Category: Norse City Limits (Page 1 of 2)

“The Writer’s Journey” by Vogler

January 13, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I got this book from the library about a month ago. It’s due back soon, so I thought I’d make an effort to finish it before then.

I was supposed to read Vogler’s book for a screenwriting class way back in my freshman year of undergrad, but I never actually did. I was very much anti-Hero’s Journey at that time. I’m still not quite sure how I feel about the concept even now, but I thought I could use a bit of a refresher in story structure, and despite my ambivalence about the “Hero’s Journey” with a capital H, I’m interested in archetypes and symbols, and Vogler’s book offers some interest on that score. The archetype stuff is very general, but again, I felt like I need a refresher. Sometimes a re-acquaintance with ideas we already know is helpful; we might see something new in studying them again, or we might see how these ideas work differently within our new context.

Since I’m in the midst of writing a noir fantasy novel that’s leaning heavily on certain tropes and types (while at the same time trying to put my own spin on them… the same dance we’re all doing, basically), I’ve enjoyed reading through Vogler’s descriptions of types like the Shadow, the Shapeshifter, and the Trickster. My main character Grettir has been a bit of all three archetypes so far, and I’m curious why that is. What made me craft a hero who is all these other types at various times? What’s happening under the surface in my imagination that I’m trying to explore?

I can definitely see how my other characters might fit into these frameworks too, and already I’m getting ideas for how I might lean into these archetypes a bit more.

What I like about Vogler’s approach is that he doesn’t prescribe how we should use these archetypes or structures. He’s quick to point out ways in which great stories often subvert or subtly shift these elements to fit the story that’s being told. These are frameworks not prescriptions or dictates. I like that element of freedom, recognizing that every story will be shaped by the teller and the needs of the tale.

The other thing I like about the book is a bit towards the end where Vogler compares the artist’s process of writing and creating to the hero’s journey (hence the title: The Writer’s Journey). What are my Shadows? Who are the Tricksters on my journey?

These questions are not simply cute metaphor. At least for me, they enliven the creative process, showing how this journey into imagination and storytelling is a transformative experience for the writer (and hopefully for the reader too). Not that every story needs to be “important.” In fact, it’s not about the finished story at all because that way leads to writer’s block and frustration.

Instead, the “writer’s journey” framework helps me see that what I’m doing isn’t pointless or stupid. No matter how my stories “turn out,” the act of creating them is what’s important. It’s a journey, after all. The emphasis is on the journey itself and not the finished product. It’s about the writer and her transformation as she goes on this journey.

In some ways, this is what I love about telling stories and writing in general. It’s about what it does to ME. Yes, I hope for the audience to have a good time and get something out of it, but that part is out of my control in the grand scheme. I can write to the best of my ability and hope the audience responds, but I can’t make them have a good time. I can only try.

But for myself, the writer, I do have control. By putting words on a page, I am embarking on my own journey. I’m telling myself the story. I get to face the ups and downs of the adventure, both in the tale I’m telling and in my experience of writing that tale. The act of writing is the journey. I will face Shadows and Threshold Guardians, find Mentors and Allies, and ultimately, if I finish the story, I will face the Ordeal of Critical Voice, defeat it, and bring back the Elixir of Life.

(All these terms are covered in Vogler’s book as part of his analysis of the Hero’s Journey, particularly in films; he cribs a lot from Joseph Campbell.)

Anyway, this is what struck me as I read through as much of the book as I could before it had to go on its own journey, back through the return chute at the library.

Goal: Finish Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess

January 3, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This one was always going to be a challenge. It’s a tortured history, and I might not be ready to confront it.

I wrote the first Merlin book in roughly 2014-2016 (exact dates are fuzzy because it was so long ago, which is exactly why my goal to finish Ysbaddaden is so fraught).

That was almost ten years ago, when I published The Thirteen Treasures of Britain. Not too long afterward, in January 2017, I wrote a Merlin prequel short story, and I started the second book of the trilogy, a book about the giant Ysbaddaden, a chess game between Merlin and his arch-nemesis, and the continued hunt for the treasures of Britain.

Yeah. It was gonna be great. It was gonna rock. I was gonna finish this book and get it out, then write the third one and have a complete trilogy and be awesome, yay, yay, yay.

Then, after I had completed the trilogy (so my plan was planned), I was gonna write more. So much more. Dozens more. Dozens upon dozens. Ideas for more books, more series, more stories. I had so much more I wanted to write.

So, while I was excited about the Merlin trilogy, I also had plans for more. I needed to get “through” the Merlin stuff to get to all the other stuff I wanted to write.

I was excited for Ysbaddaden, yes, but I was also nervous about it. It wasn’t something I had a clear idea about plot-wise. I knew roughly what I wanted to see happen, but I also wanted to discover new things as I wrote. This is my way. Discovery writing.

I started writing, started the journey roughly in 2017, but then life stuff happened. Another pregnancy happened. And the excitement of the Merlin trilogy began to chafe against my unclear idea of what would happen with Ysbaddaden. In those days, I didn’t have a good handle on how to deal with “stuckness” as a discovery writer. And I was stuck. Stuck physically (with the pregnancy), stuck emotionally (also with the pregnancy), and most especially stuck with the story.

I didn’t like the direction Ysbaddaden was going. And I couldn’t find time to write.

This went on for at least a couple of years. Honestly, I have a bad memory, so I’m not sure when things really started going off the rails, but off they went, and soon enough I realized I needed to scrap twenty-thousand words and redraft huge sections of the work-in-progress.

The redrafting was better, and I started to find a good footing with the story, but then two of my side projects started to become main projects. I finished Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion during the time when I was “supposed” to be finishing Ysbaddaden.

By 2023, I had published those two side project books, but I still had a half-completed manuscript for the second book in a trilogy I first started publishing in 2016. And instead of barreling ahead with Ysbaddaden, I decided to start ANOTHER book, Norse City Limits.

So, as I indicated above. Fraught.

This is probably a Critical Voice problem. Fear that the second book will be worse than the first. Fear that my ideas are stupid and I’ll ruin the series.

But even more than fear, I think what’s happened is that I’ve lost the momentum. I can already tell that momentum is starting to wane with NCL too. Turns out, I need to keep momentum going on a project or else risk losing interest. I’m like a kitten or puppy, distracted by every shiny thing that comes my way.

Going forward, with new projects, the key will be to keep the momentum going and not get too rolled by hiccups and life events.

But for these older projects, for the eternal project that is Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess, I need to somehow regain the momentum. With NCL, I think I’ve managed it, but only time will tell. My goal is to finish it by March. Then, it’s on to Ysbaddaden, trying to finish it in the second quarter.

Regaining momentum on a long-delayed project is not easy. Frankly, I’m not sure how to do it. The best I can figure is the old stand-by for when I feel creatively stalled: More input.

If (for both NCL and Ysbaddaden) I can start reading and watching and listening to stuff that fuels my creative voice, then I might be able to rev the motor and restart. Reignite.

The NCL input list includes the aforementioned Myths and Symbols book by H. R. Ellis Davidson, as well as a long list of film noir (a list I might post on the blog in a soon-ish timeframe).

For Ysbaddaden, the list includes The Sandman comics, tons of medieval romances like Tristan and Isolde, the Lais of Marie de France, and Parzival. And, of course, the ur-text for all my Welsh Arthurian stuff: The Mabinogi. Throw in some Tennyson, some T. H. White, and maybe even some Susan Cooper, and add a dash of my favorite old fantasy films like Labyrinth and Excalibur, and I’ll be good to go.

This the hope, anyway. Maybe this time will be different.

I do know that I need to stay connected to the story once I start writing it again. I have to work on it a little bit every day so that the momentum never falters too much. And I have to keep the whole thing fun. Momentum and fun. I’m learning that these are MY key factors for finishing. Momentum and fun.

I think what hurt me way back in 2017 was that I was overwhelmed with life stuff and the writing was harder and harder to fit into my life. I made the book “important” and put myself under pressure to write it. The importance and the pressure and all the personal stuff just stalled me. And instead of being gentle with myself and going easy on the self-criticism, I went self-critical HARD. I beat myself up for my lack of progress, and that made progress all the harder to come by.

I’ve grown a lot as a writer since 2017. I know how to handle stuckness a little better, and I know that I’m really doing quite a lot, actually, so I don’t need to beat myself up about it. The most important thing is that I haven’t given up.

“Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe” by H.R. Ellis Davidson

December 23, 2024 / / 1 Comment

When I was reading this book, I was on fire with drafting Norse City Limits. When I stopped reading it (due to other reading obligations), the writing dried up.

Coincidence?

Ideas don’t come from thin air. At least mine don’t. Mine come from what I see, what I read, what I listen to, what I notice. When I’m reading a book that’s bursting with ideas, suddenly I’m bursting with ideas. When my reading is directed toward something related to my work-in-progress, my work-in-progress gets a boost from that reading.

And when my reading or attention shift elsewhere?

The writing does too. It shifts into that other elsewhere or it withers a bit from lack of sustenance.

Donna Tartt’s process seems right to me: read something related to your work-in-progress at the end of the day.

Of course, the lesson here is to get back to my Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe book.

The difficulty, is that I have a growing stack of books I need to read for my winter semester classes, and a book club book, and some library books that will soon be called back to the returns bin. Making time for my weird mythology book is hard to justify.

Still. I need to justify it. I need that sustenance. That juice.

Watching more film noir will get me that juice too. I can’t keep running off the fumes of what I remember from my twenties and early thirties when my art diet consisted of a steady stream of movie noir and hard-boiled fiction. I need to dive back in. Myths and symbols, alleyways and wise guys. More jazz. More Led Zeppelin. More Thor and Odin and trolls.

I started writing NCL because of my love for both Norse mythology and film noir. But that love needs nurturing.

My fantasy writing (maybe all my writing) really thrives from using symbols, thinking about symbols, reviving and trying to breathe life into old, familiar symbols. The Davidson book is full of these: blood, birds, wood, stone, feasts, water, wolves. The mystery surrounding our understanding of these early northern European pagan peoples is part of the fun, part of the allure. Using these half-guessed at rituals and rites, tales and traditions, as the material for my story is part of why I tell stories. I want to remix and re-imagine. I think most fantasy writers do. Whereas science fiction writers are farseeing into the future, we are farseeing into the past. And then we mix it together with whatever else is swimming in our imaginations. Fantasy is a synthesis. Neither old nor entirely new. A bridge between times (and worlds).

Goal Update: November 2024

November 25, 2024 / / 0 Comments

It’s been five months since I posted my ridiculously long list of goals, and I figured it was time to do an update. Mostly for my own reflection. Maybe this is the teacher side of me, but reflecting on my work helps me see where to go next. It’s a taking-stock process. Let’s me know what steps to take next.

I set a huge number of goals in the hopes of “failing to success,” figuring that if I kept working at a bunch of different things, I’d make more progress than if I limited myself to only a few. Does this make any sense? Who knows, but it makes sense in my own head. I tend to do better and feel better when I have lots of creative projects going on that I can toggle between and work on bit by bit. Sometimes a particular thing takes over and I obsess over it, but other times I flit back and forth like a butterfly.

So, how is my flitting these days?

Hm.

That’s the short answer. Here is the longer answer:

Finish writing Norse City Limits (urban fantasy novel): I am not finished but this is the goal I’ve probably made the most progress on. As of right now, I’m roughly 40k into the story (maybe 45k… not sure because I handwrote a bunch of it and am now typing it up). I’m a bit stalled, however, so I’ve decided to go back to the last moment in the story when I was still really excited and start redrafting from there. That means that my most recent three chapters will be entirely new material as I scrap the old and start again. I’m not too upset by this because it means I’m getting excited about the story again and seeing where it heads next. I’m still hopeful I can finish this before 2024 kicks it.

Finish writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess (second book in Merlin series): Haven’t done anything with this one yet. I’m focused on finishing NCL. I have a bad habit of losing steam in the middle of a novel and jumping to other things, and I don’t want that to happen with NCL, so I’m holding off on another big project until that one is finished. NCL is where my energy and imagination are at the moment too. Not that I won’t get to Ysbaddaden in 2024, but it’s probable that 2025 will be the year of Merlin’s Last Magic.

Finish a short story set in my sword and sorcery world: Not yet.

Finish a short story about a mother who learns a terrible secret about her son: Not yet.

Finish a short story set in my Children of Valesh universe: Not yet.

Publish my short story collection: Embarrassingly not yet. I have the cover art, I have the stories, I have them mostly copy edited, and now it’s just a matter of finishing layout and proofing. Getting those ISBNs assigned and uploading to markets.

Why have I stalled on this project? I think because when I have time for creative things, I tend to put my energies into writing and creating and not into the publishing. Publishing feels too much like “work,” and when I have free time, I don’t want to work, I want to play. This is good for my writing but bad (obviously) for my publishing. I should make a more concerted effort to get my writing out to readers, but in order to do so, I must steal time from my writing sessions, and I’m loathe to do that.

If there’s one goal on this list I really want to achieve before the year is out, it’s this one, so I MUST block time into my schedule and get this book out to market. I haven’t felt much urgency until now, but the pressure is starting to mount. Hopefully, I have a short story collection to announce in the coming weeks.

Finish a novella in my City of Ashes series: Not yet. Still focused on NCL and don’t want to switch to any other bigger projects.

Blog everyday (this one again!! LOL!): I am not blogging everyday… but I am trying to blog more and seeing some improvement on this measure.

Send out Substack newsletter every two weeks: Ugh. This is the one that hurts. I just haven’t been able to get into a rhythm. Since I’m really trying to finish NCL, I don’t devote much time to other writing pursuits. It should be obvious, then, that the Substack will suffer. But I hate that it’s being neglected. I don’t want to neglect it, but non-fiction takes longer (at least the kind I do on Substack), partly because it takes me longer to generate ideas and evaluate whether they’d be good enough for a newsletter essay.

I can write shorter thoughts and musings, and those tend to go on the blog, but for my Substack readers, I feel like if I’m sending something to their inboxes, it needs to be more substantial. That desire for a more in-depth and lengthy piece of writing puts the pressure on, and I shut down when there’s too much pressure. My ideas dry up. My fears and critical voice rear their heads.

The answer, such as it is, is to devote more time during my writing sessions to working on the Substack: generating ideas, drafting, researching, etc. This is a process that requires a good chunk of time. If I don’t schedule that time, it ain’t happening.

But to block time for the Substack means to lessen time for my fiction. This is the Sophie’s Choice I’m loathe to make.

Anyway, the Substack goal is a conundrum. Not sure how this is going to go other than maybe reassessing my goals and making a few hard choices.

Play more role-playing games with my kids, my husband, family, and friends: Have played more with the kids, but not where I’d like to be. We’ve played two sessions of Hero Kids RPG, but I’m itching to play more. The kids like it, but it’s hard for me to muster the energy some evenings, so we end up not finding time to play.

I need to block time for playing into my schedule (this is a recurring theme, isn’t it?). I want to try playing solo as well, and I’m currently reading the Emirates of Ylaruam gazetteer from the old Basic D&D TSR stuff. I’m planning to use the rules for Cairn and run a little solo campaign to explore the setting and get my role-playing fix.

I’m not sure I’ll get to play more with family and friends. No one seems particularly interested; I’m by far the most enthusiastic of the group. So perhaps solo gaming is the way to go.

Create some RPG modules for Norse City Limits and Merlin’s Last Magic: Not yet.

Make a “Saturday Morning” zine series and publish an issue every month: Not yet.

Make other zines: Not yet.

(Zine-making still excites me, but like with my other pursuits, I feel like all my focus should be on finishing NCL and writing fiction. If I had all the time in the world, I would do more with these side projects, but when my time is limited, I feel like I have to make the choice to write fiction. Can I find more time in my day? Can I schedule more time for these pursuits? I suppose I can, but what will be sacrificed to get this time? My walking? My reading? Time spent with my kids?

Maybe I try to fold my zine-making into time spent with my kids… we can all make zines together. This is worth a try…

Of course, I’m doing this to myself by having so many flipping goals! I realize that there’s simply not enough time in the day to do all these things to their fullest. But the seed of desire is still there, so for the moment, I’m going to continue looking for ways to do all my goals.)

Read more books with my kids (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Half-Magic, James and the Giant Peach, the Hobbit, the Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, Last Battle, more Little House books, How to Train Your Dragon series, Harry Potter): Yes, a little. We are reading The Hobbit, and we’ll be starting Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone soon.

Start naalbinding again (finish the hat I started for my son and make another one for my other son): Not yet, but I’m going to try committing to doing this in the evenings. Christmas is coming up and winter too, so now is the time to get it done.

Practice my cartooning/comics drawing (for the zines): I did practice drawing cartoon owls (to turn into an Isabel-story zine…?), but that’s all. I have some drawing books for as sources, but despite identifying them around the house, I haven’t gathered them to use. As a family, we sometimes spend Saturday morning drawing, so maybe I can make that a more regular and deliberate thing.

Write essays, poems, and fiction that will serve as models for my students next school year: I’ve started a long-form essay about decluttering to share with my students, but it’s in very rough draft form. I wrote a couple of models earlier this school year, but not nearly as many as I had planned. This goal sounds good in my head, but when it comes time to actually do it, I find that I resist. Just as my students resist assignments because they are assignments, I resist writing that feels like an obligation. I know I need to work on the mental attitude here and see these as fun and practice and a chance to try something new. But I’m still battling a lot of critical voice in my fiction and for-fun writing, so doing writing that’s more obligatory is an even harder hurdle to jump.

So much of writing is a mental challenge. Yes, craft matters, and learning how to do different techniques is important, but the real challenge (at least for me) is battling the ennui and the critical voice and the lack of confidence. I’m forever fighting the fear that I’ll make a mistake or write something bad.

My goal of writing more model texts for my students is no different. I’m afraid I’ll fail, so I resist doing it in the first place. After all, what if I’m trying to model a certain technique and I do a bad job of it? I’ll embarrass myself in front of my students. What if I set a goal to write a certain kind of essay and it turns out all wrong? The students will see I’m a fraud.

And on and on the negative thoughts spiral.

I know that I need to treat every creative act as an experiment, but this requires a mental shift that I’m still working on making. To see everything as an experiment means to have a certain kind of fearlessness and courage that isn’t always readily available. To be okay with failure.

This is perhaps the overarching goal for everything: to break through mental fear and go into every enterprise with an attitude of experimentation. All my 2024 goals are really the same goal, then. To experiment freely. To cease hesitating and go for it.

Bonus achievement: I wrote a short story about walking and bird-watching that came out of nowhere. It wasn’t planned, but I got excited about it and rode the wave until it was done. So despite not making progress on planned short stories, I spontaneously wrote one anyway. This is a good example of “failing to success.” I ended up writing something even though I failed to write something else. Having lots of irons in the fire, so to speak, meant that I was ready for when a new, unexpected iron needed shaping.

Goal: Finish Norse City Limits

June 9, 2024 / / 0 Comments

My top writing goal for 2024 is to finish my novel, Norse City Limits. Inspired by both my love for Icelandic sagas and my love for film noir, NCL mixes elements from Grettir’s Saga and Norse mythology with some of my favorite noir tropes.

I started out writing it late last summer and made a lot of progress right out of the gate. I guess I was excited about starting something new. The idea for NCL has been rattling around my brain for years, so that build-up and energy just flowed right through me when I finally started drafting. I think I wrote roughly 15,000 words in those first few weeks.

Then the school year started and I began teaching again. That slowed things down considerably, and because I wasn’t outlining my chapters as I went, I ended up forgetting a bunch of stuff as my momentum stalled and I didn’t write everyday.

I wrote a short story, started another short story, started a novella, and then went back through and reread all of the NCL manuscript thus far, taking notes and outlining each chapter.

After that process, I finally resumed drafting the novel, but with a bit of a twist. The school year started with me wanting to experiment with having the students draft by hand. Basically do all their writing in notebooks and on pads of paper. This was my way of resisting AI, I guess. Of getting us all to think more intentionally about our bodies and how doing things by hand shapes how we think.

I realized that while I do a lot of writing by hand, mostly in my writer’s notebook, I was still drafting all my fiction at the computer. I can type faster than I can handwrite, and typing just made sense. Saves times, right?

But that meant that I could only write when I had access to my computer, to the desktop that sits in our basement. That meant that my writing time was limited to those moments when I was home and could steal away to the basement to write.

Translation: I didn’t get a lot of writing done once school started because I didn’t have access to my computer. And even when I did have access to it, sometimes I didn’t feel like holing myself up in the dank, cold basement. Sometimes I wanted to sit on the couch with my husband in the evening, just to be near him, to spend quiet time together.

After watching this video on Neil Gaiman’s writing routine, I realized that I really love writing in my writer’s notebook, and writing by hand has always made me feel more experimental and loose, AND I was asking my students to draft their writing by hand, but I was still shackled to my computer, so the answer seemed obvious.

I needed to start drafting my stories by hand.

I took out the lovely leather notebook case my husband got me a few years ago, stuck a couple of Moleskine softcover journals in it, and started drafting NCL and my short fiction by hand. I started bringing the notebook with me to work, drafting in spare moments at lunch or after school. I sat on the couch in the evenings and drafted while my husband worked on his grad classes.

Basically, I got back into the groove with the novel.

At this point, I’m on chapter ten but not quite sure how many words because I’ve drafted the last chapter by hand. Probably getting close to 30k words. Which is admittedly not a lot. I’m thinking this book will be roughly 100k words, but that’s always hard to say until I get closer to the end. I don’t outline, so I’m simply going by the vague impressions I’ve generated for where the story might go and the scenes I have floating around my head.

Right now, my protagonist is stumbling and fumbling along, trying to be proactive but getting swatted down at every turn by the cruel forces at work in the city. It’s weird writing noir because it’s such a dark genre/style that calls for bad luck and evil fate to circumvent the hero’s actions. I want to be careful that my main guy gets some feeling of progress going even as the net squeezes tighter and tighter around him.

To finish the novel in seven months, I must write roughly 10k words per month. Very doable… except I also have the goal to finish another novel (Ysbaddaden) and even more stories besides. So 10k a month for NCL, but that won’t be all I’m writing each month.

As always, I’m hoping to “fail to success,” so no matter where I am by next month, I’ll be further along than I am now.

Note to Self: Stop Making This Mistake!

March 23, 2024 / / 1 Comment

I’m in the midst of correcting a mistake.

The mistake was beginning a novel, writing about nine chapters, and not outlining the major plot points, character details, and world-building information of each chapter as I finished it (which is a thing I do: I outline after I write, not before).

Instead, I wrote, wrote, wrote, my hair on fire, my fingers flashing, and I just kept chugging along, oblivious to my fatal error until I’d written 25,000 words and I was like, “Oh, fuck.”

I am a “discovery writer” or a writer who writes “into the dark,” so I do not outline beforehand. Instead — ideally — what I’m supposed to do is outline AFTER I’ve written each chapter, so I have a running summary of what’s happening as the story progresses and therefore I can keep track of all the details without having to use my critical voice to plan things beforehand.

Ideally.

Because what ends up happening — seemingly every time I start a new book — is I forget to do the outlining after I finish a chapter. And then about a third of the way through the book, I realize my mistake and have to spend days/weeks going back through and rereading my manuscript and taking notes. It really puts a halt to the creative energy and stalls the progress of the story. But it’s kinda necessary, otherwise I’ll forget key details and get all messed up with the continuity of the story.

So back into the manuscript I must go. Rereading and taking notes.

That’s where I’m at right now. I started writing Norse City Limits several months ago, and I was on a real roll — letting loose and getting the story down with energy and excitement — and then I realized I hadn’t been outlining after each chapter, and it was an emergency, screeching-of-the-breaks moment, quick-grab-the-notebook-and-start-outling, and now, it’s March, and I’m still not back to writing. I’m still outlining.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

I need to put a sticky note somewhere to remind me to STOP FORGETTING TO THE DO THE POST-WRITING OUTLINE!!111!12121!

This is not the first time such an error has happened; you’d think I would have learned my lesson, but apparently not. It’s kinda good that I’m so caught up in writing the story and finding out what happens next that I forget to do the “housekeeping” side of things afterward, but man, it is not good when I have to go back and do all this rereading and it just kills the momentum of the story.

I’d like to say, “Live and learn,” but apparently, I don’t learn? I just keep doing the same stupid mistake book after book.

So that’s where I’m at. Fixing my stupid mistake and trying to get back into the story so I can start writing it again.

Ugh.

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