… And good riddance.
I’m going to try to produce a review for tomorrow, but for now, I’m drained. I have finally got through the last edits on Rag & Muffin, my first (or third?) novel.
This has been a long time coming—and I mean a ridiculously, embarrassingly long time. To give you an idea, I first conceived of this dark, subversive, deconstructive magical girl story before Puella Magi Madoka Magica existed.
Yes, really. I could have spearheaded the dark, violent magical girl trend—except I suck.
Yeah. It’s been that long. I was too sluggish to take advantage of this idea, so my muse romanced somebody else instead.
That’s not necessarily so bad, though: I had a lot of skill to develop before I was able to get this story into a polished form. I also had to get my personal stuff together because this book was for reasons I can’t state in detail an emotionally and spiritually taxing project. I had genuine “agony and ecstasy” while working on this. It is (at least in my opinion) a deeply ugly and deeply beautiful story, and I sometimes felt as if I had to rip my soul apart piece by piece to complete it.
My editor said she had a rough time going through my draft. I think (hope?) that’s a good thing, that it has the impact it’s supposed to: I ripped my heart out and stomped on it to write this, and my goal is to rip your heart out and stomp on it also.
I wanted to sprain your stomach muscles with laughter when I wrote Jake and the Dynamo, and I want to tear your heart out with Rag & Muffin. My goal as an author is to rupture organs.
Some compare writing a book to giving a birth, but creating Rag & Muffin has been more like gestating a xenomorph chestburster. It’s wicked and nasty, and I personally also think it’s beautiful. It’s a story of the highest ideals and darkest lusts mixed up and shaken together. It has guns and Kung fu and furries and gothic lolitas dumped into the setting of Talbot Mundi’s pulp fiction with a heavy dose of dungeon punk thrown in for good measure. It’s about sex and death and God, which might be the only important things in life.
It’s about growing up. It’s about getting religion. It’s about losing religion. It’s about kicking ass and taking names. It started as a simplistic and puerile revenge story, but then it grew—and grew.
It’s not about revenge anymore. It’s about saving your soul. It’s about you—you, you son of a bitch.
