because I am incapable of writing anything cute
The beach at False Cape State Park, Virginia, beneath an approaching storm. Photo credit J Snow.
It hasn’t even been a month yet since the awe-inspiring joy of visiting Bryce Canyon, and wow, it has been a wild few weeks. Less than a month ago, I sent my completed revision of my Crane Moon world WIP to two readers, one of whom has read my other work and one of whom has not. One of them tore through 500 pages in two days; the second told me it was “heart-wrenching” and bittersweet and hit so hard.
Which means…it’s working?
Did I get close to what I was aiming for? An epic cultivation fantasy, focused on parents and children with points of view of both. An established couple learning what love looks like after years together, and their adult children discovering who they are. A beloved home that’s under attack, a fragile world that’s in constant danger, where not everything can be saved.
It might work. It might make readers feel things.
I got the second reader’s initial feedback while I was sitting in a plane waiting to take off to visit a sick parent on the other side of the country (and I am in the US, so it’s a big country). I couldn’t write for over a week (still haven’t, actually, except for this), because I’m not a great traveler at the best of times and I’m emotionally and physically exhausted. I’m just grateful that I have the flexibility and resources to be able to do it right now; I’m grateful that I was able to see my parents and my family. It’s a good time for me to be thinking about this story again, about family and home and how things change, how we are constantly changing and shaping one another.
Like a lot of people past the early stages of adulthood, I’m both a parent and a child, and I think being in that space where you are both, the years rushing past as your child grows up, being the child that loves aging parents while you become one yourself, made me want to try to do this, even though narratively it’s proven very difficult. They’re two different phases in life, two different stories, but in both life and fantasy they are happening at the same time and they are shaped by one another, one becomes the other, and somehow I wanted to get to that.
It would be easier to separate them into two books, in many ways, or to give up telling one story in favor of the other. But I got it to the point where someone read it compulsively for two solid days, and someone else found it satisfying and heart-breaking, and that means something real happened somewhere!
This Month’s Reading
My favorite this month was actually a YA duology from the Avatar: The Last Airbender world, The Rise of Kyoshi and The Shadow of Kyoshi. Let me say that I will have more novels about Kyoshi ANYTIME, F.C. Yee, and thanks to AmEricaNo for recommending it! It was perfect for my mental space during these travels and afterwards, and I loved the moral complexity of the Avatar that’s hinted at here, especially near the very satisfying end of the second book. Since it’s YA (and pretty young YA, I think? Though I don’t read a lot of YA so I can’t be sure) some of the themes and relationships I wanted more of were relatively lightly touched, but it was a perfect read for my mood nonetheless. I also enjoyed A Dark and Drowning Tide, a historicalish sapphic fantasy entwined with a murder mystery, and A Kiss of the Siren’s Song, by E.A.M. Trofimenkoff, a sapphic seagoing fantasy with hidden identities and dark magic. I’m back now to re-reading C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken, which at this point is practically a comfort read for me, and as always I’m awed by the character and descriptive work. I’m sure you will hear many times from me how much I’m looking forward to The Sovereign, book 3 in the trilogy, which will come out in September!