a digression on writing.
FIRSTLY. It is time to announce JULY’S QUEER BOOK GIVEAWAY.
I will drawing for three copies of Felicia Davin’s The Scandalous Letters of V & J! This is one of my very favorite books of last year, and in the running for one of my favorite books ever. It is a book which is doing big things with exploring the full creative potential of gender, trans people as artists, and queerness as revolution, AND ALSO a witty romp across magical Paris in 1823. Sex, violence, mayhem, love, funny listmaking! All within these pages.
If you’d like to sign up to enter the giveaway, the google form is here.
While you are at it: if you are the sort of person who loves a thoughtfully-written newsletter which teaches you something new every time, absolutely subscribe to Felicia’s Word Suitcase. Every two weeks she goes into the etymology of a word and talks about what she’s been reading, and every time she reminds me that I love language and what humans can do with it.
The newsletter about Portuguese cheese (promised to my Bluesky followers) is still coming, but to be honest I have been struggling with the text of the book I bought from Portugal on the topic. The language related to cheese is straightforward (coalho, rennet, is pretty obviously linked to coagulant) but a lot of the more prosaic verbs are not ones familiar to me from either my Brazilian coworkers or my dictionary. I also am realizing that I am going to have to do more outside research on the specific sort of traditional cheese I am feeling nosy about (that is, sheep milk cheese made with vegetarian rennet.)
So what’s in this newsletter?
Writing. So much writing. Let’s talk about it.
I finished the first draft of The King in the Forest, which is the fourth Goblins & Cheese fantasy romance novel and which concludes this arc, in September 2023. I got editorial notes back early the next year, in the midst of drafting A Bloomy Head. I started the initial edit of TKitF in April 2024, only to back-burner it again when A Bloomy Head came back into my hands for a first and second round of edits. That took most of the year, whereupon I was extremely distracted by the success of my Regency Cheesemakers. I got down to business again in March of this year.
At which moment I realized, to my horror, that I needed to rewrite the entire draft, salvaging only 20-30% of the original.
Why? Why? WHY? I am the boss of this book! Why am I doing this to myself! It’s exasperating to me and almost impossible to explain to others.
There are a few external factors at play. I have been very up front in this newsletter how much stress and grief I feel observing the violent persecution of immigrants in this country, as well as the unwinding of public services and democratic norms. There is a lot for me to do that doesn’t have to do with writing fiction at this moment. I also have started working full-time at my day job, which both means that I have 10-15 hours fewer hours of free time a week, and also that I have to be much more careful about how I spend that free time. The day before a five-hour shift I could stay up until two AM writing about goats; not so the day before an eight-hour shift.
But, and, also: a lot of it is just the book itself, and what it is teaching me about myself as I am writing.
The King in the Forest deals with the same romantic grouping as the second book in this sequence, Priest-Queen: the newly-crowned queen, Elsyn, whose sister was stolen away by the fairy king Oberon and replaced with his own awful daughter; Kandar, the goblin prince, cousin to the goblin king who steals Taryn back; and Ben, heir to a dukedom and Elsyn’s childhood best friend, exiled for seven years for a murder he didn’t commit. The conflict in Priest-Queen (such as it is; it’s a fairly gentle book) relies on the three of them physically getting to the same place, navigating a magical royal wedding ceremony, and trusting each other enough to rescue Ben’s mother when she is kidnapped by fairies.
Most of the conflict in the initial draft of The King in the Forest relied on these three not really making much progress as individuals in the year which has elapsed since the end of Priest-Queen: not in trusting each other and not in developing more confidence to rise to the demands of the roles they occupy.
I actually think it is very common for people to be trapped for a long time in the exact same interpersonal problems. Sometimes people never get over their hangups around vulnerability and intimacy.
But when I came back to the manuscript at the beginning of this year, I realized that writing my guys this way displayed a deep cynicism about the capacity for people to grow and change for the better that neither served the story nor my own growth as a writer. It might be realistic and relatable for all three characters to hold back and stay wary until forced to do otherwise, but it makes for a less interesting and less emotionally real book. Three people who have done their very best to work toward meeting each other on level ground, who have packed their days with learning and listening and service, but who are still struggling to understand each other is a much more meaningful story in this moment — maybe all moments! — in historical time.
It’s also a hell of a lot harder to write than a story where they and I rehash the same problems, which is perhaps why I am still hip-deep in this draft.
(Beyond that, I realized that I had a whole bevy of side characters whose stories I did not know, including one who is going to be the protagonist in a later novella, and that taken a fair bit of time to map out. Among those is a duke who is also the chief priest to the pig god of fire, who has been fun to write.)
Hunting emotional authenticity is not a swift process, and I remain hunting yet.
Best of wishes to all of you,
Sharon