by the sandal of Hrothgar

i reread my novel. i've been thinking it was good-ish but, you know, uneven, containing too many things i don't understand personally, etc. ... that might be true, but i think it's also pretty good.

and sad. it's weird that i don't like reading books with unhappy endings, but never seem to be able to write anything that's not bittersweet at the least. the thing is, it's not taken from real life, because it's a fantasy novel about stuff i don't understand, but the things that make it good, if it is, if i'm not just reading what i want to read as opposed to what's actually on the page, are from real life. i know about alienation (you know, sad, over-precocious only child middle class girl alienation, but alienation for all that) and about belonging and love and stuff... i know what it means to not be able to say what you have to, to not be able to settle on a single explanation even when you desperately need to, even when settling on said explanation would make you able to move forward... fear, running, uncertainty, dark desire, etc., that stuff is all par for the course.

the weird part is that for me as the author, i know why kaya wrote her book: it's because she wants to bring her friends and lovers back to her, even if they can't stay. but i don't know if that's the actual explanation. i don't know if kaya actually wrote it because of that reason, or if it was something else, and that reason was just a part of it. she might not "exist" per se, but she isn't bounded by my understanding of her.

the beginning's still crap, though. and i know there are parts that get way too involved in themselves.

and i really really wish i could find the next, you know, book somewhere inside me. i get the feeling that it's waiting around in there, but i don't know where. aside from the lesbian modernized retelling of jane eyre, which is just weird, and has problems. maybe i could make it a fantasy lesbian retelling? as, for example,
"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day, by the sandal of Hrothgar! We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless gresaltha maze an hour in the first sun's cycle, but since our noonfast (Archmago Reed, when she had no affairs of the hopthar state to attend to, dined early)..."

this is literally the best idea i've ever had.