Lacey Louwagie's Blog, page 24

Rumplestiltskin ebook, beta

I’ve brought Rumpled, my Rumplestiltskin retelling, through what is close to its final revision … for now. That is, I’ve implemented everything I intended to implement based on feedback from my writer’s group, and am ready to send it to someone who has never seen it for a proofread (my eyes might fall out of my head if I read it one more time at this point.) I still need to format it for Kindle and do a little more work on the cover, but in the meantime, I’ve uploaded the “beta” version to Wattpad. It’s free there, so I’d be delighted if you checked it out!

Knowing When to Turn it Upside Down

Although I hate to do it, I find my writerly energies pulled in too many different directions right now, so I’m taking a break from Rapunzel. Ironically, this is the story I most want to be working on, and I think that’s ultimately why I have to do this — so I can free myself up for it properly by wrapping up a few loose ends — the completion of my Rumpled ebook and a new piece for a contest I’m entering. I’m hoping Rapunzel will feel like my “reward” after all of this, that the time away will only increase my enthusiasm, and that we won’t come together feeling like strangers when everything settles.

And as of last Saturday night, I’m also wrestling with a somewhat offhand comment my husband made as we drove home from an out-of-town wedding, a comment that made me re-envision the entire Rapunzel story. Different setting, different time. I began to wonder if I was doing this all wrong. It fed into a bit of insecurity I’ve had about the story for a couple months now, as I think about retellings in which Cinderella is a Cyborg, Sleeping Beauty is traveling through space, and Red Riding Hood hunts werewolves. Against stories like this, my own retelling seems quaintly traditional, staying close to the time, place, and structure of the original Grimm’s tale. I found myself often asking, Is it different enough to hold any interest, to bring anything new to the table?

Recasting it in light of Ivan’s comments would take care of that issue, but I’m still don’t feel ready to go in that direction. I’ve made so many changes already between drafts 1 and draft 1.5-ish that I kind of want to see how my new vision pans out before I do a complete overhaul of it. As I talked to Ivan about this on our drive, he said, “Why don’t you write both? Finish the one you’re working on now, and then write the other one, and see which one you like better.”

I thought, But do you know how much work it is just to write one novel, let alone two, just for the basis of comparison?

And yet, it wasn’t long before I felt like that was the course I wanted to take. There’s a reason this story won’t let me go, in its current form … and I’m going to stick with it long enough to see what that is.

In the meantime, that car conversation gave me ample fodder for many Novembers to come.

A Year in the Life, Week Eleven: Prescience

This week’s exercise in A Year in the Life was to write about a word we’d learned from someone else, and the context in which we’d learned it. I wrote about the word prescient, which I learned from my best friend, Katrina.

I was sitting at my kitchen table in my studio apartment in Duluth, a full year after Katrina had moved out. She was in Vermont studying Environmental Law, and she’d sent me the denim fairy bag I still take with me almost everywhere, along with a several-page handwritten letter. The letter commented on the “European Adventure” concept album I had sent her, saying that she could feel the yearning and wanderlust of the story when she listened to it. She also was writing a response to something I had written to her, when we were still navigating the aftermath of the temporary fissure her relationship with Chris introduced to our friendship.

I remember cathartic tears running down my face as I wrote her emails trying to work out and articulate what had happened, and at one point, I told her that the hardest part was knowing that I would no longer be her primary relationship.

Katrina and me, modeling our “wedding quilts” at my wedding shower.

For years, Katrina was the one to pick me up from the airport, to hear my frustrations at the end of a difficult day at work, my emergency contact number, my first resort when I wanted a companion for watching movies or going to art exhibits and used bookstores. I was the same to her. But when Chris entered the picture, all that changed. Chris became Katrina’s first resort. And I could no longer count on Katrina as my primary relationship because I couldn’t accept that imbalance. But it would be years before I found anyone else to fill that role (although that forced me to become my own primary relationship, and to reach out in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise, until strangers became friends, so ultimately it was for the best.)

Still, I wasn’t there yet that summer of 2008. And when Katrina responded to what I’d said about losing my primary relationship, she said, “You were more prescient than I was, Lacey — I wasn’t yet ready to accept that that was what was happening.”

And I’d never heard that word she’d used to describe me, prescient. So I looked it up, and learned that it meant “foreknowledge of what is to come.”

Is it because Katrina taught me that word that it is still beautiful to my ears? Even though her usage of it confirmed the painful truth I knew at the time, it still struck me as beautiful even then. Perhaps because it sounds so much like “precious.”

Prescient. Katrina used to say she thought I was psychic, because of the little things I noticed, the way I was able to predict how various dramas in our own lives and our friends’ would play out. The truth is, I believe that we all have a certain level of prescience if we quiet ourselves enough to listen to it. This is one of the reasons I read Tarot, because it helps me still myself inside and uncover what I already know. To get back in touch with my prescience…

Most likely, what Katrina called “prescience” was the compounded pain of others I had loved and had to let go–my best friend from childhood as we drifted apart as adults, my younger sister as she grew up into a life path that no longer was just two steps behind mine.

So perhaps my prescience was not so remarkable, just a touch of cynicism and the sense of familiarity of having done this before. But never with anyone like Katrina. Perhaps I was the one with the prescience to know my role as her primary relationship had been replaced, but she was the one with the prescience to keep reaching out, to know there was something beyond our temporary pain; she was the one with the prescience to know that what we had between us was changeable–but absolutely irreplaceable.

What are They Going to Do about It?

My latest post is up on Young Adult Catholics, which is about the freedom that comes when you realize those in positions of “power” have no real authority over who you really are. And of course, there’s women’s ordination!

Pulling up the Weeds

At about this time last month, I planted my first garden since moving to South Dakota, and my second garden in my whole life. My first garden was almost 100% neglected, and I still got some vegetables at the end of the summer, which taught me that cucumbers and zucchini are the best veggies for a negligent gardener.

This year, I resolved to do better. Except.

I let the whole month pass with very little weeding.

The lack of weeding was, admittedly, partly due to laziness. But it was also due to inexperience. When I first started seeing green sprout up from the patch of dirt, I was elated. Something was growing! I watered profusely. Everything in the garden grew. And grew. And grew. Until I started to suspect that a lot of what I saw were weeds. (I didn’t recognize them right away because I’m so inexperienced with gardening that I didn’t know what the vegetables I planted were supposed to look like when they first came up.)

Yesterday, we bought a hoe at Big Lots, and I took it out to do some serious weeding.

There was a moment of despair when I realized 85% of that green I’d been so proud of a few weeks ago had grown into ugly, insistent weeds. In fact, the whole garden seemed to be monstrous weeds. There was a moment when I wondered whether there was even a point to tackling it.

But I’d promised my husband I would if he cleaned the bathroom, and the bathroom was already gleaming.

So, I put the new hoe to work.

I was brutal.

There *might* be something good there once I get this guy and his extended family out of the way …

I chopped through the weed canopy until I noticed that, underneath it all, there were some plants that looked, well, different.

Underneath it all, cilantro, carrots, beets, green beans, watermelon, sugar snap peas, and cucumber were making a go of it, despite the hostile weeds.

I got down on my knees then and started doing precision weeding, carefully separating the weeds from the vegetables, pulling the weeds up by the roots and tossing them aside. My frustration started to dissolve. The work started to feel rewarding. There was something worth saving after all!

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the writing (and especially the rewriting) process.

Often, a first draft looks very much like that garden overrun by weeds, especially a first draft penned during NaNoWriMo. It’s easy to write it off, to decide that it’s just not worth the trouble. But then when you go in and get your hands dirty, chopping down the “weeds” of unnecessary scenes and cumbersome sentence constructions, you can start to see some beautiful themes and words and images hiding in their midst.  You start to feel a sense of satisfaction. You start to see something worthwhile emerge from the mess. The work starts to feel like it is worth something. And then, it’s much, much easier to continue.

Most of us start each new writing project the way I started my garden — hopeful, excited, a little scared, very naive, and then deliriously elated when something, anything starts to take shape … to be subsequently overwhelmed when you realize that maybe what you’ve been cultivating isn’t what you wanted after all.

Or maybe it is, if you look a little closer, and aren’t afraid to chop and pull mercilessly until you’re reminded that the good stuff really was there, all along.

On Giving Away Books for Free

Last week, I read this fascinating article from Curiosity Quills Press about giving away books for free. The author’s strategy is to offer her books for free for the first 12 months of their release. Her reasons for doing so, including much higher reading rates and establishing a fan base for later books, are pretty compelling.

As I plan to release my first self-published ebook, the article gave me a lot of food for thought. I plan to go with Kindle Direct publishing, which means that I can only offer the book for free via Amazon for a limited amount of time. However, I plan to price it very low after that — around 99 cents — for several reasons.

The book isn’t very long — about 26,500 words. Small book, small pricetag.
The price is low enough for people to take a chance on it, or make impulse purchases.
It’s still more than the book is earning sitting on my hard drive.

My decision to self-publish as an ebook is actually tied quite strongly to the book’s “inbetween” length — too long for short story markets, too short for novel markets, but “just right” for an ebook. Add to that some questionable practices amongst ebook imprints even with the big-name publishers, and going solo just seems to make the most sense.

And I think I might try Lizzy Ford’s strategy of getting the book into as many people’s hands for free as possible. Back when I wrote Aladdin and Gargoyles fan-fiction, I didn’t know a thing about marketing my work — all I did was write it, and push it out there for the world to see. My fan-fiction won me a lot of fans and admirers, including other authors who wanted to write fan-fic that included characters I introduced. I spent hours writing the stories and posting them, all completely for free. But the reward of being read was thanks enough. And, of course, the reward of creatively expressing myself.

At my heart, I’m still a writer who longs to share my stories. The main reason I’d like to earn money with my writing is so I could spend more time doing it, and less time doing other things to earn money. But a wider readership, even without a price tag attached, is still more than I can accomplish by keeping my stories in my own head and in my own house.

A Year in the Life, Week 9: My Motto

Today’s “Year in the Life” exercise asked me to write a “motto” for my life right now. I went for the first thing that came to my mind (because these exercises are supposed to be about writing, right, and not sitting there thinking of what to write?)

Photo credit: Krystl Louwagie

The first motto that came to mind for me was: I am growing.

I imagine it with an image of a flower opening to the sun.

My second thoughts were that people would misunderstand the motto, that they’d think it meant I was a child, or pregnant.

But it encapsulates my sense of life as a journey, of myself as unfinished. By doing these exercises, I am growing as a writer. By sending submissions and accepting rejection, I am growing a thicker skin and my chances at publication. By reading, I am growing my understanding of life’s mysteries, from fairy tales to marriage to God. And as a wife, I continue in my hopes to grow ever-closer to my darling Ivan, and to grow closer to the selfless, Godly love I’m called to live out in marriage.

I am 32 years old, but I am still “growing up,” still trying to get my life smoothed out enough that we can feel ready to start “growing” a family, and then I’ll see my own body growing in new and unusual and beautiful ways, too. And if marriage is a spiritual journey, how much more growing I will discover the need to do when I am a parent.

When I was a child, I never wanted to “grow up.” I think my mind would have been at ease if I’d realized then that I would never be done growing.

Catholicism, Paranormalcy, and the Tension of Hierarchy

My latest post is up on Young Adult Catholics, where Catholicism rubs up against the paranormal, and I reflect on the jumble of beliefs and experiences that make up my faith.

A New Look for Young Adult Catholics

I’m still recovering from a brief vacation and am a bit behind in all my endeavors, so today’s blog post will be short. Still, I wanted to give all a heads up that Young Adult Catholics, where I blog every other Tuesday, has a nifty new look. Along with the snazzier layout, posts will now be “categorized” according to the topics in the header. This creates something of a “blog within a blog,” where you can easily jump to the posts that most interest you. I still have to retroactively categorize most of mine, but you’ll probably not have to go far from sex & sexuality or women & gender to find them.

Imagination, Reality, and the Ever-Shifting Line Between

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I relied upon imagination throughout my life to get me through tough times. Because of this, and because, as a writer, my inner life is still very rich and active, one of my favorite themes to see addressed in books and movies is the exploration of that changeable line between fantasy and reality. Recently, I read Holly Black’s Doll Bones, which deals with this issue in a way that is especially concrete. The book explores the trauma a boy feels when his dad throws out the toys that represented his best characters in an ongoing story he was playing with two of his friends. That trauma reverberates to his friends, who also suffer the loss of those characters and all the stories that remain untold. The book really resonated with me, because it was the stories I created with my dolls when I was younger that first revealed to me the addictive power of imagination. I also had an ongoing story with my sister and a close friend, so I also appreciated Holly Black’s handling of the nuances and vulnerability of sharing a created reality with someone else. (You can read my review of the book here.)

This was the main issue I was grappling with in my own middle-grade novel, Ever This Day, although Holly Black has accomplished it more directly and more elegantly than I have. In Ever This Day, a 13-year-old girl discovers an angel in the grove behind her house, and she quickly gets sucked into a world she shares only with the angel and her two-year-old sister, her strongest link to the childhood she is moving away from.

I’ve sort of kept a running list in my mind of books and movies that follow this theme, and I have a lot of books on my “to-read” list that also seem to address it.

 Glint by Ann Coburn. This book follows two parallel stories, one that is happening in “real life” and one that is happening in an imaginary realm. My review is here.
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan. This book manages to be beautiful despite its brutality. I loved it for its writing and its deft handling of the theme, and it’s an added bonus that it’s also a fairy tale retelling. Back when I was a Teen Services Librarian, I led a program where teens used Animoto to make book trailers. I made my example trailer for this book. (And you can read my review here.)
Lars and the Real Girl. This is one of my top-three favorite movies. It’s a comedy, but I didn’t find it funny until subsequent watchings; the first time, I was too enthralled with its handling of the subject matter.
Ruby Sparks. I admit it — I was drawn to this movie because the premise is so similar to Lars and the Real Girl. And any writer will appreciate the complications that can ensue when you fall in love with your own character … and find that she’s literally “come to life.”
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? I’ve never seen this film, but the play had a lasting effect on me.
The Wild Hunt. This is the most disturbing of the movies listed here, and I’m not sure I’d recommend it; it’s definitely a darker “take” on what can happen when the line between reality and fantasy becomes too blurred.
Pete’s Dragon. One could argue that this movie doesn’t belong in this category, if one makes the case that Elliot was not imaginary. For me, that’s beside the point. I’ve found this movie to speak eloquently to the theme of needing to give up something magical and special that has helped you cope in hard times, in exchange for something more solid, real, and equally wonderful.

And of course, this list would not be complete without The Velveteen Rabbit, perhaps the true gold standard in this category: “Once you’ve become real, you cannot become unreal again.”

What books or movies have you come across that address this theme? I’d love to add them to my list!