You have reached the blog of G. Wulfing, author of kidult fantasy and other bits of magic. Visit my Smashwords page (linked below) to view my e-books, help yourself to the free ones, and subscribe to this blog or follow me on Tumblr for announcements of new ones.
I have, in the last few months, made my Tumblr blog fancier. It now has a page where you can see all my published books, complete with blurbs, links, and their gorgeous covers made by Dr Riptide. It also has a fancy new header image.
On Tumblr I mostly publish short, miscellaneous posts about writing, arguing with my brain, and ranting about things. I also post a link to my latest blog post every time I publish one.
(Of course, if you are one of my Tumblr followers and you see, on Tumblr, a post inviting you to click the link to this blog post, this blog post will be inviting you to return from whence you came. Please enjoy the irony as my gift to you.)
I have started making moodboards for my stories — which is a more demanding and time-consuming art than many might think, but very satisfying — and you can view them here. I'm quite proud of them.
Two people who hate each other get tricked into falling in love with each other.
A man discovers that he has spontaneously turned into a beetle overnight.
There are dinosaurs living in the centre of the planet Earth.
Of their own volition, animals manufacture and wear clothes that perfectly mimic the human fashions of the time.
Fairies can be brought back to life if humans applaud hard enough.
Farm animals declare themselves independent of humans and create their own flag and anthem.
A pair of human parents birth a son who looks exactly like a mouse.
A dead woman turns into another woman and comes back to life.
A woman falls in love with a man who has been nothing but abusive to her.
How many of these ideas sound stupid to you?
All of them are from classic, famous stories.* I am sure that you can think of some wildly popular fiction that astonishes you with the amount of stupidity it contains.
Yet readers love these stories. You may even recognise a favourite of yours in the list above.
When did you start to think that other people's ideas are better than yours? And when did you start to believe that your ideas have to be cool and amazing and interesting in order to be worthwhile? When did we all become so arrogant and "up ourselves" that we decided our ideas have to be The Absolute Best And Coolest before they are worth anything at all?
One of the tremendous benefits of writing is that you can take a stupid idea, follow it to its logical conclusion, explore it — either completely straightly or tongue-in-cheek — and see where you end up. You may be pleasantly surprised or intrigued by what you find along the way.
My book We Are Both Mammals was inspired by a dream I had. The premise is rather macabre: a man wakes to find that he has been the unconsenting patient of experimental surgery, and is now permanently
joined by a hose to a member of another species, a creature who functions as his living
life-support system.
Some readers have loved this story and consider it magnificent and
thought-provoking. Some hated it and thought its premise stupid. I, as
its writer, am very proud of it.
If I were not a writer, I would have shrugged off the dream's concept of a possum-like creature joined by a hose to a human and keeping the latter alive, as daft and gruesome nonsense, and forgotten about it. But it is no more ridiculous (or macabre) than a great many science-fiction stories. In fact, one could argue that the entire point of speculative fiction (that is, science-fiction, fantasy, and horror) is that we can use it to explore ideas unhindered by the constraints of our own reality, and that whether those ideas are "stupid" or not is irrelevant.
Moreover, if you keep second-guessing your ideas, you will never finish any stories. Everything is stupid if you think it is, and the more you think about the stupidness of your idea, the stupider it will seem, and then you will discard it without realising that there might have been a snippet of it that was very cool and not at all stupid, which you could have built up into something you really liked.
What happens if you follow your stupid idea to its logical conclusion? What happens if you double down on the stupidity and take it to an extreme? What happens if you reverse or invert the idea? What happens if your characters don't notice that the idea is stupid? What happens if you make it a bit less stupid in one area but take it to an extreme in another? What if you mash it up with another stupid idea? What happens if you punch the stupid idea in the face, drag it into an alley, and see if it has anything interesting in its pockets?
If the idea still seems stupid, write it down anyway. Just give it a few sentences; one minute of your time. It seems stupid now, but in a year's time you may come across it again and suddenly see how to make it brilliant. It may simmer away in your brain, dawdling about in a murky corner, then one day collide with another, much better, idea, and now it seems amazing. Once an idea is written down, you are free to ignore it, even forget about it, without losing it.
If you can't come up with any ideas, be they stupid or not, that interest you even a tiny bit, and you're starting to think that every idea you have ever had is terrible, then you are probably tired and grumpy and you need to stop trying to come up with ideas and instead go and eat, rest, and play.
In summation: yes, all of your ideas probably are stupid. So are everyone else's. Any idea will seem stupid if you think about it for long enough. The point is not to come up with non-stupid ideas. The point is to write your stories, and you will never do that if you are hung up on how stupid they are.
*(In order: Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Journey To The Centre Of The Earth by Jules Verne, The Tale Of Peter Rabbit and most other stories by Beatrix Potter, Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Stuart Little by E. B. White, 'Ligeia'
by Edgar Allan Poe; and the last is a trope that can be found in any
number of stories by men who think that being
cruel to women is an effective and acceptable way to woo them.)
I am in the process of redecorating my bedroom. Three of the walls are painted, but on the fourth wall, on smooth, pure white paper, are detailed, silver images, drawn exactly like the old pen-and-ink illustrations one often finds in classic children's books such as Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. Unicorns with feathered wings and lush tails stroll contemplatively beneath ancient, craggy trees; swallows zip through the air in pairs; families of rabbits dwell on the grassy banks of streams; mouldering castle ruins lift their proud heads to the scudding clouds; pairs of flamingoes stand delicately in ferns and long grasses, bills close in intimate conversation. Nature, fairytales, history, and mystery, all depicted in unembarrassed, unselfconscious, unironic, sincere detail. The designs seem like they are from another time.
The wallpaper is perfect; exactly the kind of thing that I would have loved at any age; a representation of so many of the things that make me who I am and symbolise the things I have always treasured most. I
had searched online for weeks for the right wallpaper for the wall in my bedroom, found this one while I was searching for a different design, and knew immediately that I had found "the one".
"My younger self would be so happy," I said to myself, when I chose the paper, and again when it arrived. What I didn't realise was how happy, and how significant the unicorns on the wallpaper would be.
Many months passed before I was able to redecorate my bedroom and put the wallpaper to use, but eventually all was ready: the room was prepared, the wall was primed, and the paper-hanger did their work.
When the paper-hanger had left, and the wall was finally complete, I stood and looked at it.
And I started to cry.
Twice I went into that room and looked at the fresh wallpaper, and each time I cried for at least half an hour.
Because, suddenly, for the first time in several years, I was glad that I had survived. I was glad that I hadn't killed myself when I was younger. For some reason, the unicorns on the wallpaper made me feel that I had arrived somewhere. Something was complete. Something had come full-circle. After years of unpacking psychological baggage and trying to heal the damage done to my mind as a child, I realised, quite suddenly, that I had achieved a place where my younger self and my adult self could both be happy. Despite the horror and anguish and grief of the last five years, the dead-end blandness before that, the frustration before that, the trauma before that, and the anger, depression, and despair sprinkled throughout all of it, we had both survived.
We carry our younger selves within us. The fears and hurts that we suffer as youngsters, as our brains are forming, become part of us, and inform everything we do for the rest of our lives. Most of our deepest wounds are inflicted when we are most vulnerable and least able. My inner child has spent most of its life crying, full of anger, hurt, and grief. I have spent the last few years trying to "fix myself" — in other words, trying to heal the wounds I suffered as a child; wounds which drove me to think how much better and easier life would be if I didn't have to live it.
The unicorns represented something. I would have loved to have unicorn wallpaper when I was a child, but my parents mocked me for liking unicorns. (They mocked me for almost everything.) So I read unicorn books, and looked at unicorn pictures, in secret. Perhaps these unicorns, blazoned serenely and unselfconsciously in silver on my wall, signified that I could now give my younger self all the love and acceptance and joy that it had been denied by the people who should have supplied it.
And I said aloud to my younger self,
"Kid, it will suck. There will be moments that are so bad that you feel half dead already. There will be whole years like that. Years whose only colours seem to be grey depression (undiagnosed and unseen) and black despair (silent and suffocating).
"But there are unicorns on the wallpaper.
"Someday, there will be unicorns on your wallpaper. And we will be glad that we survived.
"Was it worth it?
"All the suffering — was it worth it?
"Honestly, I don't know. I don't know if all the suffering was worthwhile.
"But the unicorns are the crowning decoration on a cake that, when I stand back to look at it, is pretty damn glorious.
"We made it, kid. We stayed alive, and now there are unicorns on our wallpaper, and in this moment I am glad that we survived.
"There may be miserable days ahead, for the dark voices are many, and endlessly persistent, but in this moment, I am glad that I did not die; that I did not surrender to the grey and the dark and the despair and permit them to overwhelm me beyond all recovery; that I kept breathing even when I was drowning.
"And no one else will quite understand how precious, how special, those silver unicorns on our white wallpaper are; no one else will fully understand what they mean. But we will. You, and I — my past self and my present self — will know."
As near as I can recall, a few days after the wallpapering was completed, I chanced to discover this video:
And the euphoric music and the tender lyrics and my beautiful wallpaper and several other things I have been thinking about all coalesced into an almighty sense of love for my younger self.
For years I have wished I could go back in time and hold my child-self and tell them that everything will be all right; that we were right about everything and just needed to stick to our guns; that our life would become better than we could have imagined and that, impossible though it seemed, our heart's desires were out there and would materialise at the right moment ...
I have held so much grief for my child-self.
But after listening to this song, I feel so much love for them, too. That young person is not gone: they still live inside me, with all their hurt and suffering, passion and anger and drive and desire. The unconditional love that I extend to certain people in my life, I can extend to my younger self, too. I can love that young person the way they should have been loved; the way no one else did until I met my soulmate. I can fall in love with my young self and parent them and care for them as they deserved.
(This all sounds so terribly abstract. One of my great frustrations in life is that no one, not even one's soulmate, can truly understand another person's heart; no one can live your life, feel your feelings, and fully, utterly understand what and why and how things mean to you what they do. These bizarre paragraphs about wallpaper and a child-self and a YouTube video are the closest I can come to conveying to anyone else the shift that I have felt occur inside me.)
If you are a young person who is contemplating killing yourself, I urge you to reconsider. Because someday, in five, ten, twenty years' time, there will come a moment when you realise that you have become the kind of person your younger self would think was awesome.
But you will never have that moment if you tap out now. Your silver unicorns, or whatever the equivalent is for you, are waiting for you; there will come a day when you can be loved as you cannot love yourself now, and you will be glad that you survived.
And though in my dreams I see you, I hear your voice,
When I reach for you, you are not there.
My hand falls on empty air.
And somewhere inside me, I am crying.
For life is dark, and good things are less satisfying,
Without you.
———
This kind of sentiment can be found, I daresay, in all languages. Grief for the loss of a beloved one is universal. I am doing nothing original with this poem ... but is anyone, ever?
The following is an incomplete list of my personal pet peeves in fiction.
Spontaneous manifestation of fate or destiny. Concepts like fate and destiny imply that the world is organising itself in a certain way, enacting some master plan independent of the mere humans who are participating in it. Things don't spontaneously enact a master plan by themselves; if you want to
have fate and/or destiny in your book then you need to explain what those
things are and how they can exist. They have to come from somewhere; specifically, they have to come from some sort of intelligence that is running the universe — presumably a deity of some sort. Fate and destiny are forms of predetermination: so who, or what, is doing the predetermining? The involvement of reincarnation or a similar concept can allow a story to get away with invoking fate and destiny, as characters conforming to the actions of their previous lives or archetypes can be used to imply that there is a pattern or rhythm to history, but too often, "fate" and "destiny" are code words for Writer Wants To Handwave Why Stuff Happens The Way It Does But Doesn't Want To Admit To Having A God In Their Made-up World.
Destiny "having a sense of humour". Pursuant to the above: destiny doesn't have a sense of humour. It's an abstract concept: it can't think and therefore can't have a sense of humour. If I have to read or hear something about "destiny having a sense of humour" one more time I'm going to scream. Irony doesn't require predetermination: things can be coincidental or ironic or funny without some cosmic force intending them to be so.
Banter. Sassy banter. Oh, spare me. I've written briefly here about why I don't like banter, but the shorter version is that banter is only entertaining for the participants, and, as a reader, all that banter tells me about the characters is that they are witty and Sassy™: but wit is merely intelligence performing for others: in itself, wit does not reveal character; and oftentimes "sassy" is just code for "smug and annoying" (much like "feisty" is code for "character who seems unthreatening by virtue of being old and/or a woman and/or physically small but actually thinks they deserve respect"). I suspect that a lot of authors who haven't explored their characters' psyches use banter and sass in place of personality.
Too much snark. I love a snarky character or two, but when every character is snarky it makes me wonder if — as with sass and banter — the author is using snark in place of personality, and perhaps doesn't know how to include any other form of humour in their story. Most people in real life aren't in a permanent state of snark, and for those who are, there is a reason why: it's a mechanism of defence or misdirection, and perhaps it has become habitual. A character who continually snarks makes me wonder what psychological fear or secret emotion they are covering, and if there seems to be no reason for the snark, I start to doubt that the writer understands what purpose snarkiness actually serves.
Villains without convincing motives. Not all villains have to be sympathetic, but I still want to understand why they are doing what they're doing. "Because I really, really want power" is fine, but what will they do with their power once they have it? What do they think "power" is, exactly? What do they believe it will do for them? Will it keep them safe? Bring them revenge? Enable them to live in luxury? Why do they want those specific things so badly? "Because evil is fun" is also a perfectly serviceable motive for a villain, but the rest of their psychology has to align in such a way that I can believe they really are the kind of person who does evil stuff for fun and no other reason.
A lack of justice. My main objection to Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is that women's lives get ruined by men who are never punished appropriately. Have your nasty villains, but punish them accordingly. If I wanted to see wicked people get away with their wickedness, I would read a newspaper. I'm reading fiction because I want to see justice done.
Predictable dialogue. Human speech frequently follows patterns; small talk and general conversation often follow a routine. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about conversations that should be enlightening and drive the plot forward, enhance the atmosphere, or develop the characters and their relationships, but instead are a collection of clichés. If I can predict every line of dialogue in the conversation, you're writing a soap opera and you need to stop.
In September 2014, I decided to take a vow of silence for a week. I was curious to see what it would be like and what I would learn.
Certain people around me thought it was "weird", but that was not a new experience for them nor for me.
The vow lasted from 19:00 (that is, 7 p.m.) on the 10th of September to 19:00 on the 17th of September, and by the third day (12 September) I had already discovered several things:
I talk to myself much more than I had previously realised
Half of what I say is unnecessary
I often respond to others when silence would probably be more effective
Words are surprisingly unnecessary between people who truly know each other well; and
I use talking to myself as a way to keep myself from getting too lonely.
According to my notes made at the time, the vow of silence was really only a drawback when I wanted to ask someone a question; however, not being able to talk properly with my animals was annoying, and I missed not being able to sing or hum when I felt the urge to do so, — an urge which, to my surprise, occurred several times per day.
I e-mailed a dear friend at the time, "This vow of
silence is beginning to be a pain, to be honest. I am, however, learning
some interesting things, which is what I wanted; and pain can be an
amazing teacher."
On the fourth day, I noted that it was surprisingly hard to refrain from using a skill which one has been assiduously learning from birth and then practising daily for one's entire life to date. I wrote, "Today [...] I have spoken numerous times without
meaning to, either to myself or to animals and once to [a dear human]. It takes a
surprising amount of concentration not to talk."
On the 14th of September, halfway through the vow, I wrote,
I feel surprisingly lonely when I can’t talk to myself. I have realised that not only do I spend a huge amount of time each day talking to myself, completely unnecessarily — if talking to oneself is ever necessary or unnecessary — but that I use talking to myself as a way of keeping myself company. This rather saddens me. I had not realised how lonely I still am. I’m not sure why I should still be lonely. I suppose, if I think about it, what I crave is someone to (a) listen to me, a lot, for long stretches of time, deeply and unreservedly, the way I listen to myself, and (b) talk with me about everything I want to talk about. So often I have things I want to say, but they’re trivial, or no one except me cares about them, or they’re things I’ve actually said before but haven’t got out of my system yet. [...] According to the Internet, talking to oneself is not necessarily negative: it can actually be a symptom of a highly intelligent, active, imaginative, creative, analytical mind. That’s all good; I have a mind that is all of those; but I worry that I’m spending way too much time talking to myself.
On the 16th, the day before the vow ended, I wrote,
Apparently, talking to myself is stress release for me. I was in tears of frustration last night because I couldn’t talk, couldn’t sing … and then when I did sing, I felt much better. [...]
People don’t talk to one so much when they realise that one won’t talk back. I think this is not because they want conversation or to hear one’s input, but because the ‘reward’ or validation for speaking is that the listener will respond as proof that they are listening. It’s to be listened to and validated that people want, not conversation.
After the vow of silence was over, I discovered that I missed the luxury of not having to respond when people addressed me. Not having to answer when spoken to was actually very freeing and peaceful. In fact, occasionally I am tempted to spend another week in silence, if only to experience such freedom again.
Would many of us feel freer and more peaceful if we were not expected to
speak as often? — If silence and thoughtfulness were more highly valued than they are, and if the chatter that is often presumed to be the mark of participation in social situations were not requisite?
Interestingly, several years later, during the four weeks of my country's total lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, I discovered something similar: that, as an extreme introvert, I find that not having to socialise is freeing and peaceful. (I discussed that experience in this blog post.)
Perhaps the primary themes that these two experiences and their accompanying discoveries share are "freedom from others' expectations" and "peace in solitude". The latter is probably a direct result of the former.
I recall one moment during my week of silence in which someone asked me if there was any more milk
left. He asked me this whilst he was standing beside the refrigerator and I was at the
other end of the kitchen. In other words, this person expected me to
have specific, current knowledge concerning the ever-changing
quantity of milk in the house, and expected me to provide him with that
datum, when he could have obtained it for himself faster, more accurately, and
more easily, by simply opening the refrigerator door at his side.
My vow of silence exempted me from having to answer, and he realised this and did open the refrigerator to see for himself; but this minor, inconsequential incident vividly illustrated to me how pointless much of human speech is, and how often we may expect — even demand — that others expend their energy for us when they gain nothing from doing so.
I love manners, politeness, and courtesy. There are many social niceties that are valuable because they make social interaction much more pleasant. But in how many small ways are we expected by others to expend our energy unnecessarily in order to adhere to some social custom which both parties would realise, if they considered it for a moment, is, in fact, completely pointless? How often do we ask someone to perform mental or emotional labour for us when we could just open the refrigerator door ourselves?
