It should be illegal to wake up this early.

Finished the rewrite a few days ago (yes, in between reading the Dictionary of Phrase & Fable; the etymology involved is entrancing). From 100k down to 82k; not a bad shave. I’m letting it sit for at least a week; I need a bit of distance from it so I can go back and read it with more objectivity. It’s easy to see a style and flow that aren’t there when it’s pacing along with what I imagined, and my brain is filling in the blanks. I need to approach it as something new, or at least less familiar, so I have a better hope of spotting any problems.

In the meantime I’m playing around with other ideas, just so I don’t fall into a non-writing slump that could stretch months. Right now I’m looking at Waking Magic; I don’t remember how much of that I’ve mentioned here. Vice, the pissy male warrior-fairy; Veronica, the human librarian who dies and is resurrected as something of an ethereal warrior, given a new life by your standard magical Powers That Be as compensation for the fact that it was Vice’s fault she died.

The thing is, the story doesn’t quite work. The central villain’s motives were simple enough: find a source of magic strong enough for him to rule Earth and the magical world as the only human sorcerer, as magic doesn’t exist in our world. That was part of the problem: generic villain wants to rule the world. Another part was the premise of the world was too convoluted. There was a reason for separating the two worlds, and a reason why joining them again would be bad. It was messy and didn’t quite make sense. The overall rules of their existence were too tangled and overdone; complexity is fine, but this wasn’t complex. Just bogged-down.

And then there’s Veronica, who really doesn’t work well as a central protagonist. She’s a paper doll; no real personality of her own. Just something the reader can drape themselves over as a vehicle to place themselves in the story. While you need a character that the reader can see themselves in, one they can follow and empathize with, I’m not a big fan of the type of stories where the entire world and supporting cast are fleshed-out, but the central character is just a placeholder for perspective. They need to have their own personalities, their own lives, individual strengths and weaknesses. They need to be people we can care about or hate.

On that note, I’ve been thinking of changing Veronica to Harvey, Vee for short. And if I do, Vee will be my first gay central protagonist.

It actually means something to me that I don’t write only gay protagonists, despite my sexuality. I write characters who are who they are, and if they turn out to be gay, great. If not, no biggie. This actually ties in to my previous rant over the article commending the “writer of color” for choosing to write mainstream (white) characters so they’ll have greater appeal; I have a feeling that the author in question didn’t really choose to write the character that way for those reasons. He probably just let the character develop as they would, and they just happened to be white. I tend to prefer that method of character development, honestly. It feels more natural, rather than a contrived way to build a character who has a theme, conveys a message, or fulfills a fantasy.

So far, none of my MCs have been down with the rainbow swirl, but Vee seems to be shaping up that way. Here’s where it tends towards crackfic, though: Vice and Vee, in their immortal/magical forms, are both invisible to humans. They have mortal forms that let them interact with humans; one of the other problems I’m struggling with, actually, is why Vee might need or choose to stay in his mortal form when he doesn’t have to. But the crackfic portion of it is that Vee is going to end up in the mortal body of a tiny Chinese girl, reverting back to male only when he switches to what’s basically his true form. It’s something that could be a lot of fun to write, if I can ever stop worrying over these problems long enough to write it. It’ll never be anything serious, though I think on the side it could be an interesting exploration of gender identity vs. sexual identity – basically demonstrating that homosexuality is not a desire to be or fill the role of a member of the opposite sex. Vee is very much not going to like being in this girl’s body; he likes men, yes, but he has no desire to be a woman.

I don’t know. I’m rambling; sometimes that’s what I do here. With any luck getting all this off my brain will help me work out the plot problems. Or I’ll decide I don’t have the skill to write this well, and move on to something else. After work, of course…because I have resumes to write.

Ciao.