Step 52: Confess (Day 7)

I'm going to start tagging some of these posts with a #FinalFantasyXV label becAUSE OMG THIS GAME GIVES ME ALL THE FEELSSSSS

CHOCOBROS 4 LIFE Y'ALL

Ahem. Onto the #authorconfession:

Day 7. Tell us about a CONFLICT in your WIP

My current MS is a YA contemporary romance, so most of the conflict in the book revolves around the usual teen angst: bad grades, problematic exes, school bullies, etc. The two MCs find common ground that helps them to resolve these issues, but there's a slow-burning mystery that I think is the real meat-and-potatoes of the plot.

LAYERS UPON LAYERS

Without delving into massive spoilers, my hope is that upon finishing the book readers will realize how this mystery ultimately influenced the choices of one of the characters throughout the story, and perhaps encourage them to reread the novel with this newly enlightened knowledge. Barring that, it certainly sets up some interesting dilemmas for any *future installments!

*Which may or may never see the light of day depending on whether my first book crashes and burns.

Step 51: Confess (Day 4/5/6)

I didn't keep up with #authorconfession over the weekend because I was too busy being complete and utter Final Fantasy XV trash (apologies to my Twitter followers).

I REGRET NOTHING

But I'm back at it again with the white vans, so here are my answers for the last three days worth of questions, compiled into one blog post for all two of you who might be reading this!

Day 4. Which celeb would play your MC?

The narrator of my WIP is sort of an everygirl, and is essentially just an avatar for the reader to project themselves onto. To that end, I spared most of the details of her appearance so that the reader might conjure up their own image of her.

The secondary MC, on the other hand, has a very specific set of physical attributes defined in the novel. I described her as a strange beauty with "elven-like features that were angular yet delicate" and hair so red it was "as if Hades himself had lit a pilot light over her head and had forgotten to turn the stove off". I've cycled through various celebrity comparisons in my brain over the course of writing the book, and I think I've finally settled on the love child of Tilda Swinton and a young David Bowie.

They're kind of the same person anyway TBH

Day 5. Be honest: How's your world building?

One of the earliest critiques I received from a beta reader was my weak world building. The setting of my current WIP is a small town in New Hampshire, and yet I had done nothing to really describe the uniqueness of life in the far Northeast. Sure, there was snowy weather in my book, but exactly what kind of snow? Was it the fluffy kind that feels chewy when you eat it, or the miserable wet kind that leaves residue from the salt-treated sidewalk on your nice leather boots? It took this Southern California native going to New Hampshire over the course of three Christmases and strolling around rural neighborhoods in sub-freezing temperatures to fully absorb the nuanced details of what living there was really like.

It's kind of like that.

So I can confidently say that my world building has improved a great deal from my earliest drafts. I may not have invented a whole new Planetos à la George R. R. Martin in A Song of Ice and Fire, but at least my teenagers are now eating lunch in the dead of winter inside an actual cafeteria building instead of outside on a quad because that's all I knew when I was in high school.

Day 6. How do you show diversity in your work?

We're treading dangerously close to spoiler territory, so I'll have to remain tight-lipped on the details of this answer. Admittedly, my cast is almost entirely white (an unfortunate byproduct of it being set in Caucasianland, NH), but I hope to rectify that oversight in future novels. What I can say is that this book is firmly rooted in the LGBTQ+ genre, so hopefully some underrepresented voices will find enjoyment with my story.

It's gonna bE FABULOUUUUUUUUUSSSS

Step 50: Confess (Day 3)

Day 3 of #authorconfession! Today's prompt(o)***:

What is the best compliment you've had?

This is a tough question to answer, because A) I haven't shown my WIP to too many people yet, and B) validation often comes disguised in the form of a rejection. I've had several agents read my full and compliment my strong writing and voice even when they've passed on the MS, and my current WIP was selected for #PitchWars, which says to me that someone out there felt like I had a story worth telling.

I write lies for a living. Please buy my lies.

Still, I haven't had anyone say in no uncertain terms "ZOMG BEST BOOK EVAR!!!11oneeleven", and the longer it's been since I mailed out that first agent query, the less confidence I have in my own storytelling abilities. Some days I wonder if I'm chasing a dead dream, if my book sucks monkey balls, if I'm wasting my time trying to answer a question no one asked. But then I think about the characters in my story, who live and breath and triumph in my imagination, and I'm compelled to continue moving forward.

So maybe the best compliment I ever received is from myself: Yes, Shea, your story does matter.

***I finally (heh) picked up Final Fantasy XV yesterday. Noctis, Gladiolus, Ignis and Prompto send their regards from my Xbox One.

This .gif about sums up my feelings.

Step 49: Confess (Day 2)

I just got word that an illustration project I've been working so hard on has had its original February 17th deadline pushed back to June. What a relief!

I'M FREEEEEE for now

Which means I can blog without feeling guilty for wasting time hahaha. Onward to Day 2 of #authorconfession:

What is the WORST thing you have written?

Since this is #authorconfession, I confess: A fanfiction.net account I created in 2001 is still in existence to this day. And before you ask, the answer is: No, I will never tell you what the account name is. I'm taking that shit with me to the grave. It's filled with a handful of Star Wars Expanded Universe fanfiction focusing on my favorite EU characters (Jaina Solo and Wedge Antilles) and one mushy Rurouni Kenshin fic. If you want to do the digging yourself and see just how bad of a writer I was as recently as 2008, by all means, go for it. But to quote the great Jedi Master Yoda: "If into the [depths of Shea's fanfiction.net account] you go, only pain will you find."

And that's not even the worst fanfiction I've ever written. When I first got into the Star Wars EU back in 1997, I used to write scenes featuring Jaina Solo by hand in the back pages of my notebook during class, and I'm sure I still have them laying around in a storage box somewhere because I'm a hoarder and can't bring myself to throw anything away no matter how awful it is. I'll give myself a pass on those ones, though, on account of my being 12 years old at the time.

Looking back, some of my writing at the height of my fanfiction.net days still retains some of its charm. I made a ton of rookie mistakes, to be sure--purple prose, beat tags with EVERY line of dialogue, repetitive adjective use (seriously how did I not know of the existence of a freaking thesaurus)--but I can see the influence of my favorite author, Aaron Allston, in those early works that I still carry with me in my writing to this day.

I also drew copious amounts of bad fan art, but that's another beast entirely.

On a more recent note, I was digging through my hard drive in search of who-the-fuck-knows-what and I stumbled upon my very first draft of my current WIP. NGL, I almost died of secondhand embarrassment reading just a few short paragraphs, and I cringe just thinking about the wannabe author I was trying to portray myself as in that early draft. Thankfully, I've improved in leaps and bounds in just a few short years I think, but it's humbling to recall just how awful a writer I was not even that long ago.

All I gotta say is, thank GOD for beta readers.

Step 48: Confess (Day 1)

Now that I've returned to the Twitterverse, I ran across a fun little game J.M. Sullivan is hosting called #authorconfession for the month of February. Since I'm in dire need of things to blog about other than the fact that the world going to hell in a hand basket, I thought I'd expand on the short answers I posted on Twitter here. It goes a little something like this:

Every day asks the author a different question, and today's prompt is: 

What do you listen to while writing?

My answer? Nothing. Not. A. Damn. Thing. I have to write in near-total silence in order to concentrate, and in the past I've even taken to using ear plugs to block out the sound of birds chirping and the husband playing Fallout 4. And it's not because I'm a heathen who hates music; on the contrary, I love singing badly at the top of my lungs to my favorite tunes. I even have a "Book Playlist" on Spotify with songs that correspond to certain chapters of my books, because obviously there is plenty of music out there that inspires me.

But I have a tendency to get distracted easily, to the point where sometimes I have to pause a song just to write a tweet, and oftentimes I'll interrupt my own half of a conversation just to belt out an awesome jam that came on the radio in my car. Oddly enough, I don't have this problem when I'm drawing; throw on a good playlist or a Ken Burns documentary in the background, and I can zone out for hours on end. It probably has something to do with using different parts of my brain (or lack thereof, in the case of doodling) when I'm working.

That said, there are a few songs out there that I listen to when I'm re-reading certain chapters of my WIPs, and one in particular has me obsessed to the point that I fear if I listen to it one more time I'll get sick of it. It's a cover of David Bowie's Life on Mars? performed by Aurora for HBO's Girls soundtrack (get some tissues ready):

Step 47: Leave The Past In The Past

I learned a few tough lessons last year, and one experience in particular had me fleeing social media for months on end (hence why I haven't posted here in ages). The trust I had placed in people whom I thought I could confide in had been betrayed, and as a result I failed to uphold the trust others had placed in me. It was a lose-lose situation all around, and those bridges dumpsters have regrettably been burned.

An apt metaphor for 2016 on the whole.

It took me several months, but I've finally pruned most of my social media accounts to remove any vestiges of whatever might threaten to remind me of that awful period in my life. Not because I harbor any ill will toward anyone, but because I live in a perpetual state of anxiety and the thought of imposing my online presence on anyone who wants me to go die in a fire turns my insides into knots. If for whatever reason I unfollowed or unfriended anyone reading this by mistake, please consider sending me a message and I will correct my error.

Feel free to slide right on into my DMs.

Now that that's out of the way, I have... well, really nothing new to report. I'm working on another illustration project at the moment that will be announced sometime in the near-ish future, and it's all very glamorous work (and by glamorous, I mean me sitting in my studio hovering over my tablet for hours on end and drinking copious amounts of coffee). I'd like to think that I'll have much more to write about soon considering everything I have queued up in the pipeline, but we all might die in a nuclear fallout tomorrow, so who knows. At the very least, you can find me posting on Twitter and Facebook once again.

Still better than Donald Trump's Twitter account.

Step 46: Give The Middle Finger To 2016

I think we all can agree that 2016 has been... somewhat of a shitshow.

2016 WYD???

A lot has happened since my last post in August, and none of it is particularly interesting so I'll spare my readers the details. But just yesterday I read the news that Ron Glass of Firefly fame had passed away, and it was on a morning just like this a few months ago that I was drawing a line illustration of Shepherd Book for the Serenity Adult Coloring Book published by Dark Horse, musing that Book was perhaps my favorite character of the series.

The sky is yours, Shepherd.

Speaking of books, there's been some developments with my own, but I'm not at liberty to discuss that right now. What I will say is that I finished writing a second book since August, and I haven't quite recovered from it yet. I didn't expect to become so emotionally invested in the lives of people conceived in my head, and I'm surprised at how much their fates are weighing on my shoulders. I'm sure a lot of artists struggle to separate their personal lives from their work, and the affection I carry for my characters hovers annoyingly between fantasy and reality. Perhaps I'm living vicariously through them as a means to escape the ugliness of society and my own unfulfilling existence, but I better start writing something more upbeat here pretty soon before the fictional landscape I've invented begins to mirror something altogether more awful--in the real world, and in my heart.

Here's a cute .gif of Bowie to cheer you me up.