Writers hear it all the time: kill your darlings.

Don't get too attached to anything. Achieving artistic greatness means creating awesome stuff, but it also means having the guts to cut it when it isn't one million percent needed. Sometimes you need to delete that exquisite paragraph that surfaces all the awesome stuff you learned in your historical research... but slowed the story down too much.

Or excise that awesome character altogether, because doing them justice added 12,000 words to your manuscript and pushed it from Difficult to Sell to Impossible to Sell.

Or give up on that short story because it's been rejected by all the markets where you think it could have been a great fit.

That's cool. That's real.

It's also not always entirely necessary.

I feel like killing darlings is overrated.

When I was a student at the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer's Workshop in 2012, I wrote a story called "The Glyph of Forgetting" set in a world like our own, where tattoos give magical abilities. The story included a 350-word section breaking down the rules of the magic, which I thought was pretty good.

The story never sold. I am strong enough to admit that it wasn't very good. But I loved that core idea, and once it had exhausted all available markets I didn't want to let it go.

I wrote a new story, with new characters but about 50% of the same material (including the 350-word breakdown of the magic system), called "Carry My Mark to the End of Your Days."

That one didn't sell either.

I wrote a NEW new story, called "The Delta Glyph," but the spark wasn't there and I never finished it.

But still! That darling haunted me!

The idea of a world where tattoos give magical abilities. Those 350 words that explained how.

They floated from story to story to novella. They changed from version to version. But they were my darlings and I could not kill them.

And in 2020, eight years and five projects later, they landed in my novella Kid Wolf and Kraken Boy, and that sold, and got translated into French where it won an award for best alternate history!

I've included those 350 words at the end of this email, so you can see them in their Final Form.

Now, in fiction as in life: sometimes our darlings are garbage. Sometimes there's no saving them, and we have to let them go. But lots of times, their moment hasn't really come. Or we're not ready for them.

I guess what I'm advocating for the most is for you to have a really good and reliable system for keeping and tracking notes, story ideas, possible titles, and darlings you had to kill. Like an enchanted forest or field of poppies, for those of us from time-spaces where magic is real and deep sleep can last a century. Or like cryotubes, for those covert operatives among us from time-spaces where long-term hypersleep is a thing.

For years, for me, that enchanted forest / cryobay was a stack of notebooks. All different sizes and shapes, purchased as needed across a decade or two. Slowly piling up on a bookshelf. They were still alive, still asleep... but not really very useful.

Two years ago I started digitizing those notebooks, going through them and typing up the good stuff (and the mediocre stuff) (and some of the terrible stuff that I suspect might have a tiny kernel of awesome). I use Simplenote, because it's ... uh... simple. And free and robust. But the apple fans in my life swear by that Apple Note thing? There's lots of options. And a digital slumberland / cryobay / enchanted forest will make it much easier for you to take a quick peek in search of the perfect sleeping beauty.

TL;DR: By all means kill your darlings if that brings you joy! But it's ok to put them someplace where they don't take up too much space and can just kind of chill til they get their sh*t together.

Here's that repeatedly reused and revived darling!

Four vectors determine a tattoo’s power.

The first is the Artist: their skill, their experience and intentions, their Lineage. Some schools believe an artist’s magic is forever diminished if their own skin is tattooed; others believe that the more glyphs they carry, the more powerful their own will be. Some believe that power grows as an artist ages, and others say that an artist’s magic ebbs with time, so that every year past the maturation rite their glyphs have less potency.

Basically every school has its own perfectly-consistent rules, and they usually completely contradict another school’s.

The second vector is the Recipient: their intentions and desires, their behavior, their life experiences. Are they receiving the glyph for completing a coming-of-age ritual or vision quest? What is their social rank and birth order? Have they shown suitable filial piety or deity reverence? What was the weather or season or star configuration on the day they were born? Have they chosen or been chosen by a specific animal or spirit or element? Etc.

The third is the Image itself: what it represents, where it originated, what it means to the recipient, whether it’s meant to be seen. Some schools, some glyphs, are badges of honor, and their power grows as more people see and learn about them. Others must be kept secret, seen only by the Recipient and their mate, and their power is compromised or lost altogether if anyone else sees them. 

The fourth is the Context: the place on the body that the tattoo is applied, the alignment of the stars at that time, the phase of the moon, what prayers are said while it’s going on. Massive amounts of oral lore have developed, passed down from Master to Student across millennia, governing when and how to apply a glyph. What goes into the ink; what kind of skin-piercing tool is used.

[ and then this final paragraph was added in the course of writing Kid Wolf and Kraken Boy, when the reimagined world required reimagining the rules ]

There is another vector, spoken of in some traditions: the Relationship. Who are the Artist and the Recipient to each other? In pre-modern contexts, where ink art takes place within a small community and is inextricable from their ethics and traditions, this is crucial. The bond or blood ties between the tattooer and the tattooed matter. How they feel about each other, matters. But even now, the bond means something. Is it just something someone in a storefront does for money? If so, does the Artist respect the Recipient? Or vice versa?