D. Hart St. Martin

I make female heroes badass AND believable

writing

How Hard Could It Be? (Plenty, but Worth It)

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I finished the first draft of my eighth book this week. It begins a new series for me, and finishing it proved to be quite the accomplishment. It’s a shitty first draft, of course, but I did write the last word, the last sentence for the very first time with great satisfaction.

This book surprised me in many ways. I expected the proverbial walk in the park—me having so much experience and all—but in many ways it was the most difficult project I’ve tackled. I had to confront the reality of doing some tough, very personal writing, and I had to open the veins in my soul and bleed on the page to bring the story to the life I wanted for it. The bleeding turned out to be more profuse than I’d expected.

But rather than continue with generalities, let me get down to it.

First, Arrogance

Despite the prospect of building a world anew and creating as-yet-unknown characters, I’d thought, in my unmitigated ignorance, that after seven books (six in a series, one stand-alone), the writing itself would be easy. I truly believed I could simply put my fingers to the keyboard and pound it out. Easy. Oh, I’d have to pause now and then to elaborate back story and pull a map together. I’d have to fight my way to a story, but I could pants my way through it. How many times had I done so before? (I do do some outlining, but less and less as I progress as a writer.) Again, easy.

Wrong.

I slogged my way through, and it took me from March to December to complete a 60K manuscript. Granted, I was dealing with life-threatening surgery and a recurrent infection, and the normal crises of making it from one day to the next often intruded. But at my usual speed of 1K a day, I should have finished in a couple of months. I didn’t.

Second, a Brand-new World

Here’s a hint of what you’re in for

I’d spent 40 years in Garla, a lovely spot to abide, and I’d come to know it intimately. Lovely to look at and, with its equal treatment of women and their roles in Garlan society, a paradise for this feminist. The characters were friends I would talk to in difficult times, and a few of them were better at telling the story than I was. In short, I was spoiled.

So, when I set out to create this new space for myself and my potential readers, the pain and struggles of putting Garla together had dissolved, much as the pain of labor evaporates in a mother’s mind when the baby is put into her arms. Man, was I in for a revelation. It required far more effort than I remembered from before.

And the hardest of all? Determining how to revert back to a sexist society without making myself scream in rebellion. I did eventually determine how to get some fairness in without copying (heaven forbid) everything I’d done in Garla to, in essence, “give women the vote.”

Finally, There’s Mari and Me

Mari, this book’s protagonist, is me. I mentioned this in last week’s post, and the prospect of opening up that cesspool of flaws (or wounds, as my therapist calls them) shook me to my foundation. So I moved slowly. I made a false start that I had to pull back on at two-thirds through that first draft. Some of it was usable; some, not. But I rebooted the project and pushed myself forward—always forward—if at only 200 words a day.

And I did it!

And I survived.

I’m proud of this book, and I can’t wait to begin molding it into a readable volume and ultimately sharing it with the world.

FIRST POST TO MY NEW WEB SITE

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Like pretty much everything one creates and chooses to put out in the world, web sites require a lot of work—a lot of detail work, especially. I have been very lucky to have a great online friend, Chris Rosser, who is both a writer and a techie, to do that hard work of harnessing all my copy and images and itsty-bitsy tweaks and turning them into a web site. To be specific, the web site you’re on now. (Not to mention the cray-cray I put him through with my frustrations and impatience.)

In addition, the goddess has blessed me with an artist, Jonas Steger—a really great artist—acquired recently and turning out to be the best decision I’ve made since, oh, I don’t know, since birth maybe? Not only is his work divine (check out the map on the Lisen of Solsta series page—a hand drawn masterpiece), but he tells me when he’ll get it done and then gets it done by then.

So while I’ve been preparing all the words for the site and prepping the images I already have, Chris and Jonas have been hard at work and at my beck and call. Chris says he needs a color pallet (or as he wrote it, “colour pallett”—yes, he lives in a Commonwealth nation), and Jonas provides it within less than an hour. Some things take longer, of course, but if you’re looking for a cover artist, look no further than the gentleman who created the cover for Soul Doubt.

I have to admit, it’s been a little crazy. I haven’t been able to do much writing on Mari’s story. But Mari and I have reacquainted ourselves and have returned to the world I created for her. And when the site went live on Friday night, I breathed a sigh. Of course, now I have to return to blogging and master the management of my mailing list. It’s an ongoing process, one I will probably mention now and then here.

I’m grateful to have you along for the ride. I hope you’ll consider recommending my site and blog to your friends.

War is Coming

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I am going to war.

I have been diagnosed with a left kidney stone that will kill me. Literally. Another infection caused by this stone blocking my left ureter could be the infection that turns into sepsis and kills me. So the stone must go, and my urologist believes the only way to get rid of it is to remove the kidney. But the surgery could kill me. So I’m going to war.

I write fantasy. I read fantasy. Ah, hell, I watch Game of Thrones religiously. I view my world through a veil covered with medieval figures loving and warring, and as I contemplate what I’m facing, I realize it’s a war, and I will either fight to the death or fight to survive.

I must train for this war. Hence, I must exercise my obese body. I must eat well in preparation for this war, and so I must cut certain foods from my diet. And as I step onto the battlefield (the OR), I will gird my loins to fight the good fight.

I cannot know the outcome. Everything in life is random. I may fall. But if I prepare the best I can, the odds may turn in my favor. I will not return unscathed, and the war will continue as I struggle to regain my life.

But damn it, I’d really like to survive to April 14, 2019 (actually late May 2019 when the series ends) to see the final season of Game of Thrones. So I prepare for war.

When Cross-Dressing Didn’t Have a Name

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I would not have read Earth As It Is had I not been friends with Jan Maher since our days on an AOL message board together. I probably never would have heard of it. But I did hear of it and I did read it, and I’m here to say you should read it, too.

Earth As It Is presented me with one of the most complicated character studies I’ve ever encountered. Charlene Bader comes to Heaven, Indiana in 1945 and sets up a hair salon to which all the women in town quickly gravitate, and for many years they continue to come there—some weekly, some monthly, some only a couple of times a year. Charlene, initially an outsider in an insulated small town, becomes a part of Heaven’s tapestry. Like a mother confessor, she listens to these women’s secrets but shares them with no one, unless, of course, everyone already knows them. But Charlene herself has a secret, and we as readers learn it in the first chapter while the townspeople remain ignorant. Charlene is a man.

I won’t detail the hows and whys of Charlie Bader’s evolution into Charlene Bader. I leave it to the book to skillfully and gently take the reader there. I will say, however, that as reader who is also a writer, I found myself wanting to know how Ms. Maher had navigated her way through the dark spaces of a character who came of age in the 1920s, had married, then slowly evolved into the woman we come to know in Heaven. In those days (as if these days are all that different), one didn’t share such a horrible revelation with anyone for fear of being run out of town or worse. It was a secret tightly wound into the psyche.

This is a brilliant tale which could have easily slipped into the grotesque, but Maher handles every character, every situation, every nuanced detail with the simplicity and grace which a setting like Heaven, Indiana deserves. I came to love and admire Charlene Bader. A short way into the book, I looked to the end to see how many pages there were to read and came across the “Book Club Guide.” I read the first question. “What does the title Earth As It Is mean to you?” I pondered this question as I read, and when I finished, I realized that although my initial take on the title—that everything that happens in the story is earth as it is, life as it is—may have been in part on point, I had missed it. But never fear. Ms. Maher supplies the answer in the end.

MY TAKE ON STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

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YONDER BE SPOILERS, TRED LIGHTLY

So, here’s what I thought of The Last Jedi. I didn’t love it. I haven’t quite figured out why because I think it will end up #2 on my Star Wars favorite list, but there you have it. I started crying when Luke kissed Leia on the forehead and didn’t stop until after I got in my car. It still makes me cry because my Star Wars is over. If Carrie Fisher hadn’t died, she would have been left for episode IX, but we know they’re going to have to off General Organa somehow. Sigh.

Kudos to Rian Johnson for finally getting the whole balance-in-the-Force thing right. The prophecy of “The Chosen One” always bugged the crap out of me. “The Chosen One will destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force.” That’s like saying the Chosen One will kick the kid on the left side of the teeter-totter off and bring balance to the teeter-totter. Or let’s keep the sun shining 24 hours a day. We need the dark. We need to recognize the darkness deep within us if we are to remain whole. If the prophecy had said, “The Chosen One will destroy the Sith and save the universe,” I wouldn’t have an issue with it. But it says “balance,” and you can’t have balance on a scale when only one side carries any weight.

Adam Driver was brilliant. That first scene with Snoke (the scene without Rey) where Snoke smacks him around verbally and tells him he’s still a child and then the closeup on Driver’s face where he looks like a child with that pout—great. Daisy Ridley—doggedly carrying on the seeker’s role and doing it well. Carrie Fisher—I wish we’d had more. But Luke, beloved Luke, ripped apart and desiring nothing save dying on that island to put the Jedi to rest for good. I love the conflicted ones, and Mark Hamill played that conflict right up to its razor edge.

I want to see it again and again. There’s so much going on, I suspect it will take several viewings to catch it all.

The Bitch

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My mother was a bitch. As simple as that. She had no love in her at all. She didn’t understand the concept. It wasn’t a part of her tool kit. What she felt for my father was lust, not love. It ruined their marriage. They never divorced, but for my father it was loveless.

 I quickly learned as a child not to do anything to make her unhappy.  She downplayed my intelligence, my abilities, encouraged me not to look too far afield for satisfaction, to accept less than I wanted.  She taught me basically that I was worthless and had no business striving for anything worth anything. So I failed. I failed at life and I failed at hope. I failed at ambition and I failed at discipline. She took tasks from me that she thought were beyond my abilities to complete which left me believing I couldn’t complete anything.

I gave up somewhere in the ninth grade year of my life. I’d managed to remain hopeful until then, but at some point that year, with everything going for me, I turned away and surrendered to the meaningless, the pointless, the mundane.

Don’t tell me a certain generation of parents were like this. Don’t excuse her sad excuse for parenting as okay. It left me at 68 years old a failure at everything including the thing I would love for anything in the world to see succeed. I don’t promote the books I’ve written, the books I’ve slaved over to make shiny because telling people I’ve got something I made that they’d really want to enjoy is abhorrent to the child in me whose mother said I “just missed the boat on being a genius.” Leaving a child feeling boatless and not smart at all.

I’m glad she’s dead, and I will never apologize for that.