I finished my ACFoC re-read & the #24hrnovel challenge!

Hi friends!

I HAVE DONE IT. I've finished my re-read of A Closet Full of Cauldrons. Just finished, in fact. Like ten minutes ago, as I'm typing this. Tomorrow I'll get to start Draft 3 and dive into the re-writing process and I am SO EXCITED.

I'm trying to decide between drafting the completely new scenes or starting at Chapter 1. But you know what? That's a conundrum for tomorrow. I'm betting Future Me will know exactly where to start. Right now is just about celebrating: celebrating that I’ve finished this part, celebrating that I still enjoyed the story, and celebrating that I’m excited to keep making it even better!

Before I get too carried away, I also want to share some notes on our last two Crafts & Drafts book club picks! We recently covered THE ANATOMY OF GENRES by John Truby for April & May.

From those that were able to attend the discussion live, I’d say the response was middling. The book is segmented into a sort of “genre ladder” kind of hierarchy, with Truby saying that each genre builds upon the lessons of the other.

Horror is the first that’s covered, as it’s the most “basic” in terms of its theme of “life vs. death” (according to John). To me, having not written a ton of horror, and certainly no novel-length horror, I was intrigued early. He lays out the specific beats of horror novels (a couple examples: “Drive - The Monster Attacks” and “Battle - Safe Haven”) and also gives some specific techniques (like “the cyclone effect”) to help plan more difficult beats as well as how to pair Horror with Myth and Sci-Fi in order to “transcend” the genre.

I will say, this chapter did instill in me a confidence that I could write Horror following his formula. Everything made sense from a beginner perspective!

This feeling quickly fell apart as I traveled up John’s ladder. The more I knew about the genres he was covering, the less the beats and explanations made sense. Further, his ladder is wonky and sort of backtracks and contradicts itself. I think he had an interesting idea and then decided to shoehorn another 300 words into the concept that didn’t fit. (This was also the conclusion of almost everyone in the live chat.)

By the time I got to Romance (the very last genre), I felt like his beats and advice were a waste of time. He also was super hung up on some binaries throughout the book, especially in regards to gender, and it just wasn’t fun to read (or, in my opinion, accurate).

I will say I appreciate the idea that combining genres is the way of the future and I like the examples he gave throughout the book of why certain genres work well together. I’m super jealous of the dinner he got to have with William Goldman, I like that he pointed out that the “technology” of romance novels are that of language (humanity’s first tool!), and I appreciate that he said story beats can be reordered to keep things more interesting instead of following all the advice to the letter.

The consensus from the chat was clear that we would NOT recommend buying this book, but I think we all got a little something here and there out of it. If anything, I appreciated the conversation it generated bahahah.

For the book club pick before that, we discussed WONDERBOOK: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff Vandermeer.

This one was fun because we had people that REALLY loved the book and people that REALLY didn’t like it. Divisive picks are my favorites to chat about!

WONDERBOOK touts itself as good for beginners and intermediates to the world of fiction, especially speculative fiction. This book is not kidding around when it calls itself an “illustrated guide.” If you do NOT like to learn through visuals or if you find them distracting, I think it’s safe to say this one won’t be for you. The way it’s structured is also very textbook like which made me feel like I was back in school, which was fun!

The book starts with the “basics,” things like inspiration and the elements of stories (points of view, dialogue, description, etc.) and slowly works its way up to things like characterization, worldbuildling, and revision.

I like the twists on “write what you know,” where this book says instead to “write what interests you.” Definitely going to keep that in my back pocket when I hear the typical phrase.

I also really enjoyed the “guest features” in this book, my favorite came from Nnedi Okorafor. Another (Matthew Cheney) talked about writer’s block and I appreciated that they called out how “expectation can destroy artists of all kinds.” It really served as an “aha” for me, that the times I feel under the most pressure from my own stories is because I’ve put a weird expectation onto them. Being able to pinpoint that as the issue has helped me to slowly dismantle those expectations, too.

In contrast to THE ANATOMY OF GENRES, WONDERBOOK calls out other advice books for being too narrow in scope. On page 41, “Anyone who tells you there are only a dozen types of stories should be viewed with as much suspicion as someone who tells you ‘all animals are the same.’ A penguin is not a hamster; nor is a prawn a sea cucumber, an elephant a squid, an anteater a dragon....Still, each of these story-creatures conforms to certain unities of shape, habit, and functions.” The analogy continues for several more paragraphs and honestly, I appreciated it!

There are a lot of fun nuggets in here, though I do think it caters more to beginners than intermediates. Still, I found a lot to appreciate and enjoyed the fact that there’s online resources that continue to be updated and published. That's a huge bonus. I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes a lot of visuals and focuses on the fantastical over realism, as the book promises.

A brief reminder that our next book, to be discussed at the end of July, will be BIG MAGIC: CREATIVE LIVING BEYOND FEAR by Elizabeth Gilbert!

To switch back to writing, I’m trying to decide what project to work on during the #24hrnovel. For those that didn’t know, that’s happening THIS WEEKEND (the 15th to 17th, in your own timezone)! I’ll put a poll up, let me know if you’re participating!

On the one hand, I’d like to get some hours in on this next draft of A Closet Full of Cauldrons. On the other hand, I do have several WIPs that I’ve outlined and do prefer to do my crazy experiments when I’m zero drafting. Since it’s over the weekend (not my usual “work time”), I think I know which way I’m leaning!

I won’t be doing it all in one twenty-four hour session though. I’m planning on counting mine by “butt in chair time," over the course of the three days.

And of course, we have a couple Patreon sprints to go through during that time! :)

Our Double Stream Days for the month:

A little change from what I said last, we’ll be having our first sprint on Saturday! This Saturday, the 15th, at 1:15pm CDT. And then our second Double Stream Day will be on Sunday, at 4:45pm CDT.

And look!!

Now that there are over 6,000+ people following over on Twitch, I figured everything was aligning to celebrate with a 6-hour stream. At the usual 9:45am CDT time on Monday, the 17th, we’ll go for six hours and hopefully I’ll finish up my #24hrnovel challenge! :)

That will see me through my last day here in Texas before I journey over to Europe for vacation and some fun shenanigans (more on that next time since I’ve already droned on for so long today, bahaha).

Hope to see you all for the sprints! Let me know how June’s been treating you and if there’s anything exciting you’re looking forward to it in the near future. Bye for now and happy writing!