I’ve got many years of writing experience under my belt and I’m pretty comfortable with my process, so I didn’t have any problem answering him, “If I did that, then I wouldn’t make any progress at all,” and continuing on with my day. But if I’d received that sort of advice as a new writer, unsure of myself and what I was doing? Just the idea makes me shudder.

I thrive under the pressure of a deadline. Give me a goal, even an insane one, and I’ll be stepping up to bat trying to figure out a way to accomplish it before you’ve even finished speaking. I once tried to write 50,000 words in a day, just to see if I could. (I made it to 16k and decided I wanted food and sleep more than I wanted to achieve some arbitrary ambition) But without a goal to propel me and keep me typing away?

I web surf. I catch up on my TV shows. I knit. What I don’t do is write. I need that pressure to keep me going, keep me moving forward, keep me choosing to write when there are so many other ways to squander my time that require much less effort.

The prevalence of this attitude that tracking progress, setting goals, and keeping yourself accountable is a bad thing has bewildered me since I first encountered it, but I ran into a situation today that I think may be what people fear when they give this advice. Things snowballed on top of one another for me this morning and before I knew it it was almost lunch time and I hadn’t written a word. Every time I thought about writing my chest clenched a little bit tighter and another burst of adrenaline clawed through my system. I was staring at the clock practically hyperventilating in my seat, and every time I started to think about putting words to paper, all that came to mind was, “Oh God, I have to write three thousand words a day for the rest of the month in order to finish this book when I want to. It’s 10am and I haven’t written anything. I will never make it. I’m not going to make it today, and I’m not going to finish this book on time, either. It’s too late. It’ll never happen.”

It’s a truly awful state to be in, and if this is what people are imagining others devolving into when they give the advice not to set goals, I can understand it at least a little. It’s not a productive state of mind, and does far more harm than good. But it’s not a reason to not to set them.

The problem comes, I think, when people get in a mindset where they can’t reevaluate goals. When I realized the state I was getting myself into, I didn’t try to force myself through it. That would have done more harm than good. I took a step back and said. “Okay, you know what? Sanity is more important than word count. I’m giving myself the day off.”

Gnothi Sauton. Know thyself. That’s is the part that’s important. Not the setting or abandoning of goals, but the ability to look at what you’re doing and evaluate whether it works for you or not, instead of stubbornly forcing yourself down the road you think you ought to take, when all it ever does is lead you to a dead end. I know that goal setting is vital to my process the same way I know that phase drafting, which everyone seems to be getting excited about these days, would be lethal to it. Does that mean that every time someone mentions the technique, I suggest that they’d be better off pantsing it?

Of course not. There are as many ways to write a book as there are people writing them, and what works for me may not work for everyone else, or even anyone else. It’s my process — that’s all.

I think a vital part of learning to write is learning what works for you, and what doesn’t, and too the ability to reevaluate when circumstances change. And it’s just as important that we let others do the same. One True Way-isms hurt more people than they help.

No, the question that I hate to hear, that I absolutely dread, is “What’s your book about?” Arrgh! Bad enough that we writers are expected to condense tens of thousands of words of story into a few pages for our synopses, or a few lines for our blurbs. Now laymen expect us to be able to spout out a pithy one-liner that will adequately convey to them the story that’s in our heads? I don’t know about any of you — but I can’t do it!

This morning, I told a coworker that I started writing on a new book this weekend, and this was the first question out of his mouth. Now, for all that I’ve just started, I feel I have a fairly solid grasp of what this story is and what it’s going to be about. But in order to convey to him what’s in my head, I’d have had to sit down with him for an hour. Not exactly an appropriate answer for an early-morning run to the cafeteria.

If we’d had the time, I’d have told him that it’s about the choices we make without even knowing it, and how the repurcussions of those decisions can shape the rest of our lives. It’s about learning to love — others, yes, but mostly learning to love ourselves, flaws and all. I’d have told him that it’s heavily based on the lore of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Enoch, and other apocrypha, and that it’s influenced by the steampunk genre and the Hero’s Journey structure.

If I’d had the time to tell him, and the time to prepare, I could have shared a glimpse of this story that’s growing in my head. Instead, I stammered out, “It’s about fallen angels. Kind of,” and kicked myself for the rest of the morning. Because it is very much about fallen angels — kind of — but that’s not the half of it.

What about the other writers out there? Do you dread this question as much as I do? Or is there another question that makes you cringe at the thought of having to answer it?

And I think this holds true for more than just sex scenes. I’m currently reading Deerskin, by Robin McKinley, and I was absolutely engrossed at the beginning. I loved the way she was able to make the narration sound lke a fairy tale. In the opening chapters, we learn about the main character, the princess Lissar, her beloved sighthound, Ash, and her somewhat-unusual life in the palace. I loved seeing how Lissar came into her own as she grew to adolescence, how she shrugged off what ws expected of her and followed her passion. I was very thoroughly engrossed, and very much enjoying the woman I was reading about, and looking forward to reading more.

And then Lissar suffered a terrible trauma, ran off to the mountains, and forgot pretty much everything. She doesn’t remember who she is, where she came from, or why she left. She doesn’t even remember what farmland is until she happens to see some. A goddess heals her wounds, and in doing so drastically changes her appearance so she will not be recognized. She also gives her magical abilities.

If this were the opening of the book, I think it might be another matter, but as it stands, this is just about at the halfway point. All those promises the book made to me when I started are thrown out the window, and I feel like I’m reading about another woman entirely. I’m a little miffed about it. It is not what I was led to expect.

The part tht breaks my heart is tht it’s an incredibly well-written book. But it’s not the book I thought I was reding, and I’m having a little trouble moving past that and enjoying it for what it is.

I’m not sure what’s to be done about it. I’m not sure what can be done. Should authors stop throwing plot twists and surprises into their books? How boring that would be! Should readers suck it up and deal with it? I’m not sure that’s the right answer, either. There’s something to be said for the fact that I’m sitting here thinking, “This is not the book I signed on for,” and feeling slightly betrayed, and I don’t think that’s a thought any of us want to be going through our readers heads about our books. This isn’t the book that’s had this effect on me, either. I’ve read other books that have caused a similar reaction, that turned away from the course I thought we had set, and left me impatient, irritated, or frustrated.

I don’t know that there’s an easy solution for this, from either a reader’s or a writer’s perspective. But I’ll be keeping it in mind, especially as I look at my own work.

And I’m going to keep going with Deerskin. Because it is a very well-written book, even if it’s not the one I thought I was reading.

I’m grieving.

I don’t get this way over books very often. I get emotional, certainly. I laugh, I love, I hate, I rage. But I don’t cry, almost never. The last time I remember crying over a book was when I read Where the Red Fern Grows in elementary school, and my mom came home and found me lying on the carpet, bawling. I might have cried over Bridge to Terabithia, too, but I’m not certain.

I don’t cry over books, but I very nearly cried over New Amsterdam.

In any case, this revelation got me thinking about the five stages of grief, and by golly, I’ve gone through every one of them but the last.

Denial — Oh my, yes. Lots of denial. I have been trying really hard to just pretend that the last ten pages don’t exist.

Anger — See my previous post. *grin*

Bargaining — I’ve been doing lots of this, too. From “Maybe if I talk to her, maybe if I just tell her how upset I am, she’ll understand. Maybe once she knows what she’s done, she’ll just say she’s sorry for it, that she wishes she could go back and change it, and then it will all be okay” to “Well fine. I am just going to create my own not-Jack character and stick him in my own book, and I will love him and treat him right and it won’t matter that Ms. Bear was such a meanie.”

Depression — Yep, that too, and it’s a large part of the reason that I’ve been trying to keep my mind off of it. Because inevitably, I come back to it and I think about it and I just get so sad. It makes me just want to curl up in bed and mope for days.

Acceptance — This one…this one I haven’t gotten to yet. I do hope I will. I hope I can get this damn book out of my brain and move on.

The thing I keep coming back to, the thing that keeps making me want to scream and cry and wail, is that it’s just so senseless. It seems almost random. I keep thinking, “It’s not like there was nothing they could have done to save him. It’s not like it had to happen.”

A comment on the Q&A post that Bear put up today helped me get a little bit of insight, a little bit of understanding. It helped me take one small step toward acceptance. She said, “You made me care, and then you made it hurt, and that’s the endless Sebastien theme.” And, you know, it is. And I can kind of get that. Putting us in Sebastien’s shoes, giving us a small taste of his eleven-hundred-plus years of loving and losing over and over and over and over again.

But…

That’s the thing. I keep thinking maybe I can understand, maybe that, I can accept. And I keep thinking it, and then thinking, “But…“

But it didn’t make sense. But it’s so pointless. But it could have been done so many other ways, so many better ways. But there wasn’t a set-up for his death, it just happened, out of the blue. But we weren’t given a chance to prepare.

And then I sigh and think that Bear’s response to all of these protests would probably be, “Yeah, well. That’s life.”

And yeah, it is. People die for pointless, senseless reasons all the time. People go through life blithely taking for granted that everyone they love will still be there the next day. And then something happens, they turn around, they wake up, and suddenly one of those loved ones is gone, just like that. Out of the blue, no set-up, no chance to prepare for it. That’s life.

But…

But New Amsterdam isn’t life. It doesn’t even pretend to be — it’s alternate history. It’s not life. It’s a story.

And that’s what I keep sticking on. I don’t remember who said it, but it makes me think of the quote, “The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.” And that, I think, is where Bear failed with New Amsterdam. Taken as a whole, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t work.

(You should, of course, read this with a great big “IMO” tacked on to the end of everything I’m saying here. From the comments on Bear’s blog, I gather it worked just fine for a number of people. But it didn’t work for me, and I know I’m not the only one.)

It puts me in mind of another quote. I don’t know who this one came from either, and it should probably be considered more paraphrasis than direct quotation, but the gist of it is, “If someone gets shot by a gun in Act 3, then the audience had better see the gun lying in the drawer of the desk in Act 1.” And that’s why New Amsterdam’s ending didn’t work for me. We saw no gun. I knew from the beginning that something bad was going to happen, because Terra wailed when she finished the book, and I figured that could only mean that either something happened to Jack, or something happened to split Jack and Sebastien up. And even with those strong suspicions, even watching for it and waiting for it, a page before it actually happened, I still wasn’t sure. I still thought maybe, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’d misinterpreted what Terra had been wailing about.

When a reader knows what’s coming and is searching desperately for any hint of its existence and it still takes her by surprise, you’re being too damn subtle.

From what I’ve read in Bear’s posts and comments, it seems like she’s trying for an Important Life Lesson sort of theme, in this ending¹. It seems like she’s trying for something literary. And that, too, makes me think about that second quote. Because I didn’t think I was getting Literature when I picked this book up. I had no clue. For 95% of the book, it reads like any other commercial fantasy novel². You can’t pull out a gun in Act 3 that wasn’t there in Act 1 and expect the audience to accept it, and you can’t tack a Tragic Ending onto a fantasy novel and expect to turn it into Literature.

That said, she did nearly bring me to tears, and three days later, I still can’t stop talking about her book. And that, at least, is impressive.

But it still doesn’t mean the ending works.

Rocks fall. People die. Life goes on.

Or: After bliss? The laundry.

²I don’t mean to suggest that it’s average. It is, as I said earlier, quite good. What I mean is that that seems to be the genre niche it fits itself into.

I’ve been musing over what to say about this for about a day and a half, and at some point the title came to me, “The Good, the Bad, and the Angry”. And as tongue-in-cheek as it may be, it’s appropriate.

First, the good. Because, make no mistake, New Amsterdam is very, very good. I read about it a few weeks ago, and was intrigued by the premise. It sounded really interesting, but I had a rather ambivalent experience with Blood & Iron, so I hesitated and — as is my wont — ultimately talked myself out of it.

Then I discovered that “Lucifugous”, the first story in the book, is available online at Subterranean Press. I read it, fell in love, and immediately ordered New Amsterdam. (And waited on pins-and-needles until it arrived.) And the rest was just as good as the first. I love the worldbuilding, the alternate history and what she did with the vampires. And I love — love — Sebastien and Jack. Words cannot express my love, and I can’t count the number of times I squeed to Terra over some bit of cuteness or another. My God, I love them.

Even Abby Irene (though I’ll admit I often found myself yearning for more Sebastien and Jack during her stories) was great fun to read.

So, yes. Overall? Very, very good.

Now, for the bad, and the angry…

(Here there be spoilers. You’ve been warned.)

The thing is, I loved the book… until the last ten pages. And then Jack died, and it crashed and burned.

See, I understand the need to murder your darlings, when the plot requires it. When there’s a point. But if there’s a point to Jack’s death, I just don’t see it.

He didn’t die to save someone else’s life, he didn’t die to uphold an ideal, he didn’t sacrifice himself because it was the only way to kill the beast and save Paris (although after all their talk about how stepping into the power field would kill you, I half expected that he would die because something would go wrong with their trap and the only way to kill the beast would be to go into the field with it, and Jack would end up taking the initiative and doing it). If he’d been turned by Sebastien, even, it would have worked, and it would have been a nice throwback to the conversation in “Limerent” between Sebastien and Abby Irene, over whether Sebastien would turn Jack if he needed to, and whether Jack would thank him for it.

If Jack had died for one of those reasons, I’d have been really sad. As it is, I’m sad, but I’m also really really angry. What was the point?

It’s just so senseless. And without a point, a reason for it, it just seems like melodrama, like a contrivance. The only point I can see is to make the last story have a more dramatic climax than the rest. Murdering your darling because the story requires it is one thing, and slaughtering them needlessly is entirely another. And it’s a really piss-poor reason to kill a character, IMO.