Okay, I fail at photoblogging. I didn’t get last Sunday’s work posted in a timely fashion, and then this weekend I did a bit of poking at it on Saturday and more on Sunday, and, um, now it’s done.
So you get the rest of the photos all in a bunch, I’m afraid.
I read part of a fic some time ago, and can’t remember the title or the author’s name or even where I read it (though I thought it was AO3) — anyway, the story was a crossover that began with Anyanka (of Buffy) and Lois Lane (of Superman) in a bar, and then pulled in lots of other stuff as it went along. Anybody remember this one?
I’ve decided I want to experiment with the kind of book-log posts I see some of my friends making. No promises as to how long I’ll keep this up, but since I’m looking forward to actually reading some fiction for the first time in forever, it’s satisfying to track how much of it I’ve devoured in the last month.
Within fifteen seconds of being kicked in the head during karate tonight, a part of me was thinking, “I should pay attention to what this feels like, in case I need it for a story.”
For the curious: very brief disorientation; swift (and only partially voluntary) decision that it would be better if I put my center of gravity lower for a few seconds, i.e. knelt on the floor; massive radiating heat from my ear lasting for a good half hour or more afterward. (It’s still red now, an hour later, though not swollen.) Oddly, the most painful spot is actually the skin in the crease behind my ear; presumably that has something to do with the cartilege being mashed by the impact.
(I was not kicked with any great force. Though admittedly, when one’s kumite partner is six foot three, “not with any great force” is still enough to be troublesome. And more than enough to guilt one’s kumite partner with — especially when he is also one’s husband. ^_^)
You know how I recently mentioned that my mental queue of Books I Could Write includes twenty-two entries in six series? It’s more than that, really, when you count the standalones and the things I’ve already written but haven’t sold and son on. Rather than do a first lines meme for short stories (which are kind of guilting me right now), I thought it might be fun to tally up all the openings for the novels. Note that most of these are currently laboring under working titles, and for shits and giggles I’ll include some I think are dead in the water.
A terrifyingly long list, really. And it doesn't even include sequels.
If you are San Francisco Bay Area-local, or capable of traveling here in March, you might want to check out FOGcon. It’s a new con starting up March 11-13, with a theme this year of “The City in SF/F;” having looked at their programming possibilities, they definitely have some interesting and varied ideas for how to approach that topic.
I’ll be there, and will presumably be on at least one panel. Furthermore — I guess it’s official, since it got mentioned in the recent newsletter — I’ll be running one of their writing workshops. Looks like the setup will be stories under 10K, submitted with cover letter by February 15th; default arrangement is for a Clarion-style workshop, with each student reading and critting the other pieces in addition to the instructor’s feedback. Erin Cashier, Jed Hartman, and David Levine are the other instructors, and we’re each getting our own section, so if you have a preference for one or another of us (or want to specifically run away from me), mention that in your cover letter.
(This will actually be the first time I’ve run a workshop like this at a con. But I have taught writing before, for one semester.)
Anyway, if you’re interested, register soon! I hope to see some of you there.
An Archive of Our Own, one of the big fanfic sites, is working on implementing “subscriptions,” where you can designate particular authors (or fandoms or tags or what-have-you) and be informed when new stories get posted.
It occurs to me that, as more and more short fiction publishing moves online, how useful this could be. I mean, I post links when stories of mine go up, so if you read my LJ you hear about those things. But that requires you to follow a bunch of different separate feeds, and it buries the story links in the noise of everything else you read. Maybe some online ‘zines tag their stories in a way that allows you to tell Google Reader or whatever, tell me whenever Clarkesworld publishes a Cat Valente story — I don’t know; I haven’t tried — but if she then publishes a story in Lightspeed instead, you won’t know about it. How technically difficult would it be to create an aggregator site that covers all the online ‘zines (ending at whatever bar the site’s operator chooses), and then once you pick an author from their database, notifies you whenever that author publishes something, wherever it might be? I have no idea; IANenough of a webgeek to do that kind of thing myself. I imagine it would require some amount of cooperation from the publisher’s side, tagging the pages according to the aggregator’s requirements, etc. The benefit, however, is that it drives traffic to your site; and if I discover a lot of the writers I’ve subscribed to are being published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, I might start checking out who else they print, because clearly that place fits my taste. (Heck, print magazines could even benefit, with a blog that advertises the latest ToC.)
I dunno — maybe it would weaken the sense of loyalty to particular publications in favor of the writers. We still haven’t solved the problem of funding online magazines, and if something like this makes it harder for Strange Horizons to raise money, etc, because people are no longer self-identifying as “SH readers” but readers of one author or another, then that would be a problem. But if you really like Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya stories, it would be neat to have something automatically alert you when one of them pops up, even if it’s in a place you don’t normally look. It seems to me this fits with the a la carte trend I’m seeing in how we consume media: Tivo to pull down the programs we want to watch, iTunes selling us individual tracks instead of whole albums, etc. I’m reading some serialized stories online, and I know having new chapters pop up in my reader, without me having to go check for updates, is damned convenient. If short story publishing in general had something like this, I’d use it in a heartbeat.
There was enough interest in a photoblog of my progress on the Lego Tower Bridge that I decided to go ahead with it.
Here’s something you have to understand: I love spatial stuff. Every Christmas, my mother, my brother, and I do a holiday jigsaw puzzle. I think they’re generally a thousand pieces — whatever fits on the kitchen counter, anyway — and we polish them off in a few days flat, in part because I will kind of just sit there and put pieces in until somebody makes me stop. A few years ago I suggested we try one of those 3D jigsaw puzzles, and ended up doing ninety percent of it myself, because I was the one who really wanted it; the puzzle was Neuschwanstein, and it still sits atop my desk at home. Last month my mother said I could have gone to work for Lego as one of their designers, and it’s probably true; spatial reasoning has always been one of my strong suits.
So this is a most excellent present for my husband to have gotten for me. And, like the Christmas jigsaw puzzles, I’m inclined to marathon on it unless somebody makes me stop. Since I have work to do, I’ve imposed a self-restriction, which is that I’m only allowed to play with the Legos while watching movies with friends. At the moment, we have plans to do movie double-headers every Sunday night for a while, so you’ll likely get Monday updates to the photoblog.
Behind the cut, for the sake of people’s flists, you’ll find the progress from Day Zero and Day One.
kniedzw gave me my Valentine’s Day present early, on the grounds that it would be better for me to have it before I finish the last major work on With Fate Conspire:
Four thousand two hundred eighty-seven pieces in twenty-eight sacks. Three magazine-sized instruction booklets; god knows how many steps in total, especially since after you go through all eighty-one stages (not counting sub-stages) to build one tower, you do it all over again for the second one.
This is gonna take a while.
I may photoblog the process. (And, as kniedzw suggested, try to stage that ending scene from Sherlock Holmes on the unfinished structure.)
Things I do not have the brain to deal with tonight: the continuity error I just caught during my copy-editing slog. The CE didn’t flag it for me, because it’s not the kind of thing she would notice; you have to know the floorplan of the Cromwell Road corner houses to know that I got something wrong. Yes, this means that shui_long would be the only person on the planet (other than me) to notice. I don’t care. It still annoys me, and I have to fix it. Either Louisa’s bedroom faces the street and is above her mother’s boudoir, or it’s directly off the servants’ staircase; it can’t be both. But I’m coming down with a cold and just don’t want to deal with it tonight.
Really, what god of writing did I piss off to saddle myself with this kind of historical nitpickery?
Copy-edits are here, all five hundred forty pages of ’em.
Dear Self: please to be writing shorter books in the future, kthxbye.
Dear Internets: as a reader new to the Vorkosigan books (I know, I know; I’ve been meaning to read them for years), which book should I start with?
Relevant factors include publishing order, internal chronology, accessibility, and quality of writing. Recommend the one you think is most likely to make sense and hook me into the series.
There’s a discussion going on right now in various corners of the internet about how to begin a story: sartorias talks about it here, and then you can follow links to this and this and some other pages I seem to have misplaced.
It’s timely for me because right now I’m going through another of my periodic bookshelf surveys. See, these days I go to a variety of conferences and conventions where I’m given free books, and because I still have the Starving Grad Student instinct of “free stuff is always good,” I take them home. Then they sit on my shelves for months or years without being read, until I get into one of these moods. Then I go through, grab those random books, and read their beginnings to see if I will a) keep going, b) keep it on the shelf for possible later reading, or c) cull it.
In my head, it’s the twenty-page test, though in truth that number fluctuates wildly. If I’m feeling determinedly fair — or uncertain — I’ll give a book fifty pages to convince me I should keep going. If I’m feeling cynical, it’s only ten pages, or five. On occasion I don’t make it off the first page, though that’s rare. (I have very little truck with the notion that you need a really killer opening sentence; for something the length of a novel, killer writing often requires larger units of measurement.)
What makes me keep reading, and what makes me stop? On sartorias‘ LJ, I said this:
I’m coming around to the thought that what I need most in the opening paragraph isn’t action or conflict or even character (which is what I need to keep going after a page or two), but very simply a sense of confidence. Some writers can string together words in a fashion that makes me believe they know what they’re doing; some cannot. And I think that difference is also the difference between writers who pull me in, and those with whom I remain stubbornly aware that I’m reading black marks on a page.
I don’t think I can put it any more concretely than that, except to add an addendum from elsewhere in that comment thread, which is that this only partly depends on the confidence of the author. I’m sure there are many writers out there who sleep well in the certainty that their work is brilliant, but to me it still looks shaky and weak. What I really need is for me to feel confidence in the author — however that may be done.
Some of what I’m looking for is prose — not necessarily Amazing Artful Prose; just prose that knows it’s aiming for and hits the target — but it’s also a feeling of solidity to the setting, or a character whose personality leaps off the page. Or all of the above. (Less often conflict, because for that to be compelling, I need a sense of who and what is at stake. So that takes longer to build.) The unhelpful thing about this is that it can’t be boiled down to useful instructions for the would-be writer, beyond “practice.” Practice will make you certain you want this word and not another, a semicolon instead of two separate sentences, this interesting detail about the setting, a wry bit of self-deprecation from the narrator. Practice will get you to the point where those things happen semi-automatically, without you having to consciously put each one in place, and when that happens I’ll stop seeing the seams between all the bits and just see the whole.
Sad to say, a lot of the books I’m surveying right now are failing that test. With some, to be fair, they’re hampered by genre; the further a given book is from the center of my affections, the more aware I am of the basic machinery at work. They may be perfectly good novels, for some other reader. And, of course, the ones that pass that opening test may not turn out splendidly on the whole; last week I read one that started strong and ended up disappointing. But when I find one that has a confident opening, it truly is a pleasure.
A few months ago, I told you all the basic premise of the Scion game I’m running. People seemed to find it fairly entertaining, so I thought it might be fun to provide an update on the storyline we just concluded.
xahra99 asked this in comments to the last “writing fight scenes” post, and I couldn’t remember very well, so I put it to you all here:
What films and/or online videos would you say show relatively accurate knife fights?
I know I’ve seen some that looked good, but none of them are coming to mind right now. I figured it was more efficient to ask the Great Internet Overmind, rather than staring at the wall trying to prod my own memory into working. (It always makes me think of that line from Hamlet: “Cudgel thy brain no more, for your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating.”)
I screwed up my neck and shoulder on Sunday, so I’ve mostly been staying away from the computer. But I’ll have another fight post soon — possibly tomorrow* — and in the meantime, you can entertain yourselves with “Two Pretenders,” my latest offering over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
This is, by the way, the product of one of my charity auctions, where the winner was allowed to choose one event or person in English history and I would tell them what the fae of the Onyx Court had to do with it. In the case of “Two Pretenders,” because the event chosen actually predates the Court itself, the link is more tenuous; but the short story grew out of the summary I gave the winner. So if I do another such auction in the future, remember, you may get an entire short story out of it. 🙂
And remember, after you’ve read the story, you’re always welcome to leave a comment on the forums.
*By which I mean Friday for everybody who isn’t in Asia. I’m actually posting this before midnight my time, but in social terms I don’t believe it’s the next day until the sun has risen or I’ve slept, so even if it were three a.m. Friday morning for me right now (and six a.m. or later for some of you), “tomorrow” would still mean Friday. Confused yet? 🙂
. . . a preliminary cover sketch for With Fate Conspire.
I’m all the more chuffed because the design in question is one I suggested. Authors are only sometimes asked for such input, and far more rarely heeded, because let’s face it: we’re authors, not art directors or cover designers or marketing wonks, and we generally know very little about what sells and what doesn’t. But for once I had a winning idea, and I can’t wait to see (and share) a finalized version.
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
Enough with the touchy-feely stuff about character and purpose; you want to know about weapons.
I said at the start of this series that you mostly don’t need technical expertise to be able to write good fight scenes. Weapons are the one place where that’s less true. You don’t have to be trained in everything you put into your characters’ hands, but it does help to have a grasp of general principles, and to look up details once you’ve decided what to use. What I’ll aim to do here is give you a sense of those general principles, and a few examples of what I mean by detail.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .
. . . it was the time between contracts.
That’s right, folks, I am at present the writerly equivalent of unemployed. Aside from the copy-edits and page proofs for With Fate Conspire, I have no contractual obligation to a publisher. Which means it’s time to go rooting through the brain and figure out what I’m going to try and sell.
It’s a fun time because, dude! New ideas! Shiny! Four years of Onyx Court means four years’ worth of creative backlog, all kinds of characters and concepts that have been stewing away in my subconscious. Some that used to look all sparkly and keen have now faded, but others have arisen to take their place. Just off the top of my head, I can think of twenty-two books in six series that I would be willing and able to do next, plus some stand-alones. So I am living in a time of wondrous possibility, where anything could happen . . .
. . . or nothing. This is also the time where I chew off my fingernails, wondering if my sales figures are good enough, whether the ideas are commercial enough, second-guessing what would be the best thing to do next from a career point of view. Self-doubt creeps in, because right now I have no safety net, and the publishing industry is not exactly in good health. I don’t think I’m likely to find myself sans new contract, but it’s taken writers by surprise before, and what if I’m one of them?
And, of course, the worst part is that it’s slow. I have to polish up a proposal, send it to my agent, get her feedback, maybe polish it some more, then wait for her to submit it. After that, it might take weeks or even months to achieve resolution. Hence this icon.
You may be seeing more of it in the days to come.
Yuletide being my first official foray* into fanfiction, I’d like to spend a little time thinking about it. Out loud, of course, because that’s what LJ is for.
(*Technically a lot of the stuff I made up in junior high was fanfiction, either of the “insert my own original character into this novel” or the “huh, I really like this setting, let me run amok in it with only passing references to the canon” varieties. But most of it never got written down, and none of it was really shared with anybody. Hence unofficial.)
I had to offer 4-8 different fandoms, and the ones I chose were: the Gabriel Knight computer games, K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces, Hard Boiled (the John Woo film with Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung), Into the Woods (the Sondheim musical), Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Norse mythology, and Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads.
How did I choose them, from a list of about four thousand? It was complicated.
