Oh! Yeah!

This news came in while I was out of the house a few days ago, and by the time I came home hours later, it had slipped my mind.

Francophones among you may be interested to know that Bibliothèque Interdite has made an offer for a French translation of Warrior and Witch. That’s my second foreign sale (the first being German), and a step closer to something I could actually read. (i.e. Spanish. Or better yet, Japanese — not that I could read it at anything better than a snail’s pace, but it would make for interesting practice.)

So now I get to have more adventures with international tax law. Isn’t being a writer just nonstop fun?

It’s just like the Meyerson concert and the dance recital my senior year of high school.

I have to make a decision.

Which I really don’t want to make.

There are two conventions I’ve never missed since I began attending them: VeriCon and ICFA. My involvement with the former began with the two years I was its guest coordinator (which also happened to be the first two years of its existence), and the latter when I won the Asimov (now Dell Magazines) Award. That makes for nine years of VeriCon and six of ICFA, respectively. And I very much enjoy both.

I can’t do that anymore. Because Harvard has changed its academic schedule, eliminating intersession, and causing VeriCon to migrate.

To ICFA’s weekend.

So now I have to choose. Which con do I go to? Yes, the thought of somehow trying to do both in the same weekend has crossed my mind, but no, it won’t work. I’d just end up not properly enjoying either one. The problem is, there are arguments for and against each one.

1) VeriCon puts me in front of a larger audience of readers, because I generally do at least two or three panels there, and all the panels generally have at least a couple dozen people in attendance. On the other hand, lots of those people are regular attendees of VeriCon, and I’ve been on the program for the last five years, meaning they’ve seen me plenty of times before. (My intent had actually been to keep it up until VeriCon X, and then to reconsider my schedule. Harvard’s forcing me to do so a year early.) I see lots of college friends there, since it’s a mini-HRSFA reunion, but I also have to put up with Boston weather — though that may have improved with the late January to mid-March shift.

2) ICFA puts me in front of a smaller audience, since I can only do a single reading, and those don’t usually draw more than a dozen people unless there’s a really big name on the three-person docket. On the other hand, it’s vastly superior for networking, as there are oodles of professionals in attendance — many of whom also count as friends, after six years of attendance. It’s more expensive than VeriCon, since I have to pay for a hotel room instead of crashing with a friend, and the luncheons and banquet cost money; but hey, the meals are good, and I get free books with them, plus a chance to dress up in some of the nice clothing I own and never wear. Since moving to California, I no longer have the screaming need for a dose of sunshine and warm weather in mid-March that I did while living in Indiana, but it still doesn’t go amiss. (Especially the chance to go swimming.)

I don’t know which one to choose.

And that isn’t really a decision anyone can make for me. But I’m open to arguments, if you have something that might help tip me off this fence. (Boston-area people should take note that I will be in town for Christmas, so I’m more than happy to arrange social time then.)

Revisions, Day 3

I can tell I was grappling hard with issues of plot and characterization and so on while writing this book because man, I have some awkward prose in here.

Mind you, my not-paying-attention prose of today is still generally better than my paying-attention prose of, say, five years ago, but that’s cold comfort. My miniscript has “awk” scribbled all over the margins. Relatively easy to fix; also boring as hell. It’s much easier to motivate myself to change the setting of a scene or re-order a set of conversational plot points than it is to vacuum the suck out of a paragraph.

And yeah, this is me procrastinating. My set goal is seven miniscript pages knocked off each day; I’ve done three so far. Don’ wanna go back to work. Wanna play with a new story. <whine>

Sometimes I really wish my job was something that would allow me to watch TV while I work.

gathering fodder

My recent SF Novelists posts, and a related series of posts by Kate Elliott and Ken Scholes over on Babel Clash, have turned up several male writers saying they’re nervous about writing female characters because they’re worried they’ll get it wrong. And I point at the second my posts I just linked as proof that I don’t think it’s so hard — but I’ve realized that’s a bit disingenuous. There are ways writers (male and female alike) screw it up. They just aren’t the ones people seem to be worrying about when they say “but I don’t know how to write women!”

So I’d like some help gathering fodder for more posts on the topic, this time looking at the common pitfalls. (And how to avoid them, but really, 90% of that is noticing the pit before you fall into it.) I’m thinking of things like Women in Refrigerators and the Madonna-Whore complex. What other things can you add to the list?

short story meme

You know what? I think my short-story-producing brain needs a kick in the rump. So I’m going to meme for the first time in a while, with something I picked up by way of yhlee and mrissa.

Give me the title of a story I’ve never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got submitted to magazines, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I’d been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.

(Incorporated Mris’ edit — the original phrasing had to do with “posting” stories, because it seems to have started among fanficcers. Also, as per Mris, I make no promises that these won’t turn into real stories. In fact, I’m kind of hoping they will.)

The LiveJournal Guide to Southern India

So, I don’t think I’ve gotten around to mentioning that next month, kniedzw and I are skipping off to India — specifically, Bangalore. His company is sending him there for two weeks of work, so we’ve bought me a ticket and extended his trip an extra week and a half, and will be running around sightseeing for a while.

Our timing coincides very fortuitously with Diwali, so we’ll be hanging around Bangalore for the festival. After that and a bit of local sightseeing, though, we’re interested in spending roughly five days Somewhere Else. Ergo I throw this open to you, O Internets: if you know southern India at all, where do you recommend we go? Mumbai? Goa? We like places of historical interest, temples, that kind of thing, but we’re skipping the big-name things in the north like the Taj Mahal because we’d rather see a tiny fraction of one region than an even tinier fraction of the whole country.

This is the first trip to India for both of us, so any and all advice is appreciated.

something for everyone

I have to boggle alongside kniedzw (who found this thread) that he found it on Fark, of all places. I haven’t tried to watch the video that originally started the thread — it may be gone by now — but that’s okay; the real point is the posts by user COMALite J.

Some of you may recall me posting about the Vocal Majority last Christmas. As I said then, I mostly just like their holiday music; their standard work, which is more straight-up barbershop, isn’t as much to my taste. You can’t deny, though, that they are very very good at it — as outlined in COMALite J’s first epic comment, which goes into the scoring and history of the Barbershop Harmony Society’s competitions.

(Side note: dammit! Looks like the Ambassadors of Harmony, who have been on a different gear of the three-year cycle, got beaten by the Westminster Chorus in ’07. Which meant the AoH were able to return for the competition this year — you can’t come back for two years after winning — which meant they faced off against the Vocal Majority for the first time, and the VM took silver for the first time in thirty years. Mope. I wanted them to win. Though at least it was the most epic battle for gold the BHS has ever seen.)

Anyway. If you want to know who to listen to in the field of barbershop quartets and choruses, that’s the comment to check out. If, on the other hand, you’re a music geek on a more technical level, he also posted about the harmonics of barbershop, talking about how Pythagoras led Western music down a path that missed all kinds of other harmonic opportunities, with an added bonus explanation of why proper barbershop has to be performed a capella.

And then, if your interest is more historical, he comes back for a third round, this time about the history of barbershop as a musical form, and how it got co-opted by whites in the thirties, very much to the exclusion of the black performers who started it.

But stop there. Those are pretty much the only comments of any substance whatsoever, and most of the remaining thread is your usual fark-fest of “omg that’s so gay.” What this was doing on Fark in the first place, I don’t know, but it makes for very interesting reading.

134,229.

Finit.

Man, it took me a long time to write that epilogue.

A Star Shall Fall both is and isn’t my longest novel to date. In Ashes Lie clocked in at about 143K in its final draft, but only 129,682 in the first round. I have no idea whether this, too, will be the Amazing Ever-Growing Book when it comes time to revise. That, my friends, is a concern for later.

This is my eleventh novel. I’m pretty pleased with it.

things I have a profound disagreement with

But before I get to the disagreeing: I’ve been so brain-deep in finishing A Star Shall Fall, I overlooked the fact that Podcastle’s audio of “A Heretic by Degrees” has gone live. So go, listen, enjoy.

***

Right, so, the disagreeing.

I find it interesting that Dean Wesley Smith begins this post with the assertion that “No writer is the same” — and then proceeds to make his point (on the topic of rewriting) with such vehemence and absolutism that it could easily be mistaken for divine, universal law. Which is a pity, because I think he has a good point to make; but the force behind it drives the point way deeper than I think it deserves to go, and as a result, people who find themselves disagreeing with the full version may miss the value of the reduced version.

I think he’s right that rewriting can hurt a story. It can polish the fire out, like focus-testing a product until it’s bland pablum that doesn’t offend anybody, but doesn’t interest them, either. Sometimes you get it right the first time.

But. He seems to be arguing (with the force of an evangelical preacher) that your critical brain will never be useful to you as a writer. This works because a particular rhetorical trick:

(more…)

avalanching

5008 words for Labor Day.

It isn’t labor if you love what you’re doing.

Almost done. Almost. It was five thousand because this was the climax; yesterday I wrote the first of the two scenes I’ve been wanting to write since I put together this proposal more than a year ago, and today I wrote the second. Ding, dong, the plot is dead, but the denoument lives on. There’s a bit of work to be done yet — at least one day’s worth, possibly two. We’ll see.

So very nearly done.

Word count: 130,090
LBR census: Blood and love, and some horrible, horrible rhetoric.
Authorial sadism: Memento people know I was never sure which Merriman I was crueler to, Francis or Philip. There’s no Philip Merriman in this story, but Galen’s taken his place. ‘Nuff said.

Entertaining links for a vacation day

Adorable beyond words. Especially the second picture down. (Though the adorability is undercut by the fact that she’s the only female manager in the company.)

In Which Genreville’s Writers are Twelve Years Old. Turning your beloved genre into a series of “your mom” jokes since 2009! (And some “your dad” jokes, too.) The comments get even better.

20 Neil Gaiman Facts. In which Jim Hines wins the Internet. (Again. How does he manage it?)

from last night’s party

Things to add to the list of white privilege:

You can drive across the Mexican border with your dead grandmother stuffed in the trunk of the car, and no one will catch you.

120K, and into Part Seven.

This was a 1670-word night.

Then I went downstairs to empty the dishwasher before I went to bed, and pretty much figured out the Rest of the Book.

I already know the end sequence, more or less; what I didn’t know was everything that’s going to happen between now and then. But I got all those scenes lined up in my head, and then I came back upstairs and wrote another scene, and now am retiring from the field with 2,434 words for the night.

You know you’re nearing the end when this happens. Quotas go out the window, because you’re rolling downhill and won’t really stop until you reach the finish line. I could send Galen to talk to Henry Cavendish tonight, but it’s two a.m. and I’ve got my 120K milestone, which looks nice, and there’s no sense killing myself with marathon sessions — not yet, anyway.

Not until we get to the boom.

Word count: 120,151
LBR census: Blood and love have begun their headlong charge toward one another.
Authorial sadism: It’s a martyr-off! Like a bake-off, but with more people trying to get themselves killed.

entertainment *and* a good cause

I’ve been keeping an interested eye on various crowdfunded projects, because it’s a neat (and sometimes successful) approach to publishing on the internet.

Well, this one’s a little different: Save the Dragons is not just a serialized comic fantasy novel, but fundraising for the author, who is moving from South Africa to Australia. Specifically, it’s fundraising to help him pay the quarantine costs for his family’s pets, so they won’t have to be left behind. That’s right: when you donate, you’re helping save KITTY-CATS AND DOGGIES.

I can vouch for Dave Freer, the author, being above-board. This cause is what he claims. His family is taking a gamble that they can improve their lives in Australia, and they don’t believe in abandoning the four-footed members, even if bringing them adds to the hardship. So it’s a good cause, alongside an entertaining novel. Look at my icon: Puss in Boots wants you to donate. ^_^ Check out the site, see what you think, kick a bit of help his way if you can.

Birthday egotism, 2009 edition.

There’s a tradition in my life I failed to uphold last year, because the moving truck had just shown up in California with our belongings, but I think the decision to skip it was a mistake.

See, there are some things I’m very good at — like being self-critical. Veryvery good at that one. Possibly too good. I’m not so very good at enjoying my own accomplishments without constantly dwelling on “but it didn’t turn out quite as well as I hoped” or “okay, I’ve done A, but not B, C, and D.”

Some years ago I found myself having kind of a crummy birthday, the sort where you dwell morosely on another year gone by without much to show for it. To counteract that gloom, I wrote up an LJ post listing every skill and accomplishment I possessed — and I forbade myself to qualify or belittle or play down any of them. Only good stuff, with nary a negative word. I made myself shove my ego into the spotlight, because sometimes, that’s really what your psyche needs.

I’ve done that every birthday since, except last year. So here’s what I’ve done in the last two years, that I can be proud of.

I’m twenty-nine years old today, and what do I have to show for it?

This.