Tag Archives: writing

The Famulus

Deleted Scene

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Season of Frights, Volume 2 of The Famulus series, is now available. This book went through many changes, including a title change. The original title was A Study in Emerald, which was a nod to the Sherlock Holmes book title A Study in Scarlet. Aside from a superficial reference to Sherlock Holmes, the connection wasn’t strong enough to use that title. The other issue was that there’s a Neil Gaiman story by that title, and I didn’t want to confuse people or look like I was trying to use his popularity to draw attention to my book.

In my story, “Season of Frights” is the name of Brett’s podcast, and one of the characters uses this phrase in the story. I also wrote an epigraph using this phrase and attributed it to the fictional author mentioned in the first book, Miles Denham. This quote is where Brett got the title for his podcast.

Besides changing the title I’ve been calling this book for years, I also deleted a scene that came from a project I was working on even before I started the Famulus series. I like this scene, especially the end, but I cut it for a few reasons. The chapter slowed the pace of the story, as the whole chapter was a flashback. It didn’t affect the plot at all. And I wasn’t sure if the conversation made sense. Paul Madley, the professor with whom Emerald is working on a book about the history of their town, is supposed to sound philosophical here, but I worried the scene came off as just me as the author trying to sound smart.

Here’s a sample:

“The truth is,” Paul said, “we all secretly believe we’re the exception, and this isn’t real life, not really. It’s just the slow waste of time that’s supposed to be preparing us for the real Show-with-a-capital-S, but like many forms of authority, it’s ineffective and constrained by things it should be able to ignore with a flip of the good old middle finger. So, it’s not really our fault that we’re underpaid and not as attractive as we wish we were and stuck in the crappiest dying towns of middle America when we should be off on some tropical island like you see only in commercials for resorts. Do you follow?”

Emerald wasn’t as impressed as she’d hoped to be, but she tightened the corners of her mouth in a small smile and nodded.

Paul uncrossed his legs and leaned forward over the table, conspiratorially. “The real truth of the matter isn’t this entitlement we claim to have and the belief in which we keep to ourselves in varying degrees of tact, but rather the fact that we all believe we are the only one in the entire world actually entitled to it, even if we realize that everyone else believes the same thing. As in, ‘Sure, we all believe we’re the exception, but I alone am the actual only exception.’ What I’m trying to say is that it’s our nature to think we’re special, no matter what anyone tells us.”

“But are we or not? Special, I mean.”

Paul finished off the last drops of his drink. “It goes both ways.”

The more Emerald thought about it later that night, she realized the reason she hadn’t been so impressed in the first place was because she felt as though she’d heard all those things before. But Paul was one of those prophet-like people who could pluck something out of the air as if it’d been hanging over her head in a giant thought-balloon she hadn’t known was there.

I really like the last line, but I felt like I was trying too hard with the conversation. As a rule, any time I feel like I’m purposely inserting philosophical conversation into a story, I should just cut it out immediately. It’s self-indulgent and often embarrassing.

The Famulus

Writing For One Person

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A standard piece of writing advice that gets tossed around is that you should write with only one person in mind as your audience. Write for that one person to enjoy your book and forget about everyone else. If you try to write a story that will make everyone happy, the story will fall flat. It will have no real direction or won’t risk enough.

The one person I wrote The Famulus (and the sequels) for was myself. My twenty-five-year-old self, to be specific, which was the age I was when I began this story in the fall of 2014. I felt like I wasn’t living up to my potential. I wanted so much more out of life but felt as though the world wasn’t giving me a chance to prove myself. At the same time, I was worried I would fail any challenge thrown at me.

Aberdeen, the main character, embodies my fears and insecurities. She’s generally lonely, but she worries she can’t maintain any form of relationship due to a personality flaw on her part. It’s so easy for her to spend every evening at home with her books, but she knows she can’t do that forever without her whole life passing her by. She just has no idea where to start.

Half the first book is told from John’s perspective, so it’s no secret that he plans to use her. He wants to pass his immortality curse onto her, but he can only do that if she agrees. Convincing her to accept is his challenge throughout the series, as he doesn’t want to move too quickly and scare her off. He’s an impatient person, so this is a struggle. As suspicious as Aberdeen is of other people, she shouldn’t trust him easily, but she’s so desperate for anyone to show appreciation for her and what she can do that she’s willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Throughout the series, she grows in confidence. I have all the big events plotted out through the end of the sixth and final book. There are two ways the story could end. One way might not be true to Aberdeen’s character, but the other way might bend too many rules of the magic system, unless I leave careful hints along the way. Although John is the more dynamic and interesting of the two of them, my priority in the series is Aberdeen’s personal growth, and I need to keep that in mind as I consider how the series will end.

I plan to finish the edits (finally!) on books 2, 3, and 4 this year, as well as an unrelated novel you can read about on this page linked here, all of which I hope to publish before the end of the year. Aside from those novels, I’m trying not to write any new novel drafts this year, focusing instead on short fiction and doing some total rewrites on books 5 and 6. The Famulus is available as a free e-book across platforms. Links are on this page. If you read slowly, maybe I’ll have the second book available by the time you’re done with it!

Short Stories

Grimoire

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The following is a story written in response to a Twitter prompt for #GrimList2019. Today’s prompt was Grimoire. I had a lot of fun writing this and may use it as a jumping off point for this year’s NaNoWriMo, since I’m still not sure what I want to do. I could take this in a few different directions. Enjoy!

 

The day after I was let go from my job, my best friend took the day off to indulge in some shopping therapy with me. She had a talent for finding unique local shops, and after I’d helped her pick out two pairs of shoes, a scarf, and a set of Halloween mixing bowls, she drove us out to a family-owned winery with a gift shop.

“We went shopping to cheer you up,” Charlotte said, “but I’m the only who’s bought anything.”

“It’s cheering me up to keep my money.”

“I know your weakness. Look at this.” Hands full with a bottle of wine in each, she nodded toward the table of leather-bound books.

I picked one up. Each was about five by eight inches and less than an inch thick. The pages had deckled edges and were sewn to leather covers.

“Those are made entirely by hand.”

I turned in the direction of the voice. The shop owner, a woman with long silver hair and an apron, smiled at me.

“They’re beautiful,” I said.

“My husband tanned the leather for the covers, and I made the paper using pulp from one of our trees that had been struck down by lightning.”

A bell above the door chimed, and she turned away to greet the new customers.

I turned the book over to look at the price. “Forty dollars,” I whispered to Charlotte.

“You pay for the craftsmanship.”

“What would I even draw in this?” I asked, laughing at the absurdity of spending so much on a book when I had so many unused or half-finished sketchbooks at home. “It’s too beautiful for any of my scribbles.”

“Think of it this way,” Charlotte said. “You’re not throwing money away on another sketchbook you don’t need, but investing in a local business.”

“I’m not in a position to be splurging.”

“Take it out of your severance pay and pretend your check is just that much less. Come on. You can’t go home empty handed.”

“Oh, all right. Maybe it’ll serve as inspiration. I’ll flip through these beautiful pages while I’m waiting for hiring managers to call me and dreaming about how I should have followed my heart and majored in something useful like art rather than something unpredictable like business.”

“That’s the attitude.” Before I could change my mind, she led the way to the register.

At my house that night, we made dinner and drank both bottles of wine while watching favorite movies. Rather than drive home, Charlotte spent the night. In the morning, she left me a partial pot of coffee and a note signed with a smiley face.

It was Friday. I decided to start my job hunt bright and early on Monday and allow myself a long weekend to decompress with some art. After breakfast, I took my second cup of coffee to the spare bedroom I’d turned into a studio.

The notebook sat on my drawing table. The handmade paper was thicker than most. Maybe I could fill the book with a decent collection of drawings. The book could have a theme, rather than the mess my sketchbooks usually became, filled with marginalia like song titles and grocery lists.

I opened the cover to count the pages. The first one had writing on it.

It looked like a recipe, written in ornate handwriting by what I guessed to be a fountain pen. The strokes of the letters were uneven, indicating changes in pressure. I recognized few of the ingredients, presuming the rest to be alternate names for herbs. More confusing were the lines of verse written on the bottom of the page. My limited foreign language skills were no help.

As I turned the pages, each had writing in a similar style, unintelligible to me. I could invest in a local business in exchange for a fancy sketchbook, but no way would I spend $40 on something that was useless to me. I got dressed and drove out to the winery either to return the book or exchange it for a clean one.

Although it was the first time I’d ever been to the winery, I drove past it a few times a month whenever I went out of town. While I’d never had the best sense of direction, I wasn’t likely to get lost on such a familiar road.

When I’d driven up and down the stretch of highway for two hours with no sign of it, I knew something was wrong. Turning into the nearest gas station, I tried to use GPS to find directions. No winery showed up on the map and I couldn’t remember the name. Charlotte would probably be going on her lunch break soon, so I texted her to call me.

“What’s the name of that winery we went to yesterday?” I asked when she called. “That notebook I bought has writing in it. I was trying to return it, but I can’t find the place.”

“Uh… what are you talking about? We didn’t go to a winery.”

“What are you talking about? Of course we did. That’s where you bought the wine.”

“No, we bought that at the grocery store. You’re not driving around, are you? You drank more than I did last night. I think you should take it easy today.”

I eyed the book laying in the passenger seat with my purse. “Yeah, okay,” I said absently and hung up after I promised to call her late that night.

Unsure of my own memory or senses, I picked up the book. The leather felt warm in my hands. I wondered what kind of creature it had come from.

A soft breathy sound came from the book. “Open me. Read me. Use me.”

 

The Famulus

Setting a Project Aside

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The Famulus is a six-book series that has consumed the last five years of my life. It stands at around 327,000 words now, not counting how many words of older drafts I’ve tossed out over the years. Some books have had more than ten drafts completed, while I’ve jumped from one scene to another in others and never finished their first draft. I worked on all six books at once, with the first one self-published until I pulled it this month.

This series is my heart and soul.

I came to an important realization that probably anyone reading this will think was incredibly obvious. Just because I want to be a published author doesn’t mean I have to publish everything I write. Some books can be written only for myself. Although I’m going to continue to revise and add to this series, I have no plans to send it out into the world.

I’d always thought the overwhelming fear I felt about anyone reading my work was natural and it was just something I would have to get over. Promotion of my work frightened me. I didn’t want anyone to read it, which led me to ask myself why I had published it in the first place.

What I settled on was that I published it because I wanted to be a published author and reach people with my work, and the way to do that was to put it out into the world so people could read it. Like any creative work, it has its flaws. (The largest flaw in the first book is probably that the stakes aren’t high enough.) It’s not that I’m not proud of it that I’m keeping it to myself. I’ve learned so much from writing this series, and now it’s time to take what I’ve learned and apply it to new projects, building them from the ground up with a good foundation instead of throwing all these characters, emotions, and plot points in at once and hoping they sort themselves out.

I started writing The Famulus when I was 25. The main character, Aberdeen, is so similar in spirit to me (although hopefully not a self-insert Mary Sue, since I try to play on her flaws). Loneliness is an important theme in the series, because I was incredibly lonely when I started writing it. Those books might be fantasy, with magic and immortal characters and supernatural abilities, but the loneliness is real. The story said what I needed a story to say to me at that time in my life, but I realized I couldn’t release it and let other people’s reactions affect the way I thought about it.

Yes, of course, I know not to let other people’s opinions affect my own. But when an author publishes a book or any type of artist releases their work into the world, they lose control over it, and it belongs to other people at that point. I’m selfish about this story, and I don’t want to share it with anyone else.

The only reason I might eventually republish this, years down the road, is that I know the power stories have—how books can save lives, show us we’re not alone, and prove that someone else out there thinks the same weird things we do. I would gladly share it if it would do that for someone else, but I just don’t have enough confidence that I can find those people—my people—right now.

This series helped me discover what I think about some things. It’s my credo. Just because I won’t be sharing this series with anyone doesn’t mean I can’t present those ideas in other stories I’ll write. If those ideas and beliefs don’t show up in anything else I write, they must not have the weight and importance I think they do. Besides, if I thought this was the only good thing I would ever write, why bother with anything else?

The narcissistic side of me wants to share parts of these stories here to give an example of my writing style and voice so you can decide if you’d be interested in reading anything I might publish in the future, like the project I’m currently working on. I haven’t yet decided if I’ll post excerpts (with some context given) or if I’ll reframe them as independent short stories, but I’ll put a few up in the next couple of weeks.