The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) (32 page)

. . .

I knew this was my last gig. Club Metallic again, which seemed fitting. My guitar was heavy on my back, sharp against my shoulder blades. In the dirty brown room behind the stage, I leaned it against a wall and drank a bottle of water. Drowning the nausea was the only thing that worked.

The guys who were there already were looking at me, eyes darting to me and away. I was the razor now, cutting them.

“Where’s Jude?” I asked.

Martin knelt to get something from his bass case, and then he turned to me. His voice was strung tight, savage and bitter. “He wanted me to give this to you.”

He held up a silver case, condensation on the outside, and Jude within.

One of the great things about writing a whole (whole, whole) bunch of stories for Merry Fates is that it occasionally gives a short piece the chance to develop into something bigger. Over the years, the blog has been a place to try out some of my stranger, more complicated ideas, and by actually writing them out I can understand them better and then decide if they have the potential to sustain themselves for the long haul.

In the earliest stages of a novel, my ideas almost never arrive in the form of plot. For me, it’s often just the narrow slice of a world or a set of characters that keeps coming back in various ways.
While not directly connected, “The Bone Tender,” “Girls Raised by Wolves,” and “Power of Intent” all take place in a common world, with recurring themes that play out in different ways.
This doesn’t mean that every shared character or the storyline is destined to make it into a novel, but it’s a way of figuring out what belongs in the larger story and what’s expendable. —Brenna

I think that’s pretty true of me as well—that idea that my novels never arrive with a plot. Really, I come up with my next novel the same way I decide what to watch at a movie theater. I never say “Oh, you know what I want to watch? A story about a man facing his childhood fears by dressing up in the guise of a bat and fighting crime in an urban area.” I just think, “I’d like to watch a character-driven action adventure movie!” My novels are the same way—I get this idea that I’d like to toy with a certain theme or mood or world, rather than a distinct plot or agenda. I don’t want to say that I play with these things in a short story to see if I can sustain them in a novel, because I have a theory you can sustain just about anything in a novel if you really try hard enough, but I will say that trying it out in short form ensures that something about the concept is asking questions that I actually want to answer. Both
Shiver
and
The Scorpio Races
began life as short stories; in the first I was playing with mood, and in the second I was playing with the world. —Maggie

In the beginning I assumed I couldn’t write short stories, and so all of the stories I posted on Merry Fates were somehow connected to some novel idea I had. They were vignettes or character studies or fairy tale retellings. Sometimes they worked as stories on their own and sometime...didn’t. As we wrote more and more stories, I had to figure out where to find ideas that could bloom on their own, divorced from novel thoughts and from the way I develop novels (an entirely character-based process). Because of that, I tried very hard not to let my stories have anything at all to do with novels I was writing or novels I knew I wanted to write. I didn’t give myself this playground, I gave myself boundaries! Of course, my subconscious didn’t pay attention to that order, and many of the stories I wrote I can see now are part of a pattern of exploring all the thematic issues I write novels about. Not to mention the world-building. Lately, I’ve stopped
pretending
I don’t use Merry Fates to openly play inside a world so that I can investigate all its edges and figure out what works and what doesn’t, and what aspect I should focus a novel on. It’s impossible to separate my stories and novels these days, even if that isn’t apparent from the outside. Stories and novels come from the same place and use basically the same skill set, just with different framing. —Tessa

I might be obsessed with berserker warriors. (Might be = definitely am.) The idea that the hand of God can send you into a killing frenzy is so terrible and awesome that I’ve written entire novels about it. I have control issues that make me feel crazy in crowds and dislike airplanes, so to me, going berserk is
The Worst Thing Ever
. Not only aren’t you in control, but you, like, kill everything in sight. This short story happened because I was wondering about a random footnote character in one of my novels and because I’ve wondered what might make somebody choose to be a berserk. What might make it a GOOD thing? When is that loss of self and sense and control maybe the BEST possible thing?

I don’t know if there’s really an answer for that, but writing this story was a way for me to try and figure it out.

And also:
trolls and motorcycles and
gore. —Tessa