Grief: Love's Dark Mirror

Within the fantasy genre, different races with vastly different lifespans are par for the course. Tolkien's elves are immortal. In the Faerun setting of Dungeons & Dragons, elves easily live 600 to 700 years, but are also reincarnated from one life to the next (except the Drow, sorry.) In the brutal setting of Dark Sun, they only live to 150 or so. Fae are immortal and ageless. In a genre where deities can fall in love with humans, the difference in lifespans is often magically equilized or swept under the rug and left to the imagination of fanfiction writers. 

As a reader and writer of Romance, I love and want a HEA. Disparate lifespans make that difficult. When an elf loves a human, the human gets a Happily Ever After, but the elf only gets a Happily For Now. From the start, one side of the relationship knows that, barring an accident, they will be burying the other.

While that doesn't need to be explicitly on the page, it does need to be kept in mind as a romance progresses. At some point, the elf, fae, god, or goddess must consider that falling for this mortal, or shorter-lived mortal, will mean mourning them. It's a bitter shadow to the sweetness of a romance. No one in the throes of love and passion wants to picture life without the other, but how the characters approach this tells us about them. Are they the sort to throw caution to the wind, love now, and accept the consequences of grief later? Are they careful, guarding their heart until it betrays their good sense, and the specter of a future alone haunts every moment of affection? Do they push it away every time the thought occurs, willing themselves to ignore it?

There are as many ways to circumvent this as there are fantasy novels. Tolkien's elves must choose mortality with their love or immortality alone. In ACOTAR, Feyre was raised to the same status as Tamlin and Rhysand, making the questions moot. RA Salvatore and Wizards of the Coast had Catti-Bree reborn and reunited with Drizzt, although he spends four books navigating the world without her.

The other choice is to let the characters face grief, either explicitly on-page or implicitly by not offering a workaround. I have a soft spot for sad books and tragic endings. I'd read the unabridged Hunchback of Notre Dame several times before Disney ever contemplated giving it an HEA. The Silmarillion is one of my comfort reads. Characters navigating loss and grief offer me a natural catharsis to the struggles in life. To love and care is to risk the pain of loss. 

It isn't something I've explored in a novel yet. My upcoming fantasy romance book, Mistress & Mage, pairs two people of similar ages and lifespans. My current work-in-progress does the same. Within my short stories, I've had a chance to, briefly, touch on it by bringing in an elf for multiple love stories. For Captain Caerue, the shorter lifespans of human, jaglin, and other races in the world, is all the more reason to take the risk. If someone will only live another thirty, forty, or fifty years, then it's time to love them fiercely and completely now, or the chance will pass. The brilliance of their time together is worth the darkness that will inevitably follow.

The story of him meeting and wooing Camellia (pictured above) is in the free anthology, A Season for Romance: Fall Flames, and is a sort of prequel to Mistress & Mage. Caerue and Camellia are the great-grandparents of the FMC, Delphine. However, I had to write a final epilogue for Cae and Camellia, because the darkness of grief can cast the light of love into sharp relief. 

Writing is a Muscle

 "Sheila says the heart's just a muscle.

Sheila says the heart's just a muscle."

What do writers have in common with nursing parents? They're both very concerned with production and output. How many ounces of milk today? How many words did I write?

Despite nursing six children over thirteen years of my life, I don't have any advice on that. There's only so much you can do to increase milk supply. Word supply is infinite, though. The challenge is putting them onto the page. The good news is that you can increase your writing stamina and build up to the daily word count you want. 

When I pulled writing out of my hobby closet and brushed it off after a decade, I wrote sporadically. When I was excited about a scene or idea, I would write. When I wasn't inspired, I didn't. It took me a whole year just to settle on what idea I wanted to write. Then it took a round of the flu and walking pneumonia to really get serious about it. The rough draft of what became my high fantasy quartet took about a year and a half. It was a cluttered, overstuffed mess. As I outlined, made notes, and started rewriting it, I acknowledged that perhaps it was a duology. At the end of December 2020, I had to admit that it was a trilogy. I also knew that I wanted to get it done! The end was in sight. No more dawdling. 

I made the only New Year's resolution I've ever kept. I decided on Dec. 31st that I would write 1000 words on that manuscript every day until it was finished. I finished it on May 6th (I know, because I kept a document recording every single day's wordcounts). In that time, I missed two days: the day I took the Boy Scouts on a five-mile hike in freezing temperatures and Easter Sunday.

The first month, making my daily word count felt impossible. I had a toddler, a preschooler, and I was homeschooling my four older children, so I snatched writing time when I could. I would sit down for a ten-minute sprint and be appalled that I'd only managed a few hundred words. They felt like more. As the year went on, I grew faster. I could write for longer periods (when given the opportunity), and I learned to scribble down quick notes throughout the day, outlining what I would write later. 

Three books and sixteen short stories later, 1000 words isn't that much for me. It's often less than an hour out of my day. I've done more 3000-word days recently than I ever thought I could do without burning out. 

Because writing is a muscle. 

If I wanted to run a marathon (not something I ever foresee, but IF I DID), I wouldn't throw myself into running five miles right off the couch. I would fail. To run five miles or ten miles, or more, I would have to work on my stamina. I'd have to increase my strength. The writing I did before my New Year's Resolution had strengthened my writing muscles enough that 1000 words per day was possible. Doing it every day strengthened those enough that 1000 words per day is my baseline when I'm drafting. Authors who write thousands of words per day have worked up to it. They weren't doing that back at the beginning. Many of them will offer advice on how they built their writing muscles, whether it was a timer, doing structured sprints, journaling, or freewriting every day; they've been exercising their mind and its connection to their fingers, so they can do what they love more quickly and effectively. 

The only way to become a stronger, faster, better runner is to run. (I shall never be a better runner.) The only way to be a better, faster writer is to write, and sometimes, that means writing when I don't feel like it. 

Writing is a muscle. If you want to build it, you have to work it regularly. Not necessarily daily, as I did, but regularly.