Romanticore

March 27

It's been a good day.

This morning I sold "Romanticore" to Realms of Fantasy. It's 13,700 words long -- the longest story I've ever written that actually works, certainly the most ambitious thing I've written to date.

The story behind this story is an arduous and strange one. (Want to see lots of textual pissing-and-moaning? Type "Romanticore" and "tropism" into Google, and check out my alternately plaintive-and-triumphant entries.) On January 31, 2001, I wrote eight beginnings to get me started on a month-long short-story dare (the same dare that produced "Fable from a Cage" and "The Witch's Bicycle", though they came far less painfully). The opening to "Romanticore" is the second one, the one that begins "There are many stories about a young woman..." I held on to that beginning for ages, through several drafts and bouts of revision, but eventually it disappeared, because it wasn't right for the story "Romanticore" eventually became. The beginning I ended up with was "Fucked half a hundred times by love, and still I look for more." The only request Realms had for an edit (the only edit they've ever suggested for one of my stories) has to do with that line. Not because they're opposed to the profanity (there's lots of it in this story, which is why I like it better than "Little Gods", I think -- there are monsters, and there's sex, and there's swearing in this one), but for aesthetic reasons. The layout people at Realms like to elaborate on and illuminate the first letter or word of stories, and it would just be too strange for them to do a big pretty "Fucked". So I changed it to "I've been fucked half a hundred times by love...", which doesn't hurt the poetry of the line at all, so it's okay.

The story I wound up with at the end of that Dare was a mess. There was some powerful stuff at the end, but the protagonist was all wrong (he was boring, and behaved in stupid ways), major plot points were absurd, and I really pulled away from the emotional content. This is a story about love, about desperation and obsession and hungering for connection and those sweet moments of bliss, about afterglows turning to ashes, about conquering something, about being conquered, and it was hard for me to give myself up to that, to meet the demands of the story, to put enough of myself into it.

I didn't look at it for 9 months. Then I tried to revise it, and realized that it simply wasn't salvageable. I put it away. Then, in March of 2002, I was having a bad day. This day. To cheer myself up, I decided to take a wrecking ball to "Romanticore", to salvage the few things I liked in the dreck I'd written. I wrote this about the results:

...in the depths of my simmering bitterness, I finally found the proper beginning for my horrible novelette "Romanticore", which I've been meaning to rebuild from the ground up for a while. I realized some time ago that the problem with the story was my incredibly boring protagonist, and dull narrative voice (and lots and lots of plot problems, but those things can be ironed out; the worthless viewpoint character was a bigger problem). Tonight a new protagonist started talking to me, and I sat down, put Agent Ink on the stereo, and began typing his dictation. I actually don't know his name yet, though he introduces himself to someone in the next scene, so I guess I'll figure it out. I'm not capable of objectivity yet, but it seems to me that this is some of the best writing, on a stylistic level, that I've ever done; the narrator's voice is coming through to me beautifully, and it's caustic, and it wears black, and yet it's not incapable of irony and a certain heartening self-awareness and romanticism. I'm very enamored of it.

I kept right on feeling that way. (Not that it was all easy, but I was able to successfully pillage my own emotional baggage for material, and the narrator's voice kept coming through clearly.) I finished the story near the end of March 2002, got some crits from my peeps, revised it, tightened it a bit, and sent it a couple of places. I didn't think it would sell, honestly; it's long, and dark, and strange. One major editor thought it was too long, if I recall, but actually sent a personal note, which he doesn't, usually; and another admired my chutzpah for tackling such a big theme head-on, but he didn't want it; and a third said she liked it but it wasn't right for her magazine. So I sent it to Realms -- the only reason I didn't send it there first is because it's too long, according to their guidelines. But, having sold Shawna at Realms a few stories, I decided I'd give it a try anyway... and now, there it is. "Romanticore". It'll be out sometime. I hope you all read it. And I hope I haven't overhyped it... it's hard to tell what people will like, after all, but I'm very proud of this one. The story turned out to be not-very-autobiographical at all, though I suppose parts of it are like alternate personal history; if things had gone differently, if I'd gotten more deeply involved with certain people, I might have gone through some of the same really heavy stuff my protagonist Ray does. Minus the monsters, of course...

Ray, and Lily, and Martin. The main characters of "Romanticore". They lived in my head for a long time, in various forms. In a few months, they'll have a chance to live in yours.

And in other news... I saw a galley of the new Year's Best Science Fiction, and I got honorable mentions for "The Witch's Bicycle" and "Little Gods". Whee! I wanted to flip through and see if any of my friends got mentions, but I didn't have time -- the galley got sent off to a reviewer before I had a chance...

I wrote yesterday morning, and this morning, but I was sort of groping my way along -- only did 1100 words total. But the book's going well...

Tonight Heather and I went out for celebratory sushi, mmm. I read Shadows Bite yesterday, a nice fun sequel to The Art of Arrow Cutting. Just started Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan.

Good night, all. Hope you had a good day, too.

Words written since February 1, 2003: 25,800

Words written since last entry:
1,100

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