I still haven’t gotten around to figuring out how to do text-on-images in a pretty (i.e. more than basic) fashion, so can anyone take the cover in the last post and make me a proper Ashes icon? Something in the vein of the MNC icon, seen here. The font used is AquilineTwo, which you can get for free online.
Small bit first, since otherwise it will vanish next to the other news: Shroud Magazine has purchased my twisted fairy-tale retelling “Tower in Moonlight.” (This is part of the ongoing set that includes “The Wood, the Bridge, the House”, “Shadows’ Bride,”, and “Kiss of Life.”)
***
Much bigger bits, relating to In Ashes Lie:
I actually meant to post this days ago, but it clean slipped my mind — the Science Fiction Book Club has picked it up as a main selection, as with Midnight Never Come, so those of you who got the last book in hardcover can do so with this one, too.
For the other bit, you’ll have to look behind the cut . . .
I touched on part of this last month, when I complained about how many of my short story ideas required research, but that’s only one facet of the problem:
I’m having difficulty having fun with short stories.
What I’m working on right now? Requires both research and complicated plot-juggling, a murder mystery told in two strands, one leading up to the death, the other away from it. “Chrysalis”? Was research and more structural difficulties. The various possibilities for next month? Varying degrees of research, but also plot confusion and (in one particular case) a determination to tell the bloody thing entirely in Germanic-derived words.
Too much damned work.
“Once a Goddess” was fine, because the big problem that stalled that one for seven years was almost purely a plot thing, trying to figure out where I wanted the story to go. Once I had that, it was clear sailing. “The Gospel of Nachash” was harder; I’m not sure I would have gotten through that one when I did had I not been getting input and ideas from kniedzw and kleenestar. Again, more research, and more thinkiness being buried deep into the story, plus (again) linguistic stupidity — this time, an attempt to mimic the style of the King James Bible.
I want to have this story, the one I’m currently working on. I just don’t want to write it. Here it is, almost 2 a.m., and once again I’m only now about to get started. I have a specific reason for pushing on this one, or I’d see if shelving it helps; then again, the whole idea here is to figure out how to get back into regular short story production, and quitting doesn’t help much with that. But I need more ideas that are just fun, ideas that can be good stories without requiring such heavy lifting. I wholeheartedly believe heavy lifting is good for the writerly soul, but I don’t believe work done without it is automatically bad. Sometimes the stuff that pours out easy as oil is your best work.
It would be nice to have more of that.
Is this a phase, a difficult uphill stretch on my journey through my craft? I’d like to think it signals some kind of improvement in my writing, and that on the other side of it I’ll find myself once again able to occasionally just knock something out. Unfortunately, it feels more like my e-mail inbox: I’ve already dealt with the ideas that were quick and easy, and all that’s left in the mental queue is the stuff I’ve been putting off precisely because it is too much work.
Blah. I’m cat-vaccuuming now, whining about this story to avoid actually writing it. I need to hire some West Coast or early-rising UK friends to send me chiding e-mails; it’s too easy to avoid accountability at two o’clock in the morning. Once more into the breach, etc etc, and we’ll see if we can’t have some fun tonight.
SF author Jim MacDonald has put another one of his excellent medical posts up at Making Light, this one on Why We Immunize.
He talks about the individual diseases there: their symptoms, their mortality rate in the past, and the development of their vaccines. That last detail coincides with some of the alchemy reading I’ve been doing — which you wouldn’t think, except that the eighteenth century was when chemistry finally started to pull itself free of its predecessor, as a part of a more generalized medical and scientific revolution that also included the development of the smallpox vaccine.
Here’s the thing that’s been striking me, in that reading: how frustrating it is to see the scientists of the past come so close to figuring something out, and then missing. The easier one to bear is Boyle and Hooke and their pals, who almost sorted out the combustion thing . . . but they didn’t yet have a means of handling gases (“means” = both tools and theory), so chemistry charged off down the bonny (and idiotic) path of phlogiston for another fifty years before getting back on track.
But it’s a lot harder to bear when the thing thisclose to being right is medicine. Paracelsus comes along in the early sixteenth century, says hey, this Galenic theory of humours is a load of bunk, I think diseases come from outside, and we should be treating them with chemical cures. From my seat here in a modern house with a cabinet full of chemical medicines not ten feet away, I’m cheering him on! . . . but then the iatrochemists (aka chymical physicians) get on a roll and start dosing people with, oh, antimony sulphide, mercury, and other things pretty well guaranteed to poison the patient, often fatally. Not that the Galenics were any better, mind you — their medicines were equally poisonous, just on the theory that they would help balance the humours — but I read about that, and I want to yell at the book, as if I could somehow reach back in time and make them get it right.
Eventually we figured it out. Even before we really knew what was up with germs, we figured out how to protect people from smallpox — where by “we” I mean that China and the Islamic world worked it out a couple centuries before Europe did, and India possibly even earlier than that, so let’s give credit where credit is due. Europe: not always smart. But I wonder what the history of Europe would look like if Paracelsus’ iatrochemistry had taken a more accurate angle, or foreign inoculations been recognized and adopted sooner.
It’s a good thing no one will ever hand me a time travel machine, or I’d pack up a giant case of modern medicines and zap around feeding them to people, destroying the time stream and probably getting myself burned as a witch.
Cooking is not high up on my list of things I love to do, so it’s taken me until now to follow up on the slow cooker suggestions you all gave me a while ago.
On the joint recommendation of sarcastibich and amysun, my first attempt was your average beef stew: cow, potatoes, celery, carrots, onion, garlic, some corn just for variety. It worked, more or less: needed more seasoning, either flour or thinner-cut potatoes to thicken the liquid, and I’m curious to try it with tomatoes in, but on the whole, a success.
What was definitely a success? Walking in from karate to the warm and wondrous smell of food ready to be eaten RIGHT NOW. Dear Mom and Dad: thank you for the slow cooker; it is exactly what we needed.
I think my next experiment will be kendokamel‘s suggestion of the chicken-red wine-veggie thing, since it will use up the rest of my onion, celery, and carrots, and I like the idea of being able to chuck couscous into the pot right at the end. It will mean waiting five minutes or so before we can eat, but that can be while kniedzw hangs up our gi and I get out the silverware. (Why yes, I am ravenous after karate. How could you tell?)
Bit by bit, I’m beginning to actually cook, for values of “cooking” that don’t mean “chuck pre-made thing into oven/microwave/skillet.”
-Describe me in one word- just one single word. Positive or negative.
-Leave your word in a comment, before looking at what words others have used.
-Copy and paste the meme to your journal to find out how people describe you when limited to one word.
This story is coming out slooooowly. I’m not sure whether that’s because it’s a murder mystery (plot-wise; the setting is fantasy), and I’ve never written one of those before, or because I’m essentially taking two characters my brain assigns to different stories and trying to make them be in scenes together. Maybe this is why all my youthful fanfic involved original characters interacting with the casts of stories I’d read; I don’t seem to do well at the crossover thing. Hell, my brain had an instantaneous meltdown when I tried to imagine Ree talking to Nicholas after returning from Arcadia, and that was after all the Memento characters had already shown up in the Changeling game, thus establishing the bridge for me.
But! Making two characters have a conversation where they’re talking about entirely different things, and neither one of them realizes it? That’s fun.
(Actually, one of them just realized it, in the last few hundred words I wrote. What I need to decide is when the pov character will figure it out.)
Murder mysteries, man. They’re hard. I suspect this one would go easier if I’d started from a base of “here’s how the victim died and why,” but instead I’m struggling to make that be not a macguffin for the investigation, which is the real reason I’m writing this story. We’ll see how that goes. This is one of those “permission granted to write a crappy draft” situations, though not nearly to the extent that “Chrysalis” was. I just need to write my way through before I can go back and make it tidy.
Unfortunately, I’ve about hit the end of the scenes where I knew what I was doing, and now have a vast howling wilderness between me and the end, which is the other part I know. Must figure out what to fill that with.
But not tonight. I’ve done 1,325 tonight; that’s respectable enough that I can stop.
I adore Robin McKinley’s writing; she is on that short list of authors whose books I will pick up without knowing anything about them except they’re written by Robin McKinley.
Chalice . . . is my least favorite Robin McKinley book.
I won’t say I didn’t like it, but I don’t know how much of me liking it was due to the author, rather than the book. Too much of it kept backtracking to tell me about things before the narrative began; for a while there it felt like two pages of present story, twenty pages of backstory. Too much of it was told in summary, the narration describing what happened when Mirasol talked with Clearseer or whoever, rather than actually showing me that interaction. Too much repetition — Mirasol lamenting her lack of apprenticeship, for example — for too little in the way of new development in character and plot.
I think there ultimately wasn’t enough here to fill out its length (and it’s a short book for all of that). It might have compelled me ten times more had it been a third as long.
There still would have been the inherent conservatism of the setting — the wholehearted embrace of the connection between family lineage and talent/magic/right — but I can be okay with that, inasmuch as I don’t require fantasy only to explore concepts I want to live with in real life. But it needed more exploration of that conservatism, or else less time spent dwelling on it. More story, or else less book.
It reminds me, though, that I still haven’t gotten around to reading Dragonhaven, which I remember people quibbling with back when it came out. Maybe I’ll make time for that one soonish.
. . . to everyone who helped me out with London slang a little whlie ago. Copy-edits delayed my work on “The Last Wendy” for a bit, but I finally got that back to them, and it sounds at least a bit less American now.
(One last query, actually — does “chill out” sound too American? If so, what would be the alternative?)
I’m linking to this one a couple of days late, but Bookspot Central did a Synergy post (like the SF Signal Mind Melds) on romances in fiction, and I’m one of the writers they polled.
***
Also, it’s time for me to say something over at SF Novelists again, and this time, it’s my thoughts on how flash fiction works.
This post is mostly for akashiver and mrissa, since I don’t know if you have e-mail notification turned on for comments. Now that my CEM is out the door (yay!), I’ve finally had the time to go back and respond to your thoughts on the teaching English lit post. I’m now more or less caught up on that thing, so anybody who was following the discussion, you can find the continuation of my thoughts there.
Amazon — discerning my interest in historical fiction — offered me a list of recent and upcoming titles it thought I might want to take a look at. Notice a pattern?
The Women: A Novel
Drood: A Novel
Agincourt: A Novel
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: A Novel
The Help
The Fall of the Templars
The Book of Unholy Mischief: A Novel
Roanoke: A Novel of Elizabethan Intrigue
Dear Publishers: for the love of all that’s holy, PLEASE STOP IT WITH THE “A NOVEL” THING. Seriously, what is up with that? It isn’t just a historical fiction practice, where you can try (and fail) to justify it by saying you don’t want readers to confuse it with nonfiction on the same subject; it’s like this is supposed to flag books as being somehow more highbrow than their non-novel-labeled brethren on the shelf. Guess what? It doesn’t work. It just annoys me.
I am moderately willing to let it pass if you make use of the preposition “of,” in which case “novel” is simply the anchor for an actual descriptive phrase. But when five of Amazon’s eight recommendations feel they must notify me that they are Novels (and nothing more), any value the word might have had — scant to begin with — is long since gone.
Before I get to this question, I should clarify one thing: unless I specify otherwise, when I post here for research help, I’m not asking people just to provide me with relevant-looking titles. That would be lazy of me in the extreme, since I’m usually capable of finding relevant-looking titles on my own, and I don’t want to be lazy. What I can’t do on my own is tell which ones are worth my time. So — not to thumb my nose at recommendations in general, because I do appreciate them, but what I’m really looking for are books you’ve read, or know someone who’s read, or otherwise have heard good things about. Some way to cull the list of all possible sources down to a smaller list of pre-vetted works. (And — the flip side — please do tell me if you know of any utter crap I should stay far, far away from.)
With that in mind: alchemy.
I really want to be able to use alchemy in fiction. I do not yet understand it well enough to do so. I need, not just old-school sources deliberately written to be as obscure as possible so that they won’t share your secrets with the uninitiated, but more modern secondary works that can help me unlock those old-school things, since otherwise I tend to skip off the top of them. But there’s a lot of vaporous New Age crap about alchemy out there, so if you know of any worthwhile books in a more scholarly/historical vein, please pass along titles. I’m already planning on giving Eliade a shot, and I’ve gamed Amazon into making a lot of recommendations, but it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
My poor copy-editor, dealing with London place-names. Fully half the queries on this book go something like this. “St. Laurence Jewry” — do you mean St. Laurence Pountney? “St. Giles Cripplegate” — do you mean St. Giles-in-the-Fields? “Aldgate” — do you mean Aldersgate? No, no, and no. Last book, it was people names instead; she kept double-checking to make sure this Edward whoever was not supposed to be that Edward whoever.
I’m glad she does it, of course. One of these days I will name two St. Laurence parishes when I only mean to name one. And to be fair, it took me a remarkably long time to sort the two St. Gileses from one another, and to figure out where each one was. But the queries amuse me. If this were a secondary-world fantasy, I wouldn’t repeat names half so often as the real world does, precisely because of this confusion.
Here’s the other thing about doing this copy-edit:
I have to trust I got things right.
Where by “things,” I mean the historical details. At the time I wrote these scenes, I had my research fresh in my mind, with notes and books open on the desk in front of me. That? Was last year. Do I still remember everything? No. And it’s worse with this book than it was with Midnight Never Come, because in this one, the plot engages much more directly with historical events — giving me oodles of chances to screw up. I could try to look it up again, double-check everything, but the library books have been returned and that would make the copy-edit take two months anyway. I have to trust that I got the details right in the drafting and revision stages.
Having said that . . . I’ve caught a few errors. But only because something stood out: a lack of a preposition in a historical quote, which made me check to see if that was a transcription error on my part, or the actual phrasing of the original. (Answer? Both: I have two books that give the line, and they don’t match up. I chose the clearer of the two.) Or me calling a character “Lady Elizabeth,” and then wondering if that’s the proper address for someone of her rank, which made me double-check whether I was right about her not being a countess yet. (Answer? She was a countess, and I had the address wrong. Also, I erroneously referenced her father, who was dead by then. Apparently I was asleep at the research wheel when I wrote that scene.)
I can’t check everything, though. I’ll have errors that crept in during revision, during drafting, during research when I failed to look something up in the first place. And some reader, somewhere, will spot them.
But you know, I’m okay with that. (Mostly.) Because the only way to avoid it is to have my characters float through a non-specific world, where events don’t have dates and buildings don’t have floor plans and the only people with names are the ones important to the plot. But that isn’t how real people live: the world you inhabit is concrete, specific, full of detail. You know the names of the people you work with, and sometimes they have walk-on parts in the story of your life.
What will be interesting to see is what this does to my secondary-world novels, next time I try to write one. Historical fiction has forced me to pay attention to the specificity of real life; can I maintain that specificity when I’m making it all up? I hope so.
At least nobody will be able to tell me I’ve gotten it wrong. 🙂
I’m making this post mostly as a means of collating links so I can find them again, but also so they may be useful to others:
Carl Brandon Society, February recommendations — a spec-fic list for Black History Month.
Another from the Carl Brandon Society — this one for American Indian Heritage Month.
Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler — as near as I can tell, this is English-language fiction from authors in the Philippines, not translated materia. But I’m interested to see how their work differs from the stuff coming out of Anglophone countries.
I managed a while ago to teach myself the distinction between “that” and “which” — I couldn’t tell you when each one should be used, but my copy editor has corrected me on it only twice so far in this novel.
On the other hand, I still haven’t mastered the “farther” and “further” thing. On the other other hand, the Fowler quote given in this Slacktivist post validates my tendency to use “further” for everything. I’m happy to let me CE correct me on it, but hey, at least I’m not totally off-base.
Speaking of off-base-ness, one of these days I’ll figure out where I got my notions of hyphenation from. My CE disagrees with me quite frequently on that stuff.
It still saddens me to watch these books being corrected to American spelling. (“Corrected” because random bits of my spelling are British. I blame a childhood of reading Diana Wynne Jones?) It just seems wrong. Especially since the US and UK editions are printed from the same edit.
Of all the epigraphs I chose for this book, I think my favorite is the one taken from transcripts of Charles’ trial. It’s a brief exchange between him and Bradshaw, the Lord President of the High Court of Justice, arguing about the House of Commons and the jurisdiction of the trial, and while it was almost certainly not what Bradshaw meant to say, it kind of sums up the entire damn period for me:
The King. Shew me that Jurisdiction where Reason is not to be heard.
Lord President. Sir, we shew it you here, the Commons of England.
Back to the mines.
Hee. I managed to spark a bunch of fantastic responses in my previous post about teaching literature — all while I was AFK and copy-editing. I’m responding over there, but piecemeal. Many thanks to everybody who has already offered up their thoughts.
Am off to a roaring start. This is deliberate; I habitually work out how much I need to do each day in order to meet my deadline, readjust it to create a margin of safety, then push myself to overshoot the readjustment. It’s how we make deadlines work, here in my brain.
I should note, btw, that I misspoke slightly when I said the late arrival of the CEM was due to a mixup on my publisher’s end; I have a tendency to use that phrase to signify anything that isn’t my end, which is inexact. The mixup was on the part of the copy-editor. But it’s the same copy-editor I had for Midnight Never Come, which pleases me; I like continuity, and I like getting a little note from her saying she’s enjoyed reading these books. 🙂
Anyway. I’ve done all the mechanical work scheduled for today, and then some; I’ve about hit the limit of my usefulness on that front. (Brainpower, not time, is the real constraint on copy-editing speed. It doesn’t do me much good to read over the ms if I’m zoning out while I do it.) I have a small list of revision-y things to do in these pages, but I’ll leave them until later tonight, when I’ve regrown a little of my attention span. And then maybe go over some more pages, because we like being ahead of schedule, yes, we do.
You know who likes it even better? My publisher.
