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inverarityI started writing when I was in elementary school. I was praised by my teachers and my parents for my imagination and my precocious language skills. I think my mother expected me to become a writer. In my mind, I always thought "Someday I'm going to write a book. (No, I'm going to write a lot of books.)"
Years pass faster than you think.
Lots of people have plans for their lives, but life rarely goes according to plan. I don't really have any reason to regret my choices — I have a solid upper-middle class income, a pretty good work/life balance, a reasonable retirement plan, I'm in good health, and overall, pretty satisfied with my life. There are of course so many things I could have done differently, but who doesn't entertain the occasional fantasy of a do-over?
Still, not many people would be excited, at the beginning of their lives, to be told "Someday you'll work your way up to the Professional managerial class and live the American dream of a mortgage and a pension and maxed-out IRA contributions."
You could do worse. Many people around the world are doing much worse. I am aware, so I do not complain, and any regrets in my life are largely personal ones.
But I do regret never becoming a writer.
I've written before about how I made many halfhearted and unfinished attempts to write a book over the years. Yet Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle, a fan fiction novel written over the course of one summer after I devoured the entire Harry Potter series in a few months, was the first time I actually finished something. I'd never been involved in fan fiction before. (Truthfully, I had some friends in high school who wrote fanfic and I always thought it was kind of stupid. Why would you write something based on someone else's characters which you can't even publish, when you could be writing your own stuff?) I do not know what it was about Harry Potter that grabbed me, a middle-aged man well above the age of the typical HP reader (and, uh, truthfully, I'd also been hearing about Harry Potter for years and avoided because it sounded like some dumbed-down fantasy for children). But reading the books lit up something probably not unlike what was lit in Rowling's millions of younger readers. Initially, I wanted to run a Harry Potter RPG. (Once upon a time I was a pretty good GM - whatever storytelling and worldbuilding aptitude I had I mostly exercised in long-running RPG campaigns which were generally well-regarded, and even got me some freelance work with a company you've probably heard of and a game you probably haven't.) The game never happened, but the spark of an idea - an American girl like Harry Potter but, you know, American, and a girl - stuck in my head until I started writing. And somehow, that was the story I kept writing until I finished it.
By the time I finished AQATTC, I already had a series in mind. I made plans to write seven books, just like Harry Potter. I cannot say I was really confident in my ability to do that. (I mean, I was pushing 40 by the time I finished my first book!) But as much as I have struggled with each successive book and shared with you my dilemmas about plot holes and character development and improving my writing, Alexandra stuck with me. I had her entire story, broadly, planned out in my head many years ago. Some things have turned out differently than I planned them, and many details have been altered along the way, but in very broad strokes, everything that's happened in each book was something I cooked up while I was finishing book one. I remember JK Rowling once said that she had her Epilogue written before she finished the first Harry Potter book. I wasn't deliberately trying to copy everything she did, but I have two Epilogues already mostly written.
Before I started on the second Alexandra Quick book, I began another project. I can't even remember what inspired me to write a NextGen fic. But Hogwarts Houses Divided was the second full-length "novel" I ever finished. To this day, it's more popular than Alexandra Quick, even though I wrote it 15(!) years ago and have never written any sequels.
I think HHD is fun but very definitely a more "classic" work of fan fiction, with all that that entails. It's bloated and meandering and has some questionable plot resolutions, in large part because unlike the Alexandra Quick books, I didn't finish HHD before I began uploading it, so it was a WIP even as it was being posted. I did keep about 10 chapters at a time in reserve so I wasn't flying entirely by the seat of my pants, but like AQATTC, I wrote it without any beta-readers, and unlike AQATTC, I wasn't entirely sure how it would end when I began.
I'm happy to announce that there is finally an updated Hogwarts Houses Divided ebook available for download, in my stories folder.
If anyone has any problems downloading or displaying this ebook or if you find any bugs or typos, please let me know.
I have also, at last, begun posting it to Archive of Our Own. I never bothered before because I needed to clean up the HTML, and also because I kind of figured that anyone who's read AQ already knows about HHD. But apparently that's not the case, so after 15 years, HHD seems to be finding some new readers.
I do plan to eventually create a print-ready PDF for HHD as well, but that's going to require some more work.
From time to time, I still have thoughts about the long-promised HHD sequel (or even the half-thought out trilogy), but...
I haven't written nothing but fan fiction these past few years. In between AQ books 4 and 5, I wrote a science fiction novel. This was my first completed work of original fiction.
A few people read it. They said it was good. Maybe even as good as a lot of published SF novels.
I submitted it to agents and publishers, using all Approved Best Practices, and got... nada. Well, not quite nada. One publisher (who you've probably heard of) told me it had been pulled out of the slush pile and was being reviewed. If you know anything about slush piles, you know that's actually kind of an accomplishment. Most editors will tell you that less than 5% of unsolicited manuscripts make it out of the slush pile.
So I waited. And waited. And waited. (This publisher is kind of notorious for being slow...) After over a year, they told me it had made it to a final round of editorial reviews. Meaning it was one of less than a dozen "good enough" novels they were considering for publication.
It took over another year before I was finally informed that it had not made the final cut. I even received some personal feedback/critique from the editors (which anyone in publishing will tell you is very rare), so, on the one hand, it was kind of encouraging, but... "Almost but not quite" still means "No."
Some years later, I tried again with another round of submissions to agents. Still no interest. Sometimes I reread my story, and I can see flaws and also understand that it isn't really what sells nowadays. Is there still a market for Heinleinesque YA space operas? Maybe, but it's certainly not what any agents I found were looking for.
Have I ever thought about just tossing it up on Amazon just to see if it will "find an audience"? Yeah, I've thought about it. But I know realistically it would probably sell about four copies and disappear.
A professional artist named Pierre Raveneau, who is an AQ fan, even sketched some characters and a cover for me once (just as a favor, not intended for commercial use).
I may try again someday. (I even have a sequel in mind for this one.) Or I may write some more books.
I have another novel I have been working on. An entirely different genre! It's a non-SF, non-fantasy thriller. Once again, inspired randomly but the inspiration stuck with me. It's been a WIP for, well, years. It was originally intended as a "side project" when I needed a break from AQ. It's fallen into the same development hell that so many AQ drafts did. I want to finish it.
Was there a point to all this rambling? Well yes.
Writing is about doing. You're a writer if you write. Not by talking about writing, or buying software and posting on writing forums and plotting and planning your first draft. It's about butt-in-the-chair doing the work, and choosing to do that rather than everything else in your life that you need and/or want to do.
This has always been a problem for me. My mental image of myself is of, some kind of, unpublished-but-future writer. But revealed preferences would suggest I am at best a half-assed hobbyist writer.
And, maybe that's okay. Like I said, my life is good by most standards. Writing is a fine hobby. I have an audience (that's you!) and it's enough to make writing AQ worth it.
But I want to write more. I don't really do "New Year's Resolutions" but I am working on how I can make the necessary adjustments in my habits so that I actually....write. And finish more books.
There are writers who write a book every year. There are machines like Brandon Sanderson who can trip and stand up holding a finished novel. Sure, if you're actually doing it for a living, you will spend more time on it, but I have finished entire books in less than a year! And yet, for the last 10+ years, I have been taking years to finish anything.
I want to finish something. I want to be published. And I want to finish Alexandra Quick.
I finished the first draft of Alexandra Quick and the Wizard War in February of last year. I expected to have the final draft done and begin posting by the end of the year.
Obviously, that didn't happen.
I got mentally stuck on a few things. I have mostly worked through them. I think I've made peace with its flaws. AQATWW is (IMO) a good book, maybe not a perfect book, but it is not really going to get better because I keep poking at it and trying to decide which chapters need to be cut or moved or rewritten. I like it in its current state. I know that there are parts an editor would make me cut or change if it were being published. To some degree, this has been true of all AQ books, and I have avoided indulging myself in "I can get away with it because it's fan fiction." But, I can get away with it. I'm not leaving anything that I think is boring or doesn't make sense, but I am definitely leaving some parts that some people won't like. I'm not doing a major rewrite.
I'm 92% finished with my semi-final editing pass. The only things I'm still stuck on are some relatively minor plot holes that I still need to fix. Sometimes I wonder if readers will even notice the plot holes I spend so much time angsting about. (Then they point out plot holes I never even thought of.)
It's still 66 chapters, and the word count stands at 373,693 words.
If I were someone who makes promises, I'd say AQATWW will definitely be posted in 2024... and probably soon. But every time I say something like that, I regret it. (AQATWW was originally going to be finished in 2021.) So what I will promise is that I am going to finish it. And I'm going to finish book seven too. And I'm going to write some other things.
And maybe someday I'll write that sequel to HHD.
Happy New Year.
Years pass faster than you think.
Lots of people have plans for their lives, but life rarely goes according to plan. I don't really have any reason to regret my choices — I have a solid upper-middle class income, a pretty good work/life balance, a reasonable retirement plan, I'm in good health, and overall, pretty satisfied with my life. There are of course so many things I could have done differently, but who doesn't entertain the occasional fantasy of a do-over?
Still, not many people would be excited, at the beginning of their lives, to be told "Someday you'll work your way up to the Professional managerial class and live the American dream of a mortgage and a pension and maxed-out IRA contributions."
You could do worse. Many people around the world are doing much worse. I am aware, so I do not complain, and any regrets in my life are largely personal ones.
But I do regret never becoming a writer.
I've written before about how I made many halfhearted and unfinished attempts to write a book over the years. Yet Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle, a fan fiction novel written over the course of one summer after I devoured the entire Harry Potter series in a few months, was the first time I actually finished something. I'd never been involved in fan fiction before. (Truthfully, I had some friends in high school who wrote fanfic and I always thought it was kind of stupid. Why would you write something based on someone else's characters which you can't even publish, when you could be writing your own stuff?) I do not know what it was about Harry Potter that grabbed me, a middle-aged man well above the age of the typical HP reader (and, uh, truthfully, I'd also been hearing about Harry Potter for years and avoided because it sounded like some dumbed-down fantasy for children). But reading the books lit up something probably not unlike what was lit in Rowling's millions of younger readers. Initially, I wanted to run a Harry Potter RPG. (Once upon a time I was a pretty good GM - whatever storytelling and worldbuilding aptitude I had I mostly exercised in long-running RPG campaigns which were generally well-regarded, and even got me some freelance work with a company you've probably heard of and a game you probably haven't.) The game never happened, but the spark of an idea - an American girl like Harry Potter but, you know, American, and a girl - stuck in my head until I started writing. And somehow, that was the story I kept writing until I finished it.
By the time I finished AQATTC, I already had a series in mind. I made plans to write seven books, just like Harry Potter. I cannot say I was really confident in my ability to do that. (I mean, I was pushing 40 by the time I finished my first book!) But as much as I have struggled with each successive book and shared with you my dilemmas about plot holes and character development and improving my writing, Alexandra stuck with me. I had her entire story, broadly, planned out in my head many years ago. Some things have turned out differently than I planned them, and many details have been altered along the way, but in very broad strokes, everything that's happened in each book was something I cooked up while I was finishing book one. I remember JK Rowling once said that she had her Epilogue written before she finished the first Harry Potter book. I wasn't deliberately trying to copy everything she did, but I have two Epilogues already mostly written.
Hogwarts Houses Divided
Before I started on the second Alexandra Quick book, I began another project. I can't even remember what inspired me to write a NextGen fic. But Hogwarts Houses Divided was the second full-length "novel" I ever finished. To this day, it's more popular than Alexandra Quick, even though I wrote it 15(!) years ago and have never written any sequels.
I think HHD is fun but very definitely a more "classic" work of fan fiction, with all that that entails. It's bloated and meandering and has some questionable plot resolutions, in large part because unlike the Alexandra Quick books, I didn't finish HHD before I began uploading it, so it was a WIP even as it was being posted. I did keep about 10 chapters at a time in reserve so I wasn't flying entirely by the seat of my pants, but like AQATTC, I wrote it without any beta-readers, and unlike AQATTC, I wasn't entirely sure how it would end when I began.
I'm happy to announce that there is finally an updated Hogwarts Houses Divided ebook available for download, in my stories folder.
If anyone has any problems downloading or displaying this ebook or if you find any bugs or typos, please let me know.
I have also, at last, begun posting it to Archive of Our Own. I never bothered before because I needed to clean up the HTML, and also because I kind of figured that anyone who's read AQ already knows about HHD. But apparently that's not the case, so after 15 years, HHD seems to be finding some new readers.
I do plan to eventually create a print-ready PDF for HHD as well, but that's going to require some more work.
From time to time, I still have thoughts about the long-promised HHD sequel (or even the half-thought out trilogy), but...
Unpublished
I haven't written nothing but fan fiction these past few years. In between AQ books 4 and 5, I wrote a science fiction novel. This was my first completed work of original fiction.
A few people read it. They said it was good. Maybe even as good as a lot of published SF novels.
I submitted it to agents and publishers, using all Approved Best Practices, and got... nada. Well, not quite nada. One publisher (who you've probably heard of) told me it had been pulled out of the slush pile and was being reviewed. If you know anything about slush piles, you know that's actually kind of an accomplishment. Most editors will tell you that less than 5% of unsolicited manuscripts make it out of the slush pile.
So I waited. And waited. And waited. (This publisher is kind of notorious for being slow...) After over a year, they told me it had made it to a final round of editorial reviews. Meaning it was one of less than a dozen "good enough" novels they were considering for publication.
It took over another year before I was finally informed that it had not made the final cut. I even received some personal feedback/critique from the editors (which anyone in publishing will tell you is very rare), so, on the one hand, it was kind of encouraging, but... "Almost but not quite" still means "No."
Some years later, I tried again with another round of submissions to agents. Still no interest. Sometimes I reread my story, and I can see flaws and also understand that it isn't really what sells nowadays. Is there still a market for Heinleinesque YA space operas? Maybe, but it's certainly not what any agents I found were looking for.
Have I ever thought about just tossing it up on Amazon just to see if it will "find an audience"? Yeah, I've thought about it. But I know realistically it would probably sell about four copies and disappear.
A professional artist named Pierre Raveneau, who is an AQ fan, even sketched some characters and a cover for me once (just as a favor, not intended for commercial use).
I may try again someday. (I even have a sequel in mind for this one.) Or I may write some more books.
I have another novel I have been working on. An entirely different genre! It's a non-SF, non-fantasy thriller. Once again, inspired randomly but the inspiration stuck with me. It's been a WIP for, well, years. It was originally intended as a "side project" when I needed a break from AQ. It's fallen into the same development hell that so many AQ drafts did. I want to finish it.
Was there a point to all this rambling? Well yes.
Writing is about doing. You're a writer if you write. Not by talking about writing, or buying software and posting on writing forums and plotting and planning your first draft. It's about butt-in-the-chair doing the work, and choosing to do that rather than everything else in your life that you need and/or want to do.
This has always been a problem for me. My mental image of myself is of, some kind of, unpublished-but-future writer. But revealed preferences would suggest I am at best a half-assed hobbyist writer.
And, maybe that's okay. Like I said, my life is good by most standards. Writing is a fine hobby. I have an audience (that's you!) and it's enough to make writing AQ worth it.
But I want to write more. I don't really do "New Year's Resolutions" but I am working on how I can make the necessary adjustments in my habits so that I actually....write. And finish more books.
There are writers who write a book every year. There are machines like Brandon Sanderson who can trip and stand up holding a finished novel. Sure, if you're actually doing it for a living, you will spend more time on it, but I have finished entire books in less than a year! And yet, for the last 10+ years, I have been taking years to finish anything.
I want to finish something. I want to be published. And I want to finish Alexandra Quick.
Alexandra Quick and the Wizard War, Will it come in 2024?
I finished the first draft of Alexandra Quick and the Wizard War in February of last year. I expected to have the final draft done and begin posting by the end of the year.
Obviously, that didn't happen.
I got mentally stuck on a few things. I have mostly worked through them. I think I've made peace with its flaws. AQATWW is (IMO) a good book, maybe not a perfect book, but it is not really going to get better because I keep poking at it and trying to decide which chapters need to be cut or moved or rewritten. I like it in its current state. I know that there are parts an editor would make me cut or change if it were being published. To some degree, this has been true of all AQ books, and I have avoided indulging myself in "I can get away with it because it's fan fiction." But, I can get away with it. I'm not leaving anything that I think is boring or doesn't make sense, but I am definitely leaving some parts that some people won't like. I'm not doing a major rewrite.
I'm 92% finished with my semi-final editing pass. The only things I'm still stuck on are some relatively minor plot holes that I still need to fix. Sometimes I wonder if readers will even notice the plot holes I spend so much time angsting about. (Then they point out plot holes I never even thought of.)
It's still 66 chapters, and the word count stands at 373,693 words.
If I were someone who makes promises, I'd say AQATWW will definitely be posted in 2024... and probably soon. But every time I say something like that, I regret it. (AQATWW was originally going to be finished in 2021.) So what I will promise is that I am going to finish it. And I'm going to finish book seven too. And I'm going to write some other things.
And maybe someday I'll write that sequel to HHD.
Happy New Year.
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Happy new year!
Date: 2024-01-02 09:35 am (UTC)You forgot to mention the book reviews, which by themselves comprise a body of work.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-02 12:41 pm (UTC)Seriously, the fact that you spend so much of your time and effort on a work of fiction that is meant for our enjoyment is just so wonderful that we really have no room to complain.
the whole shebangabang
Date: 2024-01-02 10:09 pm (UTC)If you want, I can connect you two and y'all can "chew the fat".
As for an HHD update??? I'd reread it for sure!!!!
AQTWW, As I've said before, and I'll say it again....Write the book you feel is the best version. sometimes us readers are hyper critical and that's not fair to the writers.
Personally I'd love to read any version you put out of AQ. 2024 release??...YES PLEASE!!! Though I the kind of person who would put something out, and if the readers didn't like it, I'd put out a "Writer's Cut" later on...buuuut that's just me.
Anyway, I hope you had a Great Christmas and New Years'.
Keep on writing
-wodcdre
no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 09:14 am (UTC)My father started writing when he retired, starting with shorter things and using all the connections he had built up systematically before to get in small publications, as well as sending stuff in for competitions.
About HHD: I read that one first too because I'm usually reluctant to start WIPs, or fanfictions that have a setting too far away from the original. It's a good gateway drug to the AQ series :) Have you changed any content in overhauling it for new uploads?
no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 01:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-09 01:18 am (UTC)Can't say anything about HHD yet (maybe I should read it to pass time until you post the first chapter of AQATWW?), but judging from AQ, you've got what a professional writer needs. Of course, I'm saying that as a fan.
And the last picture is very nice. Is this Sees-From-Laurel? A mermaid? Some other character who'll make an appearance?
no subject
Date: 2024-02-15 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-22 07:28 pm (UTC)