The DWJ Project: The Game

This, like Wild Robert, is a shorter piece published on its own; I’d guess it’s a novella, in terms of length. Hayley, having disgraced herself to the grandparents who raised her, is sent to live with her numerous cousins, who play an unnamed and very odd game involving a realm known as the mythosphere.

. . . and I really can’t say much more than that without giving spoilers, because the story itself is so short.

I like The Game; I just wish — as I often do with DWJ’s pieces in this range — that it were longer. It doesn’t partake of the flaws that tend to weaken her actual short stories, but it also doesn’t have room to fully leverage the virtues of her novels. The concept of the mythosphere is nifty, but I want a whole novel exploring it; the brief glimpses we get here only make me wish for more.

And now, the spoilers!
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I am trying very hard not to be doomed

Oh, god. I blame kniedzw. And also the research question that sent me to my bookshelf last night, searching for a book that was not in either of the sections I expected it to be in, so I scanned along the shelf looking for it, and found this instead.

I had completely forgotten that Once Upon an Eon Ago, kniedzw purchased the Spencerian System of Practical Penmanship.

Which is a reproduction of an honest-to-god 1864 system of penmanship instruction. This thing is . . . wow. The theory book starts with “Signals,” which are the cues the teacher should use, “by bell, tap, or by counting, at the teacher’s discretion.” They are as follows:

  1. Position at Desk.
  2. Arrange Books.
  3. Find Copy and adjust Arms.
  4. Open Inkstands — In double desks the pupils on the left (the pupil’s right) will open and close inkstands.
  5. Take Pens.

At this point the teacher should pay particular attention to giving instruction in penholding. When ready to write, give the order to TAKE INK.

No, seriously. I have this vivid image of a dank, grim little classroom, the teacher standing stiffly at the front, rows of bows and girls at the desks in uncomfortable suits and dresses, moving like proper little Victorian automata while the teacher rings his bell. Which probably isn’t far off the mark.

The real question, of course, is whether I am going to subject myself to the Spencerian System for the letters from the Onyx Court. I know better than to put this to a popular vote; you all, being not the ones who would suffer through it, will cackle and tell me to doooooo iiiiiiit. And I am so very much not sure it would be worth it. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop myself . . . .

Edited to add: oh my god, it’s even worse than I thought. The instructions for each exercise!

Turn in n, x, and v, at top and base the same, i.e. as short as possible with continuous motion. The x combines Principles 3, 1, 2, 1. The v combines 3, 1, 2, 2. After the combination is written, finish x by beginning at the base line, crossing upward through middle of First Principle, with a straight line, on the same slant with curves, and ending at upper line. Finish v same as w. Count 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, dot 1, cross, cross.

No really, I think the teacher is supposed to be counting out each movement for the students. I am increasingly afraid of this book.

I’ve been sitting on this for a month

I’ve worked with Ekaterina Sedia (squirrel_monkey) twice before, on “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics As Employed Against Lycanthropes” (in Running with the Pack) and “Coyotaje” (in Bewere the Night). Now that I have the go-ahead, I’m delighted to say that I have sold her a third story, this one without any shapeshifters in it whatsoever: “False Colours,” a novelette in her upcoming anthology of YA Victorian romance, Wilful Impropriety: 13 Tales of Society and Scandal.

You can read more about the anthology here. The table of contents looks pretty awesome:

  • THE DANCING MASTER by Genevieve Valentine
  • THE UNLADYLIKE EDUCATION OF AGATHA TREMAIN by Stephanie Burgis
  • AT WILL by Leanna Renee Hieber
  • STEEPED IN DEBT TO THE CHIMNEY POTS by Steve Berman
  • OUTSIDE THE ABSOLUTE by Seth Cadin
  • RESURRECTION by Tiffany Trent
  • MRS BEETON’S BOOK OF MAGICKAL MANAGEMENT by Karen Healey
  • THE GARDEN OF ENGLAND by Sandra McDonald
  • FALSE COLOURS by Marie Brennan
  • NUSSBAUM’S GOLDEN FORTUNE by M. K. Hobson
  • THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER by Barbara Roden
  • MERCURY RETROGRADE by Mary Robinette Kowal
  • THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS by Caroline Stevermer

As for “False Colours”? Well, a select few among you may recall a certain character named Lt. Ravenswood . . . yeah, this is that story. The rest of you will have to wait and read it for yourself — I wouldn’t want to spoil anything!

I’ll post a release date when I have one.

my taste in fanfic

I don’t read all that much fanfic. My fannish impulses don’t express themselves that way; I write individual stories because I come up with specific concepts, not because I have an ongoing engagement with the canon, or am linked into the social community of that fandom. Taken from the other direction, I generally only read things if a friend has recommended them, and a lot of what I read ends up not meaning a whole lot to me, because I lack the context or the interest to receive it properly.

But there are exceptions. There are fanfic stories I not only read, not only love, but remember for years afterward.

And, as I realized a while ago, they all have a common trait.

For a fanfic to really stick with me, it needs to be doing something extra, beyond just being fannish. (There’s nothing wrong with being fannish, mind you — it just isn’t what I read for.) Something intellectual, something critical, which can’t be done by writing original fiction, because that would lose the closeness entanglement of its commentary, and can’t be done by writing straight-up criticism, either, because that would lose . . . something harder to put my finger on. Stories that strike that balance make me absolutely giddy as a reader.

I’d like to share with you a few examples of what I mean, with explanatory notes. (But, uh, be warned — I guess the stories I like share two common traits. The thing I mentioned above, and the fact that they’re EPICALLY LONG. The two rather naturally go hand-in-hand.)

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Reasons I Have Quit Reading Your Novel This Evening

The cover copy of your novel made it sound like the plot was kind of stapled together out of cliches. But a) cover copy can undersell the originality of a story, and b) the cliches you are using are ones I kind of like, so I was willing to go with it — especially since your setting, being not the Usual Thing, was interesting to me in its own right.

Unfortunately, you have not managed to transcend these cliches. I skipped ahead to see if you would, once the story actually got moving; instead I discovered that it takes a regrettably long time for the story to get moving. Furthermore, you seem to lack the courage of your convictions where the setting is concerned: the names are a random mix, some appropriate to the culture, others not, with no apparent pattern or reason for this blend, and the first fifty pages are littered with small details that contradict the rest of the picture. (Example: the presence of a food that is not only non-traditional to that culture, but traditionally considered disgusting.) While I do not demand 100% fidelity to a real-world culture in a secondary-world fantasy, I cannot find any compelling aesthetic rationale to explain why you diverged from it; the result therefore feels watered down, rather than interestingly varied.

It’s a pity. I was quite hoping to enjoy your novel. Alas, it is simply not doing enough to hold my interest, but instead far too much to push me away.

I haven’t tried this in years

Trotting out the old Elizabeth icon for the occasion:

I had the wrong setting on my camera, so it’s unfortunately blurry, but you get the idea. I am so. doomed. I haven’t tried to write in cursive, except for that thing I laughably call my signature, for years.

Admittedly, my writing got better when I realized that a tiny notebook is a very bad choice for hand support and such. Practicing on better surfaces, and relaxing into it a bit, the result looks less awkward. Of course, if I relax into it, I’m prone to turning my n’s into m’s and my m’s into some alien thing with far too many little humps . . . which is only the most common of my errors. There are others, too. The letters I send may have more than a few things crossed out and corrected. (Which is part of the whole handwritten letter thing, right? Not everybody bothered to send perfect copy. I guess it all depends on which character I’m writing as. Dead Rick probably doesn’t worry much about errors. Delphia, however . . . .)

Letters from the Onyx Court

I’m tempted to follow in the shoes of Mary Robinette Kowal and participate in the Month of Letters . . . or rather, have my characters participate.

But I don’t want to advertise my home address to all the world, so I’d need to get a P.O. box. And that means I need to take the temperature of the Internet first, to see if there’s any interest. Would you like to receive a letter from the Onyx Court? If so, drop a comment here, on Twitter (@swan_tower), or via e-mail (marie[dot]brennan[at]gmail[dot]com) to let me know.

I figure all characters from that series (including the short fiction) are fair game, though be warned that some are better correspondents than others. ๐Ÿ™‚ If I do this, I’ll probably ask that you put a date on your own letter, so that I’ll know when the character should be responding; after all, Lune would write a very different response in 1588 than she would in 1757. (Mortal characters contacted before their births or after their deaths are not likely to respond at all.)

I even, like Mary, have quill pens with which to respond — though it may become a tossup between authenticity of writing implement and legibility of the handwriting . . . .

The DWJ Project: Enchanted Glass

When Andrew Hope’s grandfather dies, he leaves Andrew in charge of his magical field-of-care — with very little instruction as to what to do with it. And when a boy named Aidan Cain shows up on Andrew’s doorstep, looking for safety from the inhuman things chasing him, the two of them have to work together to sort out just what is happening in the village of Melstone.

This is one of Jones’ newest books, surpassed only by Earwig and the Witch, which is one of the only things of hers I haven’t read at all. It’s a splendid example of two of the things Jones did beautifully well, which are vivid characterization coupled with a dry wit. The opening pages, which describe Andrew trying to cope with the housekeeper and gardener for Melstone House, are just hilarious: slightly larger-than-life (quite literally, in the case of the vegetables Mr. Stock keeps dumping in the kitchen as punishment), but still grounded in something very real. And both of the protagonists, Andrew and Aidan, are the kind of sensible people I have always loved in her books. (It makes me wonder, in fact, how much of my preference for sensible characters stems from reading her work. Not all of it — Cimorene from Dealing with Dragons deserves some credit, too — but I suspect quite a bit.) First reading this book when I was thirty instead of thirteen means those characters will never occupy the deep place in my heart some of her others have, but I have very little to quibble with, where they’re concerned.

My quibbles have to do with the world, which hints at all kinds of fascinating things, but never goes into enough detail to satisfy me. For an explanation of that, follow me behind the cut.

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I suppose I should tell you . . . .

I’m in Hawaii. ^_^

I couldn’t mention it before, because it would have spoiled the surprise for my mother, but my father arranged to ship me, kniedzw, my brother, and my brother’s wife out to Hawaii for a long weekend to celebrate my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary with them. As I type this, I can pause to look out over my balcony to the lagoon down below, where yesterday I swam and basked in the sun; just past it is the sea, where in a few hours I’ll be going whale-watching.

(Yeah, I might be gloating just a bit.)

Quite apart from the beautiful surroundings, it’s great to be able to hang out with my family like this. The last pure vacation the four of us took together was also in Hawaii, nineteen years ago; the last vacation-with-another-purpose was a year or two later, when my brother was looking at colleges, and we took it as an excuse to go sightseeing in California. We see each other on the holidays, but it’s lovely to have this kind of time, where nobody has to cook or run errands or do any of the other things that can make the holidays stressful.

And, y’know, the surroundings don’t hurt. ๐Ÿ™‚ Especially in light of the fact that the Bay Area is currently receiving a lot of desperately-needed, but not terribly fun to walk around in, rain.

So huzzah for my parents and forty years of happy marriage. May they continue happy for many more years to come.

It had to happen sometime

Last month, for the first time since we launched the group blog in August of 2007, I missed my post at SF Novelists.

But I’m back this month! With the first of what turned out to be a two-part thing (since otherwise my post would have been unreadably long), on how competence is hot. (With bonus links to several people trying to pose like the men and women on book covers.)

Comment over there, no login needed, etc, but if you’re a first-timer please wait for me to fish your comment out of the moderation queue.

Writing Fight Scenes: Point of View

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

So, I’ve blathered on at length about how to imagine a fight scene for a story: who’s fighting, and why, and where, and with what, and how they’re doing it, and so on.

How do you get that onto the page?

Point of view seems a useful place to begin this discussion. It’s generally already been decided by the time you get to the scene; if the whole book has been in third person limited from the protagonist’s perspective, you’re unlikely to hop to first just for the fight. (You could do it, as some kind of avant-garde trick — but 99.9% of the time, you won’t.) So, what are you working with: first, second (unlikely), or third? Third limited or omniscient? If limited, then whose third are we in?

For a story with only one pov, again, that’s probably already been decided. But if you have multiple viewpoint characters, and more than one of them is present for the fight, you have a choice to make.

The best answer may not be what you assume.

a better (or rather, worse) metric

Remember how I mentioned before that I wanted to improve my story production this year? Well, I haven’t really made progress on that; I haven’t written anything new (yet). But I have sent something new out, that’s been sitting around waiting to be revised for a year or more.

When I went to add it to my submissions log, I noticed something . . . poor-ish.

Yes, the point (as I said in my previous post) is to sell things, not to submit them. But while the last three pieces I finished and sent out sold to the first place I submitted them — yay! — that isn’t the whole story. All three of those were basically written to order, under conditions where I more or less knew they were sold before I started working on them. The last time I sent out a story that wasn’t solicited and pre-sold?

Was April of 2010.

And it isn’t because editors have been beating down my door with invitations. Three such situations in nearly two years is nice, but not exactly the sort of thing the leads to some authors of my acquaintance saying “I’m going to have to start turning editors down; I’m already overcommitted.” More like, the only times I’ve been able to prod myself into actual short story productivity is when I know the only thing standing between me and an almost-guaranteed sale is my own lack of effort.

This isn’t a self-esteem thing. Obviously I know I can sell stories, if I bother to write them. And it isn’t a lack of inspiration thing, either; one look at my (growing) list of unwritten story ideas would cure any notion of that. I’m not sure what kind of thing it is, really. It may be part and parcel of the fatigue issue I think I’ve mentioned in passing here; writing novels has been harder, too, for at least as long as I’ve been such a short-story slacker, and while I can’t prove that has anything to do with the way I faceplant for a nap almost every day (which is a more recent development), I’m hoping that fixing the latter will lead to miraculous improvements in the former.

Anyway. Mostly I want to pat myself on the back for finally sending out “Mad Maudlin,” after way too much time spent sitting on it. I have another story in similar circumstances (which probably would have been revised and sent out yonks ago, if I could just come up with a title for the damn thing), and I’m going to push myself to get some new things written. This, at least, is a start.

The DWJ Project: Minor Arcana

There’s only one story in this collection I haven’t read already, but I still feel justified in counting it as a book read, because the story in question is The True State of Affairs, which eats up about half of the pages. I don’t have a word count for it, but it is probably squarely in novella territory, if not edging toward short novel. Either way, it’s certainly longer than some of the DWJ stories that have been published independently (like Wild Robert).

It’s fortuitous timing that I chose to read it now. I started it months ago, but kept not getting into it; now, reading it through, I realize it is apparently a verrrrrrry peripheral Dalemark story. (As in, it had sort of a Dalemark-ish feel early on, and then there’s one place where it uses that name directly.) It’s hard to tell where it’s supposed to fit into Dalemark chronology, though. They have steam engines, though not for practical use, which suggests it can’t be too long before the “present” day of that series (i.e. Mitt and Moril’s time), because that’s when Alk is about to set off an industrial revolution. Also, there is no king, which means it has to be before Amil the Great, because Dalemark is a monarchy from his time up through Maewen’s, where everything is modern. But I don’t recall hearing any of these people referenced in the novels — or even the places, though there I may just be overlooking things — so it’s hard to slot into position.

Look away if you don’t want spoilers.

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intersectionality in action

Tonight, I realized something I’m not very happy about.

There was a guy outside the grocery store, panhandling. I had to pass him both entering and leaving. And both times, I looked away and walked right past him without saying anything or slowing down.

And then I realized, If I were a man, I wouldn’t have done that.

I don’t like ignoring panhandlers and other people on the street. It erases them, and I’m sure they get that far too often. But at the same time, I know that if I had made eye contact, smiled, said anything . . . my odds of being sexually harassed would have shot up like a rocket.

It isn’t inevitable, of course. Not every panhandler would take that as an invitation to more. It’s happened to me often enough, however, that my reflex is to avoid interacting with strange men on the street, just out of self-defense. And I say that as someone who’s never been raped, or even harassed to an extent I would call traumatic; the worst was enough to put me off my stride for half an hour or so, but in the grand scheme of things, I know that’s not nearly as bad as it gets. But there’s always the little voice in my head reminding me that I’m female, and it could get worse, and so it’s safer to not engage.

(I do more often make eye contact, etc. with female panhandlers. They don’t set off the defensive reflexes in the same way.)

This bothers me a lot, now that I’ve noticed it so directly. If I were my husband — a six-foot-three man — I’d be a lot more likely to acknowledge those people, even if I didn’t give them a handout on the spot. And yet, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to chuck this pattern of behavior, either. There is no good solution, I fear, except to live in a utopian society where a) women don’t have to fear harassment, b) people don’t have to beg on the streets, or c) better yet, both.

I may try engaging more, anyway. I can withstand sketchy, unwanted compliments, for the sake of the people who don’t respond that way. I live in a pretty safe area, so I don’t think I’m likely to get assaulted just because I decided not to ignore somebody. But that isn’t always going to be true, and so this defensive habit is likely to stay — and I really wish that weren’t the case.

Things I want to improve: production in the new year

I didn’t publish a whole lot last year, in comparison with the previous five or so. With Fate Conspire, Dancing the Warrior (the doppelganger novella), and three short stories (“Two Pretenders,” “Love, Cayce,” and “Coyotaje”). The forecast isn’t good for this year, either, because I didn’t write a whole lot, either: A Natural History of Dragons, Dancing the Warrior, “Coyotaje,” and a novelette I can’t tell you about yet, but which has already been sold. In other words, everything I wrote vanished from the pipeline pretty much as soon as I finished it.

I’ve posted about that latter bit before, reminding myself that selling stories is the goal, not submitting them. Still, I have only four things in the submission queue right now, and one or more of those probably ought to be retired. Even if I sold all four of them right now, and all four saw print this year — both of which are unlikely — that’s not a lot of new publications compared to some past years, and it leaves me with nothing for next year.

Okay. So I need to write more short fiction. I’ve vowed this before, and met with moderate success; let’s try that again. Simple to say, not so simple to do, but putting it here where the internets can see it should help.