Laylah Hunter

I've been sort of following Storm Moon's anniversary blog hop over the course of the month, as one does, and today Lor Rose has a post about her muses, and how she believes that ultimately every author has them. (TW for a lot of jokey language about mental illness.) I sat there for a bit trying to compose a response to the post, but really I think what I want to say ought to be a post of its own.

I have never been a "muses made me do it" writer. I know there are people who get a lot of mileage out of that model, who picture themselves in dialogue with their characters or with a Classical Muse-type figure who spurs them on. But it's never worked for me, for a few reasons:

1. This is hard work. I'm not channeling inspiration that comes from someplace external; I'm not writing down ideas that some magical third party dictates to me. I am conceptualizing characters, building worlds, designing plot arcs, and crafting sentences of my own volition and by my own effort. Some days it goes so smoothly that it does feel almost like a blessing from the gods! Other days it's like trying to plow a field with a hand trowel. But it's still all about me, either way. Blaming a muse for any of it feels like I'd be brushing off that reality: I had to work for every one of those words. They're craft and labor as much as they're inspiration and magic. After all that, I can't imagine WANTING to give the credit to my imaginary friend.

2. Being creative =/= being crazy. This one is a really personal prickly spot for me; I am a writer and I am also a long-term depression sufferer. It took me seventeen years of living with varying degrees of depression before I managed to actually get help and get it under control. A huge part of why it took so long, why I spent all of my 20s being an emotional disaster area, was the idea that the way I felt was just "normal" for a creative person. "I write what the voices in my head tell me to!" is a glib and frivolous riff on that really pernicious idea, and I have no desire to participate in it. (For the record: I am more consistently creative and productive now that my mental illness is well-managed than I ever was as a "crazy" writer.)

Creative minds do work in a variety of ways, obviously; there are clearly people for whom it's helpful to treat their writing process as an internal dialogue, to engage themselves in conversation as a way of getting their creative drive going. But it's not all of us; it's not me. The only voice I'm listening to when I write is my own.

I should probably get going. I've been having a field-vs-hand-trowel week, and I hope to make a deadline at the end of the month. Back to the word mines with me!

Whew. Three short stories out the door this month; here's hoping December will bring me good news on one or more of them.

December's drafting will probably focus on some pieces that friends have commissioned to help me come up with suit money; I'll also be dedicating some time to the final round of pre-submission edits for The Dragon's Tale (FINALLY, I know).

Also I suppose I should be sending out resumes in search of a new day job. I'm not ready to go back yet, but the unemployment office doesn't want to hear that.

In a month or two when the rent keeps happening and I'm not getting paid, I'm sure I'll be more sorry about unemployment. But right this minute, honestly, it feels like such a relief to have time, at last. I've wanted to have time for myself for years.

And I'm not even entirely fucking off with it! Yeah, there's some Skyrim in the evenings (my dunmer is almost to level 50, you guys! she stopped the civil war and now she's chasing down the betrayer of the thieves' guild!), but I'm also settling in to be my own project manager:



Also, I'm the kind of boss who lets my employees use the internet at work. Aw yis.

My big productive activity this past weekend was more in the way of editing existing words than creating new ones. I did a lot of revision to the apocafic in progress, streamlining my existing draft so it would be easier to move forward, and I also did the revisions for my Dreamspinner short story. Several of the line edits in my DSP story were suggestions to reduce the number of semicolons and em dashes scattered throughout.

I have to confess I adore them both. I love huge, frothy confections of sentences, piled high with phrases and clauses held precipitously in balance with one another via the careful application of punctuation. I adore the 19th-century tendency toward sentences with not merely structure but architecture. I fell head-first in rapture with the Khaavren Romances subset of Brust's Dragaera universe, which are full of those glorious-excess sentences; they read like the literary equivalent of a dessert including fluffy pastry, whipped mascarpone, toasted hazelnuts, and buttery caramel sauce: one may speak in praise of their elegance, but not their simplicity.

...Not all stories need sentences like that, though. In fact quite a lot of them don't. I struggle with that fact often, and while I've tamed down my penchant for em dashes since my school days—my graduate advisor managed to talk me down from once or twice a paragraph to maybe once or twice a page—I can never give up my love for them entirely. Sadly, my current projects require me to soldier on, passing up the temptation for elaborate antique constructions in favor of prose that belongs twenty minutes or two centuries in the future. When I'm done with this batch of stories, though, perhaps I should give some steampunk adventuring a try.

Those gentlemen, I'm sure, will wield their semicolons with aplomb.

Signed a contract with Dreamspinner last night to appear in their Advent Calendar collection this year! My short story Safe Harbor will be available with them in December; it's the m/m romance equivalent of a fuzzy blanket and a cup of hot cocoa, and I hope you will enjoy it. (Trying to write cuddly Christmas Eve fic in August, when we were having our one bout of actual summer here in Seattle, was a bit of a challenge.) More details to follow when we're closer to release!

For now, back to the word mines with me. I want to get a longer piece or two out the door by the end of the year (a few of Riptide's current open calls really speak to me)—short stories are well and good, but generally you need something with more meat to it to really make readers happy.

Over on my other account I'm signed up for inkingitout this year, and one of my goals for myself -- along with my overall word count -- was to come up with 80k words of original fiction by the end of the year. I know, that doesn't sound like much to those of you who are habitual novelists, but given how short my usual form is it sounded like a good number to aim for.

So how am I doing?

Well, the longest piece I've finished this year was "Ground Mission," which clocks in a little over 16k. Then "Devil's Bargain, Devil's Kiss," but I really only feel I can count 2k of those words for this year, since the first draft had been sitting on my hard drive for quite a while before I sent it to FFP. "Falling Into Her Arms" is around 3k. My current must-finish project, The Camellia Missions, is another one where I'm only going to count part of the total; I'm aiming for a final word count around 18k, of which about half was written this year.

So that's about 30k of new original words, plus the scattering of barely-started scenes in files with working titles like "crossroads" and "ss fuck yeah." I'm definitely behind, but it's not insurmountable. Particularly if I stop writing this blog post and start writing fiction, like I meant to be doing this morning.