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OMG it’s finished!
2025-07-30 17:25![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
tacit_feedLast night, at 12:42 AM Eastern time, my Talespinnter and I finished the first draft of our novel Spin, by far the most difficult, ambitious writing project I’ve ever been part of.
This novel has a story. I mean, it also is a story, but on top of that it has a story. Lemme take you back.
I met her on Quora. She talked about beta-testing sex toys, I had some toys in need of beta testing, so I slid into her DMs with “hey, pardon the intrusion, but would you like...?” She said yes, I gave her some prototypes, she gave me an excellent beta report, she invited me to a tabletop role-playing game she GMed, and the rest is (still unfolding) history.
Anyway, I already have a wife, and a girlfriend, and a crush, so we needed something to call her. She’s a writer and a marvelously inventive creator of worlds, so we cast around for a bit, she called me her Toymaker, and I called her my Talespinner. A spinner of tales. A weaver of dreams.
One of her friends was like “The Toymaker and the Talespinner? That sounds like a YA novel!”
Naturally, we immediately started thinking of a way to write a novel about a Toymaker and a Talespinner. We invented a world, we sat down,a nd we started to write.
30,353 words into what we expected to be an 80,000-90,000-word book, we realized that the idea of casting it as a YA novel just didn’t work. The story that kept trying to emerge was not the story we planned out, but something much bigger, much more subtle, and much, much, much darker.
So we scrapped those 30,353 words and started over from a clean sheet.
We realized quickly that the complexity of the story meant we couldn’t wing it, so we drafted an extensive, detailed 11,000-word outline that also served as an extensive set of background notes on the world and its politics, much of which informs the story even though it’s not explicitly discussed in the story.
It’s now been over two years since we started work on this new, reimagined version of the story, with the working title Spin.
It’s a far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel set in a world where the central United States is now a quasi-Calvinish theocracy called the Dominionate. Human population has crashed to under a billion people. Human fertility has crashed to about a quarter what it is now. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, fertile women are effectively slaves, but unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, the Dominionate has managed to build a stable society that actually works for most of its people. (That’s the true horror, I think, of slave societies; it’s possible to construct stable, prosperous slave societies in which most people—at least the ones who aren’t slaves—are reasonably happy. It’s a little distressing how quickly people can become inured to horror if their own lives are fairly pleasant.)
We’ve been grinding on this novel for more than two years. Narratively, structurally, and in scope and scale, it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. We know the first draft is, well, a first draft, and still needs a lot of work, but I am immensely proud of this book.
At one point, we found ourselves having difficulty nailing down the timing of part of the novel, so I flew out to Missouri so that my Talespinner and I could trace the steps of one of our protagonists. That let us put together a detailed timeline, and get a sense of the kind of terrain our protagonist would journey through.
A few thousand years from now, this will be the site of Half-Circle Cothold, the tiny village home to Aiyah Spinner.
I just...I cannot tell you how I feel that this first draft is done. So instead I’ll leave you with this excerpt. I know this is first-draft material in need of polish, but I’m so delighted to have it done I want to share.
“Ever notice how God tells the powerless to respect the powerful, but never the other way around?”
Nathaniel tensed, so subtly Diego doubted she’d noticed. He raised a finger, a quick subtle signal to Nathaniel to stand down. “Perhaps that’s because those with the most power also bear the most responsibility.”
“Ha! Easy for you to say. Look at you. The Grand Inquisitor, sitting atop a mountain of skulls, with the full might of the Church behind you. People die at your command. You answer to nobody but the Emissary himself.>Funny how those in high places seem to spend more time talking about their responsibilities than their power.”
Nathaniel tensed again. Diego folded his hands in his lap, observing her for a time. Finally, he said, “Do you love people?”
“What?”
“Do you love your fellow man? Do you wish for humanity to continue?”
She turned her attention out the window, away from Diego. “I like some people well enough, I suppose. Can’t say I much care for people as a group.”
“Ah, that’s where you and I differ,” Diego said. “You see, I am a fan of all mankind.”
“You have a funny way of showing it. You kill people. You enforce conformity with violence.”
“I protect humanity.”
“You protect the Church’s power. And your own.”
“Power, young lady, is a means to an end, not an end in itself. How much do you know of history?”
“Enough to know it has always been written by people like you.”
“You must know there once was a time when we built machines that flew through the air, that traveled the roads as we are doing now without the need of horses, that generated unimaginable power from the very elements of creation itself.”
“So?”
Diego held up his hand. “Indulge an old man with some measure of influence over your destiny, if you please. Do you know what brought that time to an end?”
“I suppose you’re going to say we turned away from God. We abandoned the Divine Plan.”
“No, I’m going to say I don’t know. Nobody does. The Church theologians have ideas, as theologians often do, but I would encourage skepticism of any theological answer that seems to suit the interests of the person offering it.” Larali’s eyes widened in incredulity as he continued, “What’s of greater interest to me is the cause of the cycle of growth and collapse that came after. Perhaps mankind wasn’t meant to live in large, complex societies. The ancients certainly didn’t think so. They believed our true nature to be tribal, suited to societies no bigger than a hundred and fifty or so.”
“What?” Larali leaned forward, engaged despite herself. “How is that possible? There were billions of them!”
“Indeed. Their scholars believed that in order for a large civilization to thrive, it was first necessary to replace loyalty to the tribe with loyalty to something else, something bigger than the individual, bigger than the family, bigger than the tribe.”
“Let me guess. Something like the Church?”
“Something like the Church.”
“So you’re the enablers of civilization.”
“Yes. What you say with scorn, I say in earnest. We are the enablers of civilization. The ancients built their societies by welding together feuding, warlike tribes through conquest, not just of armies, but of ideas. Disunity into unity through a single vision.”
“How convenient,” Larali snorted. “You cement your own power in the knowledge that it’s better for all mankind. The ends justify the means.” She stared into the darkness outside the carriage, where Lieutenant Blacklock’s horse kept pace. “You surround yourself with armed men to enforce your will, then sleep at night by telling yourself that you’re bringing the benevolent light of civilization to the wretched masses. How many of the ancients told themselves the same thing, do you think?”
“Spoken with passion, for one who doesn’t much care for people,” Diego said.
“Maybe I just don’t think you can slaughter your way to a perfect world.”
