Hi squiders! Happy Friday! School is out, so I hope everyone is up for two months of chaos.
My youngest asked if she could give her teacher (the one who had me in for the outlining talk) a copy of Hidden Worlds, so I hunted one down from my MileHiCon stash. And then I was like, oh, hey, I haven’t read this in a hot minute, and I should do so.
(It’s 170 pages, and it took me about an hour and a half.)
Hidden Worlds is interesting – I wrote it for my friends in one of my writing communities, so there’s a lot of in-jokes and cameos, but also I was writing it serially whenever I felt like it, and I think I may have pantsed the whole thing. I cleaned it up and published it for said friends, and it’s just kind of random that it’s also been well-received by people unrelated to the Spork Room and that middle grade readers in general seem to really like it.
(There’s rather more sex-adjacent jokes than I remember. I think they probably generally go over the kids’ heads, but now I am wondering what my youngest’s teacher is going to think.)
(She thanked me for it today and said she’d probably start it tonight. So, uh, I guess we’ll know soon. Or I’ll never talk to her again and it will all be left to my imagination.)
It’s an interesting look into the heyday of the Spork Room, which is one of my first writing communities. Writing communities, I have found, have a shelf life of about 5 years during which they are super active, and then they kind of fade away. TSR’s was probably 2006-2012ish, and HW was written 2008, 2009ish, so it’s right in the middle. There are a lot of community aspects in the book that frankly I’d forgotten about.
(TSR still exists, but the message board where it really thrived is mostly dead. We have a Discord server now.)
But what really hit me was Hidden Worlds’ connection to World’s Edge.
Now, of course, I know the stories are connected. I just work on things long enough that sometimes that connection gets fuzzy. Or I forget cuz I’ve moved on.
Now, I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this story before, but I had this story idea about a pirate queen that wanted to raise her dead lover. And I could not get this story to do anything. So when I wrote HW (whose main character is a teenage writer working on her first story), I gave Margery (said MC) this story idea. HW’s setting is the Spork Room, except in the book it is a magical, physical location where writers from all over the world can come to work, and they have the Door, through which all stories come true, and the sporkers can go into the Door to see happen when they get stuck. So said pirate queen (named Cass) is also one of the main characters of the story, though the overall story has nothing really do with the dead lover plotline at all.
And then about five years later, the story finally solidified itself, resulting in World’s Edge.
When Cass first showed up in my re-read yesterday, it really threw me. Because she’s Rae (the captain in WE), and vice versa.
Now, in retrospect, this makes perfect sense. They are two versions of the same character. And if you look closer, they’re actually fairly different. But they have that same core.
Maybe I haven’t re-read Hidden Worlds since I wrote the first draft of World’s Edge. Who knows.
It added a weird dimension to my re-read, though. Rae is no longer a pirate queen, though she’s still captain, and she’s definitely less of a stereotype, though Cass evolves through the story as well. Cass has some problematic coping mechanisms that I unfortunately probably thought were funny at the time. They’re both physically similar.
But while they have the same genesis, I did develop them differently. Rae’s story is not the same as Cass’s, and their personalities are not the same. But every now and then, Cass would say or do something that felt very Rae.
It’s really my own fault, returning to a story idea I’d already used to some extent. But an interesting look at taking the same idea and doing two different things with it, and also looking at how my writing/plotting skills have evolved over the years.
Got the official notice for the start of the summer critique marathon, so I’m looking forward to delving into World’s Edge and hopefully making it the best version of itself.
Happy Memorial Day weekend to my American squiders, and happy weekend to everyone else!
