Of Novels and Small Puppies

Well my good friend Gwen (who was my roomie at Viable Paradise XIV) called me out recently on the fact that I haven't posted here in ages, and I PROMISED her that I would make a post today for all my faithful, probably fictional readers. That's not to insult any of you who might be non-fictional readers, it's just that I prefer to go ahead with the assumption that I am shouting words into the void. Less pressure. On occasion, yes, I do find it relaxing to imagine that I'm also just a brain in a jar. But I digress.

The truth is, though I have not been blogging, I have been writing. I have been submitting short stories--very irregularly, and I hope to improve on that. But more than that, I have been raising a litter of puppies, one of whom you can see above in all her rampant adorability (which I seriously did not believe was an actual word when I typed it, but m-w.com assures me that I'm within my rights on that one). The puppies are now all going to new homes save for one, and I feel like I actually have my brain cells back enough to expound.

So, yes, stories. And raising puppies. And finishing my first full-length (over 100K words) novel, actually.

I'm a big fan of NaNoWriMo and nine months ago in November 2011 I decided to try a project that has been dogging my creative brain for many years now. It's a fantasy reboot of the classic Norwegian fairy tale "East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon". The story is quite classical, in fact, since part of it appears to have been inspired directly by the myth of Cupid and Psyche. So I'm re-writing it in the tradition of Robin McKinley's "Deerskin", taking the rough particulars of that tale and placing it into its own fantasy world. A lot of other fairy tales make cameos. A couple of them are not entirely Norwegian, but if they can steal Cupid and Psyche, I can steal a favorite Germanic fairy tale or two. Yes?

Suffice to say that in the grand and colorful tradition of the Norwegian folk tales there are Bear Kings and troll-hags and clever foxes and cunning young women and a young man who gets in over his head. Said young man is a bit of a storyteller and so there are interwoven in the story internal stories in the tradition of Watership Down (one of my top five all-time favorite fantasy novels), that expand upon the mythology of the world and may enlighten the reader or hint at certain story elements.

That's cool, but what's the point, you all ask? Okay, so the point is, since this IS a blog about writing and learning things, I did actually learn a lot in writing this book, both about myself and my methods of working (or not doing so...cat waxing, anyone?) and about writing a novel. I am proposing a project for myself for the next week. Every day I will sit down here at this blog and write about something I learned writing this book.

Why only a week? Because in a week or so, the August session of Camp NaNoWriMo kicks off, and I will be launching myself into the second book, because I couldn't tell all of the story in just one book. So Book One is East of the Sun, Book Two is West of the Moon. There may also be a third book, cautiously entitled The Bear King's Daughter, which will deal with things similar and yet outside of the scope of that particular fairy tale.

Now, I have friends who will lecture me that as a starting writer with no short story credits to my name, I am a fool to be writing a three-book series. I will issue my rebuttal to this tomorrow, in Day One of my Week of Write-Blogging. Stay tuned!