Skip to main content

Meet the Muses: Origin: Black

This month marks the fifth birthday of my muse, Black, from "Blacker Than Black."

It was in the early fall of 2006 when I found a submissions-call for an anthology with a "Red Light District" theme. A fellow writer had challenged me to write something new and different, completely removed from anything I'd done before. Up until that time the bulk of my writing revolved around an epic fantasy which, these days, I fondly call the Trunk Novel.

Okay, I remember thinking. Something completely different. The wheels churned in my head, as I visualized the divergences and extrapolated.


Nano found me writing a story about a streetwalker. A member of a slightly post-apocalyptic society's underbelly, who sells to the upper-crust elite. I wrote in first-person to obscure the gender of the narrator. And I wrote in present tense for a number of reasons -- mainly to engage the reader and distract from the aforementioned obscuring, but also to challenge myself to do it and do it well, and break out of the doldrums of writing in the past tense for so long.

It wasn't easy. Nothing about writing BTB was easy. I wrote every sentence twice during that first NanoWrimo stint. If I wasn't slipping back into past tense, then I would find myself writing in third person. Never mind the struggles with finding the right wording or phrasing or approach, so that gender identifying pronouns were avoided.
I've heard it said that first person is the tool of the infant writer, the artist who has not yet discovered how to write well. I'm inclined to disagree. I see it as one of those tools that is easy for the beginner to get their hands on. The sheer volume of what you can find out there, amateur quality written this way, doesn't change the fact that the tool is capable of refined use, capable of crafting beauty.

At any rate, Black the Nightwalker was born from a frenzy of fifty-thousand words. It started out with the intention of being a short story, but it never stopped unfolding. There's more to this, Black kept saying. Keep going. Which is precisely what the muse-slave did, of course. And why the story now sits at full novel length. With a sequel on the drawing board.

It was a difficult story to edit, thanks to its myriad unorthodox details. Some who read it reacted with, "what are you doing writing in first person? Only amateurs do that." Others reached the second chapter, discovered the gender still wasn't clarified, and freaked out on me. Too many simply made assumptions about the narrator's gender through the first chapter based on Black's observation that the vampire john appears male.
It was an interesting exercise, with beta readers seeing what they wanted to see. The psychologist in me had a field day with it.

Black, sadly, doesn't make it easy for the reader by manifesting any cliche gender behaviors. This detail is one that I refined and honed through the rewrite and editing processes, long before the story hit the desk of Riptide's editors.

Have I mentioned I love playing with reader assumptions and socio-cultural conventions? I am an Evil Writer.
Do I hide the truth deliberately? Of course I do. Again, I am the Evil Writer.
But seriously, who walks around thinking in their head, yep, I'm [this gender] and my sexual orientation is [this]. Don't know a single person who does that, unless they have some major identity issues. Let's face it. You look at the people around you, you acknowledge beauty when you see it; you acknowledge flashes of sexual attraction when they occur. Contrary to the stigmas that currently exist in our society and culture, none of that actually defines your gender, and without that parameter, none of it defines your 'sexual orientation' as set forth by society, either.
Oops. So cruel of me, isn't it.

As a result of these details, Black's story isn't one for the faint-hearted reader. It was a struggle, finding it a good home, though no less difficult than it was spending years fashioning it into a well-written tale. Riptide is the best home Black could have. This story was probably decades ahead of its time five years ago when I began writing it, and I expect its unconventional nature is still a few years in advance of acceptable.

Still, it will touch some. Those who need this story to be voiced, who've sat in silence all this time while it wasn't written...
I hope you like Black as much as I do.
And for those that will embrace Black as wholeheartedly as I have, I will take the heat and the criticism and the vitriol that will doubtlessly accompany it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

And the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Futuristic/Sci-Fi Goes To...

*clears throat* Drum roll, please. In a three-way tie for first place, Dark Edge of Honor. My thanks to Aleks Voinov the Best Co-Author Ever (and CONGRATS too, Darth Vader -- you rock), Deb Nemeth the Editor of Awesome, and all the very professional staff at Carina Press. Cue the Snoopy Dancing, Streamers, Confetti Parade and Sundry Noisemakers.

Meet the Muses: Origin: Mike

Mike is my character from the soon-to-be-released 'Dark Edge of Honor.' I’ve been acquainted with a number of different veterans and soldiers through the years, but there was one specifically—a person I don’t know, and never met—that sparked the beginnings of this story and was the avatar of the spirit behind him. Late in 2009, I stumbled rather deliberately upon the website of photojournalist Michael Yon and delved into the dispatches from his 2005 embed with deployed troops in Iraq. One of them stopped me in my tracks. Entitled “Gates of Fire,” (click here for the link to Yon's full dispatch) it recounted an incident involving the Deuce Four’s Lt. Colonel Kurilla and Command Sergeant Major Prosser which Yon witnessed, camera in hand.

My Mini-Vacation

I'm taking all of next week off from my regular day-job so that I can celebrate DEoH's release-- Snoopy-Dancing and Grinning Like an Institutionalized Loon. Without scaring the customers. It's not really  a vacation, because I'm still working, after a fashion. If it were a real vacation, I wouldn't be staying at home, that's for sure. If I could take a real  week's vacation, I'd be here: Best View Ever, Bora Bora Hammock. However, I'm not. I'm in my little writer corner all week long, availing myself to fans and readers and bloggers and such, doing all the marketing and promo stuff that a good little author does. [Yes, Good Little Author. Pat me on the head and give me a cookie now!] But I think I'll keep this picture handy. As my desktop background or something, perhaps. Because, woohoo, that's gorgeous ain't it? They have restaurants with extreme al fresco dining, where the tables and chairs are in the water. One d