
"The Life Erotic" with Hunter Cole.
Discussion, musings, diatribes, and mad scribblings
Hey! Thanks for stopping by my journal - You got a nice journal here!
Good luck with your writing!
diffidentAn Open Letter To The People of Earth:
While I would like all of my posts, my novels, my letters, even my normal dialogue to contain more quips and quotes than quacks and quirks... I want my epitaph to be an epigram. Something like... "Hunter Cole was a merry old soul who typed one line at a time. Before being buried, and as he was carried, he finished the last few lines."
Anyway. Before I get off on a tangent - as I am wont to do - I should state that this post, in my opinion, may contain themes, ideas, and emotions that are: depressing, sad, anger, and oppression. All done with sock puppets. No, just kidding. I'm really serious. This is a "dark" post. My super identity has been reborn as "The Dark Hunter".
My quandary, it seems, is that I made somewhat smooth sailing through the first 40,000 of my novel (if, by smooth sailing, you understand it to mean constantly taking on water and slowly sinking).
Things were going good. My characters were happy, sexy, fun and inspiring.
Then... What happened? Now they're old, crockery, mean drunks. Figuratively speaking, of course. Although *I* am still inspired by the story, my characters seem to have gone fucking bonkers on me. They're not funny, witty, or sexy. They're being very, very difficult.
Sure, I threatened them. "Look what happened to (mysterious character that was killed off with one fell swoop of my fingers on the guillotine-like keyboard)... Is that what you want." I waggled my eyebrows. I shook my fist to the sky. I got drunk and passed out in the ditch in front of their imaginative house. It was pitiful.
So there we stand. 40,000. And where's the romance? Where's the erotica? Although I haven't focused on anything of substance in my blog since... oh, the beginning. I still consider myself an erotica writer. With elements of comedy and sci-fi (sometimes). But without romance, I don't find it funny, sexy, or ... well, I guess it IS still Sci-Fi. But the sci-fi elements on their own aren't what interest people in the story. They want witty, three-dimensional characters. They want sexy, exciting love scenes. They want inventive soliloquies delivered with passion by characters draped in elegance and smothered with irony. Well, really, they just want sex. And clever stuff in-between it.
Oh, woe, what is an author to do? What can save the day. Should I toss it aside in frustration like Nabokov - hey, this is my blog, I can liken myself to whoever I prefer! - only to pick it up at some point in the future and make it even better.
Should I just WRITE THROUGH IT? I seem to have been doing that, and that seems to be what got me to this point. As I look over the past few pages, I think to myself "Blah". I don't know about writing through it from here.
I believe that my plan is going along the lines of "I will start charting a better course, and start in with some excellent writing NOW... Then when I go back over the story, I will rewrite ANY section that needs it to be more exciting, fun, and sexy." That sounds easy enough, although I think it'll be a bit of work.
What about you? Surely you've been here. (Not you, the other Shirley). Certainly you've discovered the secret to eternal life, only to say "Oh fuck! That's not what I was looking for - I just wanted fun characters" and toss it aside. Or... Something more exciting?
So, let me know what you think...
And now... The Choose-Your-Own-Hunter-Adventure!
Should he:
1. Start writing with renewed vigor now and fix the rest on rewrite.
2. Start rewriting now, in the hopes that by the time I fix the last sections it will gear up towards a climatic and dramatic and sexy/funny/sci-fi/sock puppet showdown ending!
3. Get drunk and throw the figurative script in the proverbial trash can?
4. Something entirely different!
-Hunter
Chase your 'pov character' up a tree and let the 'antagonist character' throw 'gummy bears' at him or her (or vice versa).
First of all, check out this hilarious post: http://zette.blogspot.com/2005/10/author-versus-character.html