Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre. Ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Flying Dogs. Or at least dogs in midair, generally looking goofy.
Ten books that could be booted from the literary canon. As evaluated by someone who, from the sound of it, is actually a fan of literary fiction. I must say, the quoted bits make me agree with their evaluation.
Normally I write my SF Novelists posts well in advance, and just set them up to go live when the sixteenth rolls around. This one’s of a more recent vintage: it took me until yesterday to decide I wanted to spend this month talking about villains and antagonists. Go, read, comment over there.
Word count: 60,301
LBR census: There will be blood. (Pity I hated that movie . . . .)
Authorial sadism: Aw, shut it, Irrith. The lunatic hasn’t attacked you. Yet.
The tens of thousands matter. More than a week’s work, unless I’m having a pretty fast week, and there’s few enough of them in your average book that they feel like real milestones.
Also, the next one will be the official “halfway point” of the book, in the hopes that I’m right about it being 140K in total.
In the most recent issue of Locus (requiescas in pace, Charles Brown), Gardner Dozois reviewed Clockwork Phoenix 2 and had this to say about me:
[. . .] Marie Brennan’s “Once a Goddess” (sort of a fantasy version of Ian McDonald’s “The Little Goddess”) is also good [. . .]
Which I bring up because that made me go poking around online, which led me to discover that the aforementioned story is available full-text online. So of course I read it, and it turns out that Dozois is precisely right, perhaps even more than he realized; McDonald’s story is based on the same Nepalese religious tradition, the Kumari Devi, that inspired my own piece.
McDonald plays it closer to home: “A Little Goddess” takes place in near-future Nepal and India, whereas I ran off to a secondary world and an invented tradition only modeled on Kumari. Also, since he’s writing science fiction and I’m writing fantasy, we (unsurprisingly) have fundamentally different approaches to the divinity of the goddess’ avatar. But it was interesting for me to see the places where we intersect, the shared issues of life after divinity — blessings, marriage, and so on. And without giving spoilers, I’ll say that McDonald’s ending is the one I originally intended for “Once a Goddess,” before realizing that just wasn’t the kind of story mine wanted to be.
I definitely recommend his story. It was published June 2005 in Asimov’s, and nominated for a Hugo (in the novella category — it’s also a lot longer than mine). Follow that link above to read it on the magazine’s website, and if you’ve read my story, I’d be curious to know how you think the two compare.
Dear Your Royal Highness Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Dowager Princess of Wales,
Lady, if your coat of arms looks like this, perhaps it’s time to put down the quarterings and celebrate your ancestry some other way.
Though admittedly you’re not half so bad as the Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenvilles.
Love,
A Writer On An Ultimately Pointless Diversion Through Wikipedia
Well, it’s the same Driftwood, but in different format: Podcastle has just bought the audio rights to “A Heretic by Degrees.” (“Driftwood” itself has already been podcasted by the original publisher, Beneath Ceaseless Skies.)
I really should get cracking on more stories in that world.
Word count: 57,857
LBR census: Love. And awkward discussions of the various forms it takes.
Authorial sadism: Not one but two characters wrestling with some unfamiliar (not to say uncomfortable) feelings.
So I’m trying something a little different with this book. Normally — by which I mean, for nine books now, discounting only my first finished novel — I set myself a daily word-count goal, and use that to measure my progress. Usually the goal is a thousand words a day, and since that’s a minimum, not an average, I build up a little overage as I go, which helps make up for the days I miss, and gives me a margin of safety re: my deadline. (Since this became a professional thing, I use that time for revision, before sending it off to my editor.)
This time around, applying that schedule produces slightly hairy results. For one thing, this book is supposed to be longer, more like Ashes than Midnight. Also, I lost four straight weeks to travel: no forward progress during that whole time. So the five months I gave myself to write a 140K book wasn’t looking like enough, not unless I made assumptions about my overage that I didn’t really want to trust — especially not when even that left no time for revision.
I could have just set a higher goal: say, 1500/day. Or whatever. But I decided to hybridize.
This book is divided into seven parts. I did Part One before leaving town, Part Two by the end of June. So rather than pacing by word-count, I recently decided to do it by narrative chunks, and moreover to do so in a fashion that would leave me a solid couple of weeks for revision. In other words, Parts Three and Four in July, Five and Six in August, and Seven in September, with the book due at the beginning of October. The “hybrid” aspect comes in where I know that each part should be roughly 20K, of which 1K or so is going to be flashback (and therefore written outside my daily quota), so I worked backward to figure out how many words I should aim for in a given day, in order to (probably) finish the relevant part by its mini-deadline.
So far, it’s working out. Beating that quota, combined with a shorter section than anticipated, means I finished Part Three tonight, three days ahead of schedule. And here’s the other new thing: rather than just saying, “Sweet, I can get a head start on Part Four!” and diving in tomorrow, I’m going to take that evening off. I may, if I feel like it, backtrack to chisel off a few of my worse continuity errors in the existing text; or possibly do a flashback. Or not. But I get to take a day to regroup and think about Part Four — and still start two days early.
I don’t know if I can keep up this pace for the next two months. It’s definitely faster than my usual; not brutally so, but enough that it may start to tell in the long term. But I’m more comfortable with this math, for whatever reason, and that’s reason enough to give it a shot.
Just spent ten minutes or so talking at kniedzw, trying to figure out how to make a certain plot point happen, and at the end of it all I decided the best method is: embarrasssing Galen.
Poor boy. I so terribly mean to him.
ETA: I originally typed “humiliating Galen,” then decided to downgrade it. Now that I’ve written the scene?
I had it right the first time.
Poor boy. I’ll make it up to him in the next couple thousand words.
Back in April, I made an annoyed post about how Wall Street types were wringing their hands over Up — not because they thought it would be a flop, but because they didn’t think it wouldn’t be an even bigger hit than everything else Pixar has ever done, and therefore investors should abandon that obviously sinking ship. Or something.
Well, it’s slightly gratifying to see a follow-up in the New York Times, featuring this line: “Dead wrong” is how Richard Greenfield of Pali Research put his related analysis in a research note. In other words, Up has done just fine, thank you, where “just fine” is defined as “raking in profits your average studio would be breaking out the champagne for.” (He’s still recommending people sell Disney stock — but that’s based on issues with broadcast TV and the theme parks.)
It doesn’t address my underlying issue, which was the idea that every movie Pixar makes has to reap a bigger harvest than the one before it, or it’s time for investors to bail. From my perspective, Greenfield wasn’t wrong because Up turned out to be a bigger earner than he forecasted; he was wrong because he acted as if the sky was going to fall if it only made a good profit rather than a spectacular one. I still find the insistence on nothing but constant growth to be unsustainable. But at least the guy has issued something of a mea culpa.
Mary Robinette Kowal’s column over at AMC this week takes a hard look at good queens in fantasy film. The gist of it is, you can’t be both good and powerful: if you’re good, you’re a child and/or tiny and/or sick and/or married to someone else who’s holding the reins. If you’re powerful, you’re evil.
(Before somebody else points it out: yes, I think she missteps a bit with Galadriel; sure, Celeborn’s around, but even if you’re looking solely at the movie, it’s pretty obvious that Galadriel’s much more central and important than her husband is. And if you know the books, he’s her appendage, not the other way around.)
I think the situation’s much better in novels, if only because the data set’s so much bigger. But still, I think the underlying structure that produces the result Kowal describes isn’t entirely gone: “women with power” is a concept our culture as a whole still isn’t quite comfortable with. (See: the response to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.) That idea’s scary, and scary =/= good.
An interesting column. I’ve been enjoying reading them each week, but this is the first one that’s really made me go “hmmmm.”
Over on FFF, I’m pondering the question of what constitutes a faerie, outside of Northern Europe. Head over there to offer your thoughts on how I should be defining “faerie” as the Onyx Court series opens up to include characters from the Middle East and beyond.
Word count: 50,839
LBR census: Love. This book is sadly lacking in blood so far, but the love is shaping up to be even more cruel, so it balances out.
Authorial sadism: Did I mention the love? Also, Irrith just planted her foot so firmly in her mouth I think she stepped on her liver. If faeries even have livers.
I’m roughly halfway through Part Three, and (assuming my target word count doesn’t end up being wildly off-base) a little over a third of the way through the book. It’s hard to pace myself, in terms of expectations; this is the first time I’ve set out to write a 140K book. (Ashes got there accidentally.) Normally I’d be thinking of this as the middle span of the story, since most of my novels, both published and unpublished, fall in the 100-120K range. I’m definitely in “the middle,” broadly speaking — this isn’t the beginning anymore, and it sure as heck isn’t the end — but I’m a good 20K away from the actual midpoint.
I must admit, I’m not sure a seven-part structure was my brightest idea ever. It’s a strange number, and not one we really have a model for, as far as story structure’s concerned, but it fits in other ways. I just have to figure out what kinds of things go in which sections. On the face of it, this should not be a challenge; after all, I could just pretend the part breaks aren’t there, and pace things however seems natural. But there’s such a thing as three-part structure, and such a thing as five-part structure (which I did, for the record, pay attention to while writing Midnight), and the four days of the Fire meant I needed four spans of time in Ashes which dictated some of my structure there, too. I just need to figure out what the seven-part version is.
Well, any way you slice it, the next part is the middle one, when the book stops heading away from the beginning and starts heading toward the end. And I know some of what will be happening then.
Now I just need to figure out what happens in the rest of Part Three . . . .
I’m currently trying to revise something, and the further I go into it, the more I’m bogging down.
Maybe because I, y’know, skipped over that one scene, the one where I need to change it around to do something new, but I’m not yet sure how I want to spin the thing I want it to do, and even once I figure that out I’ll need outside help to set up the execution correctly, and all of that’s a valid reason for skipping over it, right?
Yeah. Right. Except for the bit where I’ve snagged my narrative on a thorn, and can’t go on until I’ve un-snagged it. My alternative is a narrative with a big ol’ rip in it, and that kind of defeats the purpose of revision.
<sigh> I shouldn’t need to remind myself of these things. And yet I do, because when you get right down to it I’m lazy, and this is a big indigestible chunk of work I keep wanting to put off. But obviously it’s past time for me to writer up and deal with it already.
Why is every other woman in this scene named Elizabeth?
(Not so imponderable. The answer is, “because history says so.” But still.)
It’s been available for order a little while now, but Clockwork Phoenix 2 is officially out now, and editor Mike Allen is offering a PDF copy to anybody who promises to blog about it in return. See that link for more details.
I’ve posted four more stories of mine up at AnthologyBuilder. The new additions include “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood,” which (just between you and me) is one of my personal favorites.
How the hell did I manage to get Rosamund and Gertrude into a fight?
With each other?
This is even weirder than the algebra.
Okay, the algebra has moved on to calculus and from thence to astrophysics (kniedzw‘s idea), picking up a side order of Norse mythology along the way, and now I’m trying to decide on a suitable driving weight for what started out as the world’s most improbable clock and has gotten weirder since.
. . . I love my job.
Even if sometimes it randomly requires math.
How the hell did I put myself in a position where my historical faerie novel is requiring me to do ALGEBRA?
Wrote a cumulative 3806 today in various new scenes, rummaging around in the guts of Part Two to make everything fall into the new order. Still need to replace the scene that introduces the CR itself, and then do at least a rough polish on the Magrat conversation, the coffee-house, and Carline; then probably wholesale replace 80% of the Vauxhall scene, and I’ll finally be ready to finish the scene I was in the middle of writing when I realized I needed to redo half of what I’d done.
One of the cherished delusions of the aspiring writer is that this stuff gets easier as you go. Sure, maybe you have to rework your first novel three times, but after a while you learn to produce clean drafts, right?
Yeah, I’m going the other way. I’ve never had to hack a book apart half as much as I’ve done with this one already. Please, please, don’t let this trend continue.
Word count: 36,810 and trying not to think about how I’m running to stay in place
LBR census: I had to work really hard to find a reason why it wasn’t blood.
Authorial sadism: Yes, Galen, when you get a good idea I will make you share it with the class.
