the percept: part one.
“We are scooping out the eyes. The Egyptians got it almost right, with their spoons and their noses, but the English got a step closer, with the eyes being the windows to the soul, and all that. After a while, we started to wonder what would happen if we just started—breaking windows.”
—From the notebooks in Amelia’s study
And - cut.
Welcome to a new series promoting the wonders of bad writing and the frustrating fabulousness of first novels.
They say that every successful novelist has about four horrible stories shoved under their bed before they write something worth publishing. I've written two such stories. This is the first - I wrote it in 2018.
The thing that fascinates me about the first story that a writer chooses to write is that it's pretty much a mirror into what they like, right? As I've started to flip back through this one, recently, I've found that what I thought was ~inspired inspiration~ was really just me regurgitating my favorite bits of Gaiman and Pinborough, mixed with some attempts at Lewis Carroll-level wonder and Doctor-Who-esque charm.
What I ended up with is a word salad that zero people found particularly interesting. I'm serious: In 2019, I sent a query letter and first page of my story to a zillion agents. Zero bites. Which - in retrospect - isn't surprising.
how to publish a book in 2021 (or any other year)
Here's the shortlist:
- Write a very, very good, extremely interesting, very timely thing.
- Know the ins and outs of the publishing industry well enough to locate the right agent, the right publisher, the right platform, and the right type of pitch (as well as the right type of project).
- Write that pitch, and write it well.
- Have incredible timing.
- Likely, have an audience or following already that you can point to. (This is not strictly necessary, but it helps, like, a lot.)
- ...And that's as far as I've gotten. There are likely other secret-sauce-steps, but it seems like that covers the basics.
I've researched the publishing industry. Timing and luck and magic and whatever are always things I'm going to be struggling with.
The factor that I can mess around with is the quality of my thing. Which brings us back to what this post is.
how to write a good book in 2021
...is the question. (How's my SEO look?)
I'll be writing more and more about this in the future, as it's a question I'm constantly trying to answer. However, there is one thing that people recommend, over and over: Rewrite your work. Rewrite it again. And, when you think it's perfect, rewrite it some more. The business of writing is largely rewriting.
This year, as a sort of remedial Andy Weir, that's what I'm about to do. (Andy Weir wrote The Martian initially as an episodic thing released in blog form. What I'm going to do is similar, but, like, trust me, I have no illusions that I'm Andy Weir.)
I LOVE LOVE LOVE reading fiction commentaries online; I love it when people snark over books and pull them to pieces in critical analyses. I also know that it'd probably be a good exercise for me to go back and rewrite my first book, to see what I'd do differently / if I've grown as a writer / etc. Hopefully I've grown as a writer; since 2018, I've gone pro...so, hopefully I've learned something.
Alternatively, this could just be a funny trainwreck, which you're invited to enjoy or ignore as you please. (From a practical standpoint, this is also helping build out my site with already-written content - yay for multitasking!)
Here's the idea:
- I haven't touched or read this manuscript since 2018. A lifetime ago, in other words.
- At that point, I innocently+hopefully thought that it was publication-ready.
- Past Ted and Past Rebecca gave it their stamp of approval.
- I'm pretty skeptical of the above two points.
- I plan on uploading, weekly, a short chunk - 1000-2000 words - of the text, poke it a bit, mix it around a little, improve it if I can and otherwise see if I can pull any useful lessons from it.
- And we'll go from there.
I am one MILLION percent sure that I'm going to shake my head at least four times in rereading this and go, 'wow, past Rebecca, did you really think that you weren't just ripping off Coraline?' But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. (The bridge isn't far off; there's 10000% a direct Hamilton ripoff in this [unedited] first part.)
So! This week, to get our collective feet wet, I'm uploading the first bit, a short vignette that I'm pretty sure my past self thought wasn't a prologue (though it definitely is). Next week, I'm going to upload a synopsis, my specific editing goals, the things I'm thinking about changing in the manuscript, and other how-to-write-good bits, probably (cough, SEO). Then, we'll dive into chapter one.
Okay! Yay! Plans are good. Now, before I yammer on for another billion words: Here we go.
the percept, part one (I think this is probably a prologue?)
Imagine a hallway. Any hall will do—but it should be a long one, one in which you stand perplexed because you cannot see either end. Something’s immediately off about the hall; things seem to grow and wobble if you stare at them too long, and if you look from side to side the ends of the hallway seem too big, as if the normal laws of perspective had decided to take a holiday.
Lining the walls are large square frames, and within them a series of portraits. They are all of the same man. Sometimes he is alone, sometimes he is with others, but the smile he habitually wears never quite reaches his eyes.
If you were to walk along the hallway to the left, you would observe the man becoming a boy — mustache disappearing, limbs shortening, grown-up clothing being replaced by trainers. His solemn look never leaves him.
We stop before a portrait in which this boy is sitting at a table with a young girl, who is speaking animatedly. A mirror hangs on the wall behind them.
“Have you ever wondered where Thin Air is,” the girl was saying to her brother. “You know—the place where grown-ups say things go to when we can’t find them anywhere else?”
“Not particularly,” said Stannon. He was working away at a particularly fiendish math problem. The furrows in his forehead were far advanced for one of his age. The math was not going well. He sighed. He was of a particular sort wherein he took and felt things more seriously than he should.
“Because I know where it is,” said Amelia; and her eyes turned dreamy. She turned to the wall behind them, and stared into the mirror to day-dream as one might out a classroom window on a sunny day. For a moment, it seemed she was merely staring into her own eyes—but then the colors shifted and the reflection of the table and the room and the two children faded away. In its place rose a purple mountain against a cerulean sky.
Stannon glanced up, briefly, and then went back to his work.
“You see, air gets thinner as you go up—so—what if there were a mountain, Stannon, a mountain with thin air all around it, and what if that mountaintop had upon it all of the people who we had ever said had just—“ she snapped her fingers—“vanished into thin air?”
Stannon continued scribbling, the lead from his pencil turning the fleshy bit of his palm silvery and sooty.
"Imagine, Stannon! Imagine if we could find the Mountain of Thin Air," she said, pronouncing the words with immense gravity and importance. "We could see - oh - Amelia Earhart, and those people from Rhode Island, and I suppose if it were a mountain big enough then perhaps we could meet some of the lost souls from Atlantis - "
On the purple mountaintop inside the mirror were now smiling people, all waving at Amelia.
Stannon sighed, laid down his pencil, and looked up. His eyes were stern. “But that would never happen, Amelia,” he said.
The light faded a bit from his sister’s eyes.
“But—“
"But, nothing. Would that help actually find any of these missing people?"
"No."
“No," said Stannon, satisfied. "It wouldn't. And, anyway; there are people out there who have legitimate problems, Amelia, and that’s just a frivolous, meaningless fantasy.”
“Fantasy isn’t meaningless,” said Amelia. “It’s beautiful.”
"It's not practical," said Stannon. "And there are better things we can do with our mirrors, anyway. Look at this, Amelia," he said, and he picked up the napkin upon which he'd been scribbling. "Look - I've been calculating, and if we could just figure out how to make food in the Percept and get it out here - "
"We can't do that, Stannon."
"But there are people starving, Amelia - "
"We can't do anything about that, Stannon!"
Stannon was quiet for a moment. He folded the napkin and put it in his pocket, and then looked at his sister. His voice became sullen. "We could try."
"You could try," his sister retorted. "You're never imagining anything but dull things -"
"And you're never thinking about anything that matters," said Stannon. He rolled his eyes and looked at Amelia's mirror with immense disdain. "Mountain-tops - and - and what was it yesterday - upside-down staircases - "
“It’s interesting, Stannon,” his sister said. “And beautiful. We need beautiful things.”
“What a horrible world that would be,” Amelia said, her voice cold. “A practical world,” said Stannon, softly. “A world that worked.” “No-one would be happy but you,” said Amelia.
“We need edible things,” Stannon said. “And we could get so much done if you just thought the way I did. I wish everyone thought just the way I did. My thoughts, and no others."
“But if I were thinking for everyone, and I were happy, then they would be, too,” said Stannon.
Amelia was quiet for a moment. "But - if you took away their thoughts - then they wouldn't really be people anymore, would they?"
Stannon smiled. "But they'd be happy. And they wouldn't fight anymore. And we would solve the food problem, and no-one would be hungry, ever again - "
“But they wouldn’t be people.”
Stannon gave his sister an odd look. “And? The world would probably be better for it.”
The two children gave each other a long, measured look. Amelia’s pretty mountaintop reverie had vanished—the mirror reflecting instead the two small people in the portrait, seething, glaring at each other while never quite seeing eye-to-eye.
The tableaux which followed down the hall were of that same boy and that same girl, growing taller and thinner and wrinkled and grey as time took hold of them and squeezed them dry. It was a series of portraits showing two siblings growing further apart, cordial and cold, their aims diametrically opposed.
Years later, when Stannon wore pinstripes and Amelia was dead, strange things began to happen in their small town.
This is not their story.
(RR initial thoughts: Wow, I did not expect that to be such an obvious moral mirror of my 2018 values. Funny, how you think you're being subtle when you're screaming, eh? Also, welcome to Intro to Villainous Backstories 101, haha. I'm sure it only goes downhill from here!)