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.

racing the deadline

<misses the Zokutou word meter>

1280 words on “And Blow Them at the Moon” today, plus a hundred or two fleshing out the first scene I’d written, for a current total of 2064. I really want to finish this by the end of the month, which is doable if a) I figure out how to get Magrat to learn some but not all of what’s going on and b) the story doesn’t balloon out of control. The idea is to keep it below 10K at all costs, and preferably shorter than that, since the markets for such a length are limited.

Also, I need to figure out what to do with the eclipses. There were two of them, one lunar and one solar, in the weeks leading up to the Gunpowder Plot going kablooey; surely I can come up with something interesting to make out of that.

Will ponder that as I go to sleep. Maybe I’ll wake up with an idea.

like riding a bike

It hurt my soul a little bit to play a changeling in a Vampire game — but man, it was fun getting to LARP again last night.

The problem is that all the nearby games I know about — where “nearby” is generously described as “within a half-hour drive” — are One World By Night Vampire games, and it really isn’t my genre. Their politics make me want to spork my eyes out, and the alternative to politics is generally Superheroes With Fangs, as they send out boot parties to take down whatever ridiculously overpowered beastie is causing trouble now. Despite that, I’d still probably play in the San Francisco game, except they play outside and it being San Francisco, I froze my toes off the one time I went.

I froze last night, too, but apparently I’ll do that for Changeling, when I won’t do it for Vampire. (The truth of the matter is that I was told the game had a partially-indoor location; what nobody told me was that it would turn out to be 43 degrees that night and the heat had, as near as I can tell, been turned off.) kniedzw having recently become the Changeling Coord for OWbN, he agreed to go up to Santa Rosa to help them finish off a faerie plot that’s been going on there. And when he asked me if I’d be interested in joining him . . . hell yeah! I miss LARPing. amysun and zunger‘s murder mysteries have been my only other fix since I moved out here, aside from my one attempt at the SF OWbN game; that’s three games in nearly a year and a half. I like tabletop gaming, too, but LARPs have a theatrical element that I really enjoy: costumes and body language and physical interaction, the spatial arrangement of a scene.

So I got to cameo as a Liam baroness, negotiating with a group of vampires whose previous leader was stupid enough to let himself be manipulated by a Balor Shadow Court operative into trying to assassinate me. It’s a pretty well-constructed plot, if by “well-constructed” I mean certain characters will be screwed if they make the wrong choice, and others will be screwed no matter what happens. <g> (Those in the latter category brought it upon themselves; the stupidity of the previous leader goes well beyond the nutshell description given above. People: DON’T SWEAR OATHS WITH FAERIES.) Negotiations did not go well, but they aren’t over yet; they have a chance to redeem themselves, and I may have a chance to play the baroness again.

Need moar LARPing. I have a closetful of costumes going to waste. <sigh>

The funny thing about motivation is how it sneaks up on you, without any warning or fanfare at all.

Weeks of a messy office and piles of e-mail I couldn’t bring myself to keep up with — and then in the last couple of days my office has been restored to something more like a livable state, and both e-mail inboxes are starting to come under control.

I can’t promise the motivation will last, but I’m trying to make use of it while it’s visiting.

funny line, followed by an update

At dinner tonight, following on a discussion of writers whose work is so densely packed with quotation and allusion that you sometimes feel hopelessly out of the loop:

“Dorothy Dunnett is the Quentin Tarantino of the sixteenth century.”

(And also possibly the fifteenth, but I still haven’t read the Niccolo books.)

Anyway, arkessian and skirmish_of_wit asked recently about the Lymond book-blogging. The answer is that I do intend to return to it, but at the moment that’s pending me setting up a separate WordPress blog for the project. See, the problem with an LJ filter is that you have to be on LJ to read the posts, but I also don’t want to intersperse the Lymond material with everything else I post here; I really feel it needs to be separate, so those who haven’t read the series are less tempted to horribly spoil it for themselves. And I want to experiment with WordPress anyway, so this seems like a good guinea-pig project. But that’s waiting on my webhost migrating to new hardware, ergo it will be a little while yet. Hang in there, though, and I’ll be sure to announce it when I start the project up again.

In the meantime, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, go read this post. And if you’ve both read the whole series and have an LJ account you’d like added to the filter so you can see the posts for The Game of Kings (the only book I’ve really blogged so far), please let me know.

should have posted this before

If you make money from your writing, take a look at the petition that Ursula Le Guin will be sending to Judge Chin re: the Google Book Settlement. I’m not positive if there will be a revision of the section where it complains about the “opt in to object” thing — which is a feature of class-action law, not really alterable in this case — but anyway, this is at least one channel by which to say “the Authors Guild representatives do not speak for me.”

necessary sacrifices

I’ve started over on “And Blow Them at the Moon.” As much as I like the opening scene I’d written, it just doesn’t fit the story; it introduces an additional pov (a bad decision, if I want to keep this thing short) and the tone is too light-hearted. This is not, I fear, going to be a light-hearted story. Not given what happened to Father Garnet, and to the conspirators, in the end.

(Man, reading about the Gunpowder Plot is depressing. Especially Sir Everard Digby. Talk about a waste.)

So that’s 614 words of a new start, and already I think it’s better. Father Garnet praying in Thames Street, and Magrat confronting the fact that she is displaying conduct unbecoming to a church grim. I need to find a way to say more about him, but maybe that will fit into a later scene.

Why I Want to Hit Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by Marie Brennan, Age 29

Because the man keeps having bits of poetry that are allllllllllllmost what I want for the Victorian book, but not quite — either because they don’t contain any phrase I could use for a title, or because they go astray in some fashion that doesn’t make them work. Take these two lines:

To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm
Of sound and smoke

It’s got grit! And a city! And a Queen! Surely this will work, right?

Except that here’s the full passage:

Take, read! and be the faults your Poet makes
Or many or few,
He rests content, if his young music wakes
A wish in you
To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm
Of sound and smoke,
For his clear heaven, and these few lanes of elm
And whispering oak.

In other words, yay nature. Which, no. There’s what this book is about, and there’s that passage, and the two are pretty much at opposite poles to one another.

The problem, I’ve decided, is that the Victorians are insufficiently angry. My impression is that they wrote about nature’s beauty as a means of hiding from industrialization; what I want is poetry that is mad as hell about industrialization and not going to take it anymore. The few things I’ve found that come close to fitting that bill have failed to provide me with a good title quote.

So I keep searching. And I glare at Tennyson, because I just speed-read HIS COMPLETE POETIC WORKS and still don’t have a title. <fume>

next query up to bat: Hindu sources

Continuing my Victorian research trawl, the next thing on the agenda is Hindu folklore and mythology1.

I’m looking for information on the closest analogues to European faeries: rakshasas, apsaras, yakshas, gandharvas, other things in that vein. (Not positive yet which of these is most appropriate to focus on, and there might well be other possibilities I’m not aware of.) I have a certain amount of familiarity with major primary texts like the Ramayana and Mahabharata; at this point what I’d really like to read is a good secondary source that discusses these things directly. Are there books out there which will talk about their origins, nature, appearance, habits, narrative or theological role, etc? Someone who’s done for Hindu material what Katharine Briggs did for British. Bonus points if your recommended source talks about the role of these ideas in daily life, outside the context of the epics.

Unfortunately, I’ll only be able to read sources in English, which I know will limit my field sharply. (Especially since English sources, especially of the older variety, are likely to be heavily tinged by the colonial lens.) But any pointers in a useful direction would be appreciated.

Edited to add: Heh. Sometimes, i r not so brite. I posted this, then got up to fetch from the shelf what books I already have on Hinduism . . . then remembered why I have them. Because I took a course on Hinduism from Diana Eck while I was at Harvard. She was even one of my House Masters! So I’ve e-mailed her, too, to see if she can help a former Lowellian out.

1 – For the record, while some people have gotten into the habit of using these words as a form of dismissal, that is never what I mean. I’m interested in the cultural material (lore) of a particular group of people (folk), and a “myth” is not a lie, but rather a specific kind of sacred narrative. (Yes, I do in fact use the phrase “Christian mythology.”) I bring this up because I spent a minute or so trying to find other words to use that would say what I mean without the baggage, before deciding I’m damned if I’ll surrender the technical terminology of my field without a fight.

In related news, “gender” is not just a polite term for “sex” and AUUUUUUUGGGGGH I hate it when useful specificity gets obliterated by careless daily speech. But we’ve already spent too long on this tangent, so back to the query we go.