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.)
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.
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.
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
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>
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.)
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?
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 . . . .
[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.
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. 🙂
Yuletide matches will be going out soon, so if you’re the person who’s been matched with me, look below the cut for further details on my requests.
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.
Things You Should Not Put Into Your Novel, No Matter How Good You Think Your Reason Is, Part Two:
Theosophy.
<swears at Madame Blavatsky>
<goes back to revising the book>
Whoa. Apparently I’ve picked up something like thirty-plus new readers since I started the “fight scenes” sequence of posts.
Hi, all! And welcome! This has actually put me up over five hundred readers, which is a nice little landmark; I feel like I should do something to celebrate it. Like giving away prizes.
As near as I can tell, alpheratz, you’re Reader No. 500, so you win! And so does everywherestars, chosen by the highly scientific expedient of pulling up my profile, closing my eyes, and sticking the eraser end of a pencil randomly at my screen. E-mail me at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll give you a selection of prizes from my Box O’ Books And Other Things I’ve Written.
(I know that not all of the 517 readers I currently have are necessarily still reading LJ, so if I don’t hear back from everywherestars, I’ll pick another recipient.)
BTW, I mentioned this to alpheratz in comments, but if you’ve read the entirety of the Lymond Chronicles and want onto the filter wherein I’ve been book-blogging the series (mostly just The Game of Kings so far), leave a note here. That particular project is on hiatus, but I have no objection to comments on old posts, so new readers are always welcome.
For the amount I’m having to juggle who knows what about whom and when they know it (and when they don’t), I really ought to have a mystery novel to show for it.
Instead, I have an Onyx Court book that makes me want to tear my hair out.
Let this be a lesson to all concerned: never inflict amnesia on multiple characters at once. (No matter how good your reason for it may be.)
Ah well. L’Editor liked it — quite a bit — so there’s that stressor removed; I do still need to do a lot of work, but it’s entirely of my own making. Can’t really blame anybody but myself for that.
Oh, hey! The “l’editor” thing reminded me. If you’re a fluent French speaker and could spare me a few minutes of work checking a handful of lines from this story, please drop me a line, either in comments or by e-mail. It isn’t much, but I should probably fix it before this goes to the copy-editor.
I promised a while ago that I would make a post about the depiction of women in the Wheel of Time, and have had the result sitting around not quite finished for more than a month. Since I’m about to buckle down for the last push on revising With Fate Conspire, I might as well get this out of the way and off my mind.
Before I get to the complaints, though, let me say a few things about what Jordan does right. To begin with, he passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. Even in the first book, Egwene, Nynaeve, and Moiraine are all significant characters, and once the story moves off to the White Tower in The Great Hunt, the importance of women to the plot is firmly assured. I can think of a distressing number of recent epic fantasies that don’t do half so well on that front.
Furthermore, the women aren’t there to be damsels in distress. They don’t get captured or tortured or raped, or killed off to upset the hero. Rand’s angst over the death of women aside, I’d have to go searching to find anyone stuffed into the refrigerator; no significant examples of that leap to mind. Heck, most of them aren’t even love interests: Egwene and Nynaeve both have their own romances, rather than being the object of someone else’s, and while Elayne may have been introduced in that role, it isn’t long before she’s doing far more important things.
That stuff is all good. So why do the women of the Wheel of Time get so badly up my nose?
The Carl Brandon Society is fundraising for the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, which helps send writers of color to the Clarion workshops. It’s a prize drawing; you can purchase tickets for the chance to win an e-reader (one of two Nooks, one of two Kobos, or an Alex eReader). This goes through midnight Eastern on November 22nd, so you’ve got just a few days left to enter.
Also, Pat Rothfuss is again running his Worldbuilders event, raising money for Heifer International. Among the items on offer are a whole lot of signed books, including a pair of In Ashes Lie and A Star Shall Fall, signed by yours truly. There are so many prizes, though, that Pat’s still in the process of posting them all; check out that first link for a list, and for information on how to participate.
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
So you’re working on a story, and there comes a point where it really ought to have a fight scene. But you’re sitting there thinking, “I’m not a martial artist! I’m not an SCA member! I have no idea how to fight!” Or maybe you’re thinking, “Fight scenes are so boring. I’d rather just skip over this and get back to the actual story.” Or something else that makes you dread writing that scene, rather than looking forward to it with anticipation.
Don’t worry, dear reader. I’m from the Internet, and I’m here to help. <g>
To the first group, I say: the details of how to fight are possibly the least important component of a fight scene. The important components are the same ones you’re already grappling with in the rest of your writing, namely, description, pacing, characterization, and all that good stuff.
To the second group, I say: it’s only boring if the author does it wrong.
This month’s SF Novelists post is a bit different, because it’s the launching point for a series I’ll be doing over here on LJ for the next indeterminate amount of time.
At Sirens this past month, I did a workshop on writing fight scenes, and promised those who weren’t able to attend that I’d be posting the material online. That begins today, and will be continuing for a while. Check out the aforementioned post for sort of an anecdote-cum-mission statement, then head behind the cut for a bit more about me and why I’m interested in this subject, plus an outline of how I’m going to approach this.
I was mentioning James Frey’s latest atrocity to a few friends last night, and promised I would point them at the details, so here they are, by way of Scalzi’s blog.
Holy abusive contracts, Batman. It appears that Frey’s crass, opportunistic exploitation knows neither bounds nor shame. I can only hope the public outcry will go far enough to scare people away from signing up to be his factory drones — but sadly, I doubt it will.
