November & Novels Oh My

So! I haven't written here in a long time, but I have a good reason, honest. Actually, I've got several. Mostly, my reasons are all about how I couldn't put words down here because I was using them all up elsewhere. Namely, my thesis & my NaNoWriMo novel.

I wrote over fifty thousand words in November & on the first of December I deleted about seven thousand of them & proceeded to rewrite them from scratch. I'm currently bumped back up, wordcount-wise (the whole thing will be somewhere between sixty & seventy thousand words), & coming in on the last section of the story, which is quite intense & a pretty exciting situation to be in - seeing this story I started just over a month ago come full circle, teasing out conclusions, letting my characters get as dramatic as they want to be because it's almost the end & endings are always dramatic.

The story is called The Accident Season & it's a young adult contemporary book imbued with enough magic realism to sink an airship & it has absolutely nothing to do with vampires, werewolves or any kind of remotely supernatural teen (okay, maybe there's a mention of ghosts & a tiny smidgeon of story-within-a-story fairies, but shush, that totally doesn't count) because I figure that as I spend every other waking moment thinking & reading & writing about vampires, it'd be nice to get a break every once in a while.

And it has been nice. It's been very nice. I'm happier with this than I have been with anything I've written for a long time (& I'm generally quite happy with what I write). Mostly, I've been having a lot of fun with it, which is sort of what writing's all about.

So although I'm sorry for neglecting this pretty little blog (seriously, look at that floral wallpaper, it's beautiful), I'm very glad I'm nearly finished the first draft of this pretty little book because I think it already has a lot of potential. I'll stop neglecting this place very soon. In fact I've kind of started now, haven't I? Because I have lots of things I want to write about, books I've read I'd like to review & Serious Academic Notes on Breaking Dawn that I'd like to share with those of you lucky enough not to be forced to sit through it because you're writing a thesis on teenage vampires. ("Why oh why???" is the lament of the moment, multiple exclamation marks & all.)

What about you guys, did you do NaNoWriMo this year? Any other year? (It's my third, I think, non-consecutive.) What did you write? How did you find it? What are you going to do with your stories now?

Deadline-Dreaders

So. I'm submitting the first chapter of my thesis soon, very soon, too soon, & I have Thinker's Block. It's more than Writer's Block (I'm writing heaps, just nothing that makes much sense or is any good), it's not quite a mental block (there's some stuff going on in my head still, but this stuff isn't necessarily thoughts, & certainly not Thesis Thoughts) & as a result, for one of the first times in my life, I'm spending my days procrastinating. I don't usually have a problem with procrastination, but something about this deadline is giving me the psychological heebeejeebees & I just can't seem to face my chapter for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

It doesn't help that (for those few people reading this who aren't my friend in real life & so therefore haven't heard & read about this all over the place & constantly for the last two weeks) I'm recently engaged, & if there's one thing that makes for excellent time-wasting, it's wedding blogs. Also, I recently got an iPhone, & if there's another thing that makes for excellent time-wasting, it's Angry Birds (isn't Angry Birds the silliest, most mindless thing ever? & for that reason isn't it wonderful?).

I think place is pretty important for any kind of writing. Here is where I can work well: on the train from Dublin to Mayo, on the train from Mayo to Dublin, in the veranda of the house in Mayo until it gets too hot, on the apple-green couch in the house in Mayo with a cup of earl grey until I get too cold, sitting on the kitchen step in the back garden in the sunlight with a glass of lemonade, squinting at the laptop screen & shooing the cat away from the keyboard.

The problem is that I can't always be on a train, & when I'm in Dublin I can't be in the house in Mayo (for obvious reasons), & when it rains I can't sit on the kitchen step in the back garden in the sunshine (sitting on the kitchen step in the back garden in the rain just doesn't have the same appeal). I've tried turning off the internet to get away from wedding blogs but I still have my iPhone. I've tried hiding my phone but I don't have any secret hiding places from myself, & even with no phone & no internet I find the cat gets quite distracting when I tempt him to chase a ribbon.

Help me, fellow deadline-dreaders! How do you cope with the psychological heebeejeebees? How do you even spell heebeejeebees? Do you have any tried & tested anti-procrastination techniques? Or would you rather I posted a picture of my cat? (He's a very lovely cat. He has a heart on his nose.) Do you think I'll get this chapter in on time? I'll match any bet against. Oh dear. Even this post is a type of procrastination. Pity me, dear reader, it looks like I'm doomed.

Harry Potter, Male Protagonists & Strong Female Characters

Hello! I'm posting again! It's quite shocking, even to me! I have some links for you! And then I'm going to talk about Harry Potter for a bit! And now I'm going to stop with the exclamation marks.

The first link is to a post by Alyssa Rosenberg about Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen & Movement Mascots, because it's pretty interesting, & the second is to a piece by Sady Doyle that the first link refers to: In Praise of Joanne Rowling's Hermione Granger Series

(ETA: Also, because I'm a few days late with this, here's the link to Sady Doyle's response to the feedback on her first post, where she makes a lot of good points. )

I have two problems with the the "In Praise of the Hermione Granger Series" post. The first problem is the issue that it takes with Joanne Rowling using her initials as her pen name. When JK Rowling approached publishers with Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone she was an unemployed single mother with a very young child who wanted to sell her novel. I think it's unfortunate that we live in a society where young boys are taught - usually completely unconsciously - to avoid reading books by female authors, even those with male protagonists, for fear of them being too girly. I think it's unfortunate that we live in a society where "girly" means "unsuitable for boys." However, I really don't think anyone can blame an unpublished writer for trying to attract a wider readership.

My second problem with the piece is this: it is entirely possible for a male character to represent gender equality. In a perfect society girls & boys would be represented equally in children's books and on television, but unfortunately we don't live in that society, & in order to raise these issues with children of all genders it seems to often be necessary to speak through a male character's mouth. The Harry Potter series is hardly a beacon of anti-feminism, but my thoughts on gender roles in the series are multiple & variant (& often contradictory) & could take up an entire thesis let alone a blog post, so I'll let them be for now.

I think that there might be a difference between feminist texts & texts with Strong Female Characters. Not all feminist texts have strong female characters & not all strong female characters live in feminist texts. Hermione Granger is a Strong Female Character. However, if she were the protagonist of Hermione Granger & the Philosopher's Stone the book, unfortunately, would never have been published. Harry Potter's opinion & treatment of women, however, is not unlike Hermione's. He accepts that women can be as intelligent & adventurous as men (he respects Professor McGonagall as much as he does Professor Dumbledore & trusts & relies on Hermione as much as he does Ron) & also that they can be as powerful & evil (he hesitates no more in fighting Bellatrix than he does Voldemort). Gender roles in the series aside, that's a pretty big feminist step.

So while, yes, we should certainly be angry & disappointed that the popular culture we've grown up with over-sexualises, underestimates & under-represents women & girls, & we should what we can to raise awareness about these inequalities in order to change them, let's also celebrate the small victories, the Strong Female Characters, the Hermione Grangers, Lyra Belacquas & Katniss Everdeens of the world.

I'm writing a book at the moment (at the same time as a PhD thesis, because I'm just that much of a masochist compulsive writer). It's a young adult book, it's got werewolves & vampires in it, & it has a male main character. In its first draft it was a sort-of-ghost-story with a female protagonist but when I sat down to rewrite the second draft the first sentence that went down on paper was "Dylan's mam always said he could lie for Ireland" & Dylan just sort of took the story from there. The reason I kept him as my main character is the same reason I decided to make the sort-of-ghosts werewolves & in a later draft added some vampires. I enjoy reading young adult fiction & mostly I enjoy researching it. I know quite a lot about it at this point, which means that I know what works (&, presumably, what doesn't work) & also what sells. Male main characters sell. Vampires & werewolves sell. If I want any chance of somebody publishing this book if I ever when I finally finish it, I want it to be as sellable as possible. However, this book will still have feminist leanings. It'll still have Strong Female Characters. And hopefully the boys who read it (my teenage brother'll be the first, as Representative of my Intended Readership) will pick up on the idea that girls & boys deserve to be treated equally & will apply that to their own lives. What about you, Writing Readers? What gender are your protagonists? (What gender are you?) Why?

And, in the same vein, who were your #childhoodfeministheroes? Who are your favourite Strong Female Characters?

Planning to write

Here are some good places for writing:
On a train.
At the beach.
On a wall (no wall in particular, any wall will do).
Up a tree.
Up a ladder if you're in the city and there aren't any immediately available climbable trees.
On grass, provided the grass is not inside a house.
On a bench (same rule applies).
Beside the water (same rule doesn't apply; baths, showers & even the kitchen sink are all good for this one).

This is how I write: longhand, in almost indecipherable handwriting, with 'x's dotting the 'i's. I write with black ballpoint pens that I buy in Paperchase because they're pretty & colourful on the outside & have floral or butterfly patterns on them, & I can't (or perhaps won't, I'm not sure, I've never tested the theory) write with anything else. I write my thesis notes on a narrow-ruled A4 pad & everything else on a variety of pretty narrow-ruled notebooks. The lines have to be thin & not too dark; grey or blue are best. When it comes to fiction, I write poetry anywhere (on any number of notebooks, alongside my college notes, in my phone, on my skin) & I type stories or novel-bits on Word documents. Until now.

I've been having Writer's Angst about my werewolf book for a while now, so I recently saved everything I had in a folder called "[Instert Name of Novel Here] Draft 10 - Early 2011," (yes, draft ten, I had a hard time believing it myself) & I started the whole thing from the beginning, & I made one of my main characters a girl instead of a boy, & that felt right, so I made her a vampire instead of a werewolf without really realising it & that felt right too, unfortunately, so now it seems I'm doomed to write about vampires in fiction as well as study. Le sigh.

My problem is that I like to plan things. I like to plan & plot & chart & I swear this makes me sound a lot more organised than I am in real life. So when I hit a rut with my werewolf book I continue the plotting of another book I'm working on that's still in the planning stage, & when you stack that up with my thesis whose first chapter is only now nearing the end of the planning stage you're left with a lot of planning.

So last week I turned off my laptop & took a new notebook (from Paperchase, narrow ruled with nice thin lines) & began to write a story with only two settings, four characters & minimal descriptive passages. I haven't & amn't planning ahead other than knowing in the back of my mind more or less where I want the story to go, & I'm not typing a single word of it out on the computer until it's finished. And I have the funny feeling that it'll get finished before any of the others.

What about you, how do you write? Are you a planner or a jumper-into-the-deep-end? What works best for you? Do you type or handwrite? Are you as obsessive as I am about how you write? Please tell me you are, so I don't feel so alone!

Speaking of planning, I think that's why I'm always so bad with blogs. I feel the need to plot & plan everything (seriously, you should see my shopping lists; the one that comes with me to the shop is usually the second or third draft) to the detriment of actually writing it. And I much prefer writing to planning. It's a strange predicament. Anyway, I didn't plot or plan this post at all, which is possibly why it's here. I actually set out to write about Sucker Punch & Buffy the Vampire Slayer but in order to do that I have to plan out what I want to say so I'm just going to go away quietly & compose my thoughts & I'll be back in a couple of days (I get distracted easily, okay?) to write them.

Vampire Girls & Werewolf Girls

I've been writing a young adult book about werewolves because it's the closest I can get to vampires without feeling nauseous.

I really dislike it when people despair of the current generation of young readers who are obsessed with teenage vampires because I find teenage vampires very interesting (I'd want to; I'm writing a PhD on them) & I think people are too quick to dismiss trends in popular culture, especially when they're primarily adolescent trends. I also dislike it when people say Twilight is a badly written book, because it isn't. It's quite problematic in many respects, but it isn't badly written.

However. I have this theory-in-progress that there are two types of girl out there: the vampire girl & the werewolf girl. The former will usually be attracted to the Beautiful Mysterious Stranger (the vampire) while the latter tends to go for the Best Friend Next Door (the werewolf). I realise this is a very vague & limited theory-in-progress, but it's mainly intended as a humorous anecdote, so it shouldn't be taken too seriously. I think that's probably why we see so many vampire-human-werewolf love triangles (in fiction, not in real life where we all know vampires don't exist), but while I can think of three off the top of my head (Twilight, the first season of True Blood & Tantalize), I can't think of any where the girl gets with the werewolf in the end. Also I can't think of any that aren't heterosexual. I'd love it if anyone who knows of any could point them out to me. I'm sure there are some, but the top of my head is a little fuzzy this evening.

I guess I've always been a Werewolf Girl. So I've been writing a book about werewolves because they're like vampires, only not, & supernatural young adult fiction is seriously popular at the moment, so I figure it can't hurt. But I made the mistake of rereading the first half of the manuscript after having devoured a wonderful young adult book in one sitting on the train back from Waterford: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which is fast-paced & action-packed & about a spunky & resilient heroine forced to compete in a dystopian future's horrific reality TV show (somewhere between Goblet of Fire & Battle Royale) & which makes anything read right after it seem dull & lagging in comparison. So now I'm faced with terrible Writer's Angst & wondering if I should leave the supernatural genre to my research & just write a nice little piece of magic-realism-with-a-hint-of-romance (Aloof Mysterious Stranger or Best Friend Next Door, which will it be?) or maybe a story about the end of the world. I've always liked those. What do you do, fellow writers, when faced with this kind of Angst? I suppose I should just concentrate on my research until it goes away.

(Beside me, on the train, Alan was reading I Capture the Castle & I couldn't help imagining the three texts combining to form some sort of strange tangled tale about dreamy teenage werewolves in 1930s dress fighting to the death in the grounds of an old castle. Maybe that's the book I should be writing.)