Damn Nature, You Crazy

The past week's been kind of weird.

The outside world (which I do venture out into, on occasion) went a little wacky, which I'm sure many of you noticed. It seemed, for a while, like something kind of ominous was sweeping in. I half expected something to come crawling out of the fog whenever I walked to my car, and it didn't help that the neighbor's dog has developed a love for howling at the worst possible moments.

I walked outside the other morning on my way to work, after the world kind of seemed like it was being run under a sloppy gaussian blur filter for three days.

It was weird, scary, and something moved in the treeline so I just kind of got in the car and sped away.

But apparently the world finally got sick of the four inches of snow on the ground that day, because when I came home 8 hours later, it looked like this:

So we're warm now? Cool, let me take off the coat I JUST spent 90 dollars on.

And now, of course, we're sitting butt deep in snow again because January is being one indecisive and moody pain in the ass. 

But it kind of made up for it yesterday afternoon. I was running late when I pulled into driveway, and it was only made later when I squealed to a halt and made full-on eye contact with the biggest screech owl I'd ever seen, just chilling in a tree that hangs over my "this is where I turn around" spot. I had three devices that had cameras in them when I saw it, so of course I hurried up and grabbed the one with no zoom and least responsive interface. (I'm looking at you, iTouch.)

I've never seen an owl outside of a zoo before, so this is a pretty big deal to me. It flew away as soon as I snapped this picture and I chased after it for like thirty seconds and called Dan on the phone to scream about  how I just saw an owl and no one would ever believe me. Then I remembered that I was, in fact, running late.

Well running later.

This is an inaccurate representation of how big my driveway is, because this was really ten feet away.

This stuff probably isn't that interesting to you guys. You know it's cold and knowing how everyone else's lives seem much more interesting, you people are probably swimming in owls.

The truth is, I'm having a hard time.

Oh, Rena.

Joss Whedon made a speech once, years ago, where he gave his famous line about why he writes strong female characters. "Because you're still asking me that question." It's a line we all know, and everyone loves it. I love it, I've always loved it. I grew up watching his stuff, like many of you, and who knows how it's impacted me.

But, Rena is not Buffy.

She does not kick butt. She does not fight vampires, she does not slay both metaphorical and real demons. She is not a character who, upon getting dropped in another world, brushes herself off, grabs a sword and goes "let's do this."

What she is, is a character who grows.

My intent with her was (is?) to show her growth as a person and a character over the course of the story. I very much wanted her to be a person who makes mistakes, who cries, who feels so helpless and weak that she lashes out. I wanted her to feel real and flawed. My intent, at least, was to show her as this person, and then have her change and grow into a strong and capable (as much as I hate this term) young woman, so that by the end of the story you feel like you watched her grow up.

The problem, I've discovered, with making a fifteen-year-old girl super realistic and flawed was this:

Nobody likes fifteen-year-old girls.

"I don't like Rena at all. She cries all the time and she doesn't do anything, things get done to her."

I finally got my critique, you guys, and while it was the criticism I needed, it was far from the criticism I wanted. 

But one of those is more important than the other. And no matter how awesome my main character gets in the second half of a story, if nobody reads that far, it doesn't mean anything. But if I change the essence of my main character, how many Jenga pieces can get pulled out of this tower before it all comes crashing down?

Uncomfortable truths, man. I kind of knew this was the case. I just put off devising a solution until someone else told it to me, and let's just say I had a couple days of soul-crushing existential crises when I realized that I had two choices in front of me:

1) Stop writing this story. Like I said in my first entry, it's almost a decade old. Maybe it's a dead horse. Maybe I'm too emotionally attached. Maybe I'm too blind to the flaws.

2) Keep writing this story. If I give up now, if I don't finish this, then where do I draw the line in the future for giving up on a project? I've never finished anything of note before. Maybe I should finish this just to say that I finished it, to go forward with the knowledge that I finished one "novel," so why not finish some more?

Why I'm Choosing What I'm Choosing

It's not easy to look at your own work when presented with such a huge substantial flaw as your main character being an untenable whinging blob of inactivity. Your writing is a reflection of yourself and hearing that there's something so fundamentally and basically wrong with it hurts.

But it's how you grow and keep moving forward as a writer. If no one was willing to tell you the things you need to hear then you'd stew in your own egoistic juices and likely never accomplish anything in your life.

It's human nature, I think, to rebel against advice you don't like. "How can they know better than me?" is, for myself at least, one of the most frequent thoughts I've had regarding just about anything - but particularly, my writing. Human nature to get angry, to want to plug your ears and shut it out, to put a tablecloth over that huge elephant and pretend it's a coffee table. Human nature is, much like real nature, pretty crazy.

I am not discarding this project. Not in January, not after I've made up my mind that this will be what I do this year. If nothing else I'll be able to look at myself in December and think "well, self, you finally finished something."

It may not be Tolstoy, but it'll be something.

But first, I'm gonna go and delete a few tears from some scenes. It's a start, and I think that in the past 48 hours I've cried enough for both myself and Rena for quite some time.