Victorian Book Report: Liza Picard, Victorian London

As usual, I don’t have much to say about this one; it’s Liza Picard, and she’s awesome. Information on daily life in London, this time in the middle Victorian period. (I don’t know what I’ll do if I continue on with a Blitz and/or modern book; for the first time since beginning the Onyx Court series, I won’t have Liza Picard to light my way.)

This might be my least favorite of her four works, not through any fault of hers. It’s just that by the Victorian period, London had gotten so huge, and so diverse — in the senses of class, ethnicity, religion, and everything else — that the resulting book inevitably feels less personal than the Elizabethan one did. She still has a wealth of excellent detail, but more and more it feels like impressionism, a scattering of data points from which to imagine the whole.

Despite that, she is and always will be the first author I recommend when someone wants to know about London daily life in the past. There are topics she doesn’t cover — for those, I have other books — but she’s a pretty excellent place to start.

your daily dose of gender rage

Cat Valente (yuki_onna) is on a roll at the moment, first with a splendid jab at the gendering of deodorant marketing (men get Science! women get Squishy Feelings!), and then with a right hook that takes down Super Bowl commercials.

Pretty much all I have to say is, right on. This is why I hate watching TV as it airs; this is why I stay away from sitcoms and comedic movies in general. Because they present me with this awful, appalling world of Bitchy Women and Immature Men and How They’ll Never Understand One Another, and then they ask me to find it funny. And not only do I not find it funny, I don’t want to. I look at the world they’re trying to sell me, and I hate it.

wrong project, but oh well

Man, I don’t know what it is. All I have to do is decide, “I’m working on Thing X!,” and I will without fail come up with ideas for Thing Y instead.

In the current instance, that means I decided I would try to finish “The Unquiet Grave” by the end of the month, and promptly put down 1,022 words on “Mad Maudlin” instead. Not really complaining — I don’t care which short story I make progress on, so long as it’s one of them — but I really wish I could find a way to leverage this for novels. As I said on matociquala‘s LJ the other day, it seems to me like there should be a way to do it. Contract for Book A, write Book B instead; then contract for Book C, somehow convince yourself you’re working on that one for realz, whereupon you write Book A. Or something. But I fear deadlines might make that tough to wrangle.

Time to go think about “The Unquiet Grave” some more, in the hopes of finishing “Mad Maudlin” in the near future.

First lines!

It seems to be that time of year (or whatever cycle this is on), when writers on my flist do the “first lines” meme. As in, we post the opening lines of our various unfinished stories, sometimes with commentary, in the hopes of maybe prodding one of them forward. In celebration of the new short story, let me go over the stuff I’ve got sitting around. (Counting only stuff that has at least a fragment written down. If we included things that consist of titles and vague ideas, or vague ideas without titles, or titles without vague ideas, we’d be here all month.)

It’s quite a list, all the same.

GOD I’ve missed this.

2,650 words today, and that’s a story. A complete short story, from beginning to end, knocked out in an evening because I just felt like it.

I don’t remember the last time I managed that. “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” was similarly an idea that mugged me out of nowhere (rather than coming from my list of unfinished ideas), but it stalled several times on its way to completion. This one sent me to pace the upstairs hallway once or twice, but that was simply a matter of finding the words.

This feels really good. I need to find my way back to doing it more often.

that’s part of the job done

I haven’t yet gone through my site and scrubbed the Amazon Associates links from my book recommendation pages, but I’ve done the pages for my own novels. Which made me realize how lazy I’d been with those; I was pretty much just linking Amazon. I’ve replaced that with a much more comprehensive set: Powell’s, IndieBound, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Fictionwise (for ebooks), Chapters (for Canada), and Waterstone’s (for the UK).

Having done that, I now put it to you, my loyal LJ readers: are there other stores I should include? I can’t list every store on the planet, of course, but if there are other major online retailers — especially for Canada and the UK — let me know what I’ve missed.

the fallout of Amazon vs. Macmillan

John Scalzi is valuable once again. This time he’s discussing what you can do to help the real victims of this publishing slapfight — “real” in the sense of “people who are losing something, right now, that they can’t afford and aren’t going to get back.” Amazon — which still hasn’t put back the buy links, last I heard — is losing sales, sure, but they can survive it. Ditto Macmillan, though their survival is less easily assured. And readers can buy the books elsewhere, or pick them up from Amazon once this mess is resolved.

For authors, though, every reader that doesn’t buy their book represents not just lost income, but the possibility that whichever subsidary of Macmillan publishes them won’t offer another contract in the future. Because when contract time rolls around, the bean-counters are going to look at how their previous books have sold. And for some, the losses they’ve been incurring since Friday — much less any of the ill-conceived boycotts flying around — may break them.

I bring this up because of a post by Jay Lake, where he describes the attitudes and assumptions he’s seen on the Kindle message boards. The list is really disturbing to anyone working as a writer — well, see for yourself:

1. Authors are greedy
2. Authors are rich
3. Authors hate ebook readers
4. Authors control pricing
5. Authors control what their publishers do
6. Authors should be punished for what their publisher does
7. Authors are taking orders from their publishers’ PR departments
8. Authors should self-publish, because they’ll make lots more money that way
9. Authors don’t know what they’re talking about
10. Authors aren’t necessary
11. Authors are bullying Amazon

My thoughts on this are, once again, rather long, so they’re going behind a cut.

It’s almost enough to make you cry.

Amazon vs. Macmillan: my verdict

The part behind the cut is going to be long and somewhat arcane, but if you want to know some of how the sausage gets made — just what’s going on with ebooks and Kindles, how pricing gets determined, and why Amazon’s strategy is problematic for the industry (let alone the petulance of their tactics) — then read onward. Outside the cut, I’ll point you at the response from Macmillan’s CEO, and the more belated response from Amazon’s Kindle Team (dissected by anghara). If you read only one other thing on the topic, it should be John Scalzi’s magesterial (and highly amusing) analysis of how Amazon failed, because his post is about the tactics, and why they were such a resoundingly bad idea. The rest of this will be about the strategy, the behind-the-scenes stuff that explains why so much of the publishing industry is up in arms against Amazon.

Macmillan may not be the good guy, but they’re the better guy in this particular war.

Squeaking the deadline by at least three hairs.

I never pulled an all-nighter to write a paper, but apparently I will pull them for stories.

(It isn’t really an all-nighter. The sun hasn’t risen yet.)

Something like 2K tonight, and now “And Blow Them at the Moon” is finally done. 8,120 words, which can certainly be tightened, though what the word-count effect will be of making the story actually work, I couldn’t tell you. And right now, I don’t care. I’ve got the damned thing on the page, and at the moment, that’s all that really matters.

a brief note on the Amazon thing

Short form, for those who haven’t heard: Macmillan (publishing conglomerate that includes, among other companies, Tor) allegedly told Amazon (you know who they are, I imagine) that they wanted to price their ebooks at $15, and Amazon, in refusing to cooperate, has stopped selling Macmillan’s books. Not their ebooks; all of their books. As in, right now you can buy the Wheel of Time used from third-party sellers, but not from Amazon.

Oh, and undoubtedly this has to to with the iPad thing — Macmillan is one of the corporations that struck a deal with Apple for the iBookstore.

Cory Doctorow has a good analysis of what that means, and I think it’s a good analysis even if you’re not usually on board with his copyright agenda (as I’m aware many people aren’t). Shorter Cory: Macmillan’s $15 thing is dumb, but what Amazon did is a hell of a lot dumber, and either way it’s like two bull elephants going tusk-to-tusk while the rest of us, the writers and readers, get trampled underfoot. This is the consequence of the conglomeration of publishing, and it really isn’t a good thing.

Lots of other people have commented. John Scalzi here and here, Jay Lake here and here; also Jim Hines, Cat Valente, Janni Lee Simner, others I’ll undoubtedly see when I open up my Google Reader, and more besides.

At the moment? I’m waiting for more information. Nothing’s certain at the moment, not even that the pulling of the books was done by Amazon rather than Macmillan (though it seems very likely). Lots of authors have pulled the Amazon links from their sites. I haven’t done that yet, mostly because a) there are a lot of them to pull and b) we don’t have the full story yet; I’d be pissed if I went to all that work only to learn something that paints Amazon in a better light. I’m not real optimistic about that, mind you, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to wait another day or two. Once I know for sure what’s up with this, then I’ll make my decision.

But I gotta tell you, Amazon’s done some kind of craptastic things in the past, and adding this one to the list does more than put a bad taste in my mouth. As Jay says, what they appear to have done isn’t precisely wrong — they’re within their rights to decide which products to stock — but the implications of it are deeply troubling. Amazon isn’t just a retailer; they dominate the audiobook market, and have been trying to lock down the ebook market, in ways that aren’t good for any of us. They’ve tried before to use that weight to strongarm publishers into doing things their way (insert industry neepery here, of a lower-profile sort), and if they succeed, we’re all going to lose.

Better.

Okay. I had to ignore the lunar eclipse and pull a new trick out of Magrat’s ear for the solar one, but at least it’s a cool trick. And I have 1,514 new words: two new scenes, which between them account for the time that had to elapse before Magrat went after Francis Tresham.

I’d love to get that scene written tonight, but it’s just not happening. Too much typing today — not just that wordage, but revision done on the earlier scenes, as I figured out what I was going to do next. And other stuff, too. So I’m going to get off the computer now.

But finishing in the next day or two suddenly looks a lot more feasible.

What am I trying to do?

Last night I didn’t add words to “And Blow Them at the Moon,” instead spending my evening re-reading the relevant chapters from my research, and thinking about the story. It’s important to ask myself: what am I trying to do? What are the things I want my narrative to accomplish?

Normally this isn’t the kind of thing I share publicly (it comes too close to spoilers), but this time I think I’ll think out loud. Behind a cut, though, so you don’t have to know anything more about the plot than you want to.

What do I need this story to do?

Four things, I think.

trying something entirely new

I don’t know how to get from where I left off last night to the end of the story — so instead I’m seeing if I can get from the end of the story to where I left off last night.

That is to say, earlier tonight I sat down and wrote a chunk of the final scene, then came back after a break and started writing the scene that comes before it. I’ll see how far I can get with that, then probably write the next one forward, and at that point I’ll have pretty much everything I know about this story. Whereupon I will hopefully figure out how to splice the two together.

This is utterly backwards for me, both literally and figuratively. I don’t write this way. But the other way wasn’t working, and hey, it’s only a short story; if I end up chucking out everything I wrote tonight, and everything I write tomorrow, it’s no huge loss. This may, like “Chrysalis,” be a story I need to write wrong before I can figure out how to write it right.

(I’m hoping for a result less broken than “Chrysalis” is. Fortunately, I’m also not attempting anything a tenth as arty as that story.)

1,173 very tangled words tonight. I think tomorrow I need to re-read chunks of my reference materials and get this crap straight in my head.

ETA: another 400 or so more. I remembered, or reconstructed, the way I wanted to handle what’s probably the most crucial turning point of the story; again, it may need replacing later, but at least I have it nailed down for the moment.

for those who find my pace too slow

I should mention, btw, that Leigh Butler has been doing a Wheel of Time re-read over at Tor.com. Possible spoilers through Knife of Dreams, but I read the TEotW posts and the only post-Crossroads of Twilight bits I found boiled down to “and this thing still hasn’t happened yet.” Much more detail there, since there are multiple posts per book.

time lapse

Driving around today, my brain wandered — like it does — and this time it wandered onto the topic of time elapsing in fiction.

Twenty-seven years go by between the beginning and ending of In Ashes Lie. I noticed, while working on that book, how few models I had for stories like that: even on a series level, genre fiction tends toward plots that zoom by much more quickly. It’s a function of the type of stories we tell; lit-fic may explore one person’s growth over their lifetime, the gradual change of their relationship with a family member or whatever, but fantasy and SF usually feature a more immediate conflict, one which must be resolved soon or the consequences will be dire.

I think one of the things that endears Mercedes Lackey’s Last Herald-Mage trilogy to me, unexpectedly, is the way it breaks that model. Sure, in the first book Vanyel is an angsty teenager with incredible power — you could so turn that into an anime without half-trying — but when he shows up in the second installment, it’s twelve years later and he’s an actual adult. One with responsibilities and experience, who’s grown into his power and discovered what problems it can’t solve for him. I don’t know what the causal order was, whether the time-lapse created the Stefan plot or the Stefan plot required the time-lapse, but I honestly think the passage of those years is what redeems the series from being purely standard-issue crackfic. The changes with Jervis and Withen always struck me as particularly satisfying, and I think it’s because they aren’t sudden conversions. The moment of transformation may be sudden, but it’s years in the making, as both characters see what kind of man Vanyel has grown up to be, and weigh that against the prejudices they began with. Likewise, I much more readily buy Vanyel as the legendary Herald-Mage half the Collegium’s afraid of, because half the Collegium’s too young to remember his days as a snot-nosed brat. It’s harder to make that kind of role pay off believably in the short term.

But the tradeoff, of course, is that you lose the sense of conflict immediacy if you have years flying by. Also, you can (paradoxically) get away with either an essentially static character, or one who suddenly undergoes a major change of heart, if only a month or two elapses within the story. If a decade passes, on the other hand, you have to find ways to show the effect of that on your protagonist and those around her, and those effects will be both small and gradual-large. It’s all the challenge of writing an adult with a real history behind him, plus the challenge of showing that history in progress.

So who are some authors that do this, and do it well? I don’t mean stories like the Wheel of Time, where maybe a year or two has gone by but it’s all continuous plot; I’m looking for books or series that leap over intervening spans to show you a real percentage of a character’s life. Fantasy and science fiction books, specifically — I know lit-fic does this a lot, but it just doesn’t hold my interest.

first you put the left down, and then the right

Since several people have suggested new wordmeters to me: does anybody know of one that, like the old Zokutou meter, allows you to show the new material you’ve added on since the last update? As in, yesterday I had 2064, today I wrote 1028, now I have 3098. I liked seeing the different-colored bit on the end of the bar, displaying your forward progress.

Anyway, that’s where I stand, after being not at all sure I was going to get anything written today. I know where I want the story to go, but getting there is proving to be the hard part.

John Johnson showed up in today’s work, for those of you sufficiently versed in your 1605 history to know who that is. (The real trick will be figuring out a sensible way to reveal him later, for those who don’t already know. I’m not trying to be terribly coy in-text about the fact that this is a Gunpowder Plot story, but since my protagonist doesn’t know that yet, there’s a fair bit of obfuscation happening as a consequence.)

Nggggh. Needs moar action, and also some way to use the eclipses. Surely I can come up with something.

various cool links

Because my browser is too full of stuff.

Pretty stuff:

V Magazine: Curves Ahead — for those of you with an interest in issues of weight, body image, concepts of beauty, etc. A photoshoot (semi-NSFW) that treats flesh as a beautiful thing.

The Plimoth jacket — the result of an epic, many-handed volunteer project to re-create an early 17th-century embroidered jacket. Scroll down to the bottom for pictures, include detail closeups that will make the costumey folks on this list drool.

The art of cutting leaves — some truly stunning artwork, achieved by surgically excising leaf surfaces while leaving the veins intact.

Less pretty stuff:

The Americanization of Mental Illness — an interesting discussion that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of how we conceptualize and treat mental illness, and what happens when our ideas get exported to other cultures.

antho update

As posted by squirrel_monkey, our esteemed editor Ekaterina Sedia:

INTRODUCTION
WILD RIDE, Carrie Vaughn
SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE, Steve Duffy
COMPARISON OF EFFICACY RATES FOR SEVEN ANTIPATHETICS AS EMPLOYED AGAINST LYCANTHROPES, Marie Brennan
BEAUTIFUL GELREESH, Jeffrey Ford
SKIN IN THE GAME, Samantha Henderson
BLENDED, C.E. Murphy
LOCKED DOORS, Stephanie Burgis
WERELOVE, Laura Anne Gilman
IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING, Molly Tanzer
ROYAL BLOODLINES, Mike Resnick
DIRE WOLF, Genevieve Valentine
TAKE BACK THE NIGHT, Lawrence Schimmel
MONGREL, Maria Snyder
DEADFALL, Karen Everson
RED RIDING HOOD’S CHILD, N.K. Jemisin
ARE YOU A VAMPIRE OR A GOBLIN? Geoffrey Goodwin
THE PACK AND THE PICKUP ARTIST, Mike Brotherton
THE GARDEN, THE MOON, THE WALL, Amanda Downum
BLAMED FOR TRYING TO LIVE, Jesse Bullington
THE BARONY AT RODAL, Peter Bell
INSIDE OUT, Erzbet Yellowboy
GESTELLA, Susan Palwick

Running with the Pack is available for pre-order now; looks like it will be released in late May.

a decision at last

ceosanna, you won the icon sweepstakes. Many thanks to everyone who provided me with icons, especially all the ones that fit my description of what I thought I wanted; it’s just that my brain went sideways and decided this one had the most suitable vibe. Foggy and dark and a little bit mysterious. So what if bridges aren’t really a major plot point in the book; it works.

Expect to see a lot more of this image in the upcoming months.