I guess that ends the debate regarding whether this is Taco Tuesday or Tolkein Tuesday…
Its Taco Tuesday!
It’s also the end of this Round of Words in Eighty Days. More about that later…
I distinctly remember my first visit to Taco Bell back in the early 80’s. For my family, that was wildly exotic ethnic food, in spite of the fact that we lived in Colorado with a large Hispanic population. Honestly, there were only two things that stuck out in my mind that classified certain friends as Hispanic. One, they spoke Spanish better than I did, and I was at the top of my class. Two, if I happened to go to their house, I might smell ‘exotic’ food. Looking back at my graduating class, I’m realizing that many of my classmates to whom I assigned any number of adjectives such as ‘popular’ or ‘quiet’ or ‘stuck up’ were also ‘Hispanic.’ At the time, I didn’t notice.
But I digress. Yes, Mexican food existed in Colorado in the eighties. The opening of Taco Bell, though, was exciting, at least for me. My family’s typical dinner consisted of boiled potatoes, a can of veggies heated in the microwave, and some kind of meat with heat applied until it was safe to eat. Yes, we also had interesting things like pineapple chicken, in which case rice was served, and there was the occasional spaghetti night, but meat/potato/veggie was the norm.
The restaurant looked like most other fast food places. I vaguely knew the difference between a taco and a burrito, but when the concept of soft-shell tacos came into the picture, my definition fell apart. Hard shell tacos also fell apart, even though we carefully followed the instructions on the wrapper about ‘how to eat a taco.’
I’m making tacos for the family tonight. OK, technically I’m making my teenager cook tacos, since she needs the practice. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Rambling on about tacos has allowed me to postpone talking about just how bad a week this has been, writing-wise. It’s not a total loss…in fact, it had a few great moments.
I’m getting frustrated with my Incorporeum story because it is too complicated. I had hoped to be finished with the rough draft by now because I planned to return to Kingdom Come in late March. Since I haven’t heard back from the beta readers yet, I put down the Incorporeum story and looked at my list of Kingdom Come stories. I wanted to set in my mind some kind of order for them to come out.
The duology that’s currently with beta readers should be the first out. They are a good introduction to the series. I have several other stories that, for various reasons, I wanted to come later. Then I had a revelation, my 2010 NaNoWriMo story was the perfect one to come after the duology! After that, others fell into place. I have four sets of novels planned, ranging from two to five novels per set. Some are already in rough draft form and sitting on the shelf. Others are outlined. In sorting these out, I could also see where there was an empty slot in a set that needed a particular kind of story.
I dusted off my 2010 NaNoWriMo story and was quite happy. It’s written in three parts. The first two stories stand alone, but the third story brings together characters from the first two. (Polyamorous romance lets me do this.)
Then disaster struck. I wrote this story five years ago, when my writing wasn’t quite as professional as it is today. It was no big deal to correct the two-spaces-after-every-sentence, but the head-hopping was terrible. Sometimes I’d pop into another character’s brain for just a sentence or two before popping right back again. It’s going to be a major rewrite, not just an edit.
The three parts were originally three novellas. Reading through them again, I realize that I did too much telling vs. showing, and some characters aren’t fully fleshed out. In rewriting, each of these stories will probably be a full-length novel. That’s a good thing…it means a trilogy would follow the duology. And the next set would have four books, and the one after that five…
Anyway, this revelation was a major breakthrough, which is a good thing since I’d been writing less and less on my WIP and eventually shelved it. The new WIP, although originally looking like a piece of cake to dust off, is going to be substantially more work, but it will be worth it to have something else to follow up after the duology.
Next week, I’ll post my plan for the next round, which includes sending THE query, a family vacation, and who knows what else.
AmyBeth Inverness 
Throwaway Novels
It’s fun to make a nice colorful water background before drawing the land masses.
I wish I knew what happened to that necklace…it’s one of my favorites…
When I was pregnant in 2007 and my hormones were all over the place, I began writing a story about an arranged marriage on a world where polyamory was the traditional norm. It was fun to explore and to figure out how the dynamics might work in such a situation. I decided that the honeymoon would be a carefully arranged week-long affair where each newlywed spends one day and night with each of their seven new spouses. On the eighth night, all are together.
Writing chronologically, even limiting it to one POV character, this meant seven ‘first time together’ sex scenes in close succession. Not necessarily a bad thing…
Then my brain decided to figure out how these character’s entire lives went. There were important incidents that wouldn’t make great stories on their own. The story about their arranged marriage wasn’t really a complete story either. The book went on the shelf, where it still sits today, unfinished.
See the girl in the picture? That’s the one who was in my womb when I started writing about Kingdom Come.
Later, I started another story about a young woman who leaves her homeworld to come to this polyamorous planet. The society she grew up in is sexually repressive, punishing women for experiencing anything remotely sexual until she is married. It turned into a takeoff of The Story of O and, in my juvenile writer’s brain, I tried to incorporate every plot bunny or stray thought that popped into my head. It also went on the shelf, unfinished, even though I knew how she was going to get her Happily Ever After.
I wrote other stories set on this planet, which I named Kingdom Come. Some were short, some were flash, some were longer. I even wrote other novels. I made a model of the planet, and later re-did it so it fit my stories. In 2010, I participated in my first NaNoWriMo, writing Dogs, Cats, and Allergies that topped out over 100,000 words. Finally, I thought I had my query-ready novel. I even wrote a query for it.
I dabbled with a few other stories that could be ‘the first’ but nothing really worked. Then, for NaNoWriMo 2013 I dusted off a story that I’d only written a thousand words on, and restarted it. That story became the duology of From Earth to Kingdom Come, and it’s perfect as an introduction to the world because it shows a woman from Earth coming to Kingdom Come and learning about the world’s customs, in particular about the romantic complications of polyamory.
Finally finished!
So, what will become of those stories on the shelf? Do I throw them away?
Not necessarily. Dogs, Cats, and Allergies, for example, follows perfectly after From Earth to Kingdom Come. Another story that is finished, but on the shelf, is The Scar, which follows nicely after that.
I had a revelation after finishing the two books that comprise From Earth to Kingdom Come. These stories work well in mini-sets. This is similar to a historical romance writer who writes a set of five books, each centering on a different sibling as they each find their HEA (happily-ever-after.) The minor difference is, with polyamory you never know who or how many lovers will end up in a relationship. The major difference is that you don’t necessarily get a HEA in every single book. Each set delivers an emotionally satisfying ending, but book 1 might have A, B, & C start a romance with D, E, & F, but in the end B & D don’t get along. However, it is still a complete story, with characters going through a life transition or finding out something about themselves. In another story in the same set, C & F might get back together in a new combination.
I know that the Kingdom Come novels will reach a culmination point that loosely ties many of the stories and characters together. It involves this bit of flash I wrote several years ago, call The World is Not Blue. But the series doesn’t have to end there.
Some of the stories I’ve written will never see the light of day, and that is exactly as it should be. But even those stories have great worth. I couldn’t have written From Earth to Kingdom Come without first writing the stories that took me through the worldbuilding that is necessary when writing plausible Science Fiction. Although the Kingdom Come stories center on relationships and romance, they are solidly SciFi in that they are an extrapolation of trends in our known universe, exploring how certain distinct changes and differences in both technology and culture affect the humans who participate in that universe.