For level 30, I took the Flying feat

By the way, this is what I did for my thirtieth birthday:

It’s called “indoor skydiving,” and it is FABULOUS.

My understanding is that the setup was invented to help skydivers train. You can also do it for fun, though. A giant fan beneath the wire trampoline blows enough wind upward to lift a person who’s perpendicular to the flow, simulating the effect of free-fall. The trainer is there to catch and adjust you; it can be hard to stabilize if you’ve never done it before, so you sink down or drift into the wall. Once you get the hang of it, they may spin you, or (in the case of our guy) latch onto you at shoulder and hip, put themselves into free-fall, and then take you zooming up into the shaft above, dropping down until you almost hit the trampoline, zooming up again, down again, maybe spinning as you go . . . .

OMG.

SO. MUCH. FUN.

You may be put off when you find out what your money gets you. My husband bought a group package for me and some friends/family; we each were allotted two one-minute flights. Doesn’t sound like much — but trust me, that’s a lot of free-fall. One of our group fell sick and didn’t come, so I got his extra time, making for two two-minute flights, and holy god by the end my pecs were tired. It’s like lying on your back, holding a heavy weight juuuuuuust above your chest, for one (or two) minutes at a stretch. (Since I, for some ballet-related totally inexplicable reason, found it more natural to bend at the hip rather than the knee – as seen in this photo — I also ended up with sore glutes. I’m pretty sure I would have just traded those for sore quads instead, though, had I made the effort to drag my knees down.) By the time my second two minutes were up, I was more than ready to be done.

If you have any desire to fly, you should absolutely try this out. Especially if, like me, you’ve had enough ankle-and-knee problems that leaping out of a plane (or rather, landing after such a leap) is just asking for trouble. It will make you giddy with joy.

holy *shit*.

It’s boggling enough that for the first time since I started writing the Onyx Court series, there are photographs from (nearly) the period in which I’m writing.

Every so often, one of them hits me like a punch to the gut:

YOU USED TO BE ABLE TO SEE ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL.

I knew this, of course. There are all kinds of references, and even paintings, to how the churches of the City used to soar over everything around them, rather than being lost in the cracks. But holy shit. Not just the dome, not just the western towers, but the body of the church. Visible. In more than glimpses caught between the buildings that crowd around it.

Obviously this photo was taken from the roof of a nearby building (or else something in the vicinity of Blackfriars was decidedly taller than everything else around it). You can get semi-decent shots of the cathedral even now, if you could persuade one of the places at the top of Ludgate Hill to let you onto their roof. But nothing with this kind of sight-line and openness, because these days, too many buildings rise higher than the top of the cathedral steps.

It really is a window into the past. The late Victorian period — this photo was published circa 1891 or 1892 — but also more than a hundred years before then, ever since Wren built the new cathedral, because the buildings would have been mostly about that height. Paste in an image of old St. Paul’s, with or without spire, and you’ve got a good idea of what the area looked like centuries ago.

For a London-history geek like me, this just blows the top of my head off.

after-action report

The reading went swimmingly. Quite a good number of people in attendance, and the stories went over well. For the curious, my final choices were:

1) “The Wives of Paris” — even if nobody had voted for it, I might have read this one, just because I’ve been looking forward to doing so for ages. As it also got a goodly number of votes in the poll, my desire had some justification to back it up.

2) “A Heretic by Degrees” — lots of votes for the various Driftwood options. I didn’t get the new story revised, so opted for this one instead. Especially because Borderlands readings are about the only opportunity I get to read longer stories; usually time constraints prohibit it.

3) a selection from A Star Shall Fall — if you’ve read the book, I did the two scenes where Irrith goes hunting in what Ktistes claims is a bad patch but isn’t really, and finds the, er, special room. (Circumlocuting so as to avoid spoilers.)

Now, back to the revision mines.

Clearing the Slate: usernames

Continuing my effort to clear out my Firefox tabs and my brain, let’s talk about usernames.

yuki_onna posted about this a little while ago, and I have to say I’m on her side. But first, let’s talk about the original poster’s argument.

I feel like pretty much everything he says can be turned around from a positive into a negative. True, on Facebook you don’t have the problem of signing up only to find your customary username has already been taken. Instead you have the problem of signing up with a name that’s maybe shared by 7,142 other people. An improvement, or only a differently annoying issue? Also, he says you don’t have to use your real name, just a name — but hang on, isn’t that essentially the username thing all over again, except without the restriction that it must be unique? And maybe a requirement that your chosen name has to come in two parts (e.g. Pony McRainbow). If you can still use a made-up name, you still have the problem he describes, of realizing belatedly that somebody you know in person and somebody you know online are actually, y’know, the same person.

But that has an easy fix. If you want your legal name associated with your pseud, put it in your profile or wherever. If you want to keep them separate, you can.

Which is part of Cat’s point. Facebook wants you to use your real name (and other real information) so you can be more effectively tracked: pinned down, advertised to, your information sold to third-party vendors, linked up with things you never intended to touch. Oh, so you’re the Melanie Dunn whose grocery purchases swing erratically between Hostess snack cakes and green vegetables (better sell you some diet aids!), who’s a registered Democratic voter in Kansas (do your neighbors know?), whose medical history shows a procedure at a particular doctor’s office three years ago (and we can guess what that was). So when you go posting on your blog about how you think bigots should get over the whole Islamic community center thing, rest assured people will have an easy time connecting that with your weight and your political activities and the fact that maybe you had an abortion. Aren’t you glad they know who you are?

False names, whether unique usernames or non-unique pseudonyms, can protect people.

But you know, even if that were taken out of the equation, I’d still like usernames, and my reason is the other part of Cat’s point. Choosing a username is an act of identity creation — one we don’t often get to do in modern American society, or (so far as I’m aware) in other high-tech nations. Your parents pick your name, without any input from you, and changing it is a legal hassle. Nicknames are generally assigned by those around you, though you can try to show up to college or your job in a new city and sell people on the idea that while your name is William, usually you go by Bear. We have very few opportunities to choose something that reflects who and what we are, or want to be — or we did, until usernames came along and gave us a whole new field to play in.

The fantasy writer in me can’t help but think about the mystical power of names, and how the process of choice invests them once more with a whiff of that power. They have meaning. How is that not cool?

Is the meaning sometimes stupid? Of course. You may get to a point where you’re embarrassed to be known as shake_that_bootay. But unlike Aschlyee, who’s embarrassed by her parents’ enthusiastic leap onto the bandwagon of “let’s find a totally new way to spell this name!,” you can put it behind you pretty easily. You can escape your party-hard high school years, major in Classics, get involved in radical politics, and rename yourself alecto_reborn. Then, when you’re tired of being a Fury, go into the business world, and settle down as dahlia_blue.

There have been times and places in the world where that sort of change was normal and expected, where having six names by the time you died was nothing unusual. (Read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms if you don’t believe me.) We’ve reinvented a form of that here, and I for one like it.

Celebrate your username! Tell me the story of why you chose it, whether you’re tempted to change it, and if so, what to.

Things learned from tonight’s revision

1) If a word or phrase isn’t in [square brackets], I should trust that means I’ve already looked up whether it’s in period or not.

2) Scenes are so much more exciting when your protagonist doesn’t play nice.

3) kniedzw gets a funny look on his face when I appear in the doorway of his office and say, “Can I get your help for a second? It’s spousal abuse for fun and profit.”

4) But he is then very good about dragging me across the living room floor so I can figure out where a flying elbow would connect under particular circumstances.

5) I’m still in draft-brain, rather than revision-brain; my subconscious is depressed that all my work has made the book about a thousand words shorter. (Thanks to my first bits of revision being the combination of two pairs of scenes that each really only needed to be one.) But I’m sure it will get longer again, soon enough.

What should I read?

So I’ve got this reading and signing at Borderlands Books on Saturday (3 p.m., if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and would like to come). I have a fair bit of time to fill, and so I’m intending to read several different things, as well as answering questions and signing books. I’ll definitely do a bit from A Star Shall Fall, but I’d also like to do a couple of short stories. The question is, which ones?

You know what that means: time for a poll.

Edited to add: I’m disqualifying “Silence, Before the Horn,” “Driftwood,” and “The Last Wendy” on the grounds that I read them during my previous Borderlands event.

oof.

Went to bed early last night, slept gloriously, woke feeling more like a human being. Which is good, because I’ve got a book that needs revising.

To entertain you while I do that: Alyx Dellamonica’s got an interview with me posted on her blog, wherein I ramble on about a whole bunch of things, including the grade-school evolution of me as a writer, and the perfectly legal tax scam I’ve got going. 🙂

Also, a review of A Star Shall Fall, from a place entertainingly named “Elitist Book Reviews.” Their opinion? “This is how Alternate Historical Fantasy should be done.” Awww, yay! And they hadn’t read the first two books of the series — in fact, they didn’t know it was a series when they started reading — so I now have a clear data point in favor of having pulled off what I was trying to do, namely, making the book work acceptably as a stand-alone.

Now I’m off to print the miniscript of this thing. Ta!

first of (probably) many

I have so many things piled up in my head, waiting for the time and energy to say them; I decided to start with this one.

There is still discussion going around concerning the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” (Which is neither, of course — but “downtown Islamic community center” doesn’t sound as scary, no matter how much the word “community” has been beaten up by those who will say anything to score points against their enemies.) There is still debate about its appropriateness. There is still outrage.

Folks, I am one of those outraged.

I am outraged that this is an issue. That people from thousands of miles away, who maybe have never set foot in New York and never will, have decided it’s their job to tell New Yorkers (of the Muslim persuasion or not) what they can and cannot build in their own city; that so many of them are willfully spreading lies on the subject so as to drum up more fear and hatred. I am outraged that our national response to this situation has skewed so far toward xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. I am outraged by this, and the later portions of this, and the attitude so ably skewered by this.

Not only do I want this community center, I want one built on Ground Zero. For real. It would have put me over the moon if I woke up one morning and found the internet blazing with the news that the 9/11 memorial was going to be a tasteful stone carved with the names of those who died, surrounded by an interfaith center dedicated to the peaceful co-existence of Christianity and Islam. Toss in Judaism, too, while you’re at it. With maybe a few wings for Hinduism and Buddhism and Wicca and all the rest. To get to the stone, you have to walk through galleries that explain the basic tenets of each religion, acknowledging the different interpretations that have been put on those tenets in different places and times. (And to get through the last door, you have to pass a quiz? No, no, we’re trying to be welcoming, here.) I want our memorial to that day to be a giant thumb in the eye of everybody on both sides who believes Christianity and Islam are and must be at war, everybody who wants a return of the Crusades. Show our true enemies that their best efforts will not achieve their goals; our commitment to the ideals of the United States is too strong to be broken by lies and fear.

Except it isn’t true. I’m not sure it ever has been; this country stumbles rather than strides toward a more perfect union, bettering itself by accident and the occasional spasm of purposeful change. And sometimes, like now, the spasms yank us in the opposite direction. It’s happened to one minority group after another: blacks, Latinos, Japanese, Chinese, Irish back in their day. All I can do is try to make sure I’m not out-shouted by the bigots, that I speak for tolerance whenever I can, to give the lie to the notion that “Americans” feel this way or that. No matter what the news may say, not all of us think the community center is a bad idea. My only problem with it is that I want more, and I’m afraid we won’t even get a little.

139,446.

It’s messy, it’s ragged, it’s got continuity holes big enough to drive a subway train through, but for the moment, it’s done.

I now have four Onyx Court novels.

Good Christ that epilogue was hard to write. Possibly it sucks. I have no idea. What the hell does one write, to end a four-book series? Especially when one isn’t sure whether this is the end permanently, or just the end for now? How does one wrap something like that up? How many readers will kill me for not showing the [spoiler] they’ll think I should have shown? Will my editor be one of them?

These questions don’t have answers, at least not tonight. Tonight, I back up the file, and sleep the sleep of the novel-completing just.

I don’t even need to fall over!

Pssssh. That was only 2,908 words of writing. I feel like I should write something else before I go to bed; I was expecting to do so much more.

What I wrote was the climax, not the ending: this isn’t a complete draft yet. It probably won’t be for a couple of days; I have this Thing about finishing novels, where the last thing I write has to be the final scene (in this case, the epilogue), and what precedes it can’t have any holes in. There are definitely some holes in what I have at present, at least some of which I’ll have to fill before I can let myself write the epilogue — though some will probably get classed as revision-level problems, to be dealt with later. But right now, I have 133,951 words of book, and it is Very Nearly Done.

No, brain, you don’t have to write something else before you can go to bed tonight. Enjoy your victory, and get some sleep.

Um.

(Okay, maybe we’re going to write the seance AND the Giant Ridiculous Climax tonight.)

130K! (actually 131K!)

Long-time readers of this blog know that many of my metaphors for writing are related to textiles: weaving, or embroidery, or whatever. Well, the end of this book is presently the narrative equivalent of the test garments I sometimes sew, where I trace the pattern out on the cheapest muslin I can buy and baste the pieces together, then rip them apart and cut them down or stick in extra pieces of fabric and then sew the results back together again, and the whole thing ends up covered in Sharpie ink as I mark where things need to be changed or fitted together or whatever.

The comforting point to this metaphor is, doing that helps me figure out how to go about sewing the real fabric together, so I do a better job the second time around. So I’m telling myself that this “muslin draft” I’ve got going here is okay, because in the revision I will take all those Sharpie marks and translate them into a much better draft. Cyma’s train station scene will go away; Eliza will have that ability I just decided tonight that she needs; I’ll figure out what the hell to do with [spoiler] plot thread that has, at present, completely fallen out of the story. But before I can do any of that, I need to nail down the central points of this ending, and then reverse-engineer them to figure out how they should be set up. So, ragged Sharpie-covered draft it is.

At least tonight was fun writing. Tomorrow, I think we’ll have a seance, and then it’s onward to the Giant Ridiculous Climax!

Word count: 131,042. I might as well go ahead and give this book the trophy for Longest Onyx Court Novel now; I know it will win in the end.
LBR quota: A bit of (hopefully) ringing rhetoric, courtesy of one Eliza O’Malley!
Authorial sadism: Sorry, Cerenel. Of the people in that scene, you were the best mouthpiece for the elitist point of view. At least I gave you a good reason for it.

last of the series

I only just barely managed to get it written in time, but I do have an SF Novelists post this month: “Woman =/= Body,” which is the last (for now) in my series about stereotypes of female characterization.

Same drill as usual; comment over there, no registration needed, though if you’re new I’ll have to dig your first comment out of the moderation queue, so don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t appear immediately.

Fascinating Title Goes Here

The Internet has this magical ability to cough up stuff on whatever topic you’re thinking about, even when you aren’t looking for it*. At the moment, that’s this post by Jay Lake, which led me through daisy-chain of other posts by Seanan McGuire, Edmund Schubert, Misty Massey, and David Coe, all on the topic of titles.

I have titles on the brain right now for two reasons:

1) I just sent my crit group the most recent Driftwood story, which doesn’t really have a name yet, though my tongue-in-cheek dubbing of it as “Two Men in a Basket” might end up sticking just for lack of anything better.

2) I still don’t have a title for the Victorian book.

These two situations have different root causes, I think. Thanks to the first three installments in the series, the Victorian book is hedged about with all these requirements that I should fulfill if humanly possible: it has to be a quote, the passage the quote comes from has to work as an epigraph (ideally for the last part of the book), it should have a verb (ideally at the end of the phrase), etc. Finding a piece of Victorian literature that will fit all the requirements at once is proving much more difficult than I expected — to the point where I may well have to compromise on one or more points, though the perfectionist in me doesn’t want to. For the Driftwood story, on the other hand, the problem is that I don’t have any requirements. It’s a wide-open field, and so I end up standing around in it, not sure where to go.

And it’s made more complicated by the fact that novel titles and short story titles aren’t quite the same kind of beast. Certain things could work for either, and in fact I think you can generally port novel titles onto short stories without too much problem. But short story titles can’t necessarily go the other way. “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” strikes me as only working for the short form; “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” would NEVER go on a book. Short story titles are allowed to be wordier, because they don’t have to function as a piece of marketing in the way their novel-related cousins do. (Exceptions like The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making are just that: exceptions.) Cleverness in book titles is somewhat limited to humourous work, while a broader range of short stories can get away with it.

I’ve said before that my best titles usually show up at the start of the process; my average titles are the ones I stick on after the fact. (I have some bad titles, too, but let’s not talk about those. They’re after-the-fact efforts, too.) What makes a title good? It has to be evocative — which is one of those vague, hand-wavy descriptors I actually kind of hate, but I don’t have a better one that manages to combine the concepts of “striking” and “memorable” and “suggestive of more than it’s saying.” Lots of writers try to achieve evocative-ness (evocativity?) by throwing in nouns that supposedly carry that quality: Shadow. Soul. Dragon. Yawn. My attention is drawn more to odd juxtapositions. Queen isn’t a terribly interesting word, but the contradiction of The Beggar Queen is a lot more intriguing.

And then you have to worry about titles in a series, and how to make it clear these books belong together. I have to say I’m not a fan of the Mercedes Lackey answer to this question: Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise, Magic’s Price; Winds of Fate, Winds of Change, Winds of Fury; The Black Gryphon, The White Gryphon, The Silver Gryphon . . . well, if you dropped all the books on the floor it would be easy to sort the trilogies from one another, but exciting this is not. I prefer Dunnett’s approach with the Lymond books, where the titles may not be individually brilliant, but the running chess metaphor connects them all. This is why the pattern of the Onyx Court titles matters to me, too, because the structural characteristics are what advertise “this is part of that series!”

But you still have to come up with the title. For the Victorian book, I go looking in Victorian literature, but what about stories or novels where the title could be anything? How do you even get started? I swear, sometimes it’s harder than writing the actual stories. If you have any brilliant thoughts, please do share them in the comments.

*By which I mean that our brains have this magical ability to notice stuff that matches the pattern of what we’re interested in. But it’s more fun to say the Internet gets credit.

you brought this on yourself, you know

What’s harder than trying to write wacky made-up faerie science?

Writing wacky made-up faerie science from the point of view of a character who doesn’t know the first bloody thing about it. Especially when the education of your other major protagonist pretty much stops at her knowing how to read.

There are days when I really, really wish I’d constructed this story in a fashion that made Wrain or somebody the faerie protagonist, in Dead Rick’s place.

on reflection

Oh, that’s why I couldn’t figure out how to end the scene last night.

Because it wasn’t time to end it yet; we needed about eight hundred more words of Eliza having that epiphany I thought was going to happen later. And now it’s clear which of the next several bits of story needs to happen first, before we move along to the others. So if you’ll pardon me, I’ll get back to the book.

kitsune_den, thank you for “Owlsight”

Okay, it’s painfully obvious I had no idea how to end the scene when I finally got to it, but right now that doesn’t matter. I have, at last, written the scene that’s been in my head since before I started writing this book: since I pitched the proposal to Tor, at least. And probably earlier than that. If I had to guess, I’d say 2008, but it might be as far back as 2007.

Eliza ended up getting pov on it, which meant she got to do something unexpectedly cool. And Dead Rick got what he wanted, and now all the characters have to do is save the world.

In about the next ten thousand words, theoretically.

Shyeah right. This is so totally going to run long.

Mush!

120K! Actually, 122K!

I keep going backwards and forwards in this book, mucking around with crap in earlier scenes, then slapping words onto the end, and that’s why I’ve netted more than 2K today, not counting the words replacing the ones I cut. I think I FINALLY have a working version of Hodge’s Academy scene, which will be a bloody miracle if it’s true. And the thing in there is paying off on the back end with the new scene I added tonight. We’re getting into the Thrilling Climax now — if I can just wrangle all the parties into position.

Three weeks to deadline, and some heavy lifting to do before then. I’m very excited about what I’ve got here, but I really need a mallet to beat this damned book into behaving itself.

Oh, and if you know anything about dynamite, please do comment on the previous post.

Word count: 122,086
LBR quota: Blood. And Dead Rick loves me for it.
Authorial sadism: Aside from the Horrible Thing I Can’t Tell You About . . . Dead Rick not getting the specific blood he wants. (Not yet.)