Tag: femslash

NaNoWriMo, eBooks, and Permission Slips

Welcome to November, the time honored month where every writer suddenly feels painfully behind on whatever their project is (myself included). Everything feels daunting, the air is colder, the days are getting shorter. Family holidays and the rising tide of compulsory gift giving capitalism are sneaking up on you, and you’re pushing yourself as best as you can.

It’s a lot, and I’m here to tell you that you are indeed doing your best, and your best is always enough, no matter what anyone else tells you. 

I ended October with a delightful bout of COVID (my second one within 6 months after 3 years of not catching it, so please be careful at those family gatherings) and while quarantined from my family, and unable to do 80% of my normal daily household responsibilities, I had a lot of time on my hands. When I wasn’t feverish and my brain was actually working, I discovered a fascinating ebook genre: Sentient Object Romance.

Some of these books were 71 pages, and some of these were even shorter, including a 13 page masterwork involving Pumpkin Spice Lattes in dubious places. The average Kindle page is 250 words, meaning that a set publishable length can be under 18 thousand words.

I checked further, what about sapphic wlw romance in general? I found some that were 100k words, but there were almost as many coming in around 76 pages.

As someone who started reading fantasy written by Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss, this was mind blowing for me.

Yes, this is no magnum opus, and is likely classified closer to a novella, but for someone like me who is constantly fighting their dopamine seeking ADHD brain, a 40 hour work week, and parenting in the homework grade levels, it was a permission slip.

Permission to write something that didn’t need to be so long that it took years of my life, that didn’t need to jump out at a slush pile reading intern, it didn’t even need to be perfect. I looked at some samples and honestly I’ve seen fanfiction that was better beta’d and edited than some of these ebooks. I watched the author’s timeline waffle in the opening chapters, or have sudden POV shifts from tight third to omniscient, or even leftover pronouns from shifting first to third person. 

I sat there, and looked at these samples, and for the first time in my life I thought to myself, I can do better than that, so why aren’t I?

Cue 10 thousand words written in a quarantine induced flurry, of stuffing my inner perfectionist editor into a closet and going, “We can fix this later.” The absolute unfettered freedom of being able to write multiple chapters alone and going back to just add in a line of foreshadowing. In the realm of fanfiction you’ve got to have it perfect chapter by chapter, foreshadowing on instinct and the slim hope that you can keep your entire plotline in your brain across the multiple months or years it will take to get your gigantic fic (or 125k+ novel) to completion.

There’s a Voltaire quote that says, “Perfect is the enemy of good,” and I’d like to say that perfect is also the enemy of good enough, that you are good enough. 

I’m currently writing a seemingly self indulgent hair washing scene in a historical fiction hurt/comfort storyline. I went to check the stats to see if it really was as self indulgent as I thought it to be. Guess what? I discovered 20% of historical romantic fiction involves hurt/comfort, and furthermore there were no less than five books that included a hair washing scene.

Your words are good enough. That thing inside you banging at the gates to get out on the page? It’s good enough. You are good enough, and here is my permission slip for you to make the thing.

I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Review: The Priory of the Orange Tree

8.5 out of 10

So I’m not entirely sure how I Amazon click stumbled onto Samantha Shannon’s, The Priory of the Orange Tree, but I’m very glad that I did.

It’s a one book, self contained epic fantasy with very strong queer and feminist overtones with fully fleshed out characters, including characters of color with their very own plotlines and no sidekick tropes.

Yet the fight against the status quo for queer love is not the centerpiece for this tale. No, it is far more epic than that, and Shannon gives us not just one but two distinct groups of dragons (yes, dragons) with multiple subtypes and a menagerie of draconic creatures to inhabit this world. When the cover image scene hit on my commute home, I was glued to my seat until it finished, which happened to be ten additional minutes in my driveway with the engine off, but it was really that riveting.

The worldbuilding itself is lush in Act 1, and the individual chapters of character viewpoints are divided across the East and West continents of the world. She does a great job of making storylines and characters collide unexpectedly, and oh what characters they are. I find myself with a soft spot for grumpy gay alchemist Niclays Roos, and loved it every time his POV or character showed up in a plotline. This seemed odd, since there is one queer female canon relationship and one other that is implied, but I found myself rooting the most for Niclays out of everyone.

I listened to the Audible version and Liyah Summers does a fantastic job with the character voices and making the world of the Priory come alive off the pages. That said, a friend of mine picked up the hardcover edition and it seems large enough to use as a self defense object or a weapon to annihilate small mammals. It is, however, 26 hours on Audible and I believe one of Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive books clocks in at 55 hours on Oathbringer, so size is relative when it comes to epic fantasy.

Now for the Cons:

Act 2 was slow, gruelingly slow, with no real foreshadowing. One of the characters has depression, which makes for a more realistic character, but is exhausting to read on the page and makes for a very inactive storyline. This act was also riddled with random worldbuilding stories and anecdotes that were only relevant so that a character could make an idiom. My biggest gripe was with the introduction of the ichneumon, which is a bear sized mongoose (yes, a gigantic mongoose) which characters can ride upon. This would have been AWESOME to figure out as a reader, if the Mother that slayed the first, most evil dragon called The Nameless One that we heard so much about (and really, there were multiple versions of this tale in Act 1) had been mentioned riding a gigantic mongoose across the desert, I would have been salivating in wait to point at an upcoming part of the story and say “OMG! There’s the giant mongoose!”

I never got the chance. When the ichneumon showed up, we got a description of a bear sized mongoose and then the story of how they fit into the world, which showed up as an info dump that broke the tension of that particular plotline. The rest of Act 2 was like that, with the reader unable to figure out any puzzles because they were given none of the pieces and then just handed the whole picture. Luckily Shannon ramped it back up and the Act 1 foreshadowing and Act 2 info dumping actually made for some pretty good reveals in Act 3 that really kept me engaged. 

Overall, for how much of an epic fantasy world she crammed into this book, I’m shocked Shannon managed to pull off as much plot and character arc fulfilments as she did. It’s a fantastic read, and it has its weak points, as any work does, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, literally.

Final Score: 8.5 out of 10, I just couldn’t get over the frustration of the Act 2 foreshadowing, but the rest of the book is as good as the genre gets for all of us that cheer for queer fantasy characters.