Sometimes one needs a fresh start.

See also: Batman & Robin, fatally flawed first drafts, Hulk poodles.

A lot of the time, though, a reset button can hurt you and your story. When we read or watch a series, we’re invested in these characters, their growth, and the changing status quo of the world they live in. It’s why we continually pick up the next book or record the next episode. If, at the end, nothing changes–for either better or worse–it can feel hollow, unnecessary, like filler.

We want to see growth.

Which is why it can be so, so vexing when creators seem to want to avoid this at all cost. To name a few recent examples:

[SPOILERS BELOW FOR RECENT WAREHOUSE 13, THE LEGEND OF KORRA, and CATWOMAN.]

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Warehouse 13. At the end of last season, the warehouse was destroyed. Blown up. Gone. I watched and went, “Cool. Gutsy move.”

At the start of this season, we picked up right where we left off: the MCs stand in the middle of the destroyed warehouse, numbly taking in the debris surrounding them. Everything they’ve worked for over millennia–gone. Worse, the destruction of certain artifacts has nasty consequences. Things are set free that really shouldn’t be.

I got excited. Here’s what I thought would happen: Now, they have to fight to contain the effects of those destroyed artifacts. They’ll have to find new artifacts without the occasionally deus ex machina-y aid of previously captured artifacts. They have to rebuild the warehouse, one piece at a time.

It would have been awesome.

Here’s what happened: Artie turned back time. The warehouse is perfectly intact. Nothing to see here, move along.

Legend of Korra. At the end of the first season, Korra has her powers taken away by Amon. She’s powerless–until her airbending kicks in (and let’s not go into how that happens) and that ends up being the only skill left to her.

As an Avatar, she is destroyed.

Here’s what I thought would happen: Korra spends the season two perfecting her airbending and finally getting in touch with her spiritual side. This is great! She’ll finally learn to be less dependent on the “hit things with fire/stone/water” approach she’s been using all season! She’ll finally shed some of that Avatar arrogance!

After a frequently disappointing first season, I was all geared up for an amazing season two. The creators were shaking up the status quo, and now they were getting down to business.

Here’s what happened: Spirit!Aang showed up, restored Korra’s bending, and offered the Avatar state as a special treat. She then restored all the bending abilities Amon took away from other benders.

… Oh.

Catwoman: This is a different case from the above two. With comics, you need a reboot on occasion. Decades-long histories get incredibly unwieldy to manage, and they’re very unfriendly for newer readers to boot.

I appreciate that, so after some hesitation, I picked up some of the rebooted Catwoman comics this week. Between seeing The Dark Knight Rises, playing Batman: Arkham City, and reading some Gotham City Sirens trades, I had a craving for some Selina Kyle, and if there’s an active solo going on, welllll…

… I read it with a feeling of dread.

This new iteration of Selina is 23. She’s a thief. She’s self-destructive to the point of being suicidal. She has few true friends.

Here’s a taste of the plotlines: Selina’s apartment gets blown up. Selina gets a friend killed. Selina gets thoroughly beaten up. Selina has an emotional breakdown. Selina almost kills a man in revenge. Selina spars with Batman. Selina steals from the wrong people and gets into trouble. Selina helps out Gotham prostitutes. Selina has trouble opening up to her friends.

We’ve seen all of this before. These areas have been very, very well-covered in Catwoman’s previous solo run–except, wait, that doesn’t exist anymore. All the growth she had as a character is gone, and we’re repeating the same things with a sense of, “Been there, done that.”

We’ve back to square one.

What upsets me just as much as the erasure of her emotional growth is the resetting of the status quo. I loved seeing Selina turn from a thief to a fully-fledged (anti-)hero. She found out Batman’s identity. They talk to each other as equals. They have a mature, established relationship–be it as allies or lovers–and not this self-loathing, self-destructive ripping off of clothes where they can’t even hold a normal conversation.

Ted? Maggie? Holly? Helena? Gone.

Moving in with Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, and the three of them grudgingly helping each other stay on the straight and narrow? Gone.

The friendly banter with Dick when he assumed the Batman mantle? Gone.

Playing on the same level as the other Bat allies? You’ve got it. Gone.

It’s hard to stick with a character for so long, root for them, and then be told, “Nope. Sorry. Classy? Mature? She’s no fun like this. We need her as a twenty-three-year-old with her bra showing in every other panel. Oh, and can we tie her to a chair and beat her up some?”

A similar thing happened to Spider-Man a couple of years ago. He’d grown up to be a confident, strong man, married to a fantastic woman. They had a loving, trusting, healthy, mature, equal relationship.

“Oh,” the company went. “Our readers can’t relate to that.”

So they wiped the marriage from the characters’ minds. Petey’s back to lamenting his inability to get a date.

I got my geek on for a moment there; sorry.

My point is… shake up the status quo. Have your characters evolve. Have the world change. Embrace the consequences of your plots.

As long as you do that, you’ll have an infinite supply of story.

And you’ll also avoid my bitching about you in my blog. (But seriously. Guys. Guys. What are you doing. Stop. Stoooop iiiiit.)

I promise, I have actual blog posts to write. I just need to… you know… write them.

In the meantime, here are a couple of unrelated tidbits.

• I read four books in January and four books in February. For me, that’s a lot. In March, I read only one book. The clear connection here: in March, I actually tried to be productive. It didn’t work out exactly as planned, but it did mean that I felt far too guilty to be spending time reading when I ought to edit or write instead. Interesting to realize these things; I’ll need to organize my future book-reading accordingly.
• I’m sure everyone has heard about the Wicked Pretty Things drama by now. If not, the short version is that Jessica Verday wrote a story which contained a relationship between two teenage boys for an upcoming anthology. The editor requested that one of the boys would be rewritten as a girl, instead, as she believed an M/M romance would not be acceptable. Jessica Verday ended up pulling her story in protest — followed by a lot of other authors from that anthology doing the same thing, as well as a handful of authors pulling their stories from different anthologies by the same editor. I’m still sorting out my feelings over some of the fall-out, but I do know one thing: I am incredibly, incredibly heartened by the uniformly supportive responses to come out of this.

  While Fae Print has a straight lead, various other projects I have in the pipeline — including the Fae Print sequel — do not. Representation matters. It was important to me to find an agent who supported me in this, and I’m thrilled that I did (yay Agent Michael!), but I’ve worried a lot over the years about the responses to and market for queer leads. Even queer secondary characters seem to be rare. That’s why seeing authors, editors and agents coming out in support of queer leads as loudly as they have is, well, amazing. I can only hope that this support will show through over the next few years in the increase of queer leads in YA — especially SFF YA.

• I forgot to mention a classic I read in that blog post from the other week. I’ve also read Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives. (Does that count as a classic? Please tell me it does. I need to pad that list!)

• Remember how I squeed about that tablet with the fancy screen coming out this year? For various reasons, I’ve chosen not to buy it. Instead, I ordered a separate Pixel Qi screen and a compatible netbook. The former is currently with a friend in America and will be arriving here mid-April, and the latter will be mailed out tomorrow. I can’t wait to spend the summer working out in the sun.
• I have far, far too many exciting projects I want to work on, and I love each and every one of them to pieces. I want to write all the books!
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is the cutest thing ever. I think I love Pinkie Pie best of all. Or Fluttershy. Or Rainbow Dash! Or maybe Twilight Sparkle… #nerdponylove

• I thought Captain America: The First Avenger was coming out in 2012? I only just found out it’s actually coming out in July. Between that, Harry Potter, and Thor, I’m going to have a delightfully geeky summer. (Green Lantern doesn’t interest me much — I don’t know much about the character and the trailer didn’t look that great.)
• OH EM GEE The Last Airbender: The Legend of Korra is going to be a-ma-zing. This honestly looks like it could be my favourite cartoon ever. It has everything I loved about the original series, with extra awesome chick and steampunk goodness.
• … how come all three those things I just mentioned had colons in their names?

At the start of this week, I was freaking out at how much I still had to do and how many things I had planned outside of the house. The solution, of course, was simple: cancel the first half of my plans so I’d have energy left for the second half of the plans.

At which point, my body went “neener neener neener!” and got sick, so I had to cancel all the other plans as well.

My body really needs to deal with stress better. Just sayin’.

So instead of dressing up as my superhero identity and attending a dorky Halloween party with some friends, I’m sitting at home in a futile attempt to let my body recover.

All of that means that if you were expecting an insightful, coherent blog post, you’re out of luck. You get miscellanea. (Which, by the way, may be one of the coolest words in the English language.)

Halloween
If you’re looking for an awesome bit of Halloween-themed flash fiction – and who isn’t? – check out The Monster in the Night by budding author Owen Polson. If that doesn’t make you smile, I don’t know what will.

Writing

I got Cate Gardner’s Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits in the mail this week! I am so excited. I have a BOOK! And it has a friend’s NAME on it! There are few cooler things in the world, dudes.

Also, a brand-new novella just went live over at The Red Penny Papers! If you’ve got some time available, take a look at Particular Friends by Camille Alexa. I haven’t had the opportunity of checking it out yet – apparently, germy brains don’t make for the best reading mindset – but I’ve no doubt it’ll be glorious.

Especially looking at that cover. Whoa.

Art
I drew! Holy crap, I drew! Given how little I’ve done so far this year, I thought that was quite an achievement. Check out Abed from Community (possibly the best comedy series in all of history) on the left, and an in-progress commission on the right.

I have a few other posts brewing… and then I realized I was a few days behind on the 30 Days of Writing meme. Whoops!

Before I start, though, I have to ask: do any of you follow Community? If not, why not? If so — oh my god that cat from last night’s episode. I cried laughing. No exaggeration.

Anyhow! Onwards with the questions! (And I repeat: if you’re even remotely inclined to answer these questions for yourself, please do so! I’m super curious about all your answers!)

21. Do any of your characters have children? How well do you write them?
Cally’s son Ben is a huge part of the plot in The Hands of Cally Wu. He’s twelve, and I’m pretty sure I write him awfully. What can I say; I just don’t have a heck of a lot of interaction with twelve-year-old boys these days.

But hey, I’m working on it! (Er, on writing Ben. Not so much on hunting down twelve-year-olds…)

22. Tell us about one scene between your characters that you’ve never written or told anyone about before! Serious or not.
Lillian informs Merel that, actually, she’s being terribly offensive to actual pagans with her uninformed wannabe-goth-punk-pagan-wiccan shtick.

I suppose her cluelessness is endearing… but someone probably does need to bonk her upside the head at some point.

23. How long does it usually take you to complete an entire story—from planning to writing to posting (if you post your work)?
I shall take ‘querying’ instead of ‘posting’, and I shall attempt not to weep.

I started planning Fae Print in the summer of 2008, wrote the first draft that November, and queried it in the spring of 2010. As for the others – ah – I suppose I’d need to get to the querying part of it, first. I think I take too much on my plate, which requires me to put some projects on halt for months in order to work on others. This means that everything takes too long, and I’m always busy.

It’s probably not the best strategy ever.

24. How willing are you to kill your characters if the plot so demands it? What’s the most interesting way you’ve killed someone?
*squeak*

I tell myself that I’m absolutely willing to do what it takes, and in theory, I am. I’ve killed a PoV character before (RIP, dude), so I’m up to anything, right?

Apparently not, because usually it doesn’t really occur to me to kill my main characters in the first place.

Sadly, I can’t describe any of the deaths so far: they’re major spoilers. But there’s a somewhat gruesome off-screen death in Fae Print, and several minor/secondary characters bite the dust in painful ways in The Hands of Cally Wu. (Mostly because of Cally’s doing. Sympathetic leads – pshaw! Who needs ‘em?)

25. Do any of your characters have pets? Tell us about them.
Yep! I can’t write a character without first knowing if they’re a dog person or a cat person – or a pet person in the first place.

Lillian’s parents have a talking cat named Person (previously known as Bobo – he renamed himself for obvious reasons). Her love interest Arjan has a cute white girl pit bull called Mick; he also has an unnamed snake.

Roy has a cat called Mouse. He also had cats named Sil and Mac, but, um, I killed them. Horrifically.

(Sorry, Roy.)

(It made for good character motivation.)

I’d have some witty alliterative title, but I couldn’t think of any. Woe.

On to the good news!

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Cate Gardner sold her book Theatre of Curious Acts to Hadley Rille Books. How awesome is that? (The answer: VERY AWESOME.) Congrats!

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I just won a contest on the QueryTracker blog with my Tweet-length pitch for Always Read the Fae Print. Huzzah! Winning things always feels nice.

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The following isn’t actually good news. It’s very, very bad news: the absurdly talented Billy Bell was voted off So You Think You Can Dance last night. I’m spinning it around to be good news, though, since it means all you lucky, lucky people get to be spammed with YouTube videos of him dancing.

LIKE THIS ONE.

If you liked that, here’s some more videos of him dancing – a solo, another solo, krumping with Comfort, contemporary with Kathryn, jazz with Lauren, Broadway with Katee, and contemporary with Alex and Ade.

I normally keep my obsessive So You Think You Can Dance love off this blog, but I’m thinking I may need to do a similar dance spam for Alex Wong some day. These guys blow my mind.

I’m always so proud when I get that word right in one go.

Anyway.

Though this isn’t a proper WIP Wednesday post – I’m afraid I haven’t been productive enough for that lately – I do want to share a line from the short story I’ve been editing this week. I actually wrote it over a year and a half ago, and abandoned about about half a year later. It’s got prostitutes and vampires and more blood than I’m used to.

That’ll teach me to make sudden movements around a jumpy prostitute with a gun.

Most of us learned that lesson a long time ago, man.

In different news: did any of you catch Sunday night’s Sherlock? It’s a three-part BBC miniseries by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss (both of Doctor Who fame), and… I think it’s fabulous.

I should note that I’m not actually a Sherlock Holmes buff, so I have no idea if it’ll appeal to fans of the characters or books as well, but I truly enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. The dialogue is great – I cracked up more than once – and the update to the 21st century was pretty smooth, in my opinion.

And, really, you have to love a character who defends himself from being a psychopath by saying, “I’m a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research.”

Is it Sunday yet? I want part two!

Lastly… I’ve often wondered how is it that the more books I read, the more my TBR pile seems to grow. And now I have the answer: it’s because The Book Depository has been including such pretty pretty bookmarks in each of their orders lately. If you planned to order from them, I highly recommend doing so ASAP, because I’m not sure how long this will last.

… complain about something and it magically resolves itself.

In this case, I didn’t really complain, but I did mention I’ve never been able to match actors to my characters.

And tah dah! Criminal Minds delivers the goods with Johnny Lewis in a season four episode, ‘Zoe’s Reprise’, in which he plays a serial killer.

A quote from the episode: “I see a guy walking down the street with a stupid look on his face and I want to bash him over the head with a bottle. To me, that’s normal. It’s weird to me that no one else feels that way. It’s all I think about. I can’t stop.”

If he let his hair grow a few inches, he’d be excellent for Arjan from Always Read the Fae Print, my air-guitar-playing, delightfully ineffectual vegetarian pacifist. He’s the type to name a water fae ‘Mariel’, because, I quote: “It’s like Ariel.”

… yeah.

As you can imagine, I was somewhat freaked out to see this head-person of mine going around merrily strangling people.

But also terribly, terribly amused. Sorry, Arjan!

Since I’m a very visual person – comes with the whole artist territory, I guess – it should come as no surprise that I’m pretty obsessive when it comes to figuring out my characters’ looks. (“Really?” I can hear you say; “All those avatars you’ve been posting didn’t tip me off at all.” To which my response is: “Fie on you.”)

If I had to cast my characters for a film or TV show, I’d come up blank. I can point at a million photos of models I’ve gathered and give you an exact idea of what they look and act like in my head, but I haven’t been able to match actors to the roles.

What I have done – based on a friend’s prompt – is think about the people behind the curtain. If Always Read the Fae Print were turned into a TV series, he asked, who would you want involved?

Oh.

So, so easy.

Bryan Fuller of Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies fame. Because he can combine the quirky with the supernatural and tackle serious storylines without losing the overall sense of ‘cute!’ that I try to keep in the Fae Print series; it should be a bit more along the lines of Dead Like Me than his other work, though, to keep it grounded.

The Community writers, because they’re trope-conscious and hilarious as all heck, and usually decent with minority issues to boot.

The True Blood writers, because they know their genre and know how to mess with it to amusing results. Humour is essential.

The Dexter writers, because they know how to adapt a book to a TV series, and do it well.

(Also: whoever created the True Blood and Dexter intro sequences. Because wow. Wow.)

(Also: those shows both manage to infuse a real sense of location into each episode. I don’t know who’s behind that, but, er, I want those guys too, because Fae Print isn’t Fae Print without Amsterdam.)

Only one thing is vital, though: They have to be willing to make a musical episode at some point.

That point is non-negotiable. Take note, future agent.*

Please share your own dream team, either actor-wise or behind the scenes, either in the comments or at your own journal. I’m madly curious!

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* Oh my god please don’t take note, future agent, I promise I’m realistic and low-maintenance and take instructions excellently. And I’m house-broken! Also, I never bark at the mailman.

(But I do really love musicals.)

Man, I’m stealing blog topics lately like… um… is there any kind of animal out there that regularly steals blog topics? No? Okay. That’s probably what makes that simile fall kind of flat.

Anyway, this blog post was inspired by a) Jodi Meadows’s excellent post on the things Stargate SG-1 taught her about writing and b) the unrelated realization that, yes, I love TV shows as more than just distraction from writing. I know a lot of people harp on how you shouldn’t watch TV if you can read/write instead, it’s just a waste of time, etc. etc. but I really think that, in addition to the sheer entertainment value and closing-off-your-brain factor you sometimes need as a writer, it’s a great way to study storytelling. It won’t teach you to write prose, but it can teach you plenty about other things, and studying how and why TV shows do what they do can be an excellent way to learn.

Which is a kind of long intro to me saying that, holy crap, I love the TV series Community and if you haven’t seen it yet, you ought to do so. Right this second. Or at the very least when the DVD-set comes out. It’s a very smart comedy which far exceeded my expectations based on its rather standard premise: community college! band of misfits! shenanigans ensue! It’s probably my favourite comedy series in a long time, on par perhaps only with Better Off Ted.

(Which you should also watch.)

Warning: as I discuss what I think Community does right, I’ll use comparisons from certain shows who try to do similar things but don’t pull it off, in my opinion. By ‘certain shows’, I mean Glee. I’ll try to be fair, but my unparalleled loathing of Glee¹ may colour my analysis. Fair warning!

1. Know Thy Tropes
Whether you want to avoid them, subvert them, or ridicule them all to hell – know them. Your audience will, too, and they’ll appreciate being taken by surprise or seeing a clever spin on something they recognize.

This means reading/watching in your genre, and spending a lot of time on TV Tropes. If you don’t know the site, prepare to waste an ungodly amount of hours there.

(Note to self: next time you link to TV Tropes, do it at the end of a post, or you’ll lose readers.)

2. Go There – But Know Where You’re Going
This applies to anything ~controversial~ or otherwise shocking: go there. Don’t back down, don’t play it safe. It’s okay to be outrageous.

But please, know what you’re doing. Don’t just do random shit for the sake of being edgy and then wonder why people are annoyed or offended when you fuck up.

Community is a silly comedy and they regularly tackle issues of racism or sexism in the least PC way possible, and they succeed². Glee is a silly comedy that regularly tackles issues of sexism or racism in the least PC way possible, and they fail on multiple levels, because they’re doing it for kicks without understanding what they’re doing. Sometimes this results in laughs. But usually, when it comes to the issues they address, they do more to alienate the groups they’re trying to support than anything else. I think that’s a shame. With that kind of cast and talent, they could do so much better.

3. A Little Goes A Long Way
Community is a comedy show and it KNOWS this, but it can still tackle solid drama. In one episode – minor spoilers to follow - the students have a Halloween party. One of them, Abed, dresses in a Batman costume and plays the role awesomely, raspy Christian Bale voice et al. Jeff, the lead of the show, is embarrassed by his friends’ immaturity and tries to avoid the party, but keeps getting dragged in. At one point, he snaps:

Jeff: Britta, I don’t care about your high school soap opera. Abed, you’re not Batman.
Abed: I know I’m not Batman. You could try not being a dick.

Paraphrased, since I can’t seem to find the quote online. When I watched this, I went, ouch. When I rewatched the episode with a friend, he gasped.

It’s so simple, so direct, and it works so damn well for both characters. There’s no need to harp on the point whatsoever.

4. Make Up Your Mind
For the most part, Community doesn’t try to be something it’s not, and I love it for that. It’s the same reason I love shows like Chuck: they don’t take themselves too seriously. This doesn’t mean that Community can’t do drama on occasion. Just watch the episode Introduction to Film.

But it does mean that it knows its genre and doesn’t bounce between different styles. Only very few shows (Buffy!) can pull that off without giving the viewer a mental whiplash.

Now, certain shows have a big problem with this. They try to be satirical high school comedies and then interject it with moments of tearful Very Special Episode-style drama, played completely straight. Even people who have liked Glee since the beginning have expressed issues with this, and the more pronounced it gets, the more people are getting annoyed by how the show can’t seem to figure out what it wants to be.

It pains me to say this, but here goes: In its first season finale, Community did the exact same thing. It went from a trope-subverting ensemble cast to a one-man-show that played entirely by the rules, annoying love triangle included, and it irritated a lot of its die-hard fans in the process.

(See? I can be fair and criticize the shows I love!) 

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¹ Believe me, I gave Glee a fair shot: I started the show fully expecting to love it, and gave it a full season to redeem itself when it didn’t quite catch on. It just ended up annoying me more and more. Sorry, Glee fans. (I still love the singing-and-dancing.)

² It doesn’t succeed all the time. I’ve been rather annoyed with its treatment of Britta and Shirley. Still, it does a lot better than 95% of shows out there, so I think the point is valid.

After finishing the NaNoWriMo goal of 50k in six days, I finished the rough draft of the novel on day ten, at roughly 70k.

At which point I started to slack off. Ha! I’m nothing if not predictable.

With minor editing and a bunch of scene edits, Always Read the Fae Print currently stands at 75k. I still need to add a lot of content and fix some continuity and characterisation issues before I shelve it to focus on editing Wielders for a while. With future novels already developing in my mind, and editing being my least favourite part of the novel-writing business, I anticipate problems balancing the two. We shall see…

In the meantime, I’ve been depressed over the cancellation of Pushing Daisies, and the rumoured risk of Chuck befalling the same fate. That’s half the shows I follow at the moment. If they touch T:SCC and Dexter, bodies will start hitting the floor.

On a cheerier note, I’m thoroughly amused by Wordle, which counts how often certain words appear in any given blog or chunk of text and shows them in a word cloud. I love it because I’m a sucker for fun gadgets, because it has pretty colours, and because it’s helpful in pointing out words you over-use and should probably edit out (to name one, I’m embarrassed at the size of the word “just”). Below are my word clouds for Wielders and Always Read the Fae Print – both early second drafts:

Anyone want to share theirs? I need something to procrastinate with – I couldn’t possibly be conscientious about this editing business and risk being productive. Lord forbid!