Katherine Villyard's Blog, page 8

Year In Review

My novel started the year at 65,000 words (draft 1.5), increased to 120,000 words (draft 2) to address developmental concerns, and decreased to the current 96,000 words. I feel like it’s structurally there and am just looking for things like how many times I’ve used the word “look” in my novel. ���� (It was a very large number but I did a search and destroy.)

I remember when it was all done in first draft telling Gene Wolfe, who is the wisest writer I know, that I thought I had now learned how to write a novel. Gene looked at me, and smiled kindly. “You never learn how to write a novel,” he told me. “You only learn to write the novel you’re on.”

—Neil Gaiman

Yeah, I… well, I figured out a process that works for me? Yeah. That’s huge. (I’m a methodological pantser. Very loosely methodological.)

I also worked too much, had a sick cat (she’s a lot better, but also she has extensive food allergies so… that’s a thing), visited my sister for the first time since COVID… but this book is the main thing I did that you would be interested in!

What is the Meaning of Life?

42, of course!Eat well, try to get exercise, make some friends.Something else?

You know. The unanswerable question. Fun for the whole family!

It’s something that I’ve always been interested in. In college, I signed up for a freshman English course called “The Search for Self.” They gave us a Myers-Briggs on the first day and discovered that the class title had attracted a statistically unlikely number of INFPs… including me.

(Do people still “believe” in the Myers-Brigggs? I’ve heard some backlash. Does it matter for the purposes of this story?)

My parents were badly matched on matters of religion. My mother was a “Don’t tell me what the Bible says, young man, I’ve read it cover to cover!” Christian. My father was a bitter atheist who followed my mother’s instructions to keep his mouth shut at home. Our religious instruction was…. illogical and Disneyfied and failed to stick. My sister is an atheist, and I… pondered a lot.

Like, a lot. People who’ve read my work can probably tell. Even as a mythology-loving agnostic, I had a soft spot for stories about what it means to be a person.

I was curious upon reading an article that the propensity towards religion might have a genetic component. (Don’t worry, I’m probably not headed where you think I am.) Is it genes? Or are my sister and I so different on the topic of religion because Mom dragged her to an awful church after our parents divorced, and I was treated to nightly lectures on how religion proves that P.T. Barnum was right that there’s a sucker born every minute?

I went to that same church after I moved in with my mother. My sister and I had an amazing rebellion, where we would put our heads together and sing poorly. I would go up or down the way you’re “supposed” to for the song but at the wrong interval, and she would sing a half or quarter tone off from me. Our mother, a former Opera singer, stopped making us attend. BWAHAHAHA!

For what it’s worth, this is my official position on atheism:

��

A Rabbi is teaching his student the Talmud and explains God created everything in this world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson.

The clever student asks ���What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?���

The Rabbi responds ���God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all ��� the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs an act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone who is in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that God commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.���

���This means��� the Rabbi continued ���that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ���I pray that God will help you.��� instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ���I will help you.’���

��

Anyway. What makes a robot or a string of code a person or not? What is the ineffible thing that makes something alive? Do vampires have souls? What about cats? My mother told me that “Good kitties go to heaven and bad kitties go to hell” and it completely destroyed my faith in what she had taught. Parents, I hear lots of people say they lost their faith when they asked Mom and Dad if Rover and Fluffy went to heaven, so answer that question wisely. But in my case, I spent wayyyy too long analyzing what a cat could do that would merit eternal damnation. Eating a mouse? that’s dinner. Pooping on the floor instead of the box? clearly lake of fire material (NOT). It just led me to believe, as a precocious 11 or 12 year old, that hell is dumb.

So, what is consciousness, anyway? There’s clearly some kind of gestalt where the chemical processes become more than the sum of their parts, and this process breaks apart on death. Is that a soul? I don’t know! Does it matter, when whether it’s a soul or not breaking down the process is a Humpty-Dumpty thing where you can’t put it back together?

I’m not sure having the answer is what’s important. I think the freedom to ask the question (or choose not to) is.

Music History Novel Research

Felix Mendelssohn. Know him? He wrote Elijah, among other things. Like this:

He also has the dubious honor of being singled out as proof that Jews are incapable of true music in Wagner’s antisemitic essay on the topic. Fuck Wagner!

Mendelssohn’s grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, was a well-known Jewish philosopher who advocated for the rights of Jews in Prussia and for religious tolerance in general. An example, which I quoted in my novel:

Brothers, if you care for true piety, let us not feign agreement, where diversity is evidently the plan and purpose of Providence. None of us thinks and feels exactly like his fellow man: why do we wish to deceive each other with delusive words?

But Felix’s father Abraham converted the entire family to Christianity when Felix was a child in a home ceremony–less out of religious fervor and more out of a feeling that the days of Judaism were over and the family needed to assimilate. Felix was always proud of his Jewish heritage. (Apparently there are some who believe that he was a crypto-Jew but there is no evidence aside from him being friendly to Jews.)

The Berlin Academy didn’t allow Jews to attend, but Mendelssohn convinced them to make an exception for his friend, Lewis Lewandowski. Lewandowski was the first Jew to attend, and wrote huge swaths of Jewish liturgical music, including this piece:

Writing Process Stuff

Disclaimer: Any writing process that results in finished writing that you’re proud of is a valid process! It’s also normal that you’ll have to experiment with different processes to see what fits.

So, when I was at Dragoncon this year, there was a discussion where I was not a panelist, so it wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to interrupt, but I so wanted to answer. So I’ll do it here!

Audience Question: How do you do a twist ending?

Panelist: You outline it very, very, very thoroughly and sometimes even then it doesn’t work!

Me: You be a pantser and attempt to outline.

I tried SO HARD to be a plotter. I outlined! I did the Snowflake method in Excel, usually. At some point in the writing, I would no longer believe that my characters would do the thing I expected them to do at the end and I would have to think hard about what they would actually do instead.

I mean. I’m sure there are die-hard plotters out there who are saying that just means my outlines all suck, 😉 which might be valid! But also it means that I’m the sort of writer that needs to see something on paper and reread it a few times to figure out what’s going on, and that I’m not afraid of dashing off on a tangent if I think the tangent is a better story. A die-hard plotter would redo their outline, but no, I wing it. If I get stuck, I think about story structure and what, structurally, would need to go there and use that as a writing prompt.

At the end of my novel, I got stuck and just wrote down Save the Cat beats and used those as writing prompts. I did put notes about what I expected to happen. I used none of those notes. Then for my other POV characters, I similarly wrote in Save the Cat beats with notes of what I expected to happen, and similarly used none of those notes. That said, while puttering around the house, driving the car, etc., I would get weird random insights into my characters and write those in.

In short, I am a slob and a mystic, and you should probably not emulate my process. 😉

That said: one common misconception about pantsers is that we all come in overlong and have to cut 2/3 of our novel. My first draft was 52,000 words. My second draft was 102,000 words. I tend to draft lean, though. My zero drafts almost feel like stage plays, with dialog and rough blocking, but those get fleshed out immediately.

Actually… with my art degree I did a lot of gesture drawing, so… my process feels a lot like this:

When can a grrl call herself a bestseller? :D

So, uh… I intended to have a giveaway on Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and Apple books… but Amazon price-matched me. Hey, I’m cool with that! As a freebie, my book is pretty popular. Like, #4 in Science Fiction Anthologies (Kindle Store) and #10 in Fantasy Anthologies and Short Stories. It was #3 in SF Anthologies a few days ago.

(Also, Amazon detected I was writing this and dropped my rank to 7 and 11. LOL!)

Seriously, when do I brag that I was #3 or #4?

What is Mastodon and why should I use it?

I’m so glad you asked! 😀

So, of all the Twitter clones–let’s not get into Twitter, shall we?–the current top three are Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads. I don’t have a Threads account so I can’t speak to whether it’s any good or not. Moving right along.

Bluesky: I’m on Bluesky and I like it! but it is also invite-only, which is a bummer. Unless you know someone who has invite codes, you can’t use it. Moving right along.

Mastodon: I hear a lot about how Mastodon is hard and confusing and difficult to use, usually when evangelizing it to my friends. 😉 Actually using it is fine, IMHO. It’s the initial setup that bugs people.

So, picking a server is the usual first hurdle. Mastodon is decentralized, which is good because if a billionaire buys your Mastodon instance and changes all the rules you can just switch and carry on. Switching is so easy that I almost said the instance you pick doesn’t matter, but… you want one that has up-to-date software, moderation rules you agree with, and it’s nice if it’s in your language and centered around a topic you’re interested in so you have a lively local timeline. That said, if you don’t like your server it’s SO EASY to just go migrate to another that this isn’t THAT big a deal. Just pick one and sign up.

You can follow people who are on different servers, so you can always follow your friends even if their server is closed to new subs because of the latest Twitter drama. How do you find them? Well, I did things like search for Neil Gaiman, search for John Scalzi, etc. I looked at who the friends I did find were following. If your server software is up to date and your client supports it (or you’re on desktop) you can also follow tags, like #catsofmastodon. But generally, I looked for the people I was already following elsewhere.

So, if Mastodon isn’t owned by a billionaire, how does it work? Well, your server is run by a volunteer who is probably accepting donations, or sponsored by some tech-related non-profit–but probably the first. It’s an attempt to get around what Cory Doctorow calls “Enshittification” by breaking the link between advertising and profits and your social life. In other words, I think it’s worth supporting.

If you want to get started and know people on Mastodon, maybe start by joining their server. If not, go here and see if any of these tickle your fancy, then follow some people and cat photos. If you decided you don’t like it, you can pack up your followers and go elsewhere. This is built-in functionality, and I think it’s stupidly easy but perhaps I’m not the best judge–but it’s built-in functionality and they try to make it simple. Mastodon is intended to NOT be a walled garden that keeps you in and traps you.

SALE! Love Stories only 99 cents!

Do you want a copy of my short story collection for a very low price? Love Stories will be on sale until the end of the month. Grab it while it’s cheap!

Yet Another Novel Update

Hilariously, there is a part of my author brain that insists that my book is AMAZEBALLS and will be deeply beloved by anyone who reads it. It is clearly untrue that my book is for everyone and this is okay. (So far, my book seems to be for people over 30 who love cats and have a keen interest in religion and/or the politics of religion, as well the history of marginalized people in Europe and classical music. My parents met singing opera, yo. I started going to choir practice with them when I was six weeks old.)

That said, so far my new readers have been SUPER USEFUL for fixing my foreshadowing. My writer’s group has seen it twice, so they know all the reveals and can’t tell me if my foreshadowing is enough for a new reader. These readers seem to have helped me fix my foreshadowing! which is huge and OMG THANK YOU. I, er, have a recurring problem in which I think I am being BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS and instead am being ludicrously obscure. One of my early short story critiques from a friend included a stern lecture about “WHY ARE YOU SO DEATHLY AFRAID OF PROVIDING ANY INFORMATION TO A READER? YOU’RE GOING THROUGH THESE BIZARRE CONTORTIONS IN ORDER TO AVOID GIVING THE READER EVEN THE TINIEST SCRAP OF INFORMATION! THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF SUSPENSE!” while my response was “I thought I was being sledgehammer obvious.”

I’d like to say I’ve moved past this, but no. 😉 I have a weird brain and need the eyes of normal people upon my work from time to time. 😉

Current comps, btw: When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Cohen, Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco, and A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Er, mostly the first, but it does have vampires and queer like the second and a vampire married to a witch with lesbian moms like the third. (Resemblance was coincidental but I’ll take it.)

Goodreads and Apple Books issue

Hi!

Due to a mix-up with my audiobook, an incorrect category was applied to my book Love Stories. It's listed as Romance here at Goodreads and at Apple Books on the audiobook edition only.

I'm trying to correct the issue, but authors aren't allowed to edit their own categories. These sync from the publisher. I've opened "an idea" to allow this, but in the meantime there's nothing I can do except apologize to any reader who is expecting a Happily Ever After out of Love Stories.

I'm so sorry! I have a ticket open with Apple Books, and Goodreads refuses to fix it.

So. Why vampires?

Vampires are interesting! They’re the most “human” monster, and they usually represent what society fears.

Look at the OG: Dracula. (He’s not the first vampire in English literature–Polidori’s The Vampyre, our lesbian queen Carmilla, and the serial Varney the Vampire predate him, but he’s the one people think of nowadays.) Dracula was published during a time period when people in England had a lot of anxiety about male “deviant” sexuality after the Oscar Wilde trials, and fears of reverse colonization following a large number of Jewish and Eastern European immigrants. Dracula is an oddly seductive Eastern European nobleman (and is metaphorically sexually deviant–he bites both men and women, insert penetration metaphors here) looking to “invade” England. I really love Kaz Rowe’s YouTube video on the topic and highly recommend it!

(Perhaps not coincidentally, the vampires in my novel in progress include a Jew, a queer man, and an eccentric freethinking woman who works as an actress during the 19th century.)

There’s also Interview with the Vampire, both the original novel series and the AMC TV reboot (love them both!). In Anne Rice’s books, they’re mostly queer and sympathetic. (Varney the Vampire was also a sympathetic character, but people usually think of Anne Rice when they think of the first sympathetic vampire–although Rice herself often credited the movie Dracula’s Daughter.) All Anne Rice novel vampires are bi and genderqueer; just look at Lestat’s mother Gabrielle who immediately starts living as a man. (I’m sure it’s banned in Florida.) AMC’s reboot takes it a step farther, with Louis as an angry gay black man and Lestat as a seductive, decadent bisexual European.

Even the much maligned Twilight can be read as a Mormon girl’s fear of teen premarital sex. Edward Cullen is sparkly and sexy, and that’s scary to someone who’s afraid of illicit sexuality. The True Blood TV series is also leaning hard on fear of intimacy and illicit sexuality.

There’s also a long history of depicting societal others as vampires. From French cartoons depicting Jews as vampires during the Dreyfuss Affair, to racist cartoons depicting black men as vampires in reconstructionist North Carolina… well. You get a wide variety of things I’m not willing to link here.

There’s also the immortality. Immortality sounds great if you’re afraid of death (which most reasonable people are; even religious folk who say they’re not afraid of death sometimes say this because they believe in their faith’s version of immortality). On the other hand, you get to sit back and watch everything and everyone you love die while you continue. Since both of my parents are dead, as well as a large quantity of my pets, I think I can say with some authority that this fuckin’ sucks!

(Also, in the modern era in my novel in progress, the vampire’s mortal wife is… a vet. Someone whose entire life is built around our beloved, short-lived companions.)

So, what else? The no daylight thing was invented by the movie Nosferatu, if I’m not mistaken, but I love it. It’s a metaphor for hiding the shadow self, hiding the part of you that’s the thing that society fears. Also, I kind of feel like there needs to be a “price” for being a vampire if the vampire is the protagonist. For Anne Rice’s vampires, the “price” is that you have to be a very old vampire with excellent self-control to not be a killer. I… was more interested in the curse of Immortality, so I let that one go and stuck with no sunlight and no food. I mean, I love history so without all the icky blood (I’m a vegetarian), well. If there was no price and I would continue exactly as before without hurting anyone, sign me up.

Vampire tropes: You can either be the sad broody depressed vampire like Louis, Edward, Varney, Angel… or you can be the joyous, reveling-in-being-an-outlaw vampire like Lestat, Spike, etc. Or more, but those seem to be the most common vampire states of being. Why do Buffy/Angel fans love Spike? Marginalized fans love their marginalized-coded characters embracing who they are. I love Louis with all my heart, but ENOUGH will all the self-loathing! (On the other hand, to quote The Maven of the Eventide, if he’s not sad in the rain is he still Louis?)

Anyway. Yes. Vampires. Vampires are interesting. People tell me vampires are dead, but you can’t kill vampires! they’re UNDEAD and will always come back. 😉