Rambling - German Pop Clipper Reference

Not sure who I'm stealing this image from.

Fear of everything, that seems to be my problem.  Not saying that I'm all too different from anyone else in this regard, but it's pretty fucking aggravating that I have allowed it to push me this far into inactivity.

I've written a novel, and I even managed to find the courage to publish it.  This was a terrifying act, of course.  The idea that it might sell well was utterly horrifying; as in such a case I would be subject to attention that I detest and criticism of a kind that only the internet can offer.  Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, selling absolutely no copies of my book was an equally horrifying prospect; to put my efforts out there for inspection and to receive no response would seem to be an indicator of my work's complete lack of any intrinsic value.  Somehow though, I managed to get it done.

As it happens, things turned out more the latter than the former; the book has sold a staggeringly small number of copies.  More frustratingly, its time in the Kindle Select program moved exactly zero.  That's right, in Kindle Select, wherein they quite specifically promote my book for me and aim it specifically at people who might be interested, exactly zero people found it interesting enough to actually get a copy.  It was free.

Now, I've managed to get to the point of having an audio book ready to go.  Late last year I put out a call for voice actresses on reddit and received a good number of interested messages.  Of those interested people, a fair percentage of them even sent readings of the book's first chapter for submission.  I could only pick one of them of course, and I decided to work with Rebecca Bedford.  She's been wonderful to work with, and her enthusiasm for the book has been incredibly helpful.

Yet I'm at a point now where fear brings it all, once again, to a grinding halt.  If I throw the audio book out there and it becomes popular, that's horrifying.  Yet of course, if the audio version doesn't move at all that is equally horrible.  See, if I do nothing, then neither horrifying event can ever occur.

I have specific individuals in my life to thank for this over-riding fear that dictates so many aspects of my life. Fortunately, I've also got a tremendous amount of anger and arrogance to push through the fear.  It takes a lot, mind you, but I think at the moment I'm reaching a point where I can manage to make some progress; that happens every once in a while.  It's my failure, of course, to allow this fear to keep me from seeing my goals become reality.  Why I'm afraid is less relevant than the fact I choose not to overcome it.

Still, at least I've managed to get this far, and I'm going to go further.  By the time this blog entry posts, the audio version of my book should be up and available.  It had damn well better be, anyway.

Rambling - Non-Orbital Entertainment Dragons

Easily one of my favorite cinematic moments.
Powerful, memorable, and few words to muck it up.

Emotion, from the perspective of a writer, is an interesting thing; at once inescapably critical to most kinds of fiction and simultaneously impossible to actually describe.

The kind of fiction I’m talking about, of course, is narrative fiction involving specific characters and intended to make the reader feel certain ways and possibly think about certain things.  More vague, broad, or meta-based fiction might not involve emotion, or might only hint at small amounts of emotion; it might simply describe a fictional world, or the ever-famous mid-millennium book which describes fictional flora and fauna.  Yet nearly any book which tells a story about characters must inevitably involve emotion at some level, most often at its core.  We can’t be fully invested in a story if we don’t care about the characters in its telling, and we can’t really care about them if we don’t understand what they’re going through.  Without emotion, more specifically without the reader’s emotions in empathy for the book’s characters, a fictional narrative is stripped of any power it might have had.

Yet at the same time, emotion is impossible to actually describe.  I can describe what a character looks like to the last exacting detail.  I can describe their environment far and near.  I can detail every political, economic, and cultural movement of their world.  I can even describe every last second of a character’s background if necessary.  None of that, however, has any way of ever describing the emotions that a character, or any other character in their world, goes through.

An emotion is not actually a thing which can be described.  When I feel anguish I know exactly what it is and I can identify it, but I can never describe it to someone else.  I can, of course, say “the anguish was crushing, I barely ate for days,” but that doesn’t describe my anguish.  It only describes my reaction to my anguish.  There is no set of stimuli that I can point to and say “that is anguish,” there is no physical representation of anguish with which other people can identify, and therefore nothing for me to describe.  It’s the same principle as color, really; I have no way of knowing whether or not the color purple I see is the same color that you see.  Just like I can never describe purple without saying “it had a dark purple hue that shimmered bright violet in the right light,” or just “it was purple,” I can never describe an emotion.

So what is a writer to do?  For starters, a character’s reactions are literally everything.  If emotion is the core of a good piece of fictional narrative, yet we can’t describe the emotions themselves, then each character’s reactions to their own emotions are the most important tool in any writer’s skillset.  To overdo it makes the emotion unbelievable or perhaps gives the impression of the wrong emotion.  To underdo it leaves only bland emptiness, and lack of emotion is what kills a story.  Yet if I do things correctly, if my characters react just right, then I don’t have to be able to describe an emotion itself.  If everything is right then a reader will understand the anguish being felt by a character or, in a perfect world, feel an echo of that anguish in response.  When my words work correctly, I don’t have to describe joy, hate, love, fear, anguish, curiosity, depression, or any other emotion that a character goes through; their reactions should tell my reader everything.

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Copyright 2012 by J.L. V'Tar
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