everybody but me

Why do I have the niggling feeling that I’m arriving late at the party of Understanding That Working For Five Or Six Or Seven Hours On One Story Will Fry Your Brain For Working On Another That Same Day?

whee!

1,172 words and one crash course in seventeenth-century telescope design later, I have my first flashback scene.

I’d forgotten how much fun these things are. When I was writing Midnight, flashbacks were my candy bars: nothing but a neat idea, without any need for the kind of set-up or take-down ordinary scenes require. I may try to write another tonight, if I can sort out the details; I still owe this book three others, that need to go somewhere in the stuff I’ve already written.

(There’s another reason I really enjoyed this one, but you all will have to wait until the book comes out to learn what that one is.)

half a book!

Ladies and gents, we crossed the 70K line today. Which means this is officially Half A Book, assuming I end up in the reasonable neighborhood of my 140K goal.

I may celebrate by spending tomorrow, and possibly the next day, working on flashback scenes. I haven’t written any of them yet, and while I’m not sure which ones I want to stick in which parts of the story, I’ve come to suspect I won’t be able to figure that out properly until the scenes exist as more than one-line descriptions in my head. And while part of my scheduling here involves not counting flashback writing as words toward my daily goal, the early completion of Part Three means I’m still two days ahead of schedule, and spending those filling in other holes isn’t a terrible idea.

(I would do flashbacks and forward progress, but I’m also currently being sisyphized by another project, and three tasks at once is a bit much — even if the sisyphean one is a revision. I just can’t gear-shift that much.)

But hey. Half a book. Yay!

Word count: 70,393
LBR census: It’s going to be blood, if Irrith keeps on being so mouthy.
Authorial sadism: Hey, somebody needs to represent for eighteenth-century English chauvinism.

I’ll verb whatever I want to

Long ago, Tantalus turned into a verb: if something tempts you but you’re never allowed to have it, it is tantalizing you. Well, I hereby declare the verbing of Sisyphus, henceforth to be used for tasks which undo themselves every time you finish them.

As you might guess, this is because I’m being sisyphized by something right now. And not just in the usual laundry-and-dishes sense.

(Ixionizing, I suppose, would be when something goes round and round without ever getting anywhere at all, like a hamster on a wheel. Or, well, Ixion. On his wheel.)

poll time! but not here.

Over on FFF, I’m polling people about side stories — pieces of short fiction an author writes that are connected to a novel series. (Like, say, Deeds of Men.) If you’ve got any experience with those, as a writer or a reader, go over and vote.

And feel free to spread this elsewhere, if your LJ readership is interested in this kind of thing. The more data, the merrier!

This is kind of fabulous.

The VanderMeers, having been given a 13th anniversary ale to try out, decided that of course the thing to do was to see how it went with different books.

It kinda makes me wish I liked beer and/or wine. You could have a pretty ridiculous party, swigging down different drinks, trying to match them up with appropriate books. “I think this is more of a chardonnay kind of fantasy . . . .”

As it happens, Ashes didn’t go well with the beer at all, especially the selection Ann was reading. But she recommends a rich honey mead — Rosamund and Gertrude would approve. ^_^

Time to talk bad guys

Normally I write my SF Novelists posts well in advance, and just set them up to go live when the sixteenth rolls around. This one’s of a more recent vintage: it took me until yesterday to decide I wanted to spend this month talking about villains and antagonists. Go, read, comment over there.

60K.

Word count: 60,301
LBR census: There will be blood. (Pity I hated that movie . . . .)
Authorial sadism: Aw, shut it, Irrith. The lunatic hasn’t attacked you. Yet.

The tens of thousands matter. More than a week’s work, unless I’m having a pretty fast week, and there’s few enough of them in your average book that they feel like real milestones.

Also, the next one will be the official “halfway point” of the book, in the hopes that I’m right about it being 140K in total.

point to Gardner Dozois

In the most recent issue of Locus (requiescas in pace, Charles Brown), Gardner Dozois reviewed Clockwork Phoenix 2 and had this to say about me:

[. . .] Marie Brennan’s “Once a Goddess” (sort of a fantasy version of Ian McDonald’s “The Little Goddess”) is also good [. . .]

Which I bring up because that made me go poking around online, which led me to discover that the aforementioned story is available full-text online. So of course I read it, and it turns out that Dozois is precisely right, perhaps even more than he realized; McDonald’s story is based on the same Nepalese religious tradition, the Kumari Devi, that inspired my own piece.

McDonald plays it closer to home: “A Little Goddess” takes place in near-future Nepal and India, whereas I ran off to a secondary world and an invented tradition only modeled on Kumari. Also, since he’s writing science fiction and I’m writing fantasy, we (unsurprisingly) have fundamentally different approaches to the divinity of the goddess’ avatar. But it was interesting for me to see the places where we intersect, the shared issues of life after divinity — blessings, marriage, and so on. And without giving spoilers, I’ll say that McDonald’s ending is the one I originally intended for “Once a Goddess,” before realizing that just wasn’t the kind of story mine wanted to be.

I definitely recommend his story. It was published June 2005 in Asimov’s, and nominated for a Hugo (in the novella category — it’s also a lot longer than mine). Follow that link above to read it on the magazine’s website, and if you’ve read my story, I’d be curious to know how you think the two compare.

3/7

Word count: 57,857
LBR census: Love. And awkward discussions of the various forms it takes.
Authorial sadism: Not one but two characters wrestling with some unfamiliar (not to say uncomfortable) feelings.

So I’m trying something a little different with this book. Normally — by which I mean, for nine books now, discounting only my first finished novel — I set myself a daily word-count goal, and use that to measure my progress. Usually the goal is a thousand words a day, and since that’s a minimum, not an average, I build up a little overage as I go, which helps make up for the days I miss, and gives me a margin of safety re: my deadline. (Since this became a professional thing, I use that time for revision, before sending it off to my editor.)

This time around, applying that schedule produces slightly hairy results. For one thing, this book is supposed to be longer, more like Ashes than Midnight. Also, I lost four straight weeks to travel: no forward progress during that whole time. So the five months I gave myself to write a 140K book wasn’t looking like enough, not unless I made assumptions about my overage that I didn’t really want to trust — especially not when even that left no time for revision.

I could have just set a higher goal: say, 1500/day. Or whatever. But I decided to hybridize.

This book is divided into seven parts. I did Part One before leaving town, Part Two by the end of June. So rather than pacing by word-count, I recently decided to do it by narrative chunks, and moreover to do so in a fashion that would leave me a solid couple of weeks for revision. In other words, Parts Three and Four in July, Five and Six in August, and Seven in September, with the book due at the beginning of October. The “hybrid” aspect comes in where I know that each part should be roughly 20K, of which 1K or so is going to be flashback (and therefore written outside my daily quota), so I worked backward to figure out how many words I should aim for in a given day, in order to (probably) finish the relevant part by its mini-deadline.

So far, it’s working out. Beating that quota, combined with a shorter section than anticipated, means I finished Part Three tonight, three days ahead of schedule. And here’s the other new thing: rather than just saying, “Sweet, I can get a head start on Part Four!” and diving in tomorrow, I’m going to take that evening off. I may, if I feel like it, backtrack to chisel off a few of my worse continuity errors in the existing text; or possibly do a flashback. Or not. But I get to take a day to regroup and think about Part Four — and still start two days early.

I don’t know if I can keep up this pace for the next two months. It’s definitely faster than my usual; not brutally so, but enough that it may start to tell in the long term. But I’m more comfortable with this math, for whatever reason, and that’s reason enough to give it a shot.

He’s not so much a protagonist as a punching bag.

Just spent ten minutes or so talking at kniedzw, trying to figure out how to make a certain plot point happen, and at the end of it all I decided the best method is: embarrasssing Galen.

Poor boy. I so terribly mean to him.

ETA: I originally typed “humiliating Galen,” then decided to downgrade it. Now that I’ve written the scene?

I had it right the first time.

Poor boy. I’ll make it up to him in the next couple thousand words.

linkage gets a follow-up

Back in April, I made an annoyed post about how Wall Street types were wringing their hands over Up — not because they thought it would be a flop, but because they didn’t think it wouldn’t be an even bigger hit than everything else Pixar has ever done, and therefore investors should abandon that obviously sinking ship. Or something.

Well, it’s slightly gratifying to see a follow-up in the New York Times, featuring this line: “Dead wrong” is how Richard Greenfield of Pali Research put his related analysis in a research note. In other words, Up has done just fine, thank you, where “just fine” is defined as “raking in profits your average studio would be breaking out the champagne for.” (He’s still recommending people sell Disney stock — but that’s based on issues with broadcast TV and the theme parks.)

It doesn’t address my underlying issue, which was the idea that every movie Pixar makes has to reap a bigger harvest than the one before it, or it’s time for investors to bail. From my perspective, Greenfield wasn’t wrong because Up turned out to be a bigger earner than he forecasted; he was wrong because he acted as if the sky was going to fall if it only made a good profit rather than a spectacular one. I still find the insistence on nothing but constant growth to be unsustainable. But at least the guy has issued something of a mea culpa.

You can’t be both good and strong

Mary Robinette Kowal’s column over at AMC this week takes a hard look at good queens in fantasy film. The gist of it is, you can’t be both good and powerful: if you’re good, you’re a child and/or tiny and/or sick and/or married to someone else who’s holding the reins. If you’re powerful, you’re evil.

(Before somebody else points it out: yes, I think she missteps a bit with Galadriel; sure, Celeborn’s around, but even if you’re looking solely at the movie, it’s pretty obvious that Galadriel’s much more central and important than her husband is. And if you know the books, he’s her appendage, not the other way around.)

I think the situation’s much better in novels, if only because the data set’s so much bigger. But still, I think the underlying structure that produces the result Kowal describes isn’t entirely gone: “women with power” is a concept our culture as a whole still isn’t quite comfortable with. (See: the response to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.) That idea’s scary, and scary =/= good.

An interesting column. I’ve been enjoying reading them each week, but this is the first one that’s really made me go “hmmmm.”

Once upon a time, this would have been half of a book.

Word count: 50,839
LBR census: Love. This book is sadly lacking in blood so far, but the love is shaping up to be even more cruel, so it balances out.
Authorial sadism: Did I mention the love? Also, Irrith just planted her foot so firmly in her mouth I think she stepped on her liver. If faeries even have livers.

I’m roughly halfway through Part Three, and (assuming my target word count doesn’t end up being wildly off-base) a little over a third of the way through the book. It’s hard to pace myself, in terms of expectations; this is the first time I’ve set out to write a 140K book. (Ashes got there accidentally.) Normally I’d be thinking of this as the middle span of the story, since most of my novels, both published and unpublished, fall in the 100-120K range. I’m definitely in “the middle,” broadly speaking — this isn’t the beginning anymore, and it sure as heck isn’t the end — but I’m a good 20K away from the actual midpoint.

I must admit, I’m not sure a seven-part structure was my brightest idea ever. It’s a strange number, and not one we really have a model for, as far as story structure’s concerned, but it fits in other ways. I just have to figure out what kinds of things go in which sections. On the face of it, this should not be a challenge; after all, I could just pretend the part breaks aren’t there, and pace things however seems natural. But there’s such a thing as three-part structure, and such a thing as five-part structure (which I did, for the record, pay attention to while writing Midnight), and the four days of the Fire meant I needed four spans of time in Ashes which dictated some of my structure there, too. I just need to figure out what the seven-part version is.

Well, any way you slice it, the next part is the middle one, when the book stops heading away from the beginning and starts heading toward the end. And I know some of what will be happening then.

Now I just need to figure out what happens in the rest of Part Three . . . .

lessons I shouldn’t need to relearn

I’m currently trying to revise something, and the further I go into it, the more I’m bogging down.

Maybe because I, y’know, skipped over that one scene, the one where I need to change it around to do something new, but I’m not yet sure how I want to spin the thing I want it to do, and even once I figure that out I’ll need outside help to set up the execution correctly, and all of that’s a valid reason for skipping over it, right?

Yeah. Right. Except for the bit where I’ve snagged my narrative on a thorn, and can’t go on until I’ve un-snagged it. My alternative is a narrative with a big ol’ rip in it, and that kind of defeats the purpose of revision.

<sigh> I shouldn’t need to remind myself of these things. And yet I do, because when you get right down to it I’m lazy, and this is a big indigestible chunk of work I keep wanting to put off. But obviously it’s past time for me to writer up and deal with it already.