Road trips and I have a long, sordid history together that has given me a certain fondness for aeroplanes, something I still am willing to say after taking a plane ride nearing 15 hours, from New York to Tokyo. After that experience, you must understand how much I hate road trips. Being in the car for over an hour is torture, and frankly, anything in the states I'd want to see is very accessible by plane or train.
Speaking of train, I'm going to PAX this year (by train, from Vancouver to Seattle) - anyone else attend any cons? E3, PAX-East, Comic Con, VidCon?
Anyway, my topic of choice for this week will be writing, which is mostly what I've been doing for this past month. My long-term project, "The Dust of Dead Desire", is on a rocky road right now. I'm at that point where I know my book inside-out. I can recite certain passages from memory without stammering, and that is grossly detrimental to my ability to continue with it. I can't read the passages blindly, I fill in blanks without realizing there were blanks to begin with. As an example, say I wrote the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over lazy dog." Let's say you've written that sentence about eleven times now over the course of three years, obsessively plotting it and planning it, and you can recite the entire paragraph it is found in. Your eyes just sort of... glaze over while reading it. You don't notice that the the in the sentence is missing from this draft, because you're so used to it being there that you see it there.
As such, I am left with basically just saying that this is the final draft, giving it a few good edits and fixing a few sentences, and settling. After that, I don't really know. Not the most marketable piece. Everything is very tied together at this point in it's existence, every subplot is as essential as the main plot, and to remove any character will require at least two further drafts to work. I love how my piece is, but there are many things in it that a publisher would definitely want to cut. The relatonship between a fourteen-year-old girl, a twenty-something man, and his father, for instance, is not high marketability. It's basically Lolita, except it doesn't really condemn it and they are all elves. The aforementioned girl has a brother in a homosexual, polygamist relationship that I doubt the world's quite progressive enough to handle as an unspoken of element of the story.
On the same token, I don't really want to self-publish it. I have other projects waiting to be written that are at least a bit more marketable, and one that looks as though it could be my literary opus (though "The Dust of Dead Desire" will always be my creative opus), and there's still a lot of stigma attached to self-publication, enough that if I'm not successful with my attempts at selling "The Dust of Dead Desire", and again: paedophilia, polygamy, all cool, then I would have to hide it from future publishers for my other works. Which basically means I am just going to have to put it, my baby, in a folder for many years until I can fine tune it and present it with confidence to my established agent and publisher.
Oh well. It'll always be there for me to revisit. I suppose I may as well tell you about my newest project, the one which will likely occupy my efforts now that I'm done with this. Titled, "Tremble" mostly for the other name for 'milk sickness'. Takes place in a world with a single continent, one which stretches in full around the world. The only way to cross would be through the lands or by a river or canal. A couple hundred years ago, snakeroot - a fantasy weed based mostly on the real plant - spread like a plague and made the lands barren, and the livestock inedible. People took to the seas, on grand ships of unspeakable magnitude, though there were those who stayed on land, many immune to the trembles.
The main character is Regulus, one of the seafarers, who want to cross to the other sea to obtain a rare basilisk's eye (Regulus is often cited as the Latin name for basilisk, as an aside), however the world's ever increasing heat has dried up many canals and made the rivers too narrow or shallow to sail. He finds a desert dweller, a woman named Galene, and she offers to help him cross the savannah, the safest place for the two of them. The whole thing is rather surreal after the premise is established, though. Lots of unspeakable horrors on the continent, things with two many eyes or mouths, an elephant with a thousand trunks, and just your standard fare of fantasy foe (there are sphinxes featured prominently in the desert scenes). It's also not particularly happy, I reckon I'll just have them both die in the desert. :P
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