#ocean 2.0

Character Moodboard: BENJIE || Give My Love to the Ocean

The gaunt-faced boy was little more than a ghoul, white knuckles bouncing on his bony knees, sitting diligently in front of my desk. Calling Benjie a boy was misleading--he was pushing 19, had more fake IDs than I did student loan debtors, and undoubtedly had more experience with a gun than I did despite all the hours of hoop-jumping and training my carrying permit required. 

He usually looked like this: sickly and trembling. Benjie had perfected the frightened, trembling composure of a mouse tangled in the lion's jaws. Not to say the mouse was defenseless--just that it did a good job of putting on a show, which is all you can ask of prey. In all the times I saw Benjie over the years, and there were many, I was never certain whether he was actually that pitiable, or if he was one of Hollywood's missing stars.

He mumbled something. Too quiet to make out: barely more than a rasp of breath. It sounded a bit like ‘I fucked up’. 

on one hand: I know I’m not ready to address all the structural/unmarketable flaws with Ocean. I know how I work, and if I dwell too long on the flaws and all the work that has to be done, I’ll spook myself and won’t write it (or at least I’ll drop it for a few months and come back when I’m no longer spooked). I’m just Like That. 

on the other hand: I don’t want to put all this work into a novel that isn’t marketable. I mean, seriously--queer The Godfather meets Crazy Rich Asians in the structure of Lolita is, at absolute best, a niche sort of work. At its core, what Ocean touches on is still very on-brand for me--but framing it as literary/contemporary is a bit ?? considering the rest of my projects are speculative fiction. I imagine it’d be... difficult (if not straight up impossible) to sign with an agent for only one book with no current intentions to publish anything else in the genre/contemporary sphere. All the agents/presses I pay attention to are SFF-centric (and I don’t pay attention to nearly enough asdfghjkl). Yes, I could self publish, but... I don’t really want to? I mean that with all the love in my heart for my indie-pubbed friends! I just... don’t have the resources available to afford all the services I’d need to get it where I’d want it for publishing? Editing & more editing & art & formatting, etc., costs that a press would normally cover, because I’m graduating in a little under a year and will need to start saving up for grad school. My best option would be to find a small press and I! I dunno, for some reason I don’t feel confident with that being my best route. Which leads me to the really weird thought of, do I scrap half of Ocean’s premise and make it speculative while trying to keep the core concept in half? Because then I could at least pitch it to SFF agents, and I’d be building up an author brand that I’m focused on building? Can I even keep the premise intact while throwing it in a speculative world? Do I throw it in a space opera? An apocalypse/dystopia? Those are the only two speculative worlds I’m capable of writing apparently? What do I dooooooo

-

i am so psyched to finally have a clear layout of how things culminate and build along the way to lead to the climax and ending; the biggest problem i had in the first draft is that things didn’t really... combine properly, so it felt like the ending just came out of nowhere?