What I'm Working On Now

I decided to challenge myself in February, to write 40,000 words and hopefully finish my current project, Stormwright (or possibly titled The Lightning Tide, I dig the latter a little more but Stormwright is easier to type when I talk about it).

It was something I sat down to write several months ago on a whim and figured "I'll just write this to please myself and we'll see where it goes." I said to myself, "you know those stories where mermen are ugly? Obviously, mermaids find that ugliness hot. What if, instead of a mermaid's daughter living in the small town, what if it was the mermaid's son?"

I got a lot of sparkle out of it. The protagonists were so cute I could kiss them. The worldbuilding was the perfect mix of mermaid mythology, folklore, and groundedness. I didn't tell anyone about it, I just wrote it. It's totally different from my usual while also being exactly my jam. Nevertheless, I put it down to play with other toys. After all, I hadn't intended to do anything serious with it.

Out of the blue, I got an itch for something involving sharks and shark gods and realized, I could apply it to Stormwright. I finally mentioned it to a couple friends, and the response was universally "omg yes!" so I figured, why not finish it?

Note, I picked almost all the teen's names off a "top baby names" list for about 1995/2000, and it sounds so much more like a fantasy book than any fantasy I've ever written (I never tire of ways to have people mispronounce Niamh. Never.)

Gavin: an unknown mermaid seduced his father and left Gavin on the doorstep some months later. The merrows are endlessly speculative about who his mother is, but as far as he's concerned his mother is human and the other one can rot. He keeps to himself too much to be "the weird kid" but he's sure everyone thinks he's the weird kid (no teenager really considers that no one thinks about them very much). He has zero awareness that as an unmarried shark-merrow, he's something of a hot commodity among rich merchants looking to add a second husband or consort to their household, since most are promised in marriage contracts during childhood. If told, he would make a rude noise because it is cold and wet down there and fuck that.

Also, I saw the joke about how male protagonists curse a lot because rawr that's what dudes do, and I noticed Gavin curses way more than Niamh does. He curses almost as much as I do. As far as I know, I am neither a teenage boy nor a male author, so I don't know what this says about me. Other than I have yet another book where I will have to go back and clean up the language.

Niamh: a witch and the daughter of Mairi Faulkner, a huntress of considerable renown who lives for roaming the earth and killing shit. Niamh, on the other hand, has all the makings of an ass-whomping witchy warrior like mom, but what she really wants is to be a hedge witch and settle down in some town and cook potions and get up into everyone's business.

Instead, she follows mom to a small island that lies next to a merrow empire where things are rapidly falling apart. The merrow queen doesn't have an heir, and she really, really needs one. Problem is, the mystics--the stormwrights--that would choose the next queen can't come to a consensus. Public opinion favors the queen's eldest daughter, who is still a broken woman after having to kill her lover, Alsztrate, a stormwright who ravaged the empire in the way only a jilted mermaid with the power to call maelstroms could. But the field is wide open and there are plenty of other women with enough political or monetary clout to make a serious bid for the throne and probably shatter the empire in the process. Never mind the queen's youngest prince consort, scheming behind the throne.

In short, the merrow queen thinks Alsztrate is back, and is pretty sure that she:
1) Needs her to reach a consensus about who is going to succeed one of the most successful conquerors and peacemakers in nearly a millenia
2) Needs to kill one of the most powerful stormwrights in existence before she finishes what she started

I spent far too much mental energy stitching things together, going back from my brilliant first scene and rearranging everything to be more streamlined, to fit the changed plot, to maintain some of my old work and I still ended up leaving about 20,000 words on the floor that I may or may not cannibalize later. I'm now sitting at about 38,000 words total and while the form is still giving me fits I'm going to try to power ahead and get through the rest and fix everything in post. I've spent two weeks "fixing" and wanting to cry about how it will never be right and all I'm left with are the ugly, functional bits instead of the great sparkly bits (not true, I am mostly left with the long, long discussions of language and culture that will also have to be cut, sigh). I haven't even gotten to a big ball scene! Or a big battle! How will I live without endless digressions on mermaid fashion and embroidered flying dolphin or leviathan motifs!?

Mostly, I am really, really sad about dropping thousands upon thousands of words wherein our teenagers are more Scooby and the Gang than they are pawns in political machinations. Niamh is just so bright and earnest and wobbly about her place in the world, and Gavin is just so smart and sensitive and waiting to get hurt/shut out that they play against each other brilliantly and spend 90% of their time being intellectual dorks and 10% confirming each other's worst fears without realizing it. And Gavin's friends! They are so cute too! And in over their heads! I could spend two hundred thousand words on them hanging out and doing lots of nothing important adorably!