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My WIP is in trouble, and it’s all because of my protagonist.

The story, as originally conceived, alternates POV between the two main characters. I’ve written about 20K words with those two characters, and while it was going pretty well, I was having some trouble with one of my protags. He seemed to be kind of a non-entity. I had no clear idea of his personality, and my attempts to give him some character were awkward and forced. (This is the same problem that I had with the beginning of my finished novel, but fortunately I got to kill that character off and find a new one about 1/3 of the way through the book.) This was making it hard to write, particularly the chapters where he was the only one onscreen.

Then a thirteen-year-old girl dropped out of the rafters and tried to kill my other, non-problematic protag. This was completely unexpected. It was also much more interesting. A young girl who takes on full-grown men that are trying to massacre her family? Now that is a character I could write. After a bit of hesitation, I began plotting out how I would weave the story around her, and leave my original protag mostly out of it.

I’ve decided that’s what I’m going to do, but I am still flummoxed by what to do with the 20K words that already exist. My rule when writing a novel is “no rewriting until the first draft is done”–otherwise the first draft will never get done, as I’ll be constantly tinkering with the first ten chapters or so. But I think I may have to tinker with the draft anyway, since I don’t think I can write any further without knowing what happened to my new protag so far.

I’ve never been a 13-year-old girl, so it might be hard to write her. And if my protag is a teenager, does that mean my work is YA?

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So The Confession of Adrianna Belle, Princess and The Other City were both submitted today. That makes four things that I have out at the same time, which is… not that many, but it’s more than I’ve had out for a long time.

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Strange Horizons doesn’t want Lights on the Horizon, and Matt Bialer doesn’t want An Inheritance of Stars. Tough to get two of those in the same day.

The book goes to Colleen Lindsay next, I think. I haven’t decided the next place for Lights, since at 650 words it’s too long for Ideomancer and too short for Clarkesworld. Apex and Abyss, maybe, or one of the smaller flash mags.

UPDATE: Sent Lights to Flash Fiction Online, and Inheritance to La Gringa. Is it a bad idea to publicize your submissions this way? Hmmm…

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Sän has an interesting post about horror up at his blog. I would have commented on it earlier except, you know, I only meet Sän a few days ago.

His distinction between smart horror and dumb horror reminds me of something I got from Orson Scott Card a long time ago. This was from one of his writing books (I forget which one), and he suggested that there are three kinds of fear:

  1. Dread, which is the feeling when you know something is wrong but you don’t yet know what. Dread is the anticipation of Terror to come.
  2. Terror, which is the heart-pounding, adrenaline-fueled rush when you see the monster and (vicariously) experience immediate danger
  3. Horror, which is the revulsion and discomfort we experience in the aftermath of seeing something, er, horrible.

The strongest of these, he says, is Dread, but it’s also the hardest to sustain. Slasher films tend to deal almost entirely in Horror with snippets of Terror. OTOH, a really excellent thriller like Alien or The Ring manages to keep you in Dread for most of the movie. (In Alien, consider how rarely the monster is actually on screen, and how much time is instead spent creeping around in the shadows wondering where the monster is.)

Interestingly, Sän’s categories are almost entirely orthogonal to Card’s. You can do dumb Dread and smart Horror–in fact, some of the best stories I’ve read are best classified as smart Horror.

The last commenter mentions the Silent Hill games. Silent Hill 2 is the only game I’ve stopped playing because it was too frightening–and in gets this power almost entirely from Dread. The monsters in Silent Hill are not very frightening and you’re never in very much danger, so the Terror is pretty mild. There’s plenty of gore in some areas to provoke Horror, but they’re fairly rare. Rather, through a brilliant use of music, pacing, and lighting, the game creates a powerful atmosphere of Dread. So powerful that the game became no fun, because I dreaded putting the disk in.

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I just got back from Potlatch 17. This was my first con. Conveniently, it was held right here in Seattle. It was also conveniently awesome.

I don’t think that I could do justice to it in prose, actually. Until this weekend I had never met a single SFF writer in person, except for once seeing Ursula K. LeGuin at a reading. This weekend I was plunged into a sea of seasoned pros, newly-published young writers, and hopeless wannabes like me. I was suddenly and unexpectedly surrounded by people with the same interests, the same experiences, and the same aspirations as me. It was literally a revelation. On Friday night, I was literally shaking when I went to bed; Saturday morning I woke up dreaming about the evening before.

I’m still very much on a high. Enough of a high that I spontaneously started a blog :).

I’m not going to try to recap the actual content of the weekend. But these were the Hopeless Wannabes, the people that I actually hung out with most of the weekend (all unpublished writers, for the most part):

  • Jessie Kwak, making us “Jessie and Jesse” for the whole conference
  • C.S. Inman aka Sän, who said nice but completely untrue things about me on his blog
  • Elizabeth Coleman
  • Eva Folsom (no site?)
  • Natasha Oliver (also no site)
  • Jennifer Hopkins (no site–seriously people, get with the times. If Google doesn’t know about you, then you don’t exist.)
  • Brian LeBlanc

And here were the Big Important Authors that I spoke to. There were many more authors than this at the con, of course, but these were the ones that I actually talked to and who might actually remember me.

I’m going to be building a blogroll with these people and others soon.

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So this is my new blog. The question that you’re asking yourself, naturally, is why are making a new blog? After all, I already have a blog, and my own domain, even. Why do I need to go out and get a new blog hosted by WordPress, especially since my existing blog is also running wordpress.

There are two answers to this question:

  • Soon (this year, deo volenti), I’m going to publish my first short stories. By that time, I’d like to have at the very least a blog with the name that I’m going to publish under.
  • I kind of want to separate my “jaspax” persona from my “J.S. Bangs” persona.

That last point deserves some explanation. The moniker “jaspax” has served me well for 13 years now. It was the screenname I chose for my very first e-mail account, at AOL, for heaven’s sake, in 1995. Since then I’ve carried that name to almost every major e-mail provider on the net, and even registered the domain as the home of my permanent blog. I’m going to continue using jaspax for the forseeable future.

However, the site at jaspax.com is very personal. It’s also the site of my wife’s blog, and it’s the place where I (theoretically) go to rant about politics, religion, the day job, etc. (I say “theoretically” because I haven’t actually posted there in a long time. I haven’t been in a ranty mood lately.) I don’t want those to be the first things that a potential reader, agent, or editor sees when they look for me. Rather, I’d like to have a site with my regular name that focuses on writerly things and sciency things.

Dude, then why are you publicizing the link to your other blog right here?

As if I could hide it from the All Seeing Eye of Google anyway. Anyone who wants to know if jaspax and J.S. Bangs are the same person can find out here, no trouble at all. I’m not putting up a wall between the two purposes, just a lovely little hedge with a garden gate and maybe some little gnomes.

The gist of this is, here you can find me talking about writing, linguistics, geeky stuff, etc. For the time being, at least, this will be the place where I post most of my stuff, since these are the things that I find I want to write about.