almost . . . there . . .

Come on, brain. We only need 150 more words, and then we can stop for tonight. And yes, that does mean you’ll have to figure out just what Dead Rick thinks he’s accomplishing by going to La Madura, but we’ve got to make a decision on that sooner or later. If it’s sooner, that means we can spend tomorrow thinking about its ramifications, and that will make tomorrow’s writing easier.

Of course, it would help if we knew what Dead Rick is supposed to be finding. And we already skipped over that one to start tonight’s work. This skipping-details thing, it is not working out so well for us.

Something I appear to have missed

I had it firmly fixed in my head that Running With the Pack was coming out in May. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered it’s been on sale since some time in April.

So if you were interested in reading “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes” (the Fake Werewolf Paper), or generally like stories about werewolves, you’re in luck! The anthology is out. I’ve linked to Powell’s, but it’s available from other fine bookselling establishments, at least of the online sort; I don’t know for sure about physical bookstores. Anyway, enjoy!

My brain, let me show you it

Apparently I am the sort of person who thinks, “hmmm, I need to eat lunch,” and also “hmmmm, there’s that thing I’ve been meaning to watch for research,” and therefore sits down to enjoy some teriyaki salmon while watching a documentary on London’s sewers.

Complete with re-enactment video of what things looked like before the new system.

What can I say? I have a strong stomach.

a question for the Londoners

If you were to talk about where Pelham Crescent is in London, what district name would you use? Kensington? South Kensington? Is it close enough to count as part of Knightsbridge? (Not according to Wikipedia, but.) Or something else entirely?

It’s a beast, trying to sort out the boundaries of intra-urban place-names for a city you don’t live in. And for all I know the areas were defined a little differently in 1884, but that officially falls into category of “if you can prove me wrong, Dear Reader, then you bloody well deserve your victory.”

Three!

Fans of Driftwood, rejoice: I finally got around to writing and revising and submitting a third story, which are usually the prerequisite steps to selling anything. Which is to say, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has bought “Remembering Light.”

That’s three, which means Driftwood officially gets its own category in my site organization. I hope to have quite a few more than that in the long run, though.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Dragon Reborn

In my anecdotal experience, there’s a distinct cadre of people who stopped reading this series at The Dragon Reborn, on the grounds that “I could tell it was never going to end.” While that turned out to be rather prophetic, I don’t think it had to be; as of TDR, there was no obvious reason to believe the series wouldn’t be, say, five or six books total, instead of the fourteen-and-a-prequel we’re getting in the end. While long, that isn’t endless.

But I think the people who made comments to that effect were onto something, even if it wasn’t quite the something they articulated. Namely, not only did this book establish that clearly this wasn’t a trilogy (which was what most people probably expected), it transformed the work as a whole into a very odd beast: an open-ended arc plot series.

Most open-ended series are done on an episodic model: the characters may grow and change over time, but there isn’t a metaplot trending toward a definite endpoint. (Mystery series exemplify this type.) Conversely, series with metaplots and defined endpoints usually have a planned length — think Harry Potter — even if that planned length changes in the execution — think Martin. But TDR sends the clear message that, while we’re still heading for Tarmon Gai’don, the length of the journey is now anybody’s guess, Jordan’s included. It won’t be four books; will it be five? Six? Nine? Who knows.

The problem with this is that it pretty much sacrifices structure on the spot. A trilogy is a well-recognized structure in fantasy; experienced readers will have a sense of when the action is going to rise and fall, and take delight in (successful) variations from that pattern. Quartets and quintets and so on are less familiar, so reader expectation plays less of a role, but there’s still something guiding the author. The number, whatever it is, provides a standard by which to judge when the plot should be allowed to branch, and when it should be drawn back inward again. Abandon that metric, and you make it much harder to balance your story. Inasmuch as you succeed, it will be by instinct and good fortune, neither of which can sustain you forever.

TDR does not, in and of itself, set up an endless series. But it removes the plot brake, which leaves the author in less control of the vehicle than he was before.

And as a corollary, the writing relaxes into a degree of inefficiency. It’s not the degree seen later in the series, where hardly anything seems to happen, but you can see one major pattern emerge here: the establishing info. Some of which is very repetitious — like Min and her visions, which get explained for the third time in the opening scenes of TDR. While that might be useful for people reading these books a year or more apart, at any faster pace — or on a re-read, when these things are abundantly familiar — it gets old. And that’s paired with a prose-level inefficiency that requires me to read these books at speed, because if I slow down I’ll start mentally rewriting every other sentence . . . but hey, you know, these books sell like hotcakes despite flabby prose. From a cost-benefit perspective, I’m not sure it would have even been worth Jordan’s time to copy-edit his words down to something tighter. Whatever the reason, it’s undeniable that this is not a tight book, and neither is anything that comes after.

But that’s enough macro critique; on to the specifics of TDR.

I’m afraid this post is even longer than the last one.

what should I do?

So I’ve mentioned before that I’ll be one of the GoHs at Sirens. But I’m allowed to submit my own programming proposal, apart from the stuff I’m already slated for, and I kind of think I would like to do something.

The question is, what?

I have a few ideas floating around my head, but none of them have really leapt up and convinced me that’s what I should go with. I therefore turn to you, The Internets, and ask: if you were coming to hear me do something at a con other than give a keynote address and present on my own writing (which are part of my GoH duties), what would you want it to be?

They have a good outline of different programming models here. The first two are out (paper and pre-empaneled paper set; I’ve had enough of those for now), and I’m unlikely to assemble a panel discussion in the remaining time. But that leaves everything from workshops on down as a possibility. And while this year’s theme is faeries and the conference is generally focused on women in fantasy, neither of those is a straitjacket. Practically any interest of mine could fit into this — though I don’t think I inkle-weave well enough to teach anybody else, and I suspect there would be liability issues with a “Stage Combat 101” class.

So help me brainstorm. If you could have me host a discussion on any topic, or teach a workshop on some skill (writing-related or otherwise), or anything else random, what would it be? I’m not sure if I want to riff off some of my website essays, or talk about the role of violence in fiction, or how to write politics, or fight scenes, or whatever. Too many ideas, not enough decision. Halp?

two charitable causes, Onyx Court on offer

First, I tried this for the help_haiti auction and it was a lot of fun, so I’m doing it again: Onyx Court historical fiction, up for auction. Pick your person or event from English history, and I’ll tell you what the fae had to do with it. The cause this time around is ; full details here, but the short form is that Deb Mensinger is lined up for a liver transplant that will cure her of porphyria, but her donor (her brother) has no insurance and lives on the other side of the country. So the auction is to help defray costs.

Minimum bid on my offer is $5, “buy it now” is $50, and bidding ends Sunday, May 23rd.

Second, I’m once again participating in the Brenda Novak auction to benefit diabetes research. My contribution is a signed pair of the first two Onyx Court novels. Bidding currently stands at $7, with the increment set at $5.

Both auctions have a LOT of other material on offer, so browse through and see if there’s anything that catches your eye!

UPDATE: Er, so the first auction is already gone, via “buy it now.” I will contemplate possibilities for other offers.

15K! Still! Or rather, again!

Yesterday, when I sat down to write, my total wordcount was 15,085. When I stood up again, having written 1,092 words in the interim, my total wordcount was 15,085.

This has, with minor fluctuations in those last two digits, been my wordcount for the last five days. You see, the plan was this: I would write roughly 500 words a day throughout April, for an ending count of 15K, and then when May began I would kick it up to my regular pace of 1K.

But on May 1st, heading off to a friend’s concert, I finally had to face facts: I’d written the wrong beginning for Eliza. I was sitting there wondering what kind of plot complications I could think up to delay the event I wanted to end Part One with until the end of Part One, given that at present there was nothing stopping it from happening two scenes later, and nothing interesting to fill the intervening time with . . . and then it occurred to me that her immediate backstory had a number of complications that I’d just sort of skated over as a fait accompli. In part because one of those complications was something I didn’t have a detailed solution to, and it’s easier to get away with a non-detailed solution if you don’t show it onstage — but that was a pretty weak justification.

I had plot for Eliza. I’d just started her portion of the narrative after half of it was already done.

Now, the good news is that at least some of what I’ve already written for her might be salvageable. (I’ve already re-used one scene.) The rest will need heavy revision, since those scenes are full of the kind of establishing work that one puts into opening scenes, and that’s no longer needed; what’s left will probably be shorter, so I’ve still lost wordcount. And god knows it’s been frustrating to write a thousand words every day, then delete the obsolete scene and find I’m still at 15K.

But not nearly as frustrating as having to invent plot for Eliza because I skipped over the stuff I already had. So I cut the old scenes, and I write new ones, and the numbers look like I’m treading water — but they’ll start moving forward soon enough.

on the topic of Authors Behaving Badly . . . .

So Diana Gabaldon’s ill-advised polemic against fanfic?

If you want to know my general opinion, I could just point you at this whole segment of my short story output, but I want to particularly highlight “The Gospel of Nachash” (an AU take on Genesis) and “The Last Wendy”. Because both are absolutely born of the fanfic impulse: looking at the existing story and thinking, “But I have something I want to say in response.” So clearly I believe that impulse is a valid one.

My policy on fanfic (or fan-anything) of my work is here. Short form: go right ahead, so long as you don’t profit or get in the way of my ability to profit. If you’re ever in doubt, ask, and I’ll let you know if the project in question is okay.

Frankly, I think it’s flattering. That anything I write could inspire someone else to their own art? Is amazing. I’m hardly going to spit on the result.

BCS anthology

One of the victims of me falling behind on e-mail has been this announcement: Scott Andrews, editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, has released an anthology of the magazine!

The Best of BCS, Year One features such authors as Marie Brennan, Richard Parks, and 2009 Campbell Award finalists Tony Pi and Aliette de Bodard. It includes “Thieves of Silence” by Holly Phillips, named to Locus’s 2009 Recommended Reading List, and “Father’s Kill” by Christopher Green, winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story of 2009.

(My contribution is “Driftwood,” for those who are fans.)

If you’ve been meaning to sample the magazine, this is a good way to do it: a $2.99 ebook available in five different formats. Proceeds get funneled back into keeping the magazine going — and since BCS is that semi-rarity, a magazine that pays its authors more than a token amount, I’m all in favor of that! Table of contents and other details here.

me and e-mail

Imagine a cartoon hamster. She’s running on her little hamster wheel, whiskers flailing with effort, and then the wheel starts going faster and faster, because she’s not the one making it turn; and then finally it starts going so fast that it flings our poor little hamster off into space.

That’s me and e-mail, right now.

Something like half a dozen times over the last couple of months, I’ve put out a herculean effort and gotten my two inboxes down to a state of near-manageability. Just when I think I’ve got the problem licked, though, twenty new messages come through and I start getting swamped under again. And so the cycle goes.

A large part of the issue, I’ve come to realize, is blog comments — which get e-mailed to me — and that puts me in a bind. See, I like posting here on LJ, and over at SF Novelists. I especially like posting stuff that generates actual discussion. But then I get a minor flood of comments, and they’re comments with substance in them, that deserve substantive responses; so they sit around waiting for me to have brain enough and time to deal with them, and next thing I know my inbox is stuffed again. Which makes me feel guilty, because a lively back-and-forth is a pretty important ingredient for a lively blog, and I want the latter but am having trouble wrangling the former.

(And in the grand scheme of things, my problems on this front are tiny. I do not have the readership of some people I could name, much less the kudzu comment threads.)

This is not a problem with a simple solution, and I’m not expecting anybody to hand me one. But I thought it was worth at least acknowledging the situation, so you’ll understand what’s going on when I say: I’m sorry for not having responded to stuff, and I’ll try to get to some of it (but may not get to all of it) as soon as I can.

further adventures in foul period language

My apologies for continuing to discuss profanity here, but it’s just funny.

New seventeenth-century insult for my vocabulary: “windfucker.” Which, bizarrely enough, was apparently a northern term for a kestrel. (They also called it a fuckwind.) And then it got borrowed as an insult. From which I conclude that the seventeenth-century mind? Really not so different from the twenty-first century mind.

This is why I should not be let within three miles of the OED historical thesaurus. It’s bad enough when I find these things by accident, looking stuff up in the ordinary OED; if I had the thesaurus to play with, I’d never get the book written.

Anyway, now I want to revise Ashes to put the term in there somewhere. Antony probably wouldn’t say it, but Jack totally would.

The Littlest Blue-with-Black-Stripe Belt Goes Back to Class (with bonus gimpy feet)

I thought I’d be out of karate for two months following the surgery, but my orthopedist and physical therapist both said I could go back sooner, provided I wore the brace and paid close attention to what my ankle had to say. Fortunately, after thirteen years of ballet and other dance training, I am very good at listening to my feet.

So yesterday I returned to class, and god, was it a relief. Seeing people, stretching, getting some exercise . . . and it turned out better than I expected, actually. There are things I can’t do: jumping, for example. And my balance on that foot is very sketchy right now, so kicks are kind of off the menu (of course the senpai running the warm-up chose to do a kick combination across the floor that day). But the only thing really interfering with my ability to move is that I can’t pivot sharply; ask me to move from a left-hand punch to a right-hand one and I’m fine, but reverse the order and I have to just kind of mark it. It’s bloody hard to do sharp movements with the upper half of your body and cautious ones with the lower half, especially when you’ve been working and working and working at integrating your whole body rather than moving in parts.

Kumite (sparring) is still way in my future, but at least I can do kata, cautiously. As I said to several people, even if I could only do 40% of the work, that’s still a lot more than the 0% I had before. And it turns out I can do more than 40%. This makes me very pleased indeed.

Hey, brother mine! Follow this link. :-)

I’m in another Mind Meld over at SF Signal, this time with Wil Wheaton! (And others.) The topic this time around is the iPad — what we think of it, whether we own one, whether we’re ever likely to. Attitudes generally seem positive, but if your mileage varies, feel free to say so in the SF Signal comments.

(You could say it here, too, but I suspect the livelier discussion will be over there. Me, I’m likely to just shrug. This isn’t a topic I’m deeply invested in.)

things that make me happy

. . . because this is the kind of language geek I’ve turned into.

According to the OED, I am now permitted to use “fucking” as a intensifier in sentences (e.g. “Get out of my fucking house”). It’s certainly attested by 1893 — in a slang dictionary, which suggests it wasn’t brand-new — and likely appeared as early as 1864. Which is delightful, because outdated vulgarity just doesn’t carry as much impact, and right now I need Dead Rick to be as forceful as I can possibly make him sound.

I’ve fudged my word choice a little in the previous books, in cases where I just couldn’t find an equivalent period term. (Like the use of “medieval” in Midnight Never Come: that’s a nineteenth-century word.) And a few of those instances were slang-related, because it’s so hard to find evidence of truly casual and non-standard speech from more than a couple of centuries ago. One of the lovely things about moving forward in time with this series is that my available vocabulary, standard and otherwise, gets larger with every book.

We now return to the scene that is causing Dead Rick to swear.

two links of a political nature

I’m hardly the only person to post this one, but it deserves as wide a readership as it can get: Imagine If the Tea Party Was Black.”

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic?

One of many examples, flipping the colors on Tea Party activity to expose the racism and white privilege that runs throughout the movement. This isn’t just about the hideously offensive signs some protesters have proudly waved; take those away, and race would still be a major element, however much they like to deny it.

And, on the class-warfare front: Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths-people who don’t have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there’s probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there’s an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

I can’t say for sure how strong the logic is; I wouldn’t be surprised if there are also social reasons, linking CEOs to shareholders such that the latter don’t mind paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to their friends. But at the very least, it offers an argument for why there isn’t enough competition to drive CEO pay down.

in which the gimpy feet begin to ungimp

Went for a walk around the neighborhood today. Partly because, although I don’t want to court skin cancer, I’m a little appalled at how pasty I’ve gotten; it means I’ve spent too much time indoors. Partly because yesterday a trip to the Stanford library (which requires a moderate bit of walking) was way more exhausting than it should have been, and if I’m going to walk around London again, I need to get me some endurance back.

Thursday was my first physical therapy appointment. The woman tested strength and range of motion on my left foot (for a baseline) and then on my right, and we talked about the ancillary problems I’ve got aside from the surgical recovery — collapsing arches, plantar fascitis, metatarsalphalangeal sprain (say that one five times fast), and some mechanics issues of long standing, to whit, my extremely limited range of dorsiflexion. For the time being, my primary assignment is to stretch out all the muscles stiffened by my time in the boot; to that end, I’m actually not wearing the brace all the time, because it would just continue restricting my range of motion. Plus it presses on one of the two incisions in a moderately uncomfortable way, which is less than ideal.

The orthopedist cleared me to start biking again, though he advised wearing the brace. I’ll probably give that a few days more before I try it, but the idea appeals. It gets me out in the sun (which we’re finally getting a bit of), and helps regain what endurance I had, and I can accomplish some errands in the bargain. All good stuff.

In the meantime, I sit around and make faces while I point my toes. I will get this mobility back; it’ll just take some time and mild suffering. But that’s okay by me.

more researching

I’m about to go pick up a mess of books on Irish immigrants in Britain, and I’ve recalled a couple of Scotland Yard histories from Stanford’s auxiliary library facility, but in the meantime: does anybody have a specific recommendation for a history book that would talk about the Fenian bombings of the 1880s, and the early history of the Special Branch in investigating them?

I tell ya, my brain . . . .

I rarely remember my dreams, but I know that last night my brain decided it should mash together the two big things sitting around in it. Which is how I ended up trying to find my orthopedist’s office in the V&A.

I don’t know; I just work here.

Speaking of work, time to finish Eliza’s adventures in Regent Street and get to the bit where Special Branch is breathing down her neck.