Discouragement

I finished my 50,000+ words for nanowrimo and supposedly now have a first draft of a novel. I know it needs a lot more work and even with that it won’t really be a novel, more like a novella, I guess.

Fiction is strange compared to non-fiction. I don’t mind being completely out there and opinionated in non-fiction, but fiction is trickier. I didn’t use the word “vegan” anywhere in my novella because I felt it would take the reader out of the flow of the story.

So I’m wondering if I left my story way too ambiguous because it doesn’t come out and say “veganism is a moral imperative.” Also since the main plot focuses largely on foxes the story is limited in that fashion. And because it’s a third person limited narrator—we only see what the main character sees—the information is always limited. My main character doesn’t read a whole lot, throughout the story he’s acting on impulse. There was research involved on my part, just not on his.

On the other hand I worry that my last chapter might do just that, break the flow of the story by tying up all my loose ends with a vegan message. Because life is kind of messy and if fiction imitates life, should not fiction also be messy? Perhaps my devotion to ambiguity comes through too much in the story too, you never totally get all the answers, the wicked aren’t punished really and so on. Yet on the other hand, there are points where I’m practically wiring my reader’s jaw open so I can shovel in the sugar. Sigh.

If anyone out there is just itching to offer constructive criticism, likes fantasy type stories, and is not easily offended, drop me a line.

While I was frantically typing my nanowrimo novel I had some assistance. Forgive the terrible picture, it was dark and late. Buddy likes to help me type. He hits the space bar. He actually hits it a lot more than is necessary. Says Buddy, “Great story, it just needs some extra spaces!”

























My other reason for discouragement is harder to write about here, but maybe I’ll get into it over the next few days, it’s the same spiel really, activism, effectiveness, honesty and how all these things tie into our efforts. I want to talk about how to identify actual problems and not get distracted by ribbons and mirrors, or something like that. But that’s where this gets a little discouraging.

Mary Martin recently wrote about opposition to giving enslaved pigs a few more inches of space or allowing them to stand up and asked for religious arguments to use when someone defends gestation crates from a Christian point of view. For me, I can’t see any way that someone who is sincerely Christian can defend a gestation crate, so this leaves me to conclude that tossing the Bible into this debate is just a big distraction. Someone who isn’t able to care for others won’t care for others, someone who isn’t able to feel compassion won’t feel compassion. That’s a tough one to swallow, but the person arguing for gestation crates and using Christianity to back it up isn’t really putting the emphasis on Christianity, their true motives lie with profit, personal interest and convenience.

People throw all kinds of flags on the field when they talk about animals, religion flags, culture flags, “what about the children” flags, but it all amounts to one thing, changing the topic so we won’t talk about the actual issue: the suffering and needless death of thousands, no millions, no billions of animals.

Don’t fall into the trap, we’re talking about what we’re talking about, not playing twenty questions. But if, at the end of the discussion, we uncover that this suffering and death mean nothing to the other person, I guess we cannot fix that. Better at that point to move on and talk to people who are able to feel compassion and empathy.