Brittany Maresh

writer

My current WIP features several brilliant methods of taking over the world. These are a few of the rejected ideas:

1. Train ants to pick people up and dump them in the ocean. Clear entire continents this way. Brilliant: ants are strong and all over the world. Yay, plentiful minions! Not brilliant: they’re not very smart, and you’re human-shaped. Hope you like salt water.
2. Deforestationinator. Delete forests until the masses bow to your whims. Brilliant: We sort of need forests. Not brilliant: We sort of need forests.
3. Flood the oceans. Melt the polar ice caps unless people agree to do your bidding. Brilliant: raising the water levels could totally cause problems and stuff. That’s why we’re all so down on global warming, right? Not brilliant: I hope you know how to swim. Or own a really, really nice boat. Maybe mountain land? That could do.
4. Subliminal messages in a catchy dance tune. Brilliant: you now control the youths of the nations. Not brilliant: They’re still not very motivated and don’t really have very practiced technical skills. Good luck holding their attention for very long, either.
5. Squirrel army. Brilliant: Unlike mice, they have manual dexterity. Like mice, they’re good at infiltration. Also, they’re edible, should you need to make an example of someone. Not brilliant: I mean, really? Is this Willy Wonka? Nobody is going to take you seriously. Not even after you’ve taken all the access codes, cleared their bases, and infected them all with some deadly squirrel-transported virus.

Other rejected ideas included the goldfish network, shrinking the moon, and finding some fish called Nemo. Also, bringing back the dinosaurs, but we want to rule the world, not make ourselves into lunch.

In short, I’m having a good time with this writing thing. I recommend it to anyone who absolutely cannot give it up no matter how hard they try.

Today I saw the cover for Rachel Caine’s second Outcast Season book, Unknown. (I love Rachel Caine). There’s a blond girl in black on a sportsbike on the cover.  She’s nothing like Alexis—high heels? And no helmet? And blond?—but it evoked New Rochester so strongly that I was stopped dead on my Forever Fifteen progress, possibly for the whole night.

I went to my webpage (oh, that’s here!) to consider updating it, since Forever Fifteen wasn’t going well, and I saw the fall colors, and what little non-New Rochester thoughts were left disappeared. It would be winter in the city just now, and their holiday seasons are spectacular. I was daydreaming but still intent on doing something other than writing a New Rochester holiday short, and then Alexis’s song came up on the radio.  I won’t say which song, beyond it being Linkin Park, though, for fear of being laughed off the internet.

To get to the point, a New Rochester Holiday Short is in the works. I don’t know what will become of it, but if you ask nicely, it might go up on my website as a holiday gift for you all.

I guess holidays are home time, and for me, that includes New Rochester.

Sincerely,

Brittany Maresh

Working hard on my current novel the night before a writing group meeting, I had the sudden thought that writing groups were as much a guilt-driven motivation as they are a support-driven motivation.

In this particular case, I have fifteen good chapters in a novel and have for months.  I also have another seventeen not so good ones.  I’ve needed to edit those last seventeen for a while, and until it hit me that my writing group is waiting for them, I had no reason to work on them.

Actually, I’ve kind of been avoiding thinking about them, because they are frighteningly messy.

NaNoWriMo was my excuse not to, but honestly? I think a factor of fear is there.  I’m afraid to fix these chapters, because I’m not sure I can fix them.  And if I don’t fix them, I have to rewrite them.  And if I have to rewrite them, maybe I will make them better, maybe I won’t.

And the idea of not being able to close this story, just leaving it hanging for the rest of my life?  That about terrifies me.

So I’m glad I have writing groups.  Three of them, now, I think.  If I didn’t have them, maybe I’d never work up the courage to make myself finish this.

Then again, sometimes fear can create as much courage as peer pressure.

I don’t know which is more of a motivator, right now, but I’ve started working on it again.  Seventeen chapters.   Circa 40,000 words.  And I’m not going to let them beat me.

-Brittany Maresh

I haven’t updated my journal in quite a while, it seems. This is, I will admit, because I am working hard on a novel, and when I haven’t been doing that I’ve been in class or busily turning 23.  I should apologize, but I won’t.  If you’re here, hopefully you’re looking forward to reading the book as much as I am looking forward to finish it.

Instead of apologizing, I’ll… uh.  Huh. Oh! I know! I’ll tell you what I learned in class this morning!

We were supposed to be discussing Piers Plowman in my Bri Lit class, but we tripped into the seven deadly sins and seven virtues (and how they pair off) instead. This brought us into Dante and his layers of Hell, which tangented into other famous artists that immortalized people they hated by saying bad things and torturing them in their works.  In the end, the professor summed what we’d learned during the day up with:

Ars longa, vita brevis–life is short, art long

He also added this thought:

If you really want to be immortalized, make enemies with a wrathful artist.  If they’re angry enough, they’ll get good to spite you.k

I don’t know that it’s really anything new, but it was interesting to be told it directly in class, and gives me something to say other than “I’m writing a novel, forgive the silence.”

-Brittany Maresh

I was a huge X-Files fan as a child.   Lately, it’s where I’m drawing inspiration from.  Not to say I have aliens anywhere in my worlds, or conspiracies.  It’s more that I like the dynamics.  The character struggles. It makes me want to tinker and play with my latest chapters.  It’s the mechanics of faith versus a lack there of.  Scully doesn’t believe.  Mulder believes.  I have a similar pair in my world.

On another front, I’m trying to convince my writing group that we need to do another retreat.  Something where we sequester ourselves away and don’t let ourselves eat until we’ve finished a query letter.  Or, at least, until I’ve finished a query letter.

And besides, we can use the time to discuss NaNoWriMo!

-Bri

When it comes down to it, I’ve got a complicated little world.  It’s a myriad of mythologicals in a town formerly part of the good ol’ USA.  I had a hard time pegging the genre, and went with Urban Fantasy because it was easy for describing.  Really, when it comes down to it, it’s pretty much the same type of story as Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter book 1: Guilty Pleasures, even if the two are radically different.  Not her other ones, though.  I’m pretty much sure I’ll never write like her other ones–I don’t have gorgeous guys falling out of the woodwork to sex up my protagonist.  I just don’t know enough pretty guys, I think.  I have a murder mystery in an urban fantasy setting.  Five years ago I would have said Paranormal Mystery.  Seven, I’d have considered it horror.   Now, I use the umbrella term of Urban Fantasy.

Whatever it is, Guilty Pleasures is the first book I’ve looked at in a long time that has the same basic flavor, even if they are tossed together with an entirely different style and ingredients list: mythological monsters, guns and violence and potential death, protagonist with Issues (though, that’s par for the course, no?), and a balance of petty concerns, like what kind of socks are most comfortable with combat boots.

Alexis is in no way like Anita Blake, just that they have a similar sort of flavor, underneath it all.

-Brittany Maresh