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.

In Memoriam: my keychain, 1997-2011

O_O

O_O,

. . . okay, this is ridiculous, I know that, but I am in mourning.

In the summer of 1997, I worked on an Earthwatch project in South Shields, England, doing archaeological excavation on the Roman fort of Arbeia. While I was there, I purchased a keychain in a local shop: a little Roman shield, rectangular and curved, with wings and lightning bolts and a round central boss, painted red and gold. The keychain being rather on the cheap side, the paint began flaking off in short order, but that was okay; the decoration was stamped into the steel, so I just stripped off the remainder of the paint and kept it plain.

This has been My Keychain for, effectively, my entire life. I never bothered with a keychain before then, and I’ve never used another since; I am not the sort of person who keeps twelve tchotchkes strung on the ring. The whole packet right now consists only of house key, mail key, bike key, car key, and the shield.

Or it did, until tonight.

Tonight, when I pulled my keys from my jeans pocket, the ring at the top of the shield broke clean through.

For years, I’ve been worried that some day I would lose my keys — worried not because I’d be locked out of the house, but because the shield would be gone. This is better; I still have it. But my husband can vouch for the utterly tragic look on my face when I realized, standing in the front hall, that it had broken beyond repair.

What will I do?

I’ll keep the shield, of course. The scoring down the center of the lightning bolts and marking the feathers on the wings has nearly been worn off; the curve of the shield has almost been mashed flat. It was never meant to survive thirteen and a half years of constant use. It’s a relic of my first dig, though, and my first solo international trip, and my love of all things Roman; no way is it going in the trash. The real question is what I do about my keys. They’re still on a ring, with what’s left of the chain; the clasp on that is so fused, I may have to cut it off. But I don’t know what I’ll do for a keychain. Do I need one? Do I want one? Maybe I need a mourning period for the old one first. I have no idea what could possibly replace it in my affections.

Yes, I’m mourning my freaking keychain. So what. It was a dear old friend, and I’m sorry to see it go.

more fiction!

It’s just raining stories of mine around here, ain’t it?

Erin Underwood of Underwords has put together a free fiction sampler for 2011, and it includes some stories from Clockwork Phoenix 3, including “The Gospel of Nachash.” So if you’re interested in me, um, fanficcing the Bible? . . . in full-blown King James Version style . . . with sekrit ingredients thrown in . . . then go check it out. And if you’re not, check the sampler out anyway, because I am only one of twenty-seven authors bundled into it, and there’s sure to be somebody else you enjoy.

anonymous Yuletiders are no longer anonymous

The big reveal has happened, and now I can tell you what I wrote for Yuletide.

Before I do that, though — it’s interesting, the ways in which this feels different than linking you to my stories on Beneath Ceaseless Skies or wherever. Those are written for a general audience; as a result, even when they’re connected to a pre-existing text (like the Onyx Court novels), I do my best to make sure they stand alone, and can be read by anybody who’s interested. In the case of Yuletide, though, they’re fanfic, which tends to be heavily in dialogue with the source text, often in ways that bypass the kind of exposition an independent story would need.

Which is a long and overly intellectual way of saying, I have no idea whether any of these stories will mean anything to people who don’t know the sources. Since two, possibly three, of them are on the obscure side, this is me throwing up my hands and going, “I dunno, people, read ’em if you want to.” <g>

And the four stories are . . . .

new audio

In contrast to the happy stories I posted before, here’s something dark and grim for the end of the year: Flash on the Borderlands V, a collection of three flash pieces over at Pseudopod, one of which is my fairy-tale retelling “The Snow-White Heart.” Note that is Pseudopod and not Podcastle; this is the horror sibling of the EA podcast family, and as I have not yet listened to the whole file, I can’t tell you what lurks in the other two stories. (Mine starts with cannibalism and goes downhill from there.) Listen at your own risk.

the internets love me

Now that the AO3 is no longer weeping for mercy, I feel safe in pointing you all at What I Got For Yuletide.

A few days before Christmas, I noticed I had two gifts listed on my profile. My assigned writer had turned in their piece, and some total stranger had decided to write me a little something extra. Not until Christmas, though, did I discover what they were. Remember that crazy crossover idea, the The Nightmare Before Christmas/Hogfather mashup I really wanted but had no guarantee I would get?

Dear Readers, I didn’t just get one story of that sort; I got two.

My assigned writer produced “‘Twas the Night,” in which an unexpected midair collision between two sleighs leaves Discworld’s Death and Halloweentown’s Jack Skellington debating the nature of reality while Sally and Susan Sto Helit team up to fix the problem. A bit less than six thousand words of awesomeness, featuring guest appearances by characters from both stories, including (eeeeee!) the Death of Rats.

Then! Somebody else browsed the list of prompts, saw what I had requested, and wrote me “The Ill-Advised Skeletal Exchange Program,” wherein Death and Jack Skellington are pen-pals and arrange a temporary swap. Sally is Helpful, and Susan is Not Amused, and the Death of Rats shows up again, because he’s just too awesome to leave out.

Folklorist Brain is entirely fascinated to see the differences and similarities that result when two writers produce their own takes on the same prompt. Yuletide Brain is bouncingly happy to have gotten an extra gift. Anybody who’s interested is welcome, nay, encouraged to share in the bounty; go read the stories, and if you get a 502 error just try again later, when the archive has once again staggered to its feet.

(I can’t tell you yet what I wrote for Yuletide; that has to wait until after New Year’s, when the authors are revealed. Until then, I’m having to sit on my hands not to respond to the comments I’ve received so far. If anybody wants to play the “guess what I wrote?” game, though, your clues are that I wrote four pieces, one over 4K, two in the 1-2K range, and one less than 1K for Yuletide Madness; none are for novels, and no two are in the same fandom or media type. Also, no RPF: the modern stuff squicks me and the historical stuff was too much like work. Given that there were over three thousand stories produced for Yuletide 2010, though, and I have no pre-existing track record of fanfic for you to base your guesses on, I don’t expect anybody to spot my work. If you do, I’ll find some prize to give you.)

a holiday treat for you

Looking for something to read while you hang out with or avoid family? Author Stephanie Burgis has put together a project called December Lights, with various authors providing free reprints of short stories. And not your gloom-and-doom short stories, either, with grim amoral heroes and inexorable zombie apocalypses, but little bits of light for this season of darkness*.

My contribution to the project is “Lost Soul,” one of my Nine Lands stories. The full list is here, and there’s more to come before the month is out. Enjoy!

*Unless you’re in the southern hemisphere. But you guys could still use more light, right?

in-flight wireless, facilitating Yuletide silliness

So I discovered I have longer to write “Coyotaje” than I thought, which means I was able to let myself stop pushing on a stone that really doesn’t want to roll yet. Still need to get the thing written soon, but as long as that one wasn’t moving forward, I let myself write a silly little treat for Yuletide, above and beyond the story I was assigned. The recipient is somebody I don’t know in the slightest — which pleases me, because there’s something delightful about total strangers writing stuff for each other. Friends writing stories as gifts is also nice, but when it’s a stranger, it’s all about shared love for the source. Somebody else going, “omg, you’ve seen/read/heard that, too? Isn’t it fabulous?”

After the brain-drain that was With Fate Conspire, this is, indeed, what I needed. Stories as play, without having to put on my professional hat. December is a good time of year for recharging, and I can feel myself getting excited about other things now. We’ll see how much I can get done before the calendar ticks over.

Right now, though, I’m on a plane, which was okay for polishing that Yuletide story, but not terribly good for drafting something new. Plus, I’m very sleepy, and can’t let myself nap. Time to find someway to keep myself awake.

an unexpected victory

After all the doomful predictions of how it would die in the Senate, it appears that the repeal of the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gays has passed.

Dear Congress: thank you for my early Christmas present. It’s about bloody time.