Roundtable Podcast: The Aftermath

I think most writers want to believe their initial ideas are perfect.¹ It’s usually the initial idea that gets us excited about writing something, after all, and would we bother getting excited over something less than perfect? We would not, sir! We would not!

The reality is that initial ideas are exciting, not perfect. Exciting is good, but exciting for an author isn’t necessarily exciting for a reader. This realization can be ego-deflating; fortunately, a writer’s ego is quick to recover from injury. So I’m fine now.

I took Northlander to the Roundtable Podcast wanting to figure out how to make a story that was exciting for me exciting for its intended audience as well. It was a great session–Dave Robison, Brion Humphrey, and Paul E. Cooley gave me a lot of great ideas on how to approach welding together what is essentially a murder mystery and a dark fantasy into a single, coherent thing. It was also hilarious.

But I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow. Spoilers and all that. I will mention one thing, simply because I found the timing ironic: during the discussion, Dave pointed out that there were no women mentioned in the story. At all. It’s true, and it points back to one of my recent blog posts, (Why I Have Problems) Writing Women Well. The work I did on Northlander is a few years old, and the preliminary work was completed before I had the revelation I described in that post. It’s a perfect example of my broken process. If you listen to the episode (it will be released in mid-June) you should pay attention to that because it’s rather amusing the way Dave just up and points out the big, phallic elephant in the room.

Anyway, the whole thing was a lot of fun, and extremely valuable for me. Now I shelve Northlander for a little while longer, let it stew for a while, then I start tinkering on it. After I finish The Points Between.

Meanwhile, if you aren’t listening to The Roundtable Podcast, you should start. Great show.

Important Links:

• The Roundtable Podcast: http://www.roundtablepodcast.com
• Shadow Publications, Paul E. Cooley’s website: http://www.shadowpublications.com

1. We also want to write everything perfectly in our first draft and quit our day jobs. In our heart of hearts, we’re optimists. Twisted, disturbing, mildly creepy optimists.
2. So… ten thousand years in the future.