On slaying the Shiny New Idea (a love story)...

Because I thought about slaying:

Quite possibly one of my most favorite performances of my most definitely favorite poem.
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So, a few days ago, I contracted a case of the Shiny New Idea. I blogged about it. And, in blogging about it, I found that I was able to counter it.

See, the thing is with Shiny New Ideas, at least for me, is that they tend to fall apart if I think about them too hard. Actually, this is true for most ideas I have, but the difference is that I'm still excited about my current hedgehog project and so the Shiny New Idea doesn't hold the appeal it did because it is being overshadowed.

And so, on this, Valentine's Day, I'd like to share a short love story about my hedgehog project.

Young Writer's Society has a group called "Your Novel" in which members post short open letters to their novels. Often just a few lines if that, they are a cathartic way of venting frustration or love about a project. Recently, my own posts have followed an arc of sorts.

GryphonFledgling: Dear Novel, 

Be patient with me. It takes some time to move from one relationship to the other. NaNoWriMo took a lot out of me and I want to be able to give you my everything. These scribbles in-between are actually working for us, I promise.
Wed Dec 22, 2010 

GryphonFledgling: Dear Novel,

It's not cheating, just flirting. I'll come back, I promise. Just give me a little time to realize just how amazing you are and then you'll have the satisfaction of seeing how I come crawling back to your pages.

Mon Feb 07, 2011 

GryphonFledgling: Dear Novel,

See? I told you I'd come back. Here's chocolates and a rose to prove my love for you on Valentine's Day.
Tue Feb 15, 2011 
 

The first was right after NaNo, when I was sort of scribbling little scenes and things in lieu of actual writing on anything besides this blog. The idea was there, the want was there, but my heart just wasn't ready for that kind of commitment yet.

The second was right when the Shiny New Idea struck. It was all awhirl, with its glitz and glamor and snarky humor. I saw it for what it was, but I still begged for the time for a little excitement, a little adventure.

The third is self-explanatory. I wasn't dumped, I walked away before I got too involved with something that wasn't worth my time. I went back to something that I loved and that loved me and together we're going to make something amazing.

This is a project meant to last, methinks. Or at least I hope so. Right now we are going through a little rocky spot with regards to a beginning (seeing as how the beginning is going to drive the rest of the story). I'm thinking I may actually have to (*le gasp*) do a little brainstorming / outlining (*more le gasp*).

But despite being at a point where I'm feeling lost enough to want to do that, I feel good about this project. I might regret saying that in three months, when I'm mashing my forehead into my keyboard with frustration, but I've been with this project long enough for the puppy love of a Shiny New Idea to wear off and I'm still giddy with excitement at times.

Because, this project did start out as a Shiny New Idea, if you recall, in the middle of November. But, unlike this last Shiny New Idea, the hedgehog project stuck around long enough to be called a project at all, even to the point of getting me writing again after a post-NaNo funk.

I did write down my Shiny New Idea and maybe one day it will inspire me again, or at least let itself be hacked to pieces and stitched into other stories somewhere, but for now, true love triumphs and the hedgehog story and I march forward together into the great unknown.

Not-so-happily ever after...

See, here's the thing: I write angst.

I don't want to. It's not like I mean to. But it seems like, because I take my characters so seriously, they start to take themselves too seriously and I end up with these serious stories, filled with psychological issues and just general not-fun.

It just sort of happens, even when I mean to write something a little more lighthearted. I mean, for NaNo10 even, I wrote a zombie story. How can you take a zombie story too seriously? The entire point of a zombie story is to have fun with it or scare the crap out of people. It's a survivor story and because there is no society, you have no rules and so you can go on a rampage of awesome.

But I had to bring character angst into it and it became one of my darker things to date, I think, simply because of the protagonists' lack of morals. It has a relatively happy ending, but still...

Then comes my hedgehog story. I meant for it to be light-hearted, sort of like Princess Tutu, which manages to make me smile every single episode, even when it descends into the dark and heart-wrenching. There is something just so heartwarming about it and funny and cute and just plain sweet, that manages to make the darker moments all the more dark. The ending is happy, if a little bittersweet, but it manages to still feel light and cheerful despite it all.

However, my projected ending for the hedgehog story (at least as it stands) is not really happy. If anything, it's bittersweet, with emphasis on the "bitter". There is a potential for a happy ending later, but the actual last event shown on the page would be heartbreaking (y'know, if I actually succeed in the correct mood in my writing).

The problem is that I can't think of a way to make a happy ending feel like a cop-out. After all I'm going to put my characters through and the world I have established, the happy ending I want wouldn't fit. It would feel like a deus ex machina, or just simply a saccharine ending. It would feel like I was forcing a happy ending on it.

It drives me crazy when stories do this, putting us through so much and then at the last minute pulling the ridiculously happy ending. And while it feels good the first time you experience it, the second time it doesn't feel quite the same. It can feel like a let-down, sort of negating all the suffering that came before it. I'd rather have it end with hope; maybe everything isn't perfect, but there is a knowledge that the future will improve and be happy.

That's sort of what I'm shooting for with my hedgehog story, but at the same time, it just sort of makes me super-aware of how angsty my stories seem to be all the time.

Quite angsty.

Less than ten thousand to go...

I'm in the home stretch. I didn't know if I was going to be able to do this. But now I am!

I just had Scrub's own father shoot him. Why would I do that? I'm not even sure if he's going to die yet or not. I mean, he's the doctor, so who's going to fix him? And I already had one character get non-fatally shot. Two might be pushing it. I don't know. I don't really know what made do that, beyond perhaps the arguable temporary insanity brought on by Write or Die sessions.

To paraphrase Mr. Smith:
"Meme, meme, meme..."

Day 27 - What’s your word count now?  Are you satisfied with your progress or panicked that you won’t have enough time to finish by November 30?

As of this writing, I am at 40,315, after making a crazy turn around in the past two days. Not super happy with my progress, but certainly fairly certain that I will finish in time. At least, I'll make it to 50k. Whether or not this story will manage to wrap itself up is an entirely different matter (see the above note about the shooting of Scrubs).

In other news, I saw Disney's Tangled today. I liked it, but the flaws that did exist kinda really bothered me. I just want a good fairy-tale movie, people! How hard is that? Perhaps more details will come later...

It's happening again...

NaNoWriMo does this thing. I get really excited about an idea, anticipate writing it all of October, then November comes and the idea just doesn't seem as awesome as I originally thought. And a few days into that idea, when I've made a respectable amount of progress on it, I suddenly get a new idea, one that I think is a thousand times better than what I am currently writing.

Mainly it seems to be because all of my NaNo novels seem to come out angsty. I don't mean them to, but they do. In contrast, the shiny!new idea this year has a premise of anything but.

"Once upon a time, there was a hedgehog who dreamed of becoming a princess."

Yes, I went there. Basically, running with a long-established want to write a "fairy tale princess" story (seriously, I have notes from months and months back) and my recent binge of Princess Tutu (finished it, loved it, though bittersweet ending to the max), I actually have a decent idea for how this story would go. And I really want to write it.

But I think I'm going to just scribble everything I have in mind about it down now and then get on with my NaNo for this month. Then December will be waiting with a shiny!new idea already in place to distract me from the editing that I so sorely need to do.

Continuing the memetastic(ness)!

Day 6 - What is your one biggest stressor related to forcing yourself to write at least 50,000 words in a span of 30 days?

Turning off my inner editor. After having won NaNo two years in a row, I now know I am capable of doing it. The idea of writing 50,000 words in a month is, while still a challenge, no longer a daunting near-impossibility, so my inner editor pokes its head and demands that I actually put an effort towards story-telling. After all, if I'm not spending my time panicking about whether or not I can make word count, then I should be spending my time panicking about something else.

Whining is never the answer...

Writing, however, usually is.

Currently, my characters are doing something really stupid. I mean, really stupid. By all rights, they should die right now, that's how stupid what they're doing is. I mean, they're in a situation where the only real outcome should be that they die. I mean, they are professionals. What did they go and do a thing like that for? They knew what they were doing,so why'd they do it?

Yeah, but if they die, I'm not sure how the rest of the characters' situations are going to be resolved. But they really should die. So they might. But they might not.

Anyway, meme time!

Day 2 - What’s the title of your story?  Why did you choose the name you did?

Well, the temp title is City of Glass Eggs, which actually has nothing to do with the projected story at all. I just picked it because my novel has cities in it and glass in it and I like the words "glass" and "eggs". They sound cool. Yeah, other than that, there is no reason and hopefully I'll come up with something better before too long.

Day 3 - Pick one of your female characters.  Introduce your readers to her, from her point of view and her words only.

"I'm Mel."

Day 4 - What genre is your novel?  Why did you pick it?

Erm, the best way I could sum it up would be something like "dystopian fantasy". The premise is "fairies meets zombies" basically, so... yeah. It happened that way because I had an idea once upon a time for a "fae meets girl" story,with a setting possibly in the Seelie Court. Soon afterward, I saw Terminator: Salvation and due to my propensity to emulate other works that I have read, I decided to try to set that story in a post-apocalyptic world. The nuclear fall-out zones would be like the fae's forest and so on and so forth. The zombies came in when I decided that really not-good things happen to the children that the fae kidnap and then forget about.

Anyway, don't have my word count for today yet, but as of yesterday, I was at 5858. On track despite handwriting everything, spending way too much time listening to music for the NaNo CD swap and having had a really bad day yesterday.

Bad influences...

I have this tendency (whether brilliant or irritating depends on my current obligations) to be very strongly influenced by works that I have recently been immersed in.

For instance, recently, I've been plowing through Princess Tutu, an anime about a duck who is changed into a girl who is changed into a princess to bring a prince's heart back to him and defeat an evil raven. (And despite the ridiculously fluffy title and the potentially-saccharine theme of the power of ballet dancing, I highly recommend it. Get through the first few episodes and it takes a swift turn for the dark and emotionally wrenching.)

Now, I'd already been sort of wanting to try my hand at some meta-fiction, but this show really brought it home for me. I want nothing more than to write a tragic old-school fairy tale wherein the characters might just actually know that they are characters and are trying to rebel against their fates. I mean, I really, really want to write something like that. I already did, then this show went and exacerbated the want.

Thing is, NaNo is in two days (cue the hyperventilation) and I've already got an idea for it. I want to write that idea. I don't think I want to change novel plans just forty-eight hours before NaNo starts.

This always seems to happen. I have an idea that I'm excited about, then I watch a movie or read a book and fall in love with the theme or setting and want to emulate it and can't at first because the original idea isn't compatible with the influential theme or setting. It's frustrating.