just in time

I almost didn’t get this month’s installment written in time — only finished it a few hours before the thing went live — but my posting streak at SF Novelists is unbroken. That’s right, folks, it’s the sixteenth of the month, and that means I’m blogging over there, this time on the topic of responses, reviews, criticism, and critique. Comment over there, no account needed, but if you’re a first-time commenter I’ll have to fish your reply out of the moderation queue before it will be visible.

an odd metric

I don’t particularly have issues with my weight. (I couldn’t even tell you what it is, with a margin of error smaller than five pounds; we don’t own a scale.) But I will admit that I have some issues with my composition, by which I mean the lean-to-squish ratio of me is skewed more toward the latter than I would like, and sometimes that also means issues with my shape.

Last night, however, I got vivid proof that my general shape has not changed all that much in the last fifteen years or so. Going through the costume closet, in a (not entirely successful) attempt to cull its contents a bit, I dug out and tried on all the old dance costumes I’ve been holding on to.

And they all fit.

They didn’t necessarily look good on me — some of them I don’t think ever looked good, on anybody — but I got them on, and without putting the spandex to much of a test. And these are things I wore when I was fifteen and dancing eight hours a week. To which I say: dude. I would not have predicted that.

Mind you, this put a crimp in my plan to chuck out lots of costumes that don’t fit me anymore, because they do fit. I’ve chucked the truly ugly ones instead, the things that only look vaguely right when put in motion, on a stage, a healthy distance from the audience, but that’s only half or so of the total. (I should get rid of more, especially now that I’m not involved in a Changeling game where random dance costumes come in handy for playing a swan maiden or water elemental or whatever — but I can’t bring myself to do it. I might need them someday.) But it was an encouraging experience, and only firmed my resolve — pardon the pun — to do more things to increase the lean percentage of me. Today I rode my bike for the first time since my ankle surgery in the spring, and in the future intend to run as many of my errands as I can that way, weather permitting. My glutes may hate me for it today, but they’ll thank me eventually.

aaaaand . . . . GO!

Got my Yuletide story uploaded. Now I have three days in which to try and finish a story for (hopefully) paying purposes. I would have done these things in the opposite order, but the pro piece didn’t actually cohere in my head until tonight; in fact, I was on the verge of giving up and not submitting anything after all.

Working title, “Coyotaje.”

Go.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: Lord of Chaos

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after Crossroads of Twilight, as that’s the last book I read before starting this project.]

In my post on The Fires of Heaven, I said that we were beginning our journey into the swamp of bad pacing.

With this book, we jump into it feet-first.

This is rather worrisome, since my recollection was that this aspect didn’t get really bad until The Path of Daggers (two books from now). I’m hoping that was just when I took off the rose-colored glasses, as the alternative is that the pacing tanks twice: once here, and again there. I’m rather afraid to see the result, if that’s the case. But it cannot be denied that the story starts wandering badly in this book, much more so than previously. Stuff happens — this isn’t Crossroads of Twilight, thank whatever deity you like — but it’s padded out with a whole bunch of crap that doesn’t deserve nearly so much page time.

We get off onto the wrong foot with the prologue. The funny thing is, back in the day, I quite liked the prologues. Remember that I didn’t pick the series up until just before the publication of A Crown of Swords; by then, Tor had gotten into the habit of posting the prologue online, some time before the book’s street date, as a kind of “trailer” to get people excited. It worked, at least for me; the prologues touch base with a lot of characters, reminding you of where they are and what they’re doing, and providing hints of what’s to come.

The problem is, outside of that context — a pre-publication goodie — they really don’t work at all. They fundamentally aren’t prologues, not in any meaningful sense; the only thing separating them from ordinary chapters is their (increasing) length and the number of points of view packed into them. Furthermore, they rarely contain anything truly exciting: their main function is to remind you of the current state of affairs, rather than to launch anything important. The significant content of most of these scenes could be condensed to a single sentence — and not a complicated one at that.

Rather more ranting this time, I’m afraid. But also a few positive notes.

this “early bedtime” thing is for the birds

An attempt to go to bed early last night backfired spectacularly, with me waking up in the wee hours of the morning and spending god knows how long attempting to go back to sleep, before giving up around 7 a.m.

Remember, folks, my usual schedule has bedtime around 3 a.m. and waking up at maybe 11 or so.

I suspect this afternoon will feature a sizeable nap. At least if I want to make it through kobudo and karate tonight without falling over.

On the bright side, the utter screwing up of my sleep schedule has produced the impossible, namely, me getting some writing done in the morning. Since my sleepless brain decided to entertain itself with my Yuletide story, I knocked out just shy of two thousand words when I got up. I probably have another thousand or so to go, putting it pretty near the average for Yuletide fics, if maybe a bit longish. Feels about right to me.

It’s an interesting challenge, writing this thing, trying to match the characters’ voices: the perennial difficulty of fanfiction, and not one I deal with much as a professional writer. And I have an extra challenge in that I’m trying to get one of the characters wrong in a deliberate fashion — but even that is proving complicated, because the manner of the wrongness also has to arise from the source. (I hope that’s sufficiently vague as to not give things away that I shouldn’t.) Suffice it to say, I made it through that part of the story, and we’ll see what I think of the result when I’ve slept. Hopefully by then I’ll have figured out how to do the next bit, too.

maybe it’s the fluoride

They really must put something in the water, because shower-time packs more story inspiration per minute than any other thing I do, and that includes driving.

Which is by way of saying I figured out the entire plot of my Yuletide story while washing my hair, and I am very pleased with it. Hopefully my recipient will be, too. I think I’m managing to play to the ideas they floated in their request letter, while also incorporating some nifty ideas of my own. (And best of all, it’s unlikely to balloon up to a ten thousand word monstrosity. Which is good, since this has to be done by the twentieth.)

Now, do I start work on the story, or spend more time reviewing the source? Decisions, decisions . . . .

Inception in Real Time

From gollumgollum, an awesome video:

Not worth watching if you haven’t seen the movie; most of it won’t make sense, and the bits that do make sense will be spoilers. But if you’ve seen Inception? Watch this video. It beautifully illustrates the time-dilation aspect of the film. (And the vidder did an excellent job editing the “Mombasa” track onto the footage, too.)

a brief note

There will be an audio version of “Two Pretenders” in BCS; that will reportedly go live in January, which is also (I believe) when the print version itself will be published.

Back to drooling on myself, by which I mean prepping for game tonight.

apparently I still have some brain

How excited am I about the project I intend to pitch next to Tor?

Excited enough that I spent part of this afternoon working on the proposal for it, instead of just drooling on myself in a fit of post-novel lethargy. I think that must be a good sign.

Other blogging will return shortly, with fight scene advice, Wheel of Time analysis, and more. But first, I will probably drool on myself for a while.

Time to fall over.

With Fate Conspire is revised and off to L’Editor.

***

Length of final draft: 157,000 words

Length of kill-file, containing material longer than a sentence or two cut during the process: 57,000 words

***

Dear Whichever God Rules Over Novelists,

What do I have to sacrifice to you in order to guarantee that my next novel will not require me to write thirty-six percent more material than I actually use? Lemme know, and I’ll get right on that.

Your obt. servt.,
A Very Tired Writer

and she can’t call him Frederic yet

Dear Mr. Myers why did your name have to begin with an M it makes all of these sentences unfortunately alliterative gah stupid actual historical people in my novel I’m never doing this again okay that last part’s probably a lie.

<goes back to fixing the book>

tonight’s random thought

I want to get a dog — a golden retriever, ideally; or a yellow lab would do — and name her Ramoth.

Then I want to get a kitten, and name her Lessa.

And then I want to teach the kitten to ride around on the back of the dog.

(Time-traveling capability a bonus, but not required.)

for my science friends

I’m not sure how to phrase this best, but — at what point in history did we start to develop actual, workable “detection” devices? I’m thinking of things along the lines of a Geiger counter, but it doesn’t have to be a radiation detector; just a device to measure anything not visible to the eye. Wikipedia claims Gauss invented an early magnetometer in 1833, but the claim consists of three not terribly informative sentences, and the article on Gauss himself just says he developed a “method” for measuring magnetism, without specifying what it was.

Basically, Fate may or may not end up including a device for the measuring of a particular substance/effect/force/whatever, and I’m trying to figure out how much the concept of such a thing existed by 1884. (The question of how this thing works can be dealt with separately, if I decide to include it.)

Any historians of science able to answer that one for me?

more than official

With the two new scenes I added in tonight, With Fate Conspire passed the 150,000 word mark. (150,975 words, to be precise.)

Nothing next to the bricks of epic fantasy, of course — but more than long enough for me. Unfortunately for that sentiment, I have four more scenes to add before this revision is done. Please, God, don’t let this book balloon all the way up to 160K . . . .

Writing Fight Scenes: The Question of Purpose

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

All right, enough vague philosophizing. Let’s start digging into the practicalities.

For my money, the most important question you should ask yourself in writing a fight scenes is, What is the purpose of this fight?

“Who is involved in this fight?” is also a critically important question, and we’ll get to that soon enough. But the who is a matter for inside the story, whereas the purpose is a matter for both within and without.

Inside the story, we’re asking why these characters are fighting. What’s their impetus for doing so, and what do they hope to accomplish? Outside, we’re asking what the fight is supposed to do for the story as a whole. As we discussed last time, there should ideally be more than one answer to that latter question.

For this, I will use the Inigo/Man in Black duel as my example.

Yuletide assignment

No, I can’t talk publicly about what I’m writing — as they said, anonymous Yuletiders are anonymous! — but I want the record to show that I totally called it.

(Okay, I called, like, three different possibilities, based on what I’d heard about the matching algorithm pairing the rarest things first. But I kept thinking I’d end up with this one, because there is potential for tasty irony in me writing it.)

Anyway, the extra-fun part is that once I get back from Thanksgiving and have the book off my desk, I get to revisit the source for my assignment! kurayami_hime, you should totally ping me for details. 🙂

three cool links for your Friday

Unless you’re on the other side of the planet from me, in which case I think it isn’t Friday for you anymore.

The Justice League of America, Magnificent Seven-style — Superman and Wonder Woman and so on translated into Japanese film idioms.

The most awesome Fallout LARP ever — played on an abandoned base near St. Petersburg, Russia, which makes a fabulous atmosphere for a post-apocalyptic game. The costumes are even more fabulous, and the lengths they went to for setting up challenges . . . jaw-dropping. Just page down to look at the pictures, and know that your own LARP group? Is not this cool. (Unless you’re a member of Albion.)

How cats drink — “‘Three and a half years ago, I was watching Cutta Cutta lap over breakfast,’ Dr. Stocker said. Naturally, he wondered what hydrodynamic problems the cat might be solving.” The answer is pretty amazing.