A Nightmare...Sort of About Revision

After slightly fewer than three hours sleep, I woke from a dystopic science fiction nightmare involving a dark indoor place with rooms that look like gigantic, vast stadium seating auditoriums with a vast circular stage in the center (something like the courtroom scenes in the Harry Potter movies but about three times as big). I see a lot of black—black walls and floors and such—and people wearing identical dark purple clothes.

Many—probably the majority—of these people are androids, computers in humanoid form, but I didn’t know this at the beginning of the dream. I forget how I find out. I’m an innocent citizen going about my daily life and feeling confused by the behavior of most people (well, that sounds like my everyday life when I lived in the Midwest). One day, some of these computer-androids collectively go insane and want to overthrow the system. As a real human, I’m anxious and panicky as I observe one of the insane (or malfunctioning) androids run into one of these auditorium rooms and flinging herself (or itself, if you prefer) at a bunch of the androids seated in the room.

Large numbers of androids, when the crazy android makes contact with them, shatter like glass into tiny, jagged fractures, flying all over. I’m terrified not only of being hurt by the flying glass but of shattering like glass myself. (Incidentally, the hallway leading to this room feels rather like the hallway in my parents’ house where I grew up, and the doorway feels like my old bedroom doorway.)

This is my interpretation of what that dream was about. Yesterday I read a lot of editorial feedback on a fantasy novel I wrote as a teen, and I discovered that the manuscript is far worse than I imagined. Part of me is antsy to start revising, taking the novel apart and turning it into a series. Another part of me is terrified of “killing my baby” as the writing expression goes—making such drastic changes as taking the characters from Victorian England and sticking them in twenty-first century America. After all, this novel was what I found escapist when I was a teen, and for decades I’ve thought of these characters in that Victorian setting.

In the dream, the hallway led to the doorway of the bedroom in which I hid while writing those stories (that I stuck together and called a novel) as a teen. The big room resembled a courtroom, and reading the developmental edits felt like I was on trial. The androids that shatter like glass represent characters in my novel, characters who will be altered or deleted altogether.

On the bright side, I’ll certainly keep the current draft rather than destroy it like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who tended to burn manuscripts he didn't like. The current manuscript will be a reference… and a sentimental possession. Meanwhile, I’m already getting visions of what to do in order to set this series in modern-day America, and even bits of truly modern dialog are popping into my head.

Feedback on My Curious Adventures with a Witch

I met up with Michelle and collected the student feedback for my Aunt Amaryllis novel. Three student groups (out of six) from her YA Publishing class chose my novel, and they all agree there's too much in the one book. They also all agree in changing the title, which is fine with me since My Curious Adventures with a Witch is the fourth working title. And they all agreed that it's middle grade rather than YA, which I thought might happen, even though the protagonist is seventeen.

I'm thinking I'll make it into a series. I've got other ideas for writing about these characters, so I have thought about a sequel anyway.

Strangely, I'm talking about characters I invented and started writing about back when I was sixteen years old. Originally Aunt Amaryllis was purely escapist, something fun to write about while living as a social outcast in rural Indiana. The novel started out as short stories that I decided to string together and call a novel since I was compelled to keep writing about these particular characters.

Perhaps the main characters you invent when you're young are the ones who stick with you the most. I certainly haven't been as attached with other characters as I have been with Aunt Amaryllis and Violet.

Because of the success of the Harry Potter books and the consequent popularity of YA fantasy, I decided in 2003 to dig out that old manuscript and revise it and expand it. Violet became Aunt Amaryllis's apprentice rather than just a niece who shared her adventures; I also made it more clear that Violet is the protagonist. I filled in chronological gaps between chapters/stories.

I'm doing somewhat last-minute work on a fairy tale novella inspired by the European witchcraze. It has a due date of Feb 10. That said, it's far enough along that I can also get back to work on Aunt Amaryllis. So much to write! 

Witch Fiction Trend

It looks like my timing is odd--witch fiction happens to be a trend, and here I am writing it. I've read A Discovery of Witches, which is adult paranormal romance about a witch who's from a long line of witches, and now there's the YA novel Life's a Witch and its eventual series (http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/50213-swamped-by-offers-self-pubbed-ya-author-gets-agent-and-more.html). I read Beautiful Creatures about a year ago, and that's also a YA witch novel.

Too bad my novel My Curious Adventures with a Witch isn't already published. On the  bright side, my novella Witch's Familiar is available on Wormhole Electric's site. Furthermore, I'm about to get feedback on My Curious Adventures with a Witch, because I handed it over to Michelle, my former YA Publishing instructor, and she's about to give me the developmental edits that students did on the manuscript last term. So I'll soon revise it, probably share the revised version with my writers' critique group, revise some more, and start contacting agents. Then hopefully it'll get published before witch fiction goes out of style. I think many people have seen enough of vampires and are ready for something different, and I suspect witch fiction won't go out of style any time soon.

Awkward Situation

Note to self: stop being nice and polite to bullies. Transcend that childhood conditioning. Next time a creepy guy bullies me into giving him my phone number, even if he claims to be a feminist, refuse and keep refusing.

He left a message on my answering machine a few days after we met (I'm not returning the call!) and knows where I’m a volunteer. I refrained from attending an event there because I had told him about it and he seemed interested. He needs a therapist, and it’s not my job. I have a theory that he may be psychotic, since I’ve noticed insane people giving off creep vibes.

The situation has certainly confirmed that I’m still conditioned to be nice and polite to bullies—probably conditioned by relatives more than anything else, though our patriarchal society generally teaches girls to practice self-negation and be nice and polite in any situation. While a part of me is concerned, I have to protect myself. In my early childhood, relatives conditioned me to have unquestioning loyalty to them and to their side of the family, simultaneously demonizing my dad and his side of the family. But these relatives are also verbally abusive toward me, so I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to say that they conditioned me to be on their side against me. Weird, I know, but it’s probably not unusual. After I went off to college, if someone bullied me in a way similar to that of relatives, I had an unfortunate tendency to be in denial that I had a problem with this bully. Since then I’ve analyzed my relatives and intellectually reject bullies, the emotional conditioning isn’t completely gone. It takes a long time to completely purge crap from your childhood.

Before New Year's Resolutions

End-of-year rush
to bakeries for chocolate chip scones
and Boston cream pie:
hedonism before next year's ascetism.

I had a dream in which I was staying at my parents’ house, and they were there, but so was a young woman I’d never met before; she may have been Indian. I went into the bathroom, and the tub was full of water and bubble bath and a colorful plastic Sarasvati statue (she wore a red sari) that served as a water fountain—water spouted out of her hands. It may have created an arc the shape of a rainbow. Later I went into the bathroom again with the intention of taking a shower, and although the tub was drained, the Sarasvati statue was in the tub again, sitting on the floor of it. I considered taking her out, but then it occurred to me that she filled at most half the tub’s floor, and  I could leave her in there while I took my shower.

Sarasvati is my favorite Hindu goddess—she and Durga are the two I relate to the most. Sarasvati is the goddess of the arts and knowledge and wisdom. According to the New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, “She is not only the water goddess, one of a trinity that also includes Ganga and Yamuna, but she is also the goddess of eloquence, which pours forth like a flooding river.” The book also says, “Sarasvati is the prototype of all female artists (p. 273).”

Although I read a book called Hindu Goddesses before I went to India, I'd forgotten Sarasvati's association with water. It's appropriate that the dream involved seeing her in the bathtub. It's also appropriate that I dreamed about her while I'm immersed in writing a novella.

Character Naming

I'm in the process of revising my fairy tale novella Woodland Castle (it's a working title, and honestly it's a lot better than the first title I came up with). I originally wrote it rather intensely, the whole thing during the month of November, as part of my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) project. (Maybe next November I'll actually write a full-length novel instead of a novella and three stories.)

I just discovered that during that intensive November writing experience, I had created a witch-burning character called Father Duplicitous. I might want to change that name to something a bit more...subtle. After all, a villain shouldn't have a name like that unless you're writing for cartoons ("Dudley Do-Right," for example) or writing slapstick comedy. This novella is neither. I've given all the other characters German names (since I eventually decided to base the kingdom on Germany), and there's a posibility that his name might be the same thing, or something similar, but in German.