Well, it’s the same Driftwood, but in different format: Podcastle has just bought the audio rights to “A Heretic by Degrees.” (“Driftwood” itself has already been podcasted by the original publisher, Beneath Ceaseless Skies.)
I really should get cracking on more stories in that world.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Over on FFF, I’m pondering the question of what constitutes a faerie, outside of Northern Europe. Head over there to offer your thoughts on how I should be defining “faerie” as the Onyx Court series opens up to include characters from the Middle East and beyond.
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 . . . .
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.
Why is every other woman in this scene named Elizabeth?
(Not so imponderable. The answer is, “because history says so.” But still.)
It’s been available for order a little while now, but Clockwork Phoenix 2 is officially out now, and editor Mike Allen is offering a PDF copy to anybody who promises to blog about it in return. See that link for more details.
I’ve posted four more stories of mine up at AnthologyBuilder. The new additions include “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood,” which (just between you and me) is one of my personal favorites.
How the hell did I manage to get Rosamund and Gertrude into a fight?
With each other?
This is even weirder than the algebra.
Okay, the algebra has moved on to calculus and from thence to astrophysics (kniedzw‘s idea), picking up a side order of Norse mythology along the way, and now I’m trying to decide on a suitable driving weight for what started out as the world’s most improbable clock and has gotten weirder since.
. . . I love my job.
Even if sometimes it randomly requires math.
How the hell did I put myself in a position where my historical faerie novel is requiring me to do ALGEBRA?
Wrote a cumulative 3806 today in various new scenes, rummaging around in the guts of Part Two to make everything fall into the new order. Still need to replace the scene that introduces the CR itself, and then do at least a rough polish on the Magrat conversation, the coffee-house, and Carline; then probably wholesale replace 80% of the Vauxhall scene, and I’ll finally be ready to finish the scene I was in the middle of writing when I realized I needed to redo half of what I’d done.
One of the cherished delusions of the aspiring writer is that this stuff gets easier as you go. Sure, maybe you have to rework your first novel three times, but after a while you learn to produce clean drafts, right?
Yeah, I’m going the other way. I’ve never had to hack a book apart half as much as I’ve done with this one already. Please, please, don’t let this trend continue.
Word count: 36,810 and trying not to think about how I’m running to stay in place
LBR census: I had to work really hard to find a reason why it wasn’t blood.
Authorial sadism: Yes, Galen, when you get a good idea I will make you share it with the class.
I know there’s a way to code an e-mail link so it doesn’t get used by ‘bots to spam me. Can anybody tell me how that’s done?
I’ve been digging for ages now, attempting to discover when people in Britain first sighted Halley’s comet in 1759. Not when it was first seen in general; I know Palitzsch spotted it on Christmas Day, 1758, and Messier picked it up a month later, and then lots of people saw it after perihelion, throughout March and April. So I figured that if I aimed to have this book in seven sections, one per season, then I should start in summer 1757, because odds were it got spotted in Britain some time in winter 1759.
Those lazy bastards of eighteenth-century British astronomy apparently didn’t pick up the damn thing until April 30th. Which means that, for the purpose of my structure, I need to start the book in autumn 1757.
It isn’t a simple matter of changing date stamps on the scenes, either. Galen’s conversation with his father is partly predicated on the assumption that it’s summer, and therefore a lousy time to be attempting any kind of large-scale social networking. Ergo, his attempts on that front don’t begin until part two. Also, there’s a scene that has to take place on October 3rd, but part one is too early to use it, so I’ll have to rework that idea for part five instead. Etc. Etc.
The worst part is, I think this change will be a good thing. Example: I couldn’t introduce the Royal Society properly until part two, because they were on hiatus from June until November 10th. Problem solved! Now I can have them in play sooner. Another example: there was a comet sighted in late September/early October, that I was having trouble working into the scene flow of part two. It will, however, do very nicely for an early note in part one. I suspect a whole lot of things will balance out more usefully once I boot the story back one season. But this is going to mean a crap-ton of very frustrating revision on the 33.5K I already have written, because I didn’t find the answer I needed until just now. And that’s almost certainly going to put me behind, because I think I need to get my extant wordage sorted out before I’ll be okay to proceed forward.
Snarl.
And sigh. I do think things will be better this way. But I’m rather ticked at myself for not turning this info up sooner, and at Bradley and all his cohort for failing to spot the bloody comet until almost May. We’re going to have to make some changes around here . . . .
Okay, I’ve been in games where we blow up elevator shafts with a jet-skis, and I’ve been in games where we steal reincarnated lama/camels from Tibetan peasants, and I’ve been in games where meddling dwarves send their friends off with picnic baskets full of spells designed to make them stop blushing at each other and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT ALREADY . . .
. . . but I’ve never been in a game where a character glued an NPC to his back.
Nor, now that I think of it, have we ever driven the GM to drink. Must try harder!
I can tell I haven’t really gotten into the flow of a scene when all my paragraphs are of the same length. Long paragraphs and short ones are part of the dynamics and tempo of narrative; with no variation, everything’s at the same volume, the same pace. When they start contrasting more, it’s a sign I’m doing something right.
From this insight, I conclude I’m going to have to rewrite the first five hundred words of this scene.
But that’s a job for later.
CBS has all of the original series available online, so I’ve been running episodes while I clean my office or do laundry or whatever. Not entirely sure why; I have to admit that my opinion of the show hasn’t changed much. There are the occasional moments I enjoy, but there’s also hella clunky writing, cheap sets, overacting, and a general lack of the things I love (like arc plots and long-term character development).
It’s interesting to look at it with historical perspective, though. The technology: I presume they did their best to be futuristic, but now it’s this weird mash of incredibly dated limitations (tapes???) and still-implausible handwavium (tricorders). The plots, reflecting the concerns and ideals of the time. But what really gets me, as you might expect, are the characters.
I think I have an easier time coping with the show’s racial shortcomings because it’s easier for me to recognize the ways in which it was progressive for the time. I mean, two non-white bridge officers? Sure, Uhura does almost nothing of note (at least as far as I’ve watched), but as Whoopie Goldberg said to her mother, there’s a black woman on television, and she ain’t no maid. And there’s the occasional black or Asian background character, too. I still cringe at things like, oh, the casting of a Mexican actor as a northern Indian Sikh, but I can usually manage to get past it, by focusing on the ways in which this was an improvement over the mass of media at the time.
With gender, it’s harder. Maybe I just don’t know enough about female roles elsewhere on TV at the time? Because it sticks in my craw that the women are mostly just sex objects, and on the rare occasion that one of them has a relevant professional role (the psychologist in “Dagger of the Mind,” the historian in “Space Seed”) their narrative function is to be incompetent and screw everything up. The men constantly reduce them to their attractiveness and/or treat them like children, and the women respond accordingly. I damn near cheered when I watched “Amok Time” (I’m at the beginning of S2 now), because while Vulcan marital tradition blatantly reduces women to prizes for the men, T’Pring quite cleverly manipulates that tradition to achieve her own ends. Go go gadget agency! And you get T’Pau, who’s respected, powerful, and able to help the protagonists — because she chooses to, not because she has to. Vulcans: 2, Humans: 0, where non-objectified women are concerned.
(Incidentally, having watched “Amok Time” — I don’t know when exactly K/S came into existence, i.e. whether it existed before that ep . . . but ye gods is that thing slashy. Much is now explained.)
The fact that I’ve watched so much is really more a testament to my obsessive sense of completism (and the ease of online watching) than any growing affection; there’s maybe two or three eps so far I’d have any desire to watch a second time. I really wish some of the other series were available online, so I could give them a shot, but sadly this does not seem to be the case.
