Writing Junk Drawer

not writing

writing

people reading their stories

rainbow mountains (peru)

red soil (canada/PEI)

rings (saturn’s if they were on earth) 

bioluminescent waves

northern lights (canada)

salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)

and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens

Tsingy di Bemaraha, Madagascar

Zhangye Danxia, China (similar to the Rainbow Mountains in terms of appearance)

Chocolate Hills, Philippines

Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland

Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina

Lake Retba, Senegal

Tepui, Venezuela

Tsingy du Bemaraha, Madagascar again (but a different part)

(those are razor-sharp, if you were wondering. very little of this area has been explored because YIKES)

Lake Natron, Tanzania

(looks cool, but is alkaline enough to Kill Your Shit)

Lake Baikal, Russia

(the deepest lake in the world, seriously)

and I’ll wrap it up with Son Doong Cave, Vietnam, the largest cave in the entire world.

it puts anything Dagobah has to offer to absolute shame:

(seriously, the largest chamber is 660 feet high. you could jam a fucking skyscraper in there and still lose it) 

(If anyone wants info on how/why these landscapes and formations occur, just ask! If there’s somewhere I don’t know about, I’d be excited to research it.)

Me:

I think I’ve said this before, but to me it seems a bit backwards to be worrying about what to call your genre before you’ve got your book written. Genre, in general, is used to figure out what to do with your book once it’s complete and polished – to find the right agent or to figure out how to market your story.

It can be helpful to have an idea of the genre that you’re working in so that you can read stories that occupy that same genre and get a good solid foundational knowledge of the common tropes and themes that show up in that genre. I do want to stress that the point of being familiar with texts in your genre is so that you can write with nuance and awareness of what/ how things have already been done, not because you should feel the need to shoehorn elements into your story to ‘make it fit’.

Now, as to what genre you’re possibly working in, it’s going to depend on the way you use your science fiction and fantasy elements, and the way they are presented within the narrative, as well as on the overall shape of your story. It’s a little difficult to parse out exact guidelines (because tbh there aren’t many exact guidelines, that’s why they’re guidelines), so I will give examples for the sub-genres.

The super-genre, Speculative Fiction: This is the big one, the big ole umbrella that covers just about everything that isn’t that most fickle of oh-I’m-not-a-genre-genres ‘literary fiction’. The meaning is right there on the tin, these are stories that contain elements of speculation, they hinge on a ‘what if’: what if there really is a monster eating kids in the sewer? What if the prince falls in love with his valet? What if aliens have been here all along? What if the government accidentally gives us all superpowers?

Horror, fantasy, SciFi, Romance, etc, they all fit under the larger umbrella of speculative fiction.

Genre: Science Fiction: This generally presents itself as a genre which is concerned with The Future, there will probably be a focus on future societies and idealism, technology, and how we might overcome issues that seem insurmountable in our current culture. Star Trek is a classic scifi series. While it has it’s specifics, Science Fiction can also act as an umbrella for many related subgenres.

Genre: Fantasy: Much like Science Fiction, Fantasy often deals with tough concepts to do with society and culture, but more often with a focus on the past, reimagining history and incorporating ‘fantastical’ elements such as magic, strange creatures, and so on. It does not have to be set in the ‘real world’ as fantasy stories can inhabit ‘secondary’ worlds (worlds created for the story). The BBC series Merlin uses a historical setting, while any of Tamora Pierce’s series are a good example of secondary world fantasy.

Sub-genre: Space Opera: Could also be called Space Fantasy, there’s science and spaceships, but it’s all kind of thrown together in a way that seems more like magic, the narrative focus is on a large scale conflict, often with a large cast of characters. Star Wars is your classic example.

Sub-genre: Epic Fantasy: Also called High Fantasy, there are probably wizards and dragons, great big quests, clashes of mighty kingdoms, possibly a few created languages and multiple races (your classic men/ elves/ dwarves setup). The Lord of the Rings is probably the codifier of this sub-genre.

Sub-genre: 20 minutes into the future: Remember all those 80s films about how grotesque society in the year 2000 would be? That’s this, all of societies current ills are cranked up to eleven, and some dubious technological stuff is thrown into the grinder. Stephen King’s The Running Man is a good example here (the book, definitely not the movie, which is just an action film tbh).

Sub-genre: Urban Fantasy: Also sometimes referred to as Low Fantasy (in contrast with high fantasy). Rather than a big magical setting, in urban or low fantasy, magic intrudes into normality, taking your average person next door and pitting them against an evil fairy in the 7/11 parking lot. Holly Black’s Tithe is a great example.

Sub-genre: Superheroes: In an ordinary world there are people with metahuman abilities, which allow them to perform heroic feats. Many many comics, or George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards anthologies.

Sub-genre: Magical Realism: The strange offspring of Fantasy and Literary fiction, features magical elements incorporated into a realist setting, often the magic serves as a metaphor for a social or cultural focus. Often postcolonial stories. Example: Fish Hair Woman by Merlinda Bobis, or Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.

Sub-genre: Steampunk: Usually set in the Victorian era, featuring unlikely technological advance from the mindset of the industrial revolution, steam powered everything, cogs in strange places. Leviathan by Scott Westerfield is a good example.

Sub-genre: Cyberpunk: Similar to 20 minutes into the future, with an emphasis on digital technology and counterculture. Neuromancer by William Gibson.

And there are probably dozens more that I could list if I had the time.

But you see what I mean? There are so many genres, and there’s always the option of genre-mash, that is saying ‘well my book has elements of genre x and genre y’, or, you could simply say it is ‘scifi/ fantasy’ or ‘fantasy with scifi elements’ or however you think it works best.

‘Literary’ fiction is a genre which focuses on stylistic elements over content elements. It is usually seen as more ‘restrained’ than ‘genre’ fiction, in that it focuses labouriously on ‘realism’ (ie. not speculative fiction!!) and is generally more ‘serious’. While literary fiction can be a great vehicle for social commentary or depictions of someone’s lived experiences, bad literary fiction can really give the impression that it is an out of touch ‘ivory tower’ kind of writing, which is unfortunate.

Magical Realism’s literary elements are often stylistic: Magical realism will incorporate a naturalistic, realist setting, and a ‘literary’ style (focusing on language and word use and structure over action etc), and the ‘magic’ element is often highly restricted. This is not a world where magic abounds: magic is extremely narrowly focussed and related to a specific metaphor or thematic element. It is often not even remarked on as magic, but as an unexplained thing that happens in response to something in the story.

Using an example from one of the stories I mentioned above: in Fish Hair Woman the titular woman’s power comes from never having cut her long hair. When her countrymen are murdered and thrown in the river by a military coup, she is able to use her hair to pull their bodies from the water and give them some measure of peace.

Urban fantasy/ low fantasy, however, is speculative fiction, magic functions in a way resembling that of epic fantasy, but in a modern setting. You might have a witch selling potions at the weekend street markets, or the protagonist getting cursed and having to spend a lot of uncomfortable time waiting for an appointment with a wizard to get the curse broken.

The example above Tithe features a protagonist who is a fairy who has been raised by a human mother in the human world. She can shape-shift and travel between dimensions, but she’d rather hang out at an abandoned amusement park and smoke while her best friend reads gay manga.

It might help to think of it this way: 

In Urban fantasy, magic is intrinsic, it is usually incorporated into the setting as some kind of established and understandable force, myths are mundane, they walk among us. “Wizards are real and one beat me up and took my lunch money and I’m going to learn hexes just to get back at him and oops now I’m in a rivalry with a fairy.”

In Magical realism, magic is extrinsic, it is something strange that occurs because events in the story reach the emotional height where the rules of reality as laid out by the conventions of literary fiction must buckle, magic in magical realism, emphasises extremes of experience, the mundane becomes mythology. “The military junta has murdered so many innocents and thrown them in the river that the river itself is ill, and will rebel in defence of the people who live along its banks.”

Eulagisca gigantea, the giant polynoid worm, is a species of marine Polychaete worm belonging to the family Polynoidae, the scale worms. This species is found on the seabed in the Antarctic Ocean. It grows to around eight inches long, and judging by the jaws, it is a predator, but little is known about its diet or behavior.

well i have exciting news: World Anvil. 

here’s what you get for free: 

yeah. all of them. double what notebook.ai offers for pay. yeah baby.

It’s got an almost endless range of furniture, doors, windows, stairs etc and is easy to use. In addition to that, you don’t have to install anything and if you create an account (which is free) you can save and return to your houses.

Examples (all done by me):

Here’s an example for how you can use it

I’m writing a series. This is no secret. Recently, I read a great post about organizing a large series and it got me thinking that some visual aids might be helpful. This is how I personally organize my 10 book series. (What on Earth have I gotten myself into?)

So, when I began the process of getting all my thoughts down for the Newborn City Series I didn’t know about Evernote, or any other program like it. I was writing everything down in notebooks and on tiny scraps of paper while at work and my stuff was a mess. A mess I tell you! Thankfully I did find Evernote, thanks to it already being on my phone, and it has helped immensely. This is how I keep track of everything that needs to happen in each book, for each character, and in the series as a whole.

Step One: I created a “notebook” for the series.

You can see here that I called it Newborn City Novels and that each book has its own set of notes. There’s also notes for the villain Roger and plot drivers for each book in a separate section. Because I like working in order, I numbered the notes for the books. However, numbering something 10 put it as the top, so Rise from the Wraith is after plot drivers.

P.S. You can now see all the titles for the future books! Oh my!

Each books set of notes opens up to this, with a few differences once I’ve started working on something. For example, Burn the Bone has a section called Appearance change scene and forward. This is when inspiration grabbed me and I have to write the scene down before I forgot it. Each book has it’s own outline, which you can see above except for what I had to erase because spoilers. There are also rough synopses and detailed character studies in each chapter. Those are talked about in this post. I also create text for the back of the book, or a “blurb,” which can be adjusted later.

This is what each of the notes look like in order.

I also have a sort of miscellaneous section which includes “helpful notes” and well as creatures I want to incorporate into the world. 

When you look at the rough ploy synopses they are mostly focused on the characters arc and who they are in the story.

I also made sure I had a basic plot driver, McGuffin, which gets the story going for each novel.

And of course there is a section just for my bad guy! I needed to understand him too and I needed to keep track of what I was going to reveal about him in each book.