Few Thoughts on Writing

One of the reasons I started writing was as a way to relax, I create art for a living so as satisfying as that is it's still work. Writing is solely for fun, any sales on ebooks or anything is just a nice bonus. I have other creative pursuits that pay the bills.

I've always been a bit disappointed with certain types of books and TV shows. Too often the "strong" female characters really aren't that strong or if they are that all goes to hell once they fall in love. This even happens in Buffy the Vampire Slayer at times as much as I love that show, Angel and then later Riley and even Spike made her weaker not stronger. So if I'm writing a female lead character I don't want her to need rescuing all the time, not that she never needs help (because that would be boring and unrealistic even in a universe where magic and vampires exist), but she is quite competent and formidable all on her own and it is not the job of her love interest to save her. In my mind Cal's a bit like a female Harry Dresden.

Yeah, this doesn't happen in my writing. Period. Not even with a freaky chaos inducing spell on Halloween.

 This isn't a happy nice world, again magic and creatures that eat people exist in it and that doesn't lend itself to sunshine and puppies. Even if it did, that would be boring. It seems like the more I write using these characters the darker it gets, the Blue Lady has a pretty tidy happy ending but the novella I'm working on right now probably won't (I'm still fuzzy on how I'll end it, but I'm far from that point in the writing) and I'm torturing my characters in the process.

You could could make a pretty good drinking game out of spotting my kinks in my writing and they aren't light and fluffy ones. I'll admit now that there's a certain amount of what I write that is blatantly pulled from my own fantasies (ahem, Lucas's accent). In a lot of vampire stories it's implied that blood drinking is a metaphor or substitute for penetrative sex, I'm going to say right now that in my stories it's not. Doesn't mean the blood drinking isn't sexual, because it certainly is, but it's more of a masochistic blood fetish because that's a lot more fun to explore.

This is how I like to approach my writing. I ask myself what sort of scenarios would be fun to explore and go from there. This is why I've chosen to have Cal and Lucas already in a relationship that has existed long enough for them to be living together because figuring out how you actually make a long term relationship with a vampire work is more interesting to me than how they fell in love (I am writing a short story about how they met, because the idea I came up with was kind of fun and I couldn't leave it just as something in my notes). I hope people enjoy it but I write to please myself first and my audience second. 

Update on Writing Progress

So what I had planned to be a novella in the 20K word range is taking on a life of it's own. My rough draft is already a few pages longer than the Blue Lady and I'm still firmly in the beginning of the story. I would be unsurprised if the final word count for the rough draft is closer to 50K and my rough drafts are always shorter than my later drafts (because I work out plot and characters first then flesh out the rest). What this means is that for the foreseeable future posts with new fiction will be few and far between unless I get an idea stuck in my head.