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NaNoWriMo update
Nov. 5th, 2014 07:38 pmSo, I've been ill for the past week or so. I managed to pick up the flu from somewhere, which turned into bronchitis. At the same time one of my wisdom teeth decided to give another push, and then I got yet another extremely heavy period (I suffer from PCOS) so all in all, the first few days of November haven't been all that great. Also, I've managed to write a total of 192 words, most of which I am certain are utter crap. Oh well.
More importantly though, is that I've come across a bit of a problem, and I'm not entirely sure where it's coming from. As I'm reading what I've written so far, I'm coming across scenes that my mind immediately says is too 'fanficcy' for an original novel. Most of these scenes are when I'm trying to get across tension of an attraction nature between the two male characters. But, I can't work out if this is heteronormative conditioning speaking for me, or if my hesitation has merit. Because the thing is, although I want these two boys to have some kind of attraction and a little bit of sexual tension between them, that's not what the story is about, so I want it to be subtle. On the other hand, if I replace one of the characters with a female, I think that these little scenes would turn out fairly similarly - if there's some attraction there, they're going to notice things like freckles on his nose, the blue of his eyes, the patches of skin through the rips in his jeans, right?
The thing is, I don't just want to write about queer characters just because they're queer, but I also don't want to leave it all to subtext either, because I think the time has come for queerness to step into the realm of text without the novel being automatically relegated to the LGBTQIAP+ genre. It's a bit of a delicate balance, I think, and at the moment I'm not sure I'm getting it quite right. Ugh.
More importantly though, is that I've come across a bit of a problem, and I'm not entirely sure where it's coming from. As I'm reading what I've written so far, I'm coming across scenes that my mind immediately says is too 'fanficcy' for an original novel. Most of these scenes are when I'm trying to get across tension of an attraction nature between the two male characters. But, I can't work out if this is heteronormative conditioning speaking for me, or if my hesitation has merit. Because the thing is, although I want these two boys to have some kind of attraction and a little bit of sexual tension between them, that's not what the story is about, so I want it to be subtle. On the other hand, if I replace one of the characters with a female, I think that these little scenes would turn out fairly similarly - if there's some attraction there, they're going to notice things like freckles on his nose, the blue of his eyes, the patches of skin through the rips in his jeans, right?
The thing is, I don't just want to write about queer characters just because they're queer, but I also don't want to leave it all to subtext either, because I think the time has come for queerness to step into the realm of text without the novel being automatically relegated to the LGBTQIAP+ genre. It's a bit of a delicate balance, I think, and at the moment I'm not sure I'm getting it quite right. Ugh.
