came into my head were Caucasian. I don't want to alter their races just to appease social justice warrior readers.)

Comments

[celtic_maenad]

Agency, I hope. If they like me enough.

Sweetie, I just wanna say here, it's not you they'll be judging, but your book. And while I know this book is your brain-baby, and you are pouring yourself into it, it's not NOT *you* they'll be judging. Promise.

*hugs*

[unico-love.livejournal.com]

*hugs* I'm sorry you are depressed:( The remaining parts of your book, the synopsis, etc. will all reveal themselves soon, I'm sure. It will be okay. You are an amazing writer! You kick butt at storytelling! Remind yourself of that! Hardly anyone has as much talent as you! Sure, some do, but that is a teeny, tiny percentage. And you are living up to your potential just fine.

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

*head-butts* *purrs*

What those lovely folks up there said. ^^

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

*lip-biting*

I got choked up, Naamah. I haven't sent out those chapters to Tor or the Curtis Agency. Instead, I've been tweaking the first few chapters and losing my mind. I know I should have. But I freaked out. I know I must. I WANT to. I'm pumping myself up. Yes, this is my baby, but it isn't ME. And I am not this book.
I will send it. I WILL.

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

Yes, you will. Do it at the end of this next week, on Friday, if you want someone to give you a date, if that'd help.

It's good enough NOW. If they want it, they'll take it. Tinkering with it further won't make it irresistible if it's not already, or even much better than itis. It's only going to wind you up and make you more tense. It was good enough to get the Penguin-Wrangler's attention, and that's SO not a little thing. Send it out, let it do its job. You've done your job. Give it a chance to work for you.

Trust me, I KNOW THINGS. I HAVE POWERS.

*hugs*

You can do it, and you will.

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

Friday. I can do Friday. *nods* Okay. And no more tinkering.

I'm seriously clinging to you emotionally. You might not know. I try not to make it obvious.

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

You can do this.

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

I CAN DO THIS.

Also, I filled in all the spaces.
I'd like your opinions. If you wouldn't mind.

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

Well-done!

I think the list of "what else might interest a reader" is indeed interesting. Especially the polytheism bit! I love future world stuff that isn't like SO FAR in the future that it's outright in your face sci-fi, and isn't postapocalyptic, but is juuust over the line into speculative. I love near future stuff. One of the best treatments of that I've seen is JD Robb/Nora Roberts' Eve Dallas books, the In Death series, which are set ostensibly a few decades from now, but really come across as about 150-200 years' worth of social/scientific advancement. GREAT job there with casual worldbuilding, not going into loads of detail, just leaving stuff there for the reader to pick up on.

I have the same POC problem. I don't want to speak for or over anyone, so I'm leery of writing about the experiences of oppressed people as primary characters. I don't want to leave POC out completely, though. And I don't want the POC characters I have to be ones I just crammed in to make myself look good. What I'm working on now, the two main characters are white, with maybe a dash of Spanish or Italian in there somewhere, but culturally very white. The two major secondary characters are, respectively, a Black Seminole/Black/little bit of white guy raised hardscrabble and poor as they come, and a dispossessed French kid who is somewhere on the Trans-spectrum in a time and place that really did not acknowledge that worth a crap, and is also not definitively either male OR female, which has made pronouns a living hell. Tertiary characters, predominantly POC, actually. Villains, mostly white, but Savage is a lab-grown devil-woman homonculus who speaks like four languages and whose genetic stock is varied but mostly not white. (There are some weird/unpleasant racial implications there, I am aware of that, but I'm hoping the rest of what I'm doing will make it apparent that I am not a complete tool.

to the point where I barely have the world around the characters really built.

That can be a neutral or even good thing, though. I have done both the heavy and minimal worldbuilding thing, and I've read both, and I like reading and writing both. It can be an advantage in that people don't think about things that are normal to them, and that can smooth the narrative and help bring the characters and their actions to the front. Readers will fill in SO MUCH if you let them. And that's GOOD. They LIKE doing the work, they truly do. It's actually LESS work for them to fill in the blanks than it is for them to try to picture exactly what it is you're talking about. I have to remind myself of this CONSTANTLY, because I have a horrible tendency to over-describe/explain.

Slightly OT:

I love casting questions! That one alone makes me kind of want to do this one for Vengeance and Valor and sequels.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I HATE when memes/quizzes/people ask me this question. Umm. I really don't know? There are people who do what I do, but they are doing it so differently I really don't think there's any comparison.

Also slightly OT: I SWEAR blurbs will be the death of me.

Waaaargh. Must sleep now! Maybe more later? I have other thoughts, but am trying to think of how to articulate them. I talked about myself a lot. I'm sorry.

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

I talk about myself a lot too. It's all good. :)

I appreciate your insights. Especially about the POC thing and the world-building.

I originally had it set in the 24th century, and it kept going down until now it's, like, in the beginning of the 22nd. Which I figure is close enough to where I don't have to bother with *new sparkly technologies* and can just let the readers figure out *oh, it's just a shinier version of blah* - because with the way technology keeps getting tossed out and at the rate it's going, there is nothing new or amazing can think of, except maybe medical technology (which we'll soon see in a few years anyway).
When I started writing the book in 2000-2001, the characters had tablet computers, with and without styluses. Today, everybody has them, and they're even convertible laptops, and I'm like, "Shit." But it doesn't matter. I just think about the Star Trek shows and how they basically just had weird looking versions of things we had in the '90s.
(Also, cell phones were completely and totally based on Kirk's communicators. Motorola was the first, I think, with flip phones or clamshell phones. Star Trek really did help us invent everything.)
For a while I had, well, not flying cars, but levitating cars that would drive on autopilot when you put in the address - like Google Maps and a taxi driver smushed into a car computer. And then I had to figure out how and why the car would be able to lift off the ground. Still working on that. Maybe not wheels but some sort of gliding technology, I don't know. I don't do actual science fiction well.

My friend Charlotte is obsessed with Nora Roberts/JD Robb and owns all the Eve Dallas books. I love the world more than the characters, honestly. I may need to use the In Death books as a guide!

I'm planning on changing a tertiary important character from white to black. I know so many oversensitive Social Justice Warriors out there who will probably criticize "the lone black woman in a sea of non-black characters" yada yada yada. And I get that, I truly do. So I feel like I'm doomed no matter what. Use a few POC, get accused of writing them like white people. Use on important POC, get accused of not having enough black characters (except that I do, I just don't mention them, but readers won't realize that...). Two of my main characters are bisexual - I'll probably get accused of using them somehow because I the author am bisexual.
Fuck, I hate all these eggshells all over society's floor.

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

Well, if you're a white writer, you ARE kind of doomed to piss someone off, and they're going to be pissed for reasons that are, when you look at them divorced from anything you're doing, actually reasonable, if unpleasant to have applied to your own work. And I've had to kind of cope with that and accept it as a side effect of our shitty culture, and not something to do specifically with me and what I write. So I do what I feel I am able to do, I remain open to criticism, and I seek out and listen to POC's voices, especially very angry ones, and I listen.

It's frustrating, of course, because I want to be better, I want to not make things worse, I want to be fair and meaningful and not exclude anyone, and the only way I know of not to do that to SOMEBODY is to not write at all, because we are never going to get so perfect at it that we won't. And not writing is not an option for me. My voice is valuable, too. Not because I'm white, fuck that, but because I'm mentally ill, I'm not straight, my gender identity is somewhere out near Saturn and fuck if I know what it is. And all of those are voices that need to be heard, too.

Which applies to YOU. You're subtexting this thing with mental illness stuff? The world needs that.

By all means, try not to take anything away from anyone else, or silence anyone, or speak over or for them, but don't lose sight of the fact that what you have to say is valuable, too, in a different way.

Do you know how many offensive and annoying stereotypical CRAZY people I've been subjected to? I think you do. So yeah.

And I gotta say, GRANTED, I am writing PORN, but there is not a single goddamn straight character in this story, and not a single completely gay person either. There is most likely not going to be a single important character that we will not SEE have sex with people of various genders. And I'm fairly certain I'll have people say that's unrealistic. Which it is. But . . . I'm tired of stories where you know two people with intense chemistry are never going to get it on, because it's a "straight" book; or a "gay" one. So I am not doing that. I am not.

I'm pretty sure I'll be told I'm failing, because there is way less sexism and racism in my version of the 19th century than there actually was. And in a sense, I am. It could be seen as pretending that all that oppression didn't exist. That it's just a nasty thing I don't want to have to dirty my hands with, that it's something I just think would bring the narrative down.

The truth is that I don't want to write those worlds or those stories. I think we need stories that don't constantly show women or POC or gay people suffering horribly for being what they are. It's like, with Brokeback Mountain, it was an amazing movie, but it felt to me like a movie for people who needed to be shown an ugly thing, and not for people who have lived under the threat of it. The Tragic Gay Movie is . . . disturbingly ubiquitous.

cont'd

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

Agreed with EVERYTHING. I just need to accept that I will piss people off. *reads this again and again*

Continued? *folds hands, leans forward*

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

Awshite, I forgot to post part II, because Firefuckup crashed on me.



So my characters live in a racist, sexist time, but they treat one another with respect. I don't feel obligated to make anyone horribly racist because that's accurate, even though it is highly likely that Valor, raised privileged, educated at school, physically average, and white as they come, would be intensely uncomfortable around someone like Rutter, who came from a mess of a family, learned his trade by doing and then by teaching himself, is physically impressive and willing to fight if he has to, and very not-white with all the cultural baggage that comes with that -- he's been treated like shit because he's mixed-race, and he's got a chip on his shoulder about it. But I didn't want to do that. I wanted it to not be an issue that caused lots of tension. It causes SOME, Valor doesn't fully understand, but he's respectful, and it doesn't make Rutter scary or unapproachable to him. The characters make it about how they do relate to each other.

For all I know, people will be offended by him, and by his sister and his mom, who are also going to be showing up. And by the Wandering Star's captain, who is Greek/Iranian/German. For all I know, I AM being offensive. Which, you know, okay, I'm not going to argue if someone says it is, because I don't get to decide that, ever, no matter how gross and sad it makes me in my feels.

But it was grosser to me not to try. It's taken me a while to get to where I thought I COULD try, I didn't want to do it before I felt ready, but I do feel like testing the waters now, and I'm willing to take the dunking if I deserve it, and do better the next time.

Anyway. Technology. Could the hovercars work on some sort of magnetic repulsion? They'd only be running along streets or tracks, they couldn't go offroad without deploying wheels, but maybe? The roads could be made with something in them or on them that makes that possible? I'd say that sounds like crazy talk because I have no idea how that would be accomplished, but as you point out, there's stuff we never thought would happen that is happening now. We can print cells with a 3d printer, FFS. The future is happening to us REALLY FAST. I have a friend who is a genius at nanotech batteries. The things he knows about the universe and how it works are amazing, and the things he can do with it are amazing, no matter how small they SEEM. We know so MUCH, it's only a matter of time before we put that knowledge together in ways that do any given remarkable thing.

THERE THAT IS WHAT I WAS GONNA SAY.

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

Yes. I believe my cars would work on a sort of magnetic repulsion. I'd have to discuss that with Adam, who would know.

Oy. People are difficult, you know??