as the industry moves online

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.

Lego Tower Bridge Photoblog: Days Zero and One

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.

Also an explanation for why there's a Day Zero.

my break from the copy-edits

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.)

more problems I bring upon myself

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?

after much delay

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.

The [X]-page test

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.

not directly about Writing Fight Scenes: knife fights?

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.”)

more (sort of) Onyx Court to tide you over

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? 🙂

Things I Have and You Don’t . . .

. . . 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.

Writing Fight Scenes: What?

[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.

Let’s get to the stabby things!

why I have this icon

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.

post-Yuletide thinkiness

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.

Now it can be told . . . .

The coyotes of Mexicali were bold. They did their business in cantinas, in the middle of the afternoon; the police, well-fed with bribes, looked the other way. Day by day, week by week, people came into Mexicali, carrying backpacks and bundles and small children, and day by day, week by week, they went away again, vanishing while the back of the police was obligingly turned.

The short story I was having so much angst over was “Coyotaje,” and it’s been sold to Ekaterina Sedia’s anthology Bewere the Night. (A sequel anthology of sorts to Running with the Pack, but there’s no connection between my two stories.)

It just goes to illustrate what every writer figures out eventually: that the ease with which a story comes out of your head has no particular relationship to its quality. I’m actually quite proud of “Coyotaje,” even if writing it was like pulling my teeth out one by one with rusty pliers. Not that the difficulty automatically implies quality, either; I’ve had stories that just raced from my fingers which I was also extremely proud of. The two things just don’t correlate at all.

Release date is April, if Amazon can be believed; I’ll keep you updated.

obligatory awards pimpage

If you’re a Hugo or Nebula voter, here’s what I published in 2010:

Novel
A Star Shall Fall

Novelette
“And Blow Them at the Moon,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies #50

Short stories
“Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes,” Running With the Pack, ed. Ekaterina Sedia
“Remembering Light,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies #44
“The Gospel of Nachash,” Clockwork Phoenix 3, ed. Mike Allen
“The Last Wendy,” On Spec #81
“Footprints,” Shroud Magazine #9

. . . I need to get back on the short story wagon, or I’ll have very little to list for 2011.

We now return you to a more interesting corner of the Internet.

Writing Fight Scenes: Who?

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

The short story is DEAD AT LAST — or at least written, revised, and sent off to someone who can check it for howling factual errors — and so it’s time for the triumphant return of How to Write a Fight Scene!

So: who’s fighting?

I said last time that the most important question to ask yourself is, what is the purpose of this fight? Only slightly less important is this: who is involved in the fight? This both arises from and feeds back into purpose, of course, so you generally end up asking them both at the same time, but they’re both major enough issues that I split them apart for the purpose of discussion.

The answer to this is, in its simplest form, very short: a minimum of two people (or one person and some kind of opponent, anyway). But it isn’t enough to have their names. There are a lot of details packed into the question of who, and those details can have a strong effect on how the fight goes. So let’s take a moment to unpack them.

Do not be frightened by what you find inside.

Droid app recommendations?

kniedzw and I finally joined the twenty-first century yesterday, buying ourselves a pair of smartphones to replace the ancient flip-phones we’ve been using for years. We went with Androids — mostly because of my husband’s overpowering hatred for AT&T — so now I ask the internets: what apps do you recommend?

Free ones are fabulous, but I’m also willing to pay for stuff that’s good. In particular, I’d like a recommendation for some kind of calorie tracker, because I know my eating habits are very bad; not in the usual way (“oh, I eat too much ice cream”) but in the “I kind of forget to eat in the first place” way. I don’t know what, if anything, I want to do to change this, but I figure it can’t hurt to spend a couple of weeks actually paying attention to what I’m eating, and when, and what it adds up to. Having a phone app to track it with would help.

Beyond that . . . y’all know me. I do not need the Nascar app that came installed on the phone and is seemingly impossible to get rid of, but geeky things like Google Skymap are totally up my alley. What do you recommend?

better late than never?

It occurs to me I never put up an open book thread for A Star Shall Fall. So, as I beat my head against this bloody short story, feel free to comment here with any questions you wanted to ask or observations you wanted to share. Spoilers for this book are, of course, a given; there may also be spoilers for Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie (or for that matter the short stories), so be warned.

(I may also answer questions about With Fate Conspire, but only if I feel like it. No, I won’t tell you how it ends. Or whether your favorite character is going to die.)

a missive from the salt mines

Why won’t this short story just die?

I’m itching to do things like get back to the fight-scene blogging, but I can’t let myself do that until this damn thing is finished. Which will happen tonight, come hell, high water, or the lure of sweet sweet procrastination . . . but god, it’s taking forever.