Happy Pride!!!

I hope you all are staying safe, celebrating our amazing community, and breaking gender norms and cis, allo, heterosexual expectations everywhere. I celebrated pride by sending Kingsley, my angry queer anthro crocodiles giving the middle finger to colonial asshat wip to my editor after a six month long intense rewrite.

For those who don’t know, Kingsley aka the Queer Croc WIP is about:

Kingsley, an anthropomorphic crocodile rebel leader, is being tried for war crimes he definitely committed. To save his life (and maybe stop WWIII – no guarantees though), he’ll manipulate Alex, a traumatized journalist whose wife Kingsley tortured, into publishing classified documents that will implicate the rich and powerful in their own war crimes. What? He’s done worse. 

I hope this was the final rewrite and we can focus on copy edits and tweaking some things/catching inconsistencies. I don’t know if I have it in me to tear this book apart and rewrite it from scratch again. 

I’m still planning to launch this story first as a podcast and accompanying webseries and then throw a kickstarter to publish the actual physical copies. I’m also working on sticker/button/t-shirt/poster designs and maybe hand-sculpted busts and dreaming of plushies for my store. I’m really excited about the potential scope of this launch, but also have to actually sit down and crunch some numbers to figure out what I need to print/record/host everything. I guess that’s the one drawback of self-publishing (and the marketing). Honestly, though, dealing with finances and marketing seems like an easy battle compared to understanding what is going on with traditional publishing right now. 

Rewriting Journey

I got my editor’s comments back in September, but was deep in the accursed Demon book, so I didn’t really dive deep into their comments until I hate another dead end with the Demon Book. I think that was in October/November. I wrote Kingsley from November to January, addressing all of my editor’s comments. That was the first rewrite. Then I sent it to my beta readers who read it from March to May and then I rewrote it again based on their comments. I was five chapters away from finishing my rewrites when I noticed I actually missed major structural notes from one of my beta readers so I went through the book again and rewrote parts of it for a third time. Oh, and in February my dog died, completely devastating me and making it almost impossible to write. So it’s been a journey. 

First Structural Change

The crux of my editor’s comments was that, as it stood, the book was two different books and they either needed to be integrated better or I needed to split the book in two, which had been a fear of mine for a long time. However, being the stubborn jackass I am, instead of doing the easy (and maybe logical thing) and admitting defeat and splitting it in two, I doubled down and expanded Alex’s POV into a fully fleshed out narrative. 

Originally, the main POV was Kingsley (since the book is his memoir) and Alex was just a gadfly who poked at his narrative. However, my editor pointed out for Alex to be truly effective, they needed to tell their own story as well. So I added an Alex chapter for every Kingsley chapter and expanded Alex’s cast of characters to include people Kingsley mentioned in his memoir to bridge the two narratives as well as some of Alex’s family members to further explore the theme of how poisonous and expansive the horrors of colonialism is. 

The expansion of Alex’s narrative allowed me to better establish their own feelings towards their wife which made me happy because I really like their relationship, haha. 

It’s my favorite relationship trope: wild child who may be a magical entity meets straight laced nerd who willingly embraces both their beloved world of “logic” and “science” and her world of the unknown and “magical”. I’m fairly certain Alex is on the ace spectrum while Christine is most likely a biromantic ace and their marriage is strained because of a complicated pregnancy that neither really wanted but sort of went through because they thought they needed to to be “normal”. 

Adding Alex’s POV allowed me to explore that dynamic and, since they’re both on the ace spectrum, there was no traditional resolution of confessing one’s heart and then making out or having sex. It was nice to have these two characters actually talk to each other and begin the process of healing via dialogue and fight the ingrained impulse to “prove” they still love each other by having them engage in physical intimacy. Honestly, Alex kisses Christine’s cheek once and there’s a lot of hand holding, hugging, and crying, and that’s about it. It’s a very sex netural ace book. 

The other thing I’m glad I was able to do with this expanded POV is dig a little deeper into the harm of compulsive or expected desire to have children when you really don’t want children. To be perfectly frank, neither Alex nor Christine should have children because neither truly wants children, but they felt the need because they both feel alien and “broken” for different reasons and having children is the often offered answer. Feel incomplete: have children. Marriage is on the rocks: have children. Getting older: have children. Feeling lonely: have children (and for people with uteruses: you have to have children before your eggs run out!). Job’s no longer fulfilling: have children. Or, if you’re not concerned about not having children, other people are concerned for you. Why haven’t you had children yet? Are you planning to have children? When are you going to have children? I have children and it’s the best thing ever. Love giving up everything in my life for my children. You really should have children. Your eggs won’t last forever. What happens when you’re old and there’s no one to care for you because you don’t have children? 

The poking in nonstop and while my world is pretty progressive when it comes to gender and sex, there’s still this concept of a family unit (however you want to define it) and there’s still this need or desire to pressure others into having family units. And while Alex’s and Christine’s family members aren’t directly saying these things to them, many of them have children and have shifted from being single people or pair of people into “family mode” and there is concern about Alex and Christine and while that concern is more around their general mental health, I think it’s natural for Alex and Christine to misinterpret it as in “why aren’t you two settling down? Where is your family unit?” 

Add on top of that the fact that both Alex and Christine come from large families and there is even this internal expectation that they too would have large families because why won’t they (even though their lifestyle and actual goals means they’re not actually in a place to have children) and it just complicates everything. And I get to explore those complicated clashes of desires without feeling the need to resolve it with “oh, well, we’ll try again and do it better this time” or “actually, I really want children”. 

After adding Alex’s expanded POV, I needed to figure out how to resolve the footnote issue because my editor hated them but I love them. I grudgingly acknowledged that there were too many footnotes and decided I would add “primary sources” instead. So now I have posters, pins, wanted posters, maps, pamphlets, etc that I’m designing myself using Krita that I’ll insert throughout the chapters. I’m going to take the best and turn them into posters, shirts, and buttons people can buy as well. I’m super excited and while my drawing skills aren’t great, they’re not as bad as I thought they were. I’m just dreading the ten plus maps I have to draw….

Second Structural Change

After my first rewrite, I wanted beta readers to take a look to make sure I hadn’t overcomplicated an already complicated narrative (which I tend to do). Overall, the feedback was really positive but there were a few remaining structural issues: more footnotes were needed because this book is written by people who know the world and I don’t have an “outsider” or “new person” who needs things explained to them. Footnotes fill that gap. Two, since I expanded Alex’s POV I made a lot of references to his past (which is actually the series’ present, since his past is what all these books are leading up to) but the reader doesn’t know anything about it, so I needed to make a few things more specific. Finally, there is a wall between the reader and Kingsley. 

Adding the footnotes back in was fun and easy and I even got a few more ideas for the multimedia aspect of the book. Additionally, since I’m launching this as a podcast and accompanying webseries, I can also publish additional information on my website and when the book is ready for the kickstarter I can either publish those articles as appendices or as a separate companion book. 

Expanding Alex’s POV even more was initially a challenge because there were important things that happened to them that I wanted the reader to learn about in later books and I didn’t want to spoil anything, but I also realized that just because I go in depth into some tragic incident in Alex’s life doesn’t mean people won’t read the other books. In fact, it may make people more eager to read the other books because they are anticipating that the moment is going to happen and will want to actually read the moment in all its glory. So I expanded upon Alex’s previous relationship with Kingsley and how Alex knows the Demon monarch and I also provided context as to some of Christine’s past decisions which I’ll expand upon in the Demon book. Kingsley is Alex’s book whereas the Demon book is Christine’s and the Scorpion book will be either Christine’s brothers or Alex’s sibling’s book. 

However, expanding Alex’s POV also changed some of my plans for them, because I was building up a key moment with the Demon Monarch so much, I needed a better resolution than I originally planned. That also affected Christine’s plot which, in turn, affected her best friend’s and her oldest brother’s plot which may affect the family tree I spent hours working on…but that is a future problem. 

Finally, the gap between Kingsley and the reader. I’ve gotten this comment a lot and I think that’s just the way it’s going to be. Writing a memoir from an unreliable narrative severely limits how much information you can share and how much the reader will trust Kingsley, so even if I have him tell the truth, you’re going to be skeptical because you should be. He’s a manipulator and a bastard and he has so much unprocessed and complex trauma that he’s not going to be vulnerable in a memoir he’s purposely writing to implicate everyone still alive who could testify against him. The closest anyone can get to knowing him is through Oisin’s memoir, but there’s bad blood between the two so even that is suspect. 

In some ways, Kingsley and Alex have a pseudo Will and Chiyoh relationship from the show Hannibal, with the Demon Monarch being Hannibal (the Demon Monarch is currently in “hiding” although he’s mentioned many times in this book and will obviously make an appearance in the Demon book).

Both were manipulated/used/befriended by the Demon Monarch, both trapped in a past/prison they can’t escape, and both troubled with guilt but also anger that there should be guilt over associating with the Demon Monarch. Alex never loved the Demon Monarch, but there are definitely complicated emotions there (especially when one considers what happened between the Demon Monarch and Christine) and Kingsley “loves” the Demon Monarch, but it’s an ugly brutal love. And it’s this commonality that makes Kingsley think he can be familiar with Alex, but that’s news to Alex, haha. Ideally, this relationship will hit even harder once the entire series is out and people reread all the books. 

So, overall, these rewrites have added an additional depth to the plot and the characters and give a discerning reader the vague outlines of a roadmap for some of the other books in the series.