I’m about to run off to Potlatch again, but: Paradox has purchased a flash piece from me, “Salt Feels No Pain.” This is the same editor who previously published “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe,” so I’m very pleased to be working with him again.
But man, I really need to get some replacement pieces into my submission queue . . . .
And that, ladies and gentlebugs, is 18,678 words of a very messy but (I think) not horribly broken draft of a novella currently titled “Deeds of Men.”
Not the most exciting title, but it’s the best we’ve got at the moment, and reasonably fitting for the story that follows it.
Oof. No more novellas for a while, ‘kay?
17,615 words and counting.
Stupid novella.
Almost done, though.
This is an interesting chart — we say “it’s Greek to me,” but what do the Greeks say? (Arabic, it turns out.) What about the Arabs? (Hindi.) And a crap-ton of cultures point at Chinese for sheer buh? factor.
But the punch line? Apparently the only language the Chinese feel is utterly beyond them . . . is the language of Heaven.
I stalled hard last night, not knowing what to do with the next scene. Having re-read the entire thing today, I ended up swapping the upcoming bit with the previous A-strand scene; the information the new one was going to convey really needed to go earlier in the story than where I was trying to put it. There’s a godawful Frankenstein seam thanks to the swapping — wow, is that earlier-now-later scene going to have to change — but I think it’s closer to working.
(No, I don’t expect that to mean anything to anybody, but it makes me feel better to type it out for posterity.)
1500 words tonight, two and a half scenes to go, but it’s bedtime for me, because I have to figure out how they’re going to mug this guy. Right now it’s more of a curb-stomping scenario than anything else; there’ll be no chance to do anything interesting with Our Heroes because their target will be a smear on the ground before they can say boo. Must stage it in non-obviously contrived way. But after that it’s pretty much just dual denouement time, so I think — I hope — I can finish this tomorrow.
<crosses fingers>
It may even have a title, though I wouldn’t be sure of that if I were me.
Four scenes left to write.
#4, I know what it will do and how it will do it.
#3, I pretty much know what it will do and how it will do it.
#2, I know what it will do, but have no freaking clue how it will do it.
#1, I don’t know anything about it except that the structure of this story demands its existence.
This is the downside to having a clear-cut pattern to the scenes — in this case, altering between two narrative timelines. I’ve spent over fourteen thousand words adhering to that pattern; skipping an A-strand scene at this late point would break the rhythm at the worst possible point. But filler would be just as bad, which means I need to think up one additional way for the A-strand to contribute to the B-strand, and it needs to be good.
And I need to do that before I can move forward, I’m afraid.
Hence spending the last half hour downstairs playing Canfield (with one hand of Bristol to soothe my annoyance at the piss-poor Canfield games I’d been having). I was hoping an idea would fall into my head, but it seems reluctant to do so.
Time to poke at my brain with sticks, I think.
This is a new experiment for me, but:
Feb 27th at 2 PM EST: “Writers on Writing (Part 1)– Fangs Fur and Fey authors Yasmine Galenorn (bestselling author of the Sisters of the Moon series), Marie Brennan (Midnight Never Come), Patrice Michelle (Scions series), Marlene Perez (Dead is the New Black), and John Levitt (Dog Days) discuss the craft of writing.
This is a podcast panel/call-in show — we’ll be chatting on some preset questions for the first twenty minutes or so, then taking questions from callers, and afterward the entire thing will be available for download. If you go to Blog Talk Radio, you can apparently set up a reminder, so you’ll be e-mailed before the show starts; that’s also where you’ll go in order to listen during the show. And there will be a chat room for listeners to use, so you can discuss things while we’re wittering on via the audio. The call-in number is (347) 826-9684; that’s both for listening via phone and for asking questions live.
Or something like that. I’ve never tried anything like this before, though Blog Talk Radio and some of the FFF authors have done it; we’ll see how it goes. But I’m looking forward to it.
2258 tonight — the end of one scene, and two complete others. It’s awkward, trying to pretend I’ve already set up who this guy is and why the characters can be confident in the conclusions they’ve just drawn, but for once I care more about finishing the draft than having it make sense. I’ve already backtracked enough to fix stuff that went awry on the first attempt, and I’m tired of it.
I am liking this story well enough, but I would like it far better if it would find a title already. <sigh>
We’re about 3K from the boundary between novelette and novella, with four scenes to go. You do the math.
Stupid neverending novellas. Worst of both worlds, I tell you.
Spent a chunk of this evening reading a YA novel . . . that I didn’t actually like or care about very much. The prose was painful, the characters were shallow, the world-concept interesting but not deployed very well at all, and I’m still not sure why I finished it. The obvious answer is that the author somehow got me to invest in the story enough that I wanted to know how it ended, but it didn’t feel like that was true while I was reading it, and then I got to the end and was not surprised to find it disappointing. I may have to chalk this one up to inertia, pure and simple: having started, I just kept coasting.
At least I was semi-skimming for the last half or so. It therefore ate less of my evening than it might have.
I didn’t watch Obama’s speech tonight, but I did just come across a thirty-second clip that put a big ol’ grin on my face. It consisted of two guys (I have no idea who they are, sorry; I am painfully ignorant of Congressional procedure) announcing loudly, “Madam Speaker, the President of the United States!” And then cheering and there’s Obama, heading out to make his first address to Congress.
Madam Speaker.
President Barack Obama.
The future is not so bright I gotta wear shades, but things like that do make it shine a bit.
It’s rare that I look at a book and think, I know who needs to read that. A generalized, “oh, so-and-so might like this,” sure — but not the sort of surety where I would drag people into the store and push the book into their hands if only they weren’t two-thirds of the way across the country from me.
The book in question is Catherynne Valente’s Palimpsest, out as of today, and I’ve been waiting for the chance to plug it (since plugging seems mean when a book is not yet available). What’s it about? Well, it has an attention-getting tag line: it’s about a sexually transmitted city. Yes, you heard me right. But you know, I’ll be honest with you; when I first heard that, aside from thinking “holy jeebus do moonandserpent and ombriel need to read that, not to mention some other friends of ours” that concept didn’t really hook me. I am ambivalent about a lot of the New Weird grotesquerie — it just isn’t my cup of tea — and Palimpsest sounded a lot like that.
What won me over was hearing Cat Valente read from it at Vericon last month. The thing I can be a sucker for in the New Weird, if the grotesquerie doesn’t put me off, is awesome worldbuilding, full of fantastic weirdnesses that are not the same stale ideas you’ve read again and again. The passage she read, about a school for the upper-class children of the city of Palimpsest, hit a bullseye on my cool-worldbuilding target. Plus it did so with lovely language that wasn’t obtrusive in its loveliness; it had sufficient clarity that I could follow it aurally without any trouble at all. And that’s something I care about, too.
Anyway, Cat’s done some awesome promotional stuff for this book, the kind of promotion I wish I had the wit, energy, and social network to do — S.J. Tucker (sooj) recorded an album of music inspired by it, there’s tie-in art and a Palimpsest corset and chocolate and perfume and all kinds of awesomeness. You can find out about that stuff here, and let me see if I can embed the book trailer:
Continuing the theme of this post, I rarely like book trailers, but that’s among the best I’ve seen — thanks to good music and no cheesy-sounding voiceover, mostly.
(Also? I didn’t realize, a couple of months ago, when I came across the Tabula Rasa website via kniedzw‘s computer, that it was actually a piece of marketing for Palimpsest. But when your city is a tattoo passed from person to person, it totally makes sense . . . .)
My ability to witter on about the book more or less ends there, since I haven’t read it yet. But I have the car today, and various errands to lure me out of the house, so there may be a stop at the bookstore — and then I’ll have to bait myself through the remainder of this story I’m writing by promising I get to read when I’m done. It will make a lovely change of pace.
Dear Brain,
Yeah, you know, that character, the one who’s really important to the reason why the dead guy is dead? The character we haven’t yet mentioned once in over eleven thousand words of story?
Yeah, him.
We’re going to have to find ways to work him into these scenes — along with hints of the Very Important Relationship he has to that other character, so it doesn’t come out of freaking left field the way it’s about to in the next thousand words. Because you’ve hung a key component of this story on that character and his Very Important Relationship, and the whole novela/ette is going to fall resoundingly on its face if that gets chucked in ex machina.
This is what you get for not bothering to figure out who he was until it was time to bring him in. How were we supposed to bring him in if we didn’t know who he WAS yet? This is how we end up eleven thousand words into the story and he’s still offstage. You brought this on yourself, you know.
Ah, well. That’s what revision is for.
Still miffed,
–Your Writer
Saturday night, I was feeling very cranky and unproductive and generally not desirous of working on the Still Untitled Novelette/a of Doom. And I was sitting at the computer trying to flagellate myself into getting started (at about one-thirty in the morning, naturally), and then it occurred to me:
It’s Saturday. I don’t have to write.
This was, after all, the plan I laid down when I started thinking about the full-time writerly life. When not noveling, I can have weekends off. Provided, of course, I’ve done at least 500 words a day during the week — which I had, several times over. I can write on the weekend, if I feel inspired to. But I don’t have to.
Mind you, that rule should probably break down if it’s getting to the end of the month and I haven’t finished the story I’m working on. Astute minds will notice that is the case here; I’m going to have to haul tail pretty fast these next few days to get it done. But in my fiction-writing life (as well as other things), I’m addicted to the opposite of the all-nighter: I tend to drive myself halfway into the ground in order to make sure I finish before deadline. This is a habit I could benefit from breaking. Let’s recharge for a couple of days, before charging onward.
It’s a nice theory. We’ll see how it works out for me this week.
Imagine being Anne Hathaway, twenty-six years old, sitting there twenty feet from Shirley MacLaine while she tells you how awesome she thinks you are.
I actually really liked that aspect of the Oscar ceremony — having the acting awards presented by groups of previous winners, each of whom addressed one of the nominees personally, instead of speaking impersonally about them in the third person. And it fit the whole aesthetic of the ceremony, which was, as one of our party said, “glam on a budget.” How do you do Hollywood glitz in a recession, without seeming grotesque in your conspicuous consumption? Well, inasmuch as that’s even possible, you do it by hearkening back to classic Hollywood style, and also by leaning on the star power of your people, rather than big-budget displays. (lowellboyslash, I know you hated the song-and-dance numbers, but Hugh Jackman actually does a fair bit of musical theatre, and both he and (later on) Beyonce actually carried off the style of it decently well.)
Kate Winslet wins the Best Acceptance Speech award for the night, by being all sweet and touching and then telling Meryl Streep she can suck it. *^_^*
Not the most memorable ceremony ever, but we enjoyed it. The key to the Oscars, as always, is to watch them with a big ol’ group of friends and as much snark as you can bring. They’re dead boring on their own.
No, really.
I say this now because today kniedzw and I will be hosting our annual Outrageous Clothing Mockery Oscars party, and that means a lot of time spent sitting and watching the TV. And when I do that — or anything else that engages my eyes and brain, but not my hands (i.e. books are exempt) — I find myself very restless, needing to do something with my hands. If I’m table-top gaming, I keep rearranging my dice, not out of superstition but a need to occupy my hands. If I’m watching TV . . . let’s just say I know over a dozen varieties of solitaire, but after a while that gets boring.
I need a hobby.
The problem is, the obvious hobby — knitting — is not really useful here, because kniedzw already has our knitting needs (such as they are) covered. We have all the scarves we need, and aren’t in desperate need of hats or gloves or sweaters or suchlike. I could knit things for my cousins’ kids, maybe, but that moves it from the category of “random thing to do while watching TV” to “obligatory thing I must finish by X time because someone’s waiting for it/will outgrow it otherwise.” I don’t want to take on any more obligations. I want this to be something where if I don’t finish it for six months it’s no big deal. Crocheting is too similar to knitting, and we already have sufficient afghans in the house. Embroidery? It’s a possibility — especially if I learn more than the three stitches I presently know — but I’m not sure what I would make. We’ve already got embroidered dish towels, courtesy of my mother, and I don’t have any costume pieces in foreseeable need of it. (I think I was embroidering during the Oscars a couple of years ago, for the Changeling game.) Ditto inkle weaving, though I’d like to make use of the looms currently sitting around uselessly. I could learn to card weave, as I’ve been meaning to do for years, but at least in the short term it’s likely to occupy too much of my attention to be suitable for this situation. Maybe once I know the basics, it would work. And cross-stitching is once again covered by my mother. The only patterns I like are much too complicated for me to attempt, so I leave them to her.
Other possibilities? Maybe even ones that don’t involve textiles? (No, I don’t know why I default to thinking of Things Involving Thread.)
Many thanks to Astres, for the lovely new icon.
From a review of my short story “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual”:
“. . . has the feel of a counterfactual, but I Googled it and there is no such person.”
It wasn’t my explicit intent to present this story as some kind of alternate history, but the instant I read this line, I realized that was the general vibe I wanted it to have. So: wiktory! The reviewer calls the story “very elegant,” too, so a win all around.
***
Yesterday, while deleting “Tower in Moonlight” from my submissions tracker, I realized I have fewer than ten short stories out on the market. I don’t think that’s been true since spring of 2002, when I went on a big story-writing binge and knocked out six in eight weeks; my stubbornness about selling those early stories, plus other binges on later occasions, have kept my inventory pretty well stocked. But my recent short-fiction drought, coupled with the tendency of my newer pieces to sell faster (yes, Swan, you are getting better at this game), means I’m down to nine.
Which, y’know, isn’t a small number. But it keeps shrinking, and I keep not putting new stories on the market; other than “Once a Goddess,” — which sold three weeks after I finished the draft, not helping the problem — I haven’t put anything new into circulation for over a year.
I think that when I complete this current piece (and give the stupid thing a title), I’m going to make myself revise “On the Feast of the Firewife” before I start anything new. Or “Footsteps,” which last time I checked just needed a better last line or something. Or give “The Memories Rise to Hunt” to my new critique group and see if this time we can figure out what that story needs in order to work — a question I’ve been pondering for far too long now. Or even “Sciatha Reborn,” except what that one needs is for me to finish fixing its world, and that might be more work than I can really do right now.
<scrounges through list of completed stories for other things that ought to have gone out the door ages ago>
Righty. All of that is a good idea, but first, this stupid novelette-maybe-novella needs finishing. I’m pretty sure I have at least six scenes left, which means we’ve still got a ways to go.
For once, I’m finishing work at 2 a.m. instead of starting. And nearly eighteen hundred words tonight, no less, in two work sessions.
And I even had some fun. When in doubt, throw in a walking death-omen who really wants to say hi to one of the protagonists.
Dang it, Internets, you are suppose to entertain me, and you are failing. One thing I preferred about being on East Coast time: in the wee hours of my morning, the West Coast folks might still be updating their LJs. But alas, I’m sitting here on a Friday night with hardly anybody giving me anything to read.
Well, tonight was supposed to be a night of productivity anyway. And it has been: so far, I’ve gotten 1,007 words on the ongoing story. But I think we’ll need to have another work session tonight, because this story, y’see, it has already passed short story territory and is charging merrily through novelette on its way to a possible novella. (Which is part of last night’s whininess: I keep working on this damn thing and it isn’t done yet. Novellas: the worst of both worlds.) Anyway, while it isn’t absolutely critical that I finish it before the calendar page turns, I would like to, and that means it’s advisable to get through this damn scene tonight.
But first I need to figure out who the characters are going to talk to, and what he knows.
In my non-writing time, I’ve been entertaining myself while doing other downstairsy things by re-watching the first half of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Quibble all you like with his interpretation; I will always love it for being full-length. And this re-watch has made me realize my favorite stretch is from the conclusion of the interior play to the moment Claudius sends Hamlet off to England. Why? Because that’s probably the densest stretch of Hamlet being a smart-ass in the entire play, and I do love him when he’s a smart-ass. I’ve thought for quite a while now that he’s probably one of the literary ancestors of Francis Crawford of Lymond.
Meh. I think it’s time to practice that time-honored writerly technique known as “flopping on the bed and staring at the ceiling until I can bludgeon my brain into working.” I have to get these characters to Coldharbour somehow.
