I think I see blue sky outside my window! (Another problem: I never leave the apartment. It is too hot outside and I was sick for that first week and couldn't handle it at all and now I'm not even trying. Sigh.)
oh man that is like everything I tried to write as a teenager ever. I have this problem where I want to write the kinds of books I loved as a kid and also wanted to write as a kid but now I'm older and Know Things about Government and People and The Importance of Logical Worldbuilding and It Is Lazy To Just Write Generic Fantasy Without Having Some Interesting Underpinnings and scale is hard because it's like look, I just want to write about these two countries, but it's not like it's they're Haiti and the Dominican Republic, obviously they have neighbors that probably play some kind of role in their international interactions, and if you have magic you don't necessarily have the excuse of "well people usually don't travel more than ten miles away" for keeping things limited and anyway part of the fun of generic fantasy is going to all sorts of different places and Journeys and Stew and you have to be so much cleverer to write this than I thought you did.
I think the exiled queen is a thirteen-year-old trapped in the country of another court that's claiming to protect her and fight to reclaim her throne but is really just pillaging her country for its resources. Also probably there are dragons. I like dragons. I'm thinking male, nineteen-year-old protagonist. Which is interesting, because I don't usually write guys (you know how there's on-again-off-again discussions about the level of realism necessary in literature, like "why do people never pee" or "should you be aware of your female main character's hormonal cycle and work PMS into your book somehow"? I feel like--and you have to keep in mind that I grew up in a house with three other women and a dad who majored in philosophy and likes musicals [and occasionally watched movies with lots of explosions on his teeny-tiny TV in his bedroom because nobody would let him watch them on the big TV in the living room], so poor WP is becoming my "so what do guys really think?" measuring stick, which is pretty accurate because he has interacted with a large cross-section of the male population [football, band, West Point, and now the Army itself, enlisted and officers]--anyway I feel like with writing guys it's a matter of "how often should I mention breasts?" And I tend to write guys with lots of ~*~feelings~*~, which I have been blasted for [turns out they don't overthink things as much], but then again there's that example of the male author writing about a badass female character and having her notice the way her breasts were feeling under her armor or something and ANYWAY, it's not the sort of thing any woman would pay attention to unless it hurt, so if men can get published writing about women who pay too much attention to their breasts then a woman should be able to get published writing about men with too many feelings.)
...what was I originally talking about? Oh right. Nineteen-year-old male protagonist. Member of foreign court? Maybe like way way down there, like a page. (ooooooh, there's a new movie about Marie Antoinette out told entirely from the perspective of a servant at Versailles, and I WANT TO SEE IT.) Not actually a noble. Starts trying to help out the queen in order to impress a girl? Though obviously the girl he'll get with at the end is a freedom fighter from the queen's country who hates him on principle when they first meet. Also there are dragons.
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sarken
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-07 03:57 pm (UTC)I think I see blue sky outside my window! (Another problem: I never leave the apartment. It is too hot outside and I was sick for that first week and couldn't handle it at all and now I'm not even trying. Sigh.)
oh man that is like everything I tried to write as a teenager ever. I have this problem where I want to write the kinds of books I loved as a kid and also wanted to write as a kid but now I'm older and Know Things about Government and People and The Importance of Logical Worldbuilding and It Is Lazy To Just Write Generic Fantasy Without Having Some Interesting Underpinnings and scale is hard because it's like look, I just want to write about these two countries, but it's not like it's they're Haiti and the Dominican Republic, obviously they have neighbors that probably play some kind of role in their international interactions, and if you have magic you don't necessarily have the excuse of "well people usually don't travel more than ten miles away" for keeping things limited and anyway part of the fun of generic fantasy is going to all sorts of different places and Journeys and Stew and you have to be so much cleverer to write this than I thought you did.
I think the exiled queen is a thirteen-year-old trapped in the country of another court that's claiming to protect her and fight to reclaim her throne but is really just pillaging her country for its resources. Also probably there are dragons. I like dragons. I'm thinking male, nineteen-year-old protagonist. Which is interesting, because I don't usually write guys (you know how there's on-again-off-again discussions about the level of realism necessary in literature, like "why do people never pee" or "should you be aware of your female main character's hormonal cycle and work PMS into your book somehow"? I feel like--and you have to keep in mind that I grew up in a house with three other women and a dad who majored in philosophy and likes musicals [and occasionally watched movies with lots of explosions on his teeny-tiny TV in his bedroom because nobody would let him watch them on the big TV in the living room], so poor WP is becoming my "so what do guys really think?" measuring stick, which is pretty accurate because he has interacted with a large cross-section of the male population [football, band, West Point, and now the Army itself, enlisted and officers]--anyway I feel like with writing guys it's a matter of "how often should I mention breasts?" And I tend to write guys with lots of ~*~feelings~*~, which I have been blasted for [turns out they don't overthink things as much], but then again there's that example of the male author writing about a badass female character and having her notice the way her breasts were feeling under her armor or something and ANYWAY, it's not the sort of thing any woman would pay attention to unless it hurt, so if men can get published writing about women who pay too much attention to their breasts then a woman should be able to get published writing about men with too many feelings.)
...what was I originally talking about? Oh right. Nineteen-year-old male protagonist. Member of foreign court? Maybe like way way down there, like a page. (ooooooh, there's a new movie about Marie Antoinette out told entirely from the perspective of a servant at Versailles, and I WANT TO SEE IT.) Not actually a noble. Starts trying to help out the queen in order to impress a girl? Though obviously the girl he'll get with at the end is a freedom fighter from the queen's country who hates him on principle when they first meet. Also there are dragons.