things the human body can do

For matociquala and anybody else with a rock-climbing hobby: I think somebody flipped the gravity for a moment.

For any gamers wondering what “Quick Draw” looks like in reality: Even in slow motion, you can hardly see him fire. (Skip the first minute or so; it’s just them talking, and the guy’s kind of full of himself.)

For anybody who thinks old people can’t run races: The Legend of Cliff Young. (Reminds me of the article I read about the Tarahumara in northern Mexico — specifically the line about how they regularly run ultramarathoners into the ground, and do it in rope sandals while stopping for smoke breaks.)

And then one that has nothing to do with athletic feats, for anybody who’s a fan of Monty Python, Star Trek, or both: CamelotTrek.

there’s always more you don’t know

These two threads on Making Light?

Are why I have my “help me o internets” posts.

Because some of the bad books can be spotted a mile off — but not all. Some of them you’ve got to look at to identify. Some of them have to be read through. And some of them you can read through and still not know they’re untrustworthy resources, because you don’t know that field well enough to spot where the facts are wrong or there’s evidence being overlooked or whatever.

And at that point, you have two choices. You can either read a lot about the topic, so you become well-informed enough to spot the bad stuff on your own; or you can ask around and get the benefit of other people’s wisdom.

Since I have this terrible habit of being interested in lots of different things, rather than sticking with one and making it my stomping ground, I’m dependent on the assistance of others. So thank you all for your suggestions, and stay tuned for more cries for help. For this next book, I’m going to need to research topics ranging from the history of the London Underground to Chinese folklore, and many other things besides.

I really am deranged.

I’ve composed many an odd research query for the Onyx Court books, but the one I just sent off takes the cake.

No, you don’t get to know what it is. Not yet. (Aside from the fact that has to do with the Victorian period — duh.) I’ll let you know once it succeeds or fails, either way.

Chat time

Apropos of the Sirens Conference I’ll be at this fall — they’re having an online chat this Saturday at 2 p.m. Eastern. Details here. The book for discussion, inasmuch as there’s a topic for the chat, is Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, but it should also be a good time to talk about the conference (especially ideas for programming).

The Inscrutable Box

I have a Thing on my desk.

I’m a little afraid of it.

Courtesy of my brother, I have finally joined the twenty-first century, replacing my printer (pair of printers, actually) with an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax machine. With document feeder, even. It has doors in odd places and buttons all over, and I’ve dealt with printers for many years now but I’m not entirely sure where to stick the paper in this Thing, let alone do anything else.

(Yes, I’m exaggerating a little bit. But I keep looking at this Thing, and my brain keeps refusing to recognize it as a printer, because it doesn’t look like Printers Should Look. It’s going to take a while to adjust.)

Off to read the manual, I guess . . . .

Done.

Copy-edited manuscript is on its way back to Tor.

Ima go fall over now. (Where by “fall over” I mean “play Dragon Age.”)

Indian epic question

Which translation of the Mahabharata should I read?

(Not Buck’s abridgement/retelling. Read that already, and appreciated it as a Cliff Notes introduction to what I understand is a very complicated story, but now I need to look at the actual text.)

Three things

1) I’ve made two additions to the previous post, for interested parties to read.

2) Congratulations to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which has been vetted as a SFWA pro market! (This means they have been publishing long enough, and regularly enough, and pay their authors enough money, for SFWA to accept sales to them as qualifications for SFWA pro status. Doesn’t matter much to readers, but it’s a nice touch of certification for the magazine.)

3) Since I know I have some aspiring writers in my readership: Nalo Hopkinson is offering mentorships this spring. She is a lovely woman and an excellent writer; I’ve never worked with her in a professional capacity, nor gotten any critiques from her, but what I know is enough to make me recommend this wholeheartedly to folks looking for some guidance and feedback. I’m sure she’ll put you through boot camp, but you’ll come out the other side much better for it. (And unlike Clarion et al, this is novel-focused, and you don’t have to leave home for six weeks.)

Poll time!

I am debating a small point of spelling in my copy-edits, brought about by the change in English spelling standards over the centuries*. In this particular case, it is the variation between faerie and fairy (and also faery and fairie, but those are less common and I haven’t messed with them). The possibility on the table is that, as belief in the aforementioned creatures declines, I’ll use the “fairy” spelling when the speaker is talking about them as superstition, and “faerie” when talking about the real thing. But I can’t make up my mind whether I want to do that or not, and so you get a poll.

This will also have relevance for the Victorian book, by which point “fairy” had far surpassed “faerie” as the most commonly-used spelling for the word (and belief had also sharply declined, at least in urban areas).

*This has been an unexpected problem for me, in the Onyx Court books. For example, the general pattern is to spell the surname of the Queen of Scots as Stewart, but the surname of her grandson Charles as Stuart. Etc. And nobody, so far as I’m aware, formally changed the name of Candlewick Street to Cannon Street; it just kind of cruised along being one but occasionally the other until eventually it was the other all the time. Which are issues I didn’t consider when I wrote what I thought was going to be a standalone Elizabethan book.

Edit: So I’m leaning toward deferring the problem. The poll results so far have “pleased” winning by a noticeable margin, but a lot of “confused” votes as well, with a good discussion down in the comments of how this could be resolved by drawing attention to the difference up front. Unfortunately, there’s no graceful way to do that in my narrative as it stands — I’d have to a) horribly interrupt the first relevant scene or b) stick an out-of-narrative note at the front of the book. Neither of which sits well with me. But it doesn’t become a real issue until the Victorian period, when their rampant fairy obsession makes the use of a decidedly non-Victorian form distracting, and so I think for now I’ll stick with my usual spelling. Then, once I start drafting the next book, I’ll see if I can’t build in something that addresses the difference properly.

Edit 2: To give you an idea of why this issue sticks in my brain like a burr — the Onyx Court books are edited to American spelling, except in cases where I’m referencing something British. So ships are in the harbor but Henry Ware got murdered in Coldharbour, and the characters are looking at colors when talking about Newton’s essay “Of Colours.” Despite the fact that the entire thing is in Britain, with British characters. This annoys the snot out of me, but short of strong-arming my publisher into giving me a UK copy-edit (my preference), I can’t do much about it.

step by step, we’ll get there

While I was in Boston, I finally figured out what “And Blow Them at the Moon” wants to be about. The Gunpowder Plot, obviously; but that’s a long and complicated tale to fit into a short story, and could easily turn into a tedious history lesson instead of an interesting piece of fiction. Ideally, this will not be like Deeds of Men — i.e. not pitched primarily at people who have already read one or both novels, and please God not twenty-one thousand words long again — what I want is a short story I can try and sell to a proper market. Which means I need some frame I can put on the Gunpowder Plot, a frame that consists of a character and an engaging emotional arc for same.

While being an Onyx Court story. And it needs to explain some of the weirdnesses in the history, most notably the Monteagle Letter. That’s not too much to ask for, right?

So I think I found it, and my 599 words I had in December are now 1,105. Not a huge amount of progress, but I think I’m going to have to do a lot of wrangling to make this thing happen; I suspect there will be a great deal of infodumping that later gets scrubbed out, as I sort through what actually matters to a) my protagonist and b) my reader. Which means my progress will likely remain slow. But I’m going to try to get this done soon; today I ordered a metric ton of research material for the next book, and I need to get my head out of the seventeenth century and into the nineteenth asap.

And, y’know, it would be nice to get a story done in the first week or two of the year. Good omens and all.

begin as you mean to go on

So far today, I have eaten cinnamon rolls, done some leisurely prep for the game I’m going to run this year, visited with my brother and sister-in-law, watched TV with my husband, read (part of) a book, and taken a blissfully hot shower. In a few moments I’ll take some experimental pokes at “And Blow Them at the Moon,” which I was going to try to finish by the end of the year, until I noticed that having such a goal was really just a piece of self-imposed and unnecessary stress. So instead it will be the thing I start my year with — aside from the tail end of my copy-edits, which I’ll polish off this weekend.

As someone who firmly believes in the power of symbolic acts, I approve of the way my year has begun.

edit: AND I FOUND MY WATCH! Which has been missing since before Christmas. I’d stuffed it in the pocket of my bathrobe, which I haven’t worn in a while. Hallelujah!

resolving the argument

Ah, the perennial — or whatever word indicates "every decade" — debate about when the decade ends. Do you count 1-10, or 0-9?

Why not do both?

In Mesoamerican calendrical systems, there’s an interesting tendency to lap the edges of things. The last day of a month is also the "seating" of the next; the five leftover days in the solar calendar are the seating of the following year. So it seems to me that we can resolve this entire problem by agreeing that any given 0 year is the end of one decade (going by the math) and the seating of the next (going by the social construct).

Happy 2010, people, the end of the aughts and the seating of the upcoming teens. May it be better than what came before.

Yes, I’m copy-editing on Christmas Eve. (Don’t have much choice.) But at least I’m getting some entertainment out of it: discovering, for example, that I described someone’s manner as “both sheepless and helpless.”

Sheepish. Not sheepless. Though it’s true he has no sheep, it’s not really relevant to this scene.

FYI

I’m still pondering the icon issue, so feel free to go on adding suggestions to that post. (The problem is not with the pictures I’ve been given already, but rather with my subconscious, which just doesn’t want to play ball. I don’t know what it’s looking for — that it hasn’t been given already — or whether it’s just being cranky. Quite possibly the latter.)

Three places to find me today

1) I mentioned Patrick Rothfuss’ “Worldbuilders” charity event for Heifer International before; my own donations went up today, along with a lot of books from some awesome people. For every $10 you donate to the charity, Pat will match $5 and put your name into the drawing at the end. Donate $50, get your name in five times, plus $25 of a matching donation. See other posts on his blog for other great prizes.

2) “The Twa Corbies” is live on Podcastle. I quite enjoyed this reading; Elie Hirschman, who did the voicework for it, is a lot better at the ravens than I am. 🙂

3) SF Novelists day again; this time, continuing my discussion of ways authors do female characters wrong, we talk about virgins and whores. Comments for this should be left on the SF Novelists blog; no registration required.

a spoiler (of sorts)

Want to know how the Victorian book is going to end?

Here you go:

So there’s a funny story behind this. We’re in India, going from (I think) Mysore to Bangalore, and I’m staring out the window listening to music. My iPod’s on shuffle, and this song comes up. And the following mental conversation ensues.

SUBCONSCIOUS: We’re totally putting this on the soundtrack for the Victorian book.
ME: What?
SUBCONSCIOUS: For the end. Or rather, the Climactic Moment.
ME: Self, we don’t know what the Climactic Moment is going to be. Because we don’t know how the book is going to end.
SUBCONSCIOUS: It’s going to end like this, of course!
ME: It doesn’t work that way. We fit the music to the book, not the book to the music.
SUBCONSCIOUS: Uh-huh. That’s why the second half of Doppelganger maps perfectly to “Amazonia.”
ME: That’s different.
SUBCONSCIOUS: How?
ME: Listening to the song gave me plot ideas. You’re saying I have to generate plot ideas to fit the song.
SUBCONSCIOUS: Exactly. Now get to work.

The subconscious always wins these fights. I gave it some thought, and realized that of the two-three very vague ways I had thought of ending the book, one of them fit much better with the mood of the piece than the others did — specifically the last minute. (It’s instrumental, if you haven’t listened to it yet; hence not really a spoiler.) Odds are rather good that we’ll be going down that path.

Now I just have to figure out why the book will end that way . . . .