Tangents, apparently.

I'm beginning to see why I cannot write. Oh, I've dashed off short clips about scenes that come to my head, and I've plotted highly improbable stories until they cease to amuse me, and I've told myself tales to put myself to sleep for as long as I can remember.

I am almost incapable of going to sleep if I don't have a story to tell myself, especially if I'm not particularly tired and have seen a movie recently.

But actual writing and graphing out the plot and research and writing anything anywhere near book length has always been beyond me. I play with a story until the thing that interested me about it no longer interests me, and then I drop it. I don't have a whole lot of staying power. I've been trying to start stories that have longer plotlines and now seem as incapable of breaking from that as I do of writing it.

Recently I read back over a highly fantasy bit I wrote. I was under the influence of a series called Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clare and generally in the grip of the Steampunk idea, as well as still somewhat interested in supernatural creatures, that being werewolves and vampires.

Don't hate me, I've been interested mildly in vampires since I saw part of one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and she had a friend who as a vampire and was good. How can someone be good and a vampire? I wondered. I didn't do anything about it then, but never really forgot that interesting conflict between vampiric bloodlust and human compassion. In college I read a book called The Historian, about a search for Dracula containing very historical facts about Vlad the Impaler and other actually events. Almost makes you want to believe it about vampires, too. But after I finished that, I wanted more vampire books that weren't in what I call the "smutty romance" section. You know the section, the one where the guys are all shirtless and buff and the girls are all buxom and falling out of their clothes.

So, I found and for a while, enjoyed Twilight. I'm slightly ashamed to admit it, but that's the truth. It still bothers me because it's not a redeemable story. There isn't much for greater conflict. A girl meets a vampire, obsesses over him, and he wants to suck her blood. At least interesting tension there, until the end of the first book where he discovers he likes her too much to kill her and therefore isn't a terribly interesting vampire for the next three books. She continues to obsess with him. They obsess with each other. In the end they get each other. "Love."

But that's a tangent out of my tangent. Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clare does have vampires and werewolves in it and is set in a steampunk world, that being a rewritten version of the Victorian Era. It was one of those books that I somewhat enjoy, but I don't know why I enjoy it. There was humor in it in a snarky British way and some interesting conflicts, but there was also the inevitable love triangle that makes me ever so annoyed with much YA fiction often written by women and some weird elements like demons and warlocks and fighting using the names of angels but never seeming to think there was a God.

Anyway, I didn't totally like those books (although I am on the list for the next one at the library, whenever it comes out), but I liked enough about it that I had it somewhat in my head. So I combined a few things I liked and wrote a few scenes. What came out was about the Abandoned.

Goodness, look at the time! Well, actually, that hardly matters, but look at the length of this post! I guess I'll have to break it up, yes?

(to be continued)