Ten years (and a day).

On October 4th, 1999, I finished my first novel.

(And I would have posted about it yesterday, but the wedding weekend left me way too zombified for anything of the sort.)

It wasn’t the first one I started — for a long time the only thing I wrote was “unfinished novels” — but it was the first one where I managed to connect my random scenes into something like a narrative thread, and then put a beginning on that thread, and then carry it through to the end. 117K or so in its stocking feet, and very nearly the first story of any kind I’d ever completed; certainly it was the longest by an order of magnitude.

In the ten years since then, I’ve written ten more novels and sold six. I’ve also gotten the knack of short stories, for a total of fifty-two written and twenty-six sold; flash, nineteen written and seventeen sold; even two novellas and one novelette. My first two novels are published in Germany, and will be published in France, and I’ve won a couple of contest awards and honorable mentions in year’s best anthologies.

Not bad for ten years. I’ll do my best to top it in the next ten. 🙂

more squishiness

My (elder and only) brother got married on Saturday, to a woman who is very literally kickass — as in, she’s one of the sensei at the dojo kniedzw and I go to.

Many congratulations to them both.

a bit late, but whatever

It turns out October 1st was Support Our Zines Day. So it’s appropriate, I guess, that (all unknowing) I posted about “The Waking of Angantyr” going live at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and also about the return of the website for Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

In fact, it’s worth pointing out that I noticed the absence and return of the BCS site because I’d fallen behind on their stories. When I found myself with a little bit of spare time to read something, BCS was where I decided to spend that time. Unfortunately, the site was down, so I kept checking back until it returned. (And making sad faces in the meantime.)

Which made me realize that BCS is, hands down, my favorite magazine these days. Slipstreamy interstitial what-have-you is all well and good, but I loves me some secondary world fantasy, especially if it features a diversity of settings. I haven’t liked everything they’ve published, but they’re squarely in the mioddle of What I Want. So consider celebrating Support Our Zines Day a day late, and donating to BCS.

HELP NEEDED: 18th century dancing

Totally the wrong kind of dance in my icon there, but it’s the best I’ve got.

Does anyone out there know, or know someone who knows, how to dance a minuet? Or any other kind of mid-eighteenth-century dance, for that matter. The Wikipedia entry on the minuet step is incomprehensible to the layperson, since it was written in 1724, and while the videos it links to show me the basic step, they don’t give me any sense of the shape of the whole dance, and how one interacts with one’s partner.

In other words, it’s time to replace my bracketed placeholder descriptions in the scene where Galen’s dancing a minuet, and I need references to go by. Movie scenes that depict it correctly would also work; unfortunately, the closest I’ve been able to get is Regency dancing, and that isn’t the same.

Hellllllllllp!

Jim says it all — or at least 90% of it

Fellow author Jim C. Hines has posted on numerous occasions before about rape — its causes and consequences, our cultural attitudes surrounding it — based on his experiences as a rape counselor. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that he would post about the Polanski situation, and utterly demolish the various defenses on Polanski’s behalf.

(He does overlook the Hitler/Manson one. To which we can quote the comment thread: Your own victimhood doesn’t give you a right to make somebody else a victim.)

I don’t have much to add to that. Only an incomplete thought on what should happen now.

What do we stand to gain by imprisoning the man, or otherwise punishing him? There are three obvious possibilities. One is vengeance: make him suffer because he made someone else suffer. (No, thirty years of gilded exile as a well-respected filmmaker does not count as suffering. Not in my book.) But our justice system is, at least in theory, not about vengeance, and the victim — the one with the most claim to this angle — has said she doesn’t want it. Another is prevention: lock Polanski up so he can’t do this again. We’re a bit late, seeing as how he’s had thirty years plus in which to do it again, but there’s perhaps a faint bit of merit left in this one. The third angle, of course, is deterrence: we lock Polanski up so some other guy (whether a prominent filmmaker or not) will think twice before he drugs and rapes a thirteen-year-old. But it seems to be sadly true that prison-as-deterrence is not nearly so effective as you’d like to think.

I see a fourth angle, though, hiding in the shadow of deterrence, very similar but not quite the same. Call it principle. This is the bit where the community of the United States, and more specifically the state of California, as manifested in its criminal justice system, stands up and says very publicly that THIS IS NOT OKAY.

It is not okay to drug and rape a thirteen-year-old girl, over her continued and consistent protests. Even if you’ve had a bad life. Even if you thought she was older. Even if her mother shoved the kid at you. Even if you’ve made some art that people really like. It is also not okay to plead guilty and then flee before your sentencing. Even if you think the judge was going to be harsh. Even if you were afraid of going to jail. And if you do these things, you will suffer consequences.

It isn’t just about scaring the criminals off. It’s about teaching all the rest of society, all the ones who aren’t criminals, that these crimes are something they can and should do something about. It’s a lesson I fear too much of society still hasn’t learned, where rape is concerned, because we still hear all the usual defenses. She shouldn’t have gone there. She shouldn’t have trusted him. She shouldn’t have been wearing that dress, that makeup, those shoes. And you know, it isn’t that big a deal anyway, let’s feel some sympathy for the poor guy who raped her, because now he’s being blamed for what he did.

When the day comes that somebody like Polanski rapes a thirteen-year-old and nobody says “He thought she was older” as if it would have been okay for him to rape an eighteen-year-old, then I’ll feel like we’re making progress. And maybe then I’ll feel it’s okay to show him leniency after thirty years of escaping justice. Maybe. But we’re still light-years away from that, apparently.

In the meantime . . . I don’t know what’s the right punishment here. I find myself wondering what the penalty is for fleeing sentencing after you’ve pled guilty. It would make a good minimum to start with.

Before the day is over . . .

. . . I need to be squish-tastic and mention that this is my second anniversary. And my husband is still as awesome as he was when I married him. (Also as awesome as he was during the eight and a half years prior to our wedding — yeah, we took a long time to get married.)

(I don’t know how awesome he was before that. You’d have to ask other people.)

So yeah. Much love to kniedzw.

sale!

My Hel icon isn’t normally what I’d use for a story sale, being as how she’s not a very happy-looking goddess. But when the story in question is “The Waking of Angantyr,” based on an Old Norse poem of the same name, and the bastard child of my senior honors thesis on weapons in Viking Age Scandinavia . . . how could I use any icon but Hel?

So, yeah. “The Waking of Angantyr” has sold to the new magazine Heroic Fantasy Quarterly for (I think) their second issue. If berserker ghosts and cursed swords float your Viking longship, check it out when the story goes live.

you can’t know everything . . . though you wish you could

If I examine it logically, I’m aware that I know amounts ranging from “a little bit” to “rather large truckloads” about a whole lot of places and time periods. Ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, ancient China, Japan, Mesoamerica, India, Viking Age Scandinavia, the American frontier, etc.
And oh yeah, increasingly broad swaths of English history.

Sometimes, though, I go into fits over how much I don’t know.

This admission is brought to you mostly by my current reading on the Ottoman Empire, but also by seeing a preview for a documentary about Rudolf Kastner (who I’d never heard of before, despite him being Rather Important), and half a dozen other things reminding me that there are whole chunks of the world (like most of the southern hemisphere) about which I know almost nothing, whole centuries or even millenia in the areas I am familiar with about which ditto.

(And, of course, this little gap.)

What I know never really feels like enough. Even though I’m aware that I know more than your average bear. One of my favorite things about this job is that it gives me license to decide I really ought to learn more about Topic X; but the list of such topics actually goes from A to Z and then starts pillaging other alphabets for more. And a lifetime doesn’t feel like enough in which to learn it all. Which it probably isn’t.

Yes, folks, this is the kind of existential angst that occasionally plagues my mind. Tossing it out there because I suspect some of you feel the same way, from time to time. Consider this official commiseration space — or space to admit to similiarly half-logical forms of self-criticism. What things do you go into fits over?

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.)