Skin-singers: Hidebound
Nov. 16th, 2014 06:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjThe initial very rough dictation transcripts for Hidebound came out to about 15K words, but due to the nature of the medium, there was a fair amount of redundancy in coverage. Talk is cheap, as they say, and if I can't remember if I've covered a scene already, better to do it again than forget it. At this point I've converted that to about 2500 more polished words without substantially affecting the overall word count. If this conversion rate continues to hold, we're looking at a longish novelette, or if the final version expands a smidge more, just barely over the line to novella. It'll probably be close enough that at some point I'll start looking at how the difference would affect where I can send it. (Professional advice on the (dis)advantages of both categories will be cheerfully entertained.)
Back in 1995 when the first of my skin-singer stories was published, the whole "shapeshifter erotica" thing hadn't really come into being yet. If one can trace some of the key drivers of the motif, that same year was when the third Anita Blake novel came out (the first one with a major shapeshifter character and well before the series…well, shifted in certain directions). It would be another decade before the Twilight phenomenon cemented the popularity of vampire/werewolf erotica as a genre of its own. Today, sheer statistics would suggest that people are firmly of the opinion that shapeshifter equals erotica, no questions, no exceptions. (And when doing some cursory background research for this paragraph, it came to my attention that "gay cuttlefish shapeshifter erotica" is a thing. I. Can't. Even.)
So clearly I am once again going to be wildly out of step with the zeitgeist. The skin-singer stories are not erotic. There is an ongoing (same-sex) relationship running through the stories, but they can't really be called romance by any stretch of the imagination. Just plain old-fashioned secondary-world fantasy with a quasi-medieval Europeanoid setting, and a shape-changing process that owes more to shamanistic motifs than contagion or genetics.
So: no urban fantasy, no erotic romance, no angst over dominance/submission posturing. What we have instead is a story of cultural change and adaptation, the fine line between mutual interest and exploitation, and making bets about which path to cast your fate to. Hidebound will, above all, be a story about women's bonds and conflicts in a patriarchal context. About devising and negotiating bargains that enable all parties to win. About forging a path to your heart's desire, no matter what the barriers and the cost. All of the skin-singer stories have -- without really intending it -- turned out to be about making choices, and about demanding different options when the choices you're offered are unacceptable. I think it's going to be a really good story. I sure hope some editor thinks so as well.
Back in 1995 when the first of my skin-singer stories was published, the whole "shapeshifter erotica" thing hadn't really come into being yet. If one can trace some of the key drivers of the motif, that same year was when the third Anita Blake novel came out (the first one with a major shapeshifter character and well before the series…well, shifted in certain directions). It would be another decade before the Twilight phenomenon cemented the popularity of vampire/werewolf erotica as a genre of its own. Today, sheer statistics would suggest that people are firmly of the opinion that shapeshifter equals erotica, no questions, no exceptions. (And when doing some cursory background research for this paragraph, it came to my attention that "gay cuttlefish shapeshifter erotica" is a thing. I. Can't. Even.)
So clearly I am once again going to be wildly out of step with the zeitgeist. The skin-singer stories are not erotic. There is an ongoing (same-sex) relationship running through the stories, but they can't really be called romance by any stretch of the imagination. Just plain old-fashioned secondary-world fantasy with a quasi-medieval Europeanoid setting, and a shape-changing process that owes more to shamanistic motifs than contagion or genetics.
So: no urban fantasy, no erotic romance, no angst over dominance/submission posturing. What we have instead is a story of cultural change and adaptation, the fine line between mutual interest and exploitation, and making bets about which path to cast your fate to. Hidebound will, above all, be a story about women's bonds and conflicts in a patriarchal context. About devising and negotiating bargains that enable all parties to win. About forging a path to your heart's desire, no matter what the barriers and the cost. All of the skin-singer stories have -- without really intending it -- turned out to be about making choices, and about demanding different options when the choices you're offered are unacceptable. I think it's going to be a really good story. I sure hope some editor thinks so as well.
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no subject
Date: 2014-11-17 04:20 am (UTC)(ok, that's not all I took away from this post, but srsly, cuttlefish?)
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Date: 2014-11-17 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-17 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-17 05:33 pm (UTC)Not all people
Date: 2014-11-17 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-18 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-18 04:34 pm (UTC)