Murder Ponies

Let’s have a little talk about tweedle beetles unicorns.

So. Okay. I like unicorns. I’m not ashamed to admit it. In third grade, I was so into unicorns that I may or may not have formed an imaginary religion centered around them. I’m much more restrained about my love for unicorns now that I’m (allegedly) a grownup, but I still think they’re pretty cool.

But here’s the problem. A lot of the people making unicorn-related things (movies, stickers, etc) do not get what is cool about unicorns.

Even when I was a kid, sometimes family members who heard I liked unicorns would get me something with a unicorn on it that looked like this:

People.  People.  That is not a unicorn.  That is... I don’t even know.  A pig with a really big zit.

The great thing about unicorns is this: they are like horses, only armed for violence.

Unicorns are the original eco-terrorists. They’re badass, mystical defenders of the forest. They can melt into the woods like a ninja, wield powerful magic, and have a big impaling spike on their heads for melee combat. Everything about them screams “do not mess with me.”

And yet in books, games, and movies, 99% of the time they exist just to be captured, killed, or corrupted by bad guys. They’re worse than princesses.

The best (by which I mean most ironic) part is that there is always some talk about how powerful or elusive unicorns are supposed to be and how it must have taken a truly potent evil to do this awful thing. 

Dude. What self-respecting bad-guy hasn’t? Darkness... Voldemort... King Haggard... it’s like the initiation rite for the Cool Kids Club of Evil.

And mind you, this happens in books and movies that I absolutely love. But seriously, guys, we need more positive unicorn role models, here. We do have a few Princess Leias of the unicorn world — like, the Last Unicorn was definitely badass; and despite being purple, Twilight Sparkle doesn't back down from a fight... but they're the exceptions that prove the rule. We need more Sarah Connor/Katniss Everdeen kind of unicorns. They have so much badass guerrilla warrior potential!

I mean, look at that horn. What do you think it's for? It's not for butting heads in courtship displays. It's not for picking up radio signals. It’s for FATAL STABBING.

Unicorns are lethal murder ponies.

It’s time to start treating them like it.

And what have we learned today?

Horrible murderers are the snuggliest!

Robins Aren't the Only Thing Tweeting in the Slush

So, I’ve entered a pitch contest.

For those of you who may not know, in a typical pitch contest, hundreds of people submit pitches of their novels (usually consisting of a very short synopsis and/or the first page or so), and a small number are chosen and posted for a group of literary agents to compete over. They’re pretty cool even if you don’t get picked, because you get to meet other writers and find out what they’re working on. It gives you a real appreciation for how much talent is out there.

Of course, sometimes the talent of others can be hard to appreciate.

But once you beat your ego into submission, it’s a great experience.

One interesting sideshow that comes with many pitch contests is a very cool phenomenon called slush tweeting, in which the readers who choose the finalist entries make cryptic tweets about their selection process before the finalists are announced. Naturally, everyone who entered the contest stays glued to this feed like lab mice waiting for the next pellet.

Sometimes, the tweets can give you irrational confidence about your own chances.

Other times, the tweets can crush your hope like a VW Bug under the heel of a giant mutant sea lizard.

They can also engender the perverse urge to troll the judges with your next contest entry.

Eventually, trying to figure out whether any of the tweets are about your book leads to complete loss of sanity.

The smart thing to do might be to walk away from the Twitter feed. But the readers often post really good advice and pithy observations that can be useful to anyone. So it may be torture — but it’s worthwhile torture.

Or at least, it beats working.

And what have we learned today?

Wait, what’s wrong with a YA dystopian vampire Harry Potter novel?

Good Bones

I don’t know how it is for other people, but my own progress as a writer is full of “Well, duh” epiphanies.  You know... those moments when you realize something in this big flash of brilliance that should have been painfully obvious all along.

It’s comforting to me that no matter how far I feel I’ve come over the years, I still have a lot to learn.  Even really basic things that everyone else probably already knows.

Well... maybe comforting isn’t quite the right word.

A lot of my “Well, duh” realizations in recent years have been about structure.  I’m starting to believe that darn near everything comes down to structure, one way or another.  Plot... character... dialogue... if it doesn’t have good bones, you can dress it up all you want in pretty words, but it’s still going to be lame.

Lookin' sharp!

Part of the reason it took me so long to figure this out is that not too long ago, I couldn’t really see structure.  Heck, I only vaguely knew it was a thing.  My writing professors weren’t really into structure in college and grad school.

My first clue came from reading Story by Robert McKee (which is about screenplay writing, but as the name implies, works for fiction, too).  That book is jam-packed with “Well, duh” revelations, like how something should actually change in every scene, which was a big one for me.  (I was embarrassingly into “show the reader the status quo” scenes before that.)

After enough times asking myself “Does this scene contribute anything to the story?” and “What changes in this scene?” and “Is this character progressing along her arc?” and stuff like that, I finally began to actually see the structure.  This makes everything so much easier.

I’m sure lots of people could do that all along, and it’s no big deal to them. But for me, it was like raising one eyebrow.  When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be able to raise one eyebrow (so I could look at people sardonically, I guess?), and I struggled for about a year and just couldn’t do it.  Then, finally, I found the secret one-eyebrow-raise muscle, and wow, there it was!  I still had to train that muscle up, and there are still many people who raise one eyebrow better than I do, but I can do it.

This is a large part of what’s made revision more fun in recent years (see earlier post).  Trying to fix things is way more satisfying (and, I hope, effective) when you feel like you can actually see what you’re doing.

Otherwise, you can wind up doing this.

It’s taken a lot of the frustration and mystery out of revision for me.  Now, whether it lets me do something awesome, like raising one eyebrow, remains to be seen.

And what have we learned today?

Fluid dynamics are hard.

The Waiting Game

So.  My middle grade novel is out on sub to agents.

Yeah... that was pretty much my January.

I could say more, but really, the comic sums it up nicely.