I’m ill while writing this, but I can’t be arsed writing my novella at the moment (not the one this is about), so this will have to do. Be grateful this isn’t a handful of misspelt bullet points followed by, “pffft I dunno”. Even then, I want to get this off my chest, since the fact I’ve not had this published yet is a shame. I put all this work into writing the thing and no one event wants to be my agent. It feels as pathetic as walking around in first school with a shitty paper card and asking the one girl I liked if she wanted to be my valentine. Only, no. That’s stupid. It’s staying in though because it’s the best I can come up with right now. Rejection is there, and it gets tiring. That’s the word.
You’re probably wondering who Tomoe is. Most people don’t know, but the people that do know she’s the go-to example of a female samurai. The story is more her life being told by her while she listens to someone in the present day tell her life story wrong (I like the idea of a narrator complaining about the characters, and this was as good a way I could think of to do it. This is without wondering whether this style of narrator fits the story). In retrospect, it has the faint stink of that awful Robin Hood reboot where they said to ‘forget what you know’. I’m adding some stuff of my own while saying how people added to or changed her story. Me, a hypocrite? Nah. Frankly, there’s other problems with it, like me inventing a husband and saying she only had one child instead of the four she supposedly had. That’s more me wanting to keep the story trim and finding the notion she married her adopted brother (Lord Yoshinaka) to be taboo. Then again, it’s Japan and samurai. They did things we would consider strange or barbaric. But then, everyone did back then. My current novella is dealing with said barbarity from different perspectives, not just one samurai woman who, even if she’s treated like crap by the system, still punches down at the people below her.
The question then becomes, why did I pick this topic? There are other female samurai I could have written about, or simply done a period piece around a fictional character, but I chose her because of name recognition. And the fact we don’t know that much in specific about her, so it leaves me room to make stuff up. Like her original name being Ginko. Samurai got new names when they reached adulthood, with hers being named after the spiral-like pattern on her armour. I think one inspiration for me was a painting of her on horseback, using a tree branch as a club against her enemies. An earlier idea of the story was her having a great deal of strength, shattering a practice sword in a duel. This got cut because I didn’t want supernatural stuff in the story (ghost narrator not withstanding).
Why haven’t I published it? Easy, the first three chapters aren’t the best part of it. It takes a while to get going. Also, it’s just not that good as a story. It reads weird because it’s first person and… the usual stuff. I’ve drafted it 6 times, the most I’ve ever drafted something, and no one has offered to look at it other than a uni student. Very nice of her, but she didn’t change much about the story or the dialogue. It was more like having a spell-checker. It’s a shame of mine. I’ve got other stuff published, but not this. Of course, there’s a difference between a short story in an anthology and a full novella.
People don’t want to be my agent because the book’s not that good. And I need more of a portfolio. I’m getting there with the latter but the former still needs me to rewrite things. I can look at the advice I got from the Arvon retreat. I never applied it because I thought I could make it better myself. Stupid of me. I’ll redraft later. It’s putting it off, I know, but I’ve other projects and work.
Going off the feedback I got, I’d change the narration a bit. It’s about gender and class, at the end of the day, so another female perspective in the present would be nice. If not, cut out of the framing device all together, keep it in the past.
This… sucks. But, like some other things that have happened in my life recently, I can learn from it. Frankly, I’m sick of having to learn from mistakes. I can rewrite and resubmit to agents. Get up and keep going, complaining here won’t help.
I’ll look into getting this published once my next novella is done. It’s gruelling, but it needs to be done. I refuse to have that work be for nothing. If no one wants it, I can keep focussing on other projects and learn from this one.
Anyway, share this, please. And thanks for reading. This week’s been a bit mixed but it’s nice getting through it.