It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

I remember the first story I ever wrote. It was for a class in grade three when I was all of seven or eight years old. Our class was told to write a story and it had to be at least one page long, both sides. I remember this story, not because I did particularly good on it or because I wrote fifteen times the amount. In fact, I can't remember what I got as a mark on it at all, although I think it did come in at a very respectable 3-5 pages, both sides. What I remember most is that I'd recently found out about tropes and decided to subvert one. I titled it, "It was a dark and stormy night" and my first line was, "It was a bright and sunny day".

I thought I was brilliant. Seriously.

The rest of the story was about a girl and her friend going bike riding into a park, not so subtlely filling in for the one near my house. It occupies around 43 hectares of land (about 106 acres for you folks from the States), bordering a river. Unsurprisingly, I hadn't gotten to explore it all yet, though I'd been there a few times already on school field trips and such.  In the story, the girl and her friend fell asleep after riding their bikes to exhaustion, only waking up after it was dark with a storm forming overhead. They ran for their bikes but my main character saw a house that she'd never seen before and they decided to take shelter in it. A witch lived inside, and she had cast a spell so that her house only showed up during dark and stormy nights and she tried to kill my protagonists. I think they escaped, but don't quote me on that. It was a bit of a horror and I remember that my teacher had a long talk with me after that class, asking how my home life was, why I'd written it and where I'd gotten my inspiration from, confusing me greatly since I was so proud of myself, despite my father shaking his head at me when I told him of my "brilliance".

Fast forward to grade 11 when my teacher told us to write a poem about rubber boots. I followed inspiration where it took me and ended up writing a poem about suicide using the idea of losing your boots as stumbles along that path before giving up and only realizing too late that they'd made the wrong choice. Again, I thought I was brilliant, making something amazing out of such a useless little prompt. Again, my teacher did the same thing, except when I was obviously pleased about my brilliance, she talked to one of our counsellors and refused to return my poem back to me, despite giving every other student in class the option to get theirs  back. I even asked after it specifically because I wanted a copy and hadn't kept one. I assume it went into my permanent file, just in case my happy demeanour was just a mask I used.

Not to say that I've never had mental health issues; I have and I still suffer from some of them. This post isn't about that. It's about the fact that I realized much later on, after writing multiple novels and short fiction, that my short fiction is either very dark or its erotica, which is overall a very oddly opposing set of points. Strangely, my novels are straight epic fantasy, with only touches of the dark and poignant to them. 

For that matter, I tried writing an erotic urban fantasy novel last year, but I couldn't make it work either. I thought it was mostly a problem with me not having enough of the story or world figured out. Honestly, while that was certainly true, I'm also wondering if I'm writing it too long. Perhaps what I really want is a short story or novella about these characters, rather than the novel-length story I thought I had. On the other side, I have a Dieselpunk novella that clearly wants to be the precursor to a string of novel/novella-sized stories set in my own version of World War II with dimensional aliens(because why not?).

What I'm getting at here is that I'm still learning things about my writing style and that's all to the good. I'm sure that as I get even more comfortable with my writing I'll start working faster, clearer and be able to get more done.

What about you? What's your favourite type of book to read, and do you know if you prefer a different genre in shorter fiction? What would you think about getting a Dieselpunk story of mine? 

In the meantime, if you're in the mood for something a bit darker than normal, perhaps I can recommend my short story, Fated to you. If lighter fantasy is more your mood, check out my novel, Hunter's Gambit. Either way, enjoy what you're reading. Life is too short to read books that clearly aren't your thing!