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 . . . .

also on the short story front

I mentioned before that Mike Allen bought “The Gospel of Nachash;” well, now you can see the rest of the table of contents.

And that is, in fact, the TOC — that’s the order the stories will be in. Yeah, I’m at the front. No, I don’t know what Mike has been smoking. One member of my crit group could barely get through the story because of the KJV style; I’m already anticipating that at least one review will hate it on the same grounds. And yet Mike wants to start off with me. I guess he’s done well with this editing thing so far, so I’ll trust him, but yeesh . . . talk about pressure!

Also at that link, you’ll find him talking about Norilana Books, the publishers of the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies. He says some important things about them, better than I can, but for my part I’ll just encourage you all to go look through their inventory and see if there’s anything up your alley. If not one of the CP volumes, how about another anthology? They’ve revived the Sword and Sorceress series, and started one called Lace and Blade that’s full of romantic highwayman-style goodness. Or there are novels, both originals and reprints of classics. They’ve got quite a list, so check them out, and maybe pick up a book or two.

One down, one to go.

No progress on “And Blow Them at the Moon,” but I’ve finished off “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes,” which is competing with “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” for the achievement of being my most ridiculous title yet.

Yeah, I just wrote a fake academic paper. As a short story.

I blame Patricia Briggs’ husband.

the impossible favor

Back when I decided to spend 2008 writing In Ashes Lie rather than the Victorian Onyx Court book, the rightness of that decision was encapsulated by two things: I had both a title and an LJ icon for Ashes, and I had neither for the Victorian book.

Now it’s almost 2010, and I realio trulio am writing the Victorian book, and I still need those two things. I’m working on the title issue at the moment; I have possibilities, though all of the ones assembled so far have flaws.

But I don’t have an icon. And the problem there is, I’m not sure what I want for an icon. Midnight had Elizabeth, Ashes had the Fire, Star had the comet, but I don’t quite feel like there’s the same kind of central object in this book — except London itself, really, and it’s hard to pack the “monster city” with all its smog and townhouses and gentlemen and beggars into 100×100 pixels. The best I can think of is some pic of a Victorian-era train, especially an Underground train, but my attempts to find such on the Internet have not turned up anything that leaps out at me. This is the closest I’ve come, but it doesn’t crop to icon size very well.

So here’s the favor I’m asking. Make me some icons — no text needed, just an image that evokes gritty nineteenth-century industrial London. If I use your icon, you’ll get a prize. Most likely prospect for said prize, if you’re willing to wait, is an advance copy of A Star Shall Fall; if you’re more impatient, I’ll come up with something else. A magazine with a story of mine in, maybe. But some kind of prize for saving me from having no icon with which to post about this book.

It’s hard to ask for something like that when I’m not even sure what I want. But I figured I’d toss the net out there, and see what it pulls in.

signals that deserve boosting

Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border.

Watts’ own account of the incident.

Here’s the thing. In the various comment threads on the many posts advertising this incident, you will find people popping up to make the inevitable argument that Watts probably brought this on himself, not by actually assaulting anyone (the charge), but by not being sufficiently respectful to the border guards.

And that attitude is, quite simply, part of the problem. Because it says we have to knuckle under, not ask why we’re being detained, not question authority, not demand the basic right of knowing what’s happening to us. Last time I checked, though, that is not actually how our laws work. Even if Watts was disrespectful, that isn’t a crime. Cops even get training in how to cope with people getting up in their faces, without resorting to violence, because punching and kicking and pepper-spraying someone is not an acceptable response to being shouted at, or called an asshole. But rent-a-cops don’t always, and given the growing tendency to outsource these jobs in America, I won’t be surprised at all if these guards turn out to be contractors — who seem to be statistically more likely to get drunk on their own authority.

Authority which goes only a certain distance, and no further. So telling us we should bow down when it pushes pasts its bounds, and it’s our own fault if we get punished for being mouthy, only reinforces their bad behavior.

Even if you can’t agree with that, then agree with this: that turning a guy out, at night, into a winter storm, without even his coat, isn’t an acceptable response to anything.

If you’d like to donate to his legal defense, details are at the first link. Either way, the more noise gets made about this, the more likely it will be picked up by news outlets, which means we’re more likely to get proper investigation into the matter and maybe steps taken to make things right. We can hope, anyway.

hee

Every so often a meme comes along that just amuses the hell out of you. So:

If I came with a warning label, what would it say?

Me or my writing, I suppose — whichever springs to mind first.

crawling out of the sickbed

I came down with a cold right after Thanksgiving that seems to have segued with hardly a pause into a second cold, which means I’ve been sick for all of December so far. Bear with me as I try to get some actual business done here.

First of all, and I should have posted this sooner: Epic fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss is putting his fame to good use by raising money for Heifer International. More details at that link, and all of the related posts can be found under this tag, but the short form is that he’s selling off lottery tickets for a giant mountain of prizes, including signed books from many fabulous authors (and also me). Go forth and win swag in the name of a good cause.

Second: this seems an ideal time to remind people of the existence of Anthology Builder, a service that lets you buy short stories and have them bound into a print-on-demand anthology of your own design. My own stories are here, and there’s enough of them now to make a decent-sized antho (especially since you can print Deeds of Men); or you can mix and match with other authors. AB has built up quite a nice selection now, and this is a great way to try out the short fiction of various writers you’ve heard good things about.

Third: I am 599 words into “And Blow Them at the Moon,” aka the Onyx Court Gunpowder Plot story. I’m still not sure how exactly this thing is going to end, but it’s begun with Cornwall’s two most incompetent knockers trying to dig a hole for their own faerie palace in Westminster, which is amusing me. And being amused seems like a good way to start.

The goal is to finish that story and another one that needs a proper title before the end of the month. Whether or not I will manage both depends in large part on whether I can manage to find my way out of these stupid colds.

I am now free to say . . .

. . . that Mike Allen has picked up “The Gospel of Nachash” for Clockwork Phoenix 3.

In the beginning God made the world, and on the sixth day he made creatures in his image. Male and female he created them, and they were the bekhorim, to whom God gave dominion over every herb bearing seed, and every tree bearing fruit, to be in their care. Mankind he formed from dust, but the bekhorim were made from air, and their spirits were more subtle than that of man.

Old Testament + New Testament + Jewish midrashim + Secret Ingredient = this story. All done in the style of the King James Bible, no less. I don’t know if it’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s up there, and I’m very glad Mike bought it; the minute I finished the draft, the Clockwork Phoenix series was the home I envisioned for it.

By the way, all the CP2 stories are available now in the SFWA forum; if you’re a member, you can read them there for Nebula consideration.