I love to
write.
Of non-school
related writings, I've poured more than a million words into different
keyboards throughout my life, and the number certainly increases if we look
back at all I've done in high school and college. One of my earliest memories,
in fact, is hammering on a typewriter in my grandmother's basement, cranking
out a poor excuse for a story on a single sheet of crayoned-over paper.
I wrote
novels throughout high school--mostly Spider-Man fan-fic--and so I have to
divide my writing 'career' as pre- and post-graduation. Since I left high
school, I have written one Spider-Man novel and four fantasy novels: Impetus, Words of the Silenced, Tales of the
Flame, and Writ in Blood. The
Spider-Man book feels legitimate to me, if only because actual novels are
published in the Marvel Universe all of the time, so I was only writing in the
market I wanted to publish in.
Or something
like that.
The four
fantasy novels, however, are all responses to my own experience. Impetus came as a result of reading too
many Terry Goodkind novels. Words of the
Silenced was inspired by a three-day job I took at a telemarketing firm
right after graduating from college. I wrote Tales of the Flame in response to an image of a man who committed
suicide but didn't die. And Writ in Blood
is my attempt at making poetry, elevated language--indeed, Shakespeare--into a
vivid, action-layered, and political powerhouse.
I, largely,
failed.
Okay, I
failed at making it "vivid, action-layered, and political", but I did include poetry and elevated
language.
Part of it
comes from Tales of the Flame, easily
my most embarrassing effort at novel writing. Poorly plotted, strangely executed,
and lacking even the most basic narrative strengths, Tales of the Flame is horrible. Like Skittles in a turd, though,
there were some good parts that were tainted by what surrounded them. One of
the parts that was worth salvaging from the train wreck (to further mix
metaphors and introduce more clichés) was a father/son relationship that I
threw in at the tail end of Tales.
The man and the boy spoke in a slightly elevated style, mimicking the cadences
of some of the prose in Shakespeare. A sonnet, put in as a song from one of the
characters, wove fairly well into the rest of the narration.
That was the
germ I needed. Proof, as it were, that I could incorporate poetry and elevated
language--done sparingly--and still make a worthwhile story.
Gayle became
instrumental in the process, since I needed a sounding board for how the poetry
would work as a magic system. Devising prices to be paid--scars and pain--she helped
me to create character motivations, characteristics, and idiosyncrasies. The
world began to form, a Mediterranean-flavored country with poetry layered
throughout. Multiple cultures morphed until settling on final versions.
At one point,
I had to make a compromise on accuracy versus readability. The conjugation of
verbs in the informal tense is what Shakespeare uses in particular cases. It
indicates the relationship between the speakers--ruler to subject, parent to
child. Whenever he uses the informal conjugation, it says more than just the
words on the page. Gertrude, in Act 3 scene 4 of Hamlet, says, "Hamlet, thou hast thy father much
offended." She's using informal voice, with the words "thou hast
thy" being an indication of their proximity as kin. But Hamlet inverts
that on her, throwing back the line, "Mother, you my father have much offended."
She immediately tunes into this sudden verbal barrier, replying, "Come,
come, you answer with an idle tongue." She reverts to formal conjugation,
implicitly agreeing that there's something that's happened between the two of
them.
In Writ in Blood, characters would be using
"thee" and "thou" and "ye"--all of the informal
conjugations. But few people consider these to be informal in English. We,
paradoxically, respond to this conjugational format as being more formal, something reserved for
incredibly polite company. It's a quasi-sacred form of speech, since the King
James Version of the Bible utilizes the informal so frequently. Knowing this, I
changed the terminology for my book. Whenever they spoke informally, I called
it Formal. Whenever they spoke "normally", they were speaking
"informally". It hurt the grammarian in me to make this choice, but
it seemed the only way to bridge the somewhat esoteric nomenclature and the
accessibility of the text.
I drafted the
book over the course of about three years, putting more effort and time into it
than any other project I've ever worked on. I produced three or four thousand
words a week--sometimes more--and ended the process with over 311,000 words in
it. In other words, I made the best book I could--and it's unpublishable.
I don't know
if it's the denseness of the prose (which can get a little thorny on occasion)
or that I'm soliciting the wrong people, but whatever the case, I've had only
the barest of nibbles as I've sent out queries for agent representation. The
thought of printing it out and submitting it (revised, it's down to 290,000
words) to publishers directly is cost-prohibitive: printing out the manuscript
would cost anywhere between $25 and $35, plus the price of shipping. It just
isn't worth it.
Part of my
worry about Writ in Blood is, in all
honesty, Shakespeare. I know he's cachet--he has hundreds of festivals named
after him every year and, 400 years down the line, he's still making headlines
and inspiring people. Sure, a lot of people are intimidated by him (silly
them), but there are few in this country who haven't heard of William
Shakespeare. And because of the tendency of aspiring authors to compare their
works to established (and lucrative) authors, I'm leery to comp-title Shax. I
mean, it simply sounds beyond audacious to say my book is "Shakespeare
meets Homer with a Cold War-style twist." The associations it invites,
while intriguing, also oversell my writing. It's inspired by Shakespeare, but it's no Shakespeare. It's set in Homer's homeland, but it's no
Homer. It pulls some of its political
concepts from the Cold War, but that's a minor particle of world building. And
yet, Shakespeare is why I ended up with the book I did, so why shouldn't I sell it as such?
I think it's
my own fear that, though my book with resonate with some, as a whole the
concept is too "high-brow" for mass appeal. When I think of people
dressing up as characters from books, they aren't going to be dressed in
colorful togas and calling themselves Nicomachus. There are plenty of other
books out there--shorter, most of them--with more iconic feeling than what Writ in Blood is trying to do. That's
part of why I love my book. It's its own thing. It fuses some of the great
loves of my life, Shakespeare and fantasy, and pushes it into a new direction.
Sadly,
no one--as yet--is interested in that direction.
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