Cris de Borja

Day 22 → Tell us about one scene between your char­ac­ters that you’ve never written.

I’m going to go with this question as asking about a scene I haven’t written yet, as opposed to something I would never write.

In Lolo, there is a scene that may or may not get used. Louie, the stern and reserved angel, hides out in a cute plushie unicorn as a false form. Magic Girl Lolo keeps her stuffed animals in her room. Her best friend, Fong, picks up the plushie, innocently snuggling it to her chest while she and Lolo are talking. Lolo hasn’t told Fong yet about her new role (saving the world). Louie’s consternation grows until he can’t bear the cuddling anymore. He is unable to continue pretending to be a stuffed animal and begins squirming and protesting about the indignity of being snuggled and complaining about Lolo’s obvious need to share secrets with her friend.

Day 23 → How long does it usu­ally take you to com­plete an entire story?

I am a slooooow writer. Even if I sit down every day and devote several hours to writing, in a good month I can produce 20,000 words of readable stuff. A more realistic production is 4,000-5,000 words on ongoing projects. Finishing something like a short story, which has to be structured and tight, may take a month… if I’m having a good month. (I’ve been working on a particular short story on and off for a couple of years already. In contrast, I had a draft "A Theft of Teapots" in about a week, then spent a few more weeks revising and rewriting it.)

One completed novel project took ten years. I felt the achievement going back to it and bringing it to a close. A current novel has been going for over two and a half years; I had targeted completion of the first pass at about two years, but in recent months I’ve only been able to add about 4K a month, sometime only a few hundred words at a time. It’s a long one (over 138,000 words), but I’m close to the ending. (I procrastinate writing endings, I do.) When I’m done, it will be the longest work I’ve finished, and one I’ve been most steady on.

The idea of spending three years on a first draft used to be daunting and disheartening. Now, I know that I am a slow writer, physically slow to put the words down even when diligent. That helps. I’m in a different place from a decade ago. I’m more patient with myself.

I believe that I will become faster as I progress as a writer. A few years ago, when I got back on the horse, pulling the words out felt like a physical act, like pulling up dandelions by the root. It was like walking through jello up to my shoulders. I fought for every single word.

I’m happy to say it’s much easier again. I’m hearing the narrative as well as seeing the scene. Now, if only I could keyboard faster than 35wpm!

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Day 20 → What are your favorite char­ac­ter inter­ac­tions to write?

Dialog! I will often write the dialog of a scene before the details. Anything with a strong emotional undercurrent flows quickly. Tense, restrained conversation is my favorite.

I have a vignette where two characters have a cerebral discussion about a sensitive subject, and that conversation has been my most difficult one to write to date. They both want their relationship to grow, and the topic is helpful toward that purpose; however, they are both the time to observe in silence and leave much unspoken.

Day 21 → Do any of your char­ac­ters have chil­dren? How well do you write them?

One of my main characters has a stepson, Julian (age 7), and a son (age 3), Adrian, by his wife Sarah. Adrian has a scene where he interrupts his father with a guest, therefore setting off discord between my mc and his guest.

Adrian is a sunny, energetic kid, and I felt he was easy to bring in to the scene. He’s too young to understand what’s going on between the adults, but he picks up on their discomfort. I hope I did a good job with writing him.

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Day 19 → Favorite minor that decided to shove him­self into the spot­light.

Argrum, a goblin in the goblin market who guides Jouet back to Faerie after she gets lost in the mortal realm, decided that I needed to do more with him. He’s gone from being a fruit seller to being — in another story — the magistrate called in on a questionable death.

The short-statured, so-ugly-he’s-kind-of-beautiful goblin is of Brian Froud stock, all stick-colored skin and knobby joints. He and Jouet make a lovely picture together.

Because of him, I’ve given a lot more thought to how the various types of fae interact. That’s helped me challenge fantasy tropes in my world building.

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Day 17 → Favorite pro­tag­o­nist.

Day 18 → Favorite antag­o­nist.

Because my darling Jouet gets to be both, I’m going to continue catching up by answering these together.

As I pointed out earlier, Jouet began as an antagonist. The point of view character was threatened by her relationship with his lover. Her second role was as a an outright villain. Genny, the protagonist of that story, is a human girl who stands in the way of what Jouet wants.

This is Jouet in the later years of her (nearly) immortal life. She is bitter and cruel after many years of sorrow and physical pain. She is not a simple villain. I have a lot of love and sympathy for her. Her roll as antagonist comes from putting her pain before all else.

In her earlier life, she a hero motivated by that same self-centered personality. In fact, it’s circumstance more than anything else that makes her the protagonist when she is caught up in the matrimonial squabble between the faerie king and queen. She falls in love with a mortal, Xiaowen, the great love of her life. And while it is love that makes her risk all she has, it is the passion thatshe feels, born of a sympathy with Xiaowen’s plight, that fuels her.

Jouet is a product of her world. Her morality is faerie morality, where power makes right. Like all faerie, she places high value on social status, the coin of Faerie. Her superiority is backed up by lineage, beauty, intelligence, and ability. She has a temperament for vengeance. She has a strong will and control of herself.

She lets me make a case for how a person’s traits and choices can present as heroic, villainous, and something in-between.

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Since I missed a few due to being offline for the weekend, here are three for catch up.

Day 14 → How do you map out loca­tions, if needed?

Oh, yes. It’s worthwhile to map out anything from a room to a world. Rooms, houses, and streets help me visualize how the character moves through the scene.

It’s not just a kitchen, Kiyomi’s kitchen has a round center table offset from the refrigerator/freezer. Proceeding counterclockwise is the back door, a window with some furniture under it (a pie safe if I think about it), about five feet of wall, then the doorway to the parlor, and so on.

With terrain, I have to know what my characters know about where they live as well as what they don’t know. I know the miles of sand that frighten Farasa as she is abducted through the desert, and I know where her abductor is taking her.

Day 15 → A writer you admire, whether pro­fes­sional or not!

Kam Oi Lee, Jess Faraday, Helen Angove, and Wendy Barron all been tremendous help, inspiration, and support over many years. Lauren Dane is so successful after all her hard work and perseverance, I’m happy to have known her when she was starting out.

As a reader, I have a long list of admired writers. Ursula Le Guin, because I feel that her writing expands my mind. Lois McMaster Bujold because she is masterful with cross-genre. Michael Marshal Smith because when I read his work, I want to write! Connie Willis, because her layered stories show how interest in everything creates story ideas.

Day 16 → Do you write roman­tic rela­tion­ships? Are you good with those? Do you write sex scenes?

I don’t write romance (the genre), nor are romantic relationships focal in my writing, yet how can any story about people not have love in it, and be worth telling? There is so much variety to how love is expressed. Focusing on romantic love, to me, feels limited, restrained. We have seen so many of those stories!

The romantic relationships I write about are never a simple boy-meets-girl. I don’t know, myself, what shape that mythical creature is.

Am I good with those? I hope so! Sometimes it takes a lot of drafts to get it right.

I do write sex, smut, physical relationship and expression. It’s sometimes very necessary, in order to understand the characters and fullness of the story. A story is already such an intimate thing. With a modest character, someone who wouldn’t kiss-and-tell, showing that aspect of them can connect them to the reader. With an exhibitionist character, I can’t avoid writing their sex scenes; they demand it! (Whether or not those make it through to the final draft is another matter altogether.)

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Day 13 → What’s your favorite cul­ture to write, fic­tional or not?

I really enjoy the future of robots and human clones that is the setting for several of my stories. I like optimistic science fiction, and that culture is one that has made progress in human rights as well as technology.

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Day 12 → In what story did you feel you did the best job of world→­build­ing?

Well, that’s not really fair. Something like "The One That Got Away" does what it needs to with a film noir mood, but it’s set in the familiar world we live in. I think it’s effective, but it didn’t require a lot of building.

On the other end of the spectrum, Ciel and Jewel’s story (The 13th Chime) is onion layered, and I mean like a blooming onion appetizer with dipping sauce in the center. It’s not solely onion. The day-to-day is a fantasy setting, across a broad geography including remote coastal outpost, wilderness, and steampunk-industrial city. It has the additional level of Jewel’s origin world, which for simplicity I can describe as a dream world. I have a lot of building and showing to do to get it right.

I wouldn’t even say that’s the most built up world. Magic Girl Lolo’s world is a world of magic, set against a place both familiar and nostalgic: the 1990s. Creating ’95 Santa Monica, California for the reader is as important as setting up the magic logic of angels and reincarnations. For a period piece, every detail is meaningful.

Then, with the world of Faerie, the difficulty is in using the tropes and motifs I want, while breaking preconceived and popular expectations. To do this, I’m using description of the physical setting. Specifically, Glorianna Palace isn’t something I anticipate a reader will have seen in fairy fantasy before. It’s literally a stadium, a tiered edifice with a central arena, where court life happens. Like the palaces of ancient China, it is composed of the stadium and surrounding buildings, all within a "wall" of enchanted gates.

So in that case, it’s the physical world that sets up the world building.

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Day 11 Who is your favorite/least favorite char­ac­ter to write (original fiction only)?

I think these questions are getting harder.

Favorites… I find that supporting characters are more fun. Maybe because there’s less pressure? Villains are great, of course. The first characters that come to mind that I can call favorite are Riddle the cat and Argrum the goblin. I’ve developed such a like for Argrum that he’s getting a more important role as a sort of magistrate in a murder mystery.

Alas, it’s often a protagonist that wears the least-favorite banner. If a less central character is a drag, I can make them go away. If the protagonist is dull, it means I have a lot more work to do. Currently, Lolo is coming out flat. She’s going through the motions. I love her, I really do, but writing about her is a chore. She’s drawn on the magic girl template, which is unfortunately not very interesting in and of itself.

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Day 10 → What are some really weird sit­u­a­tions your char­ac­ters have been in?

What’s weird, in fantasy? When I think of weird situations, I think of sitcom slapstick… and because of that I’m having difficulty answering this question.

Marin finds a graveyard with actual ghosts, but which is weirder, the haunting or the large plot of marijuana growing in the woods behind the graveyard?

Jouet gets transformed into a giant owl. In her world, that’s not as strange as falling in love with a mortal man.

Meyer has to depend on a cat to act as translator for a dragon (because dragons don’t talk to humans, but cats are OK). The cat in question, Riddle, has lived nine actual lives. Meyer is Jouet’s brother-in-law and is a parallel universe incarnation of Jouet’s deceased lover.

Lolo has two guardian angels living with her that take the bodies of stuffed animals (plushies, not taxidermy) when they aren’t in angel form. The unicorn, Louie, was the guardian angel of Lolo’s past life. Buttercup, a little cow, is Lolo’s guardian angel. The angels’ plushies are dolls I had when I was little.

I like magic. When the world is magic, it gets weird all over.

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Day 09 → How do you get ideas for your char­ac­ters? Describe the process of cre­at­ing them.

Central characters usually come first, telling me their stories. I have a basic idea of who they are. Then their role as antagonist or protagonist develops as I come to understand who else is in their immediate world. As I start to write about them, either in story creation or in free writing, I will start to bring in the "what if" elements that change details. Sometimes those details change the whole story.

My characters come from dreams, or variations on a character in someone else’s canon. For example, I mentioned earlier that Jouet began as a plot device in fanfiction. She needed to have elements that inspired a magic creation in canon timeline, so I knew she had long hair and long life (literally the first things I knew about her). Therefore, she became an immortal faerie, and that among fae hair was a status marker.

That she is confident, hot-tempered, and vengeful don’t feel like created (imposed) elements. Her personality, details of her looks, were just there. I’m quite sure that my subconscious mind works on characters and stories, which is why I have "story dreams" that are like little movies, and why a character comes on stage so close to complete. Ask me any simple question (what kind of pizza? sleeps in socks?) about any character of mine, and I will know without over thinking.

Side and supporting characters need more shaping, more active character creation, because they are storytelling elements as well as people. That’s how we tell our own stories about events, memories, our encounters. We explain relationships, or give some aspect of the person who was involved in the story we are telling.

As I start actually writing the story, I’ll be inspired to add layers to all the characters. I might hear some dialog that I think fits or even see an outfit that suits a character. Then there is the Bechdel test; if I’m not passing it, then roles get shuffled. Along the same lines, I am OK with updating character design to add diversity and create representation. It’s too easy to write bland characters when they are all the same age, same racial background, same economic background, same regional background, physically "able," and neurologically typical. Real people aren’t any kind of standard issue, so why would characters be?

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