Eccentric Flower:199911/This title bores me

I am having a crisis of confidence. I still believe I can write. I have to believe I can write, or I have nothing.

But I don't believe I can save this novel. Not at the moment, anyway.

I've been putting off revising it and putting it off and putting it off, because all along I have been worried that I couldn't save it and I didn't want to have to face it.

What's worse is that, given the things people say about my short stories, some of the flaws in this novel - I have to concede it, whether I like it or not - may not be flaws in this particular style of telling things; they may be flaws with my writing in general. And that means -

No, no, I don't want to think about it.

I don't want to be perfect. Honest. I do not have unrealistically high expectations for myself. But do you know what it's like to write the same novel three times, realize it's unsalable, and sit on it ... then finish a completely different novel and realize that it's unredeemable too? What happens when the third story isn't usable either? Do I just keep writing novels for my own enjoyment? What a crock.

Okay. So. This novel. I called it Exchange Student the whole time I was working on it, with the knowledge that I'd have to change the title before I showed it to anyone - too pat. So I called it The Six-Year Alien. No one likes that title. Fine. If you're a regular reader here, you know it as "the Aedie novel" after its main character.

The biggest problem with this novel is that it has almost no forward movement. In fact, it doesn't even have a plot in the conventional sense. My other novel, Quarter Moon, is fairly heavy on plot. Both novels are weak on character - to everyone else.

The problem with character is that I don't want to tell you what books the character reads, what music the character likes, et cetera, because that seems like needless information to me. My characters, unfortunately, reflect my tastes. I really don't care what music you listen to and it is not likely to come up in a conversation with you. In fact, none of your tastes, none of your likes and dislikes, none of the aspects of your daily life, are likely to come up in a conversation with you. Which is why I don't have more conversations. I don't want to talk about day-to-day affairs, and that doesn't leave a hell of a lot.

In my fiction, this means that I am only interested in a character's reactions to the events that take place around her. The character's reactions, to me, define the character's personality. If a character sees someone get shot, there are several things she can do next. Some will walk away and not get involved. Some will call the police. Some will try to administer medical help.

The kinds of games I think of as ideal break-the-ice party games are games that some people would consider too deep and probing for casual acquaintances. Screw your taste in music; would you steal food if you were starving? Do you believe in welfare? These are the things that define you.

Aedie, my central character, is me to an extent, but he has a problem I no longer have: The world has nothing to offer him. He does nothing. He has no entertainment, no interests, no life.

Unlike some of my short story characters who are ciphers (the most common complaint against my stories) because I just didn't bother to make them more real (in 3000 words, why bother?) Aedie is the first time I have deliberately made a character completely detached, completely devoid.

I did a great job. Too good. No one wants to read Aedie. He's sleepwalking through his existence, and it bores the readers.

The problem is, the only forward motion in the book - the "resolution" if you will - is that Aedie goes to an alien world and finally finds a person willing to be interested in him, willing to jump all the hurdles he puts up - and Aedie changes. He becomes interesting. But not enough. Several people who read the manuscript said they didn't see any perceptible change in Aedie from beginning to end. They don't understand that by the end of the book Aedie is doing things he wouldn't have contemplated at the beginning - so obviously I'm not doing it right.

More to the point, Aedie has to sleepwalk through most of the book, because once he improves, my central point is resolved and the book is essentially over. I cannot play that card too soon - but if I don't play it sooner, people will throw the book down in disgust.

I can mitigate this by giving Aedie another human to play off, but Aedie will have to be an unsympathetic character. That's just the way it is. And I'm not sure that will keep people reading.

This is the main reason I'm not sure I can salvage the book.

And all I can think of is, "Poor Aedie. It's not enough that Earth rejects him and Seth isn't very friendly to him - now the readers hate him too." Aedie just wants one good friend, one person who can penetrate his defenses and disarm them. He won't make it easy - every time he does that, people kick him, and he's forgotten how by now.

I can't manage to make people understand this. I'm not sure I ever can. And it stings even more because, as I say, Aedie is me - me at age sixteen.

One of the readers wrote that:

I find Aedie Not Credible. I have known a lot of smart kids, in similar situations to the ones you were in, or are describing here. I don't know any smart kids, no matter how badly they were abused by parents, peers, or culture, who didn't thrive as soon as they were in the company of other smart kids.

What, you mean besides me? Smart kids were worse than dumb kids. Dumb kids were just boring. The smart kids knew enough to actually wound me.

Aedie is bored with anyone dumber than himself - which is most of the world - and wary of anyone smarter than himself. I understand Aedie's point of view. I wish I could find a way to make everyone else understand it as well.

Of course, as I say, there's a crucial difference: I no longer think the world is a horrible place. But I'm thirty-one. As I have said many times, you wouldn't have liked me when I was sixteen.

So: This book is a coming-of-age novel. And one problem with a coming-of-age novel is that some people think it automatically has to involve sex.

And thereby I have discovered that I am a staunch moralist.

I put a sex scene in this book because I had to. It is an important plot point that Aedie have sex with one of the alien species. I wish I didn't feel that way. Because that sex scene is what stopped the writing cold for two months, the longest break in the whole process, and it's obvious from reading the scene that I was uncomfortable with it and I tried to sidestep it.

Aedie is sixteen years old. I have Aedie say near the beginning of the book that he doesn't really notice what size breasts the girls around him have - and four readers said that was not credible. Excuse me? I sure as hell didn't notice breasts when I was sixteen. And I'm glad I didn't.

Aedie is my idea of a typical sixteen-year-old with respect to sex: Curious but somewhat nervous, not rabid about the idea, hasn't tried it yet, not going to lose any sleep over it if he doesn't.

I am told - in no uncertain terms - that this is rather atypical. Well, tough luck. Remember, I'm the person that believes twenty is too young to get married and definitely too young to have a child. I'm the person who didn't have sex until age twenty-five and is really rather happy about that. Sixteen is too damned young.

And, more to the point, any sort of sexual explicitude whatsoever is wrong in a novel intended for teenage readers. Which, I'm told, this apparently is. I thought I was writing a book for adults but was quickly disabused of this notion. Well, you can't tell me to make it a book for teenagers and make it sexier. Those are conflicting drives, to me.

I bet you didn't realize I had this prudish center, did you? What can I say? For adults, all the deviance you can handle. For the kids: Maybe you're old enough to handle it, and that's great, but you're not going to get it from me.

Oh, the problems with this book. I could go on for days. I have a long list.

For example: Seth isn't alien enough, the readers cry. Well, no, it isn't, but if I make it more alien I have to stop and explain everything, and the few times I did that in the book, people complained about all the information they were being fed. I dared to try to make Seth really alien in only two places - language and timekeeping - and neither of those were deemed acceptable the way I did it. Where do the readers want to see alien-ness? In the routines of daily life. And my response, unfortunately, is Aedie's: Who cares? What does it matter how the Sethin cook their food, so long as it's food and I can eat it?

But both Aedie and I, I suspect, like to read stories that no one else is especially interested in reading.

I am not making fun of my brave critiquers. They went above and beyond the call of duty, and their comments are probably all valid and correct. The problem is, underpinning their comments is this fact: This is a book, as it stands now, that is not very interesting for most people to read.

It is, however, very close to being the book I wanted to write.

Ergo, I am either going to have to write things I don't want to write, so I can sell them, or keep writing things which satisfy me but which no one else cares to read.

A rather bleak future, don't you think, for someone who's so dependent upon making words?

This entry is a rant. Despite the comments in it, I haven't given up on rewriting the novel, I am not on the brink of despair, I'm not about to slit my wrists, et cetera.

It's just that I'm faced with a hugely frustrating task and I had to vent all of this spleen - it gets in the way of the editing.

You're perfectly free to ignore everything said here. In fact, it's probably for the best if you do.