Fun Things to Do to Characters, #277

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.

halfway to disappointment

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.

a belated thank-you . . .

. . . 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?)

quick heads-up

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.

No, really?

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.

I need to understand these people . . . .

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.

Nomenclative confusion

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.

Writer, Trust Thyself

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. πŸ™‚

reading outside the box

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.

Thoughts from the Copy-Editing Mines

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.

Fight on!

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.

Progress of the Report

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. πŸ™‚

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.

State of the Swan

CEM is here.

Deathmarch has commenced.

I will either be silent for the next week as I try to plow through this at top speed, or posty like a posty thing as I find myself in desperate need of breaks from the work.

It’s Pick a Fight Day on LJ!

(No, it isn’t. Just on my LJ.)

So, I’m mostly okay with this article in the Telegraph about how it’s okay not to have read John Updike, or for that matter other literary greats. It’s certainly true that it isn’t possible for even the most well-intentioned of book lovers to have read all of the Great Literature that’s been published in the last two hundred years, even if you aim only for the top tier.

But here’s where the writer and I part ways:

This is not an argument against the literary canon. I do believe there are certain key authors – most of them Dead, White, European and Male – who jolly well ought to be studied at school by virtue of the quality and intelligence and depth of their writing. And I certainly don’t believe in the modern anything-goes approach to teaching novels to children in school where they’re served up in gobbets of “text” (whole books being considered too challenging for the Xbox generation) and where literary merit is thought of less importance than “relevance” or “accessibility”.

All I mean is that once you’ve had a reasonable grounding in sufficient “proper” literature to form your taste, you should never again read a book out of duty.

Er.

Okay, middle first. I’m with him on the distressing notion that a whole book is too much for kids to read; God, I hope there aren’t many schools doing that. But. But.

Dead, White, European, and Male. The blithe assumption that they’ve got a majority share on “quality and intelligence and depth.” Gyah. I won’t even waste space on arguing that one; you all can do that for yourselves.

The end; the end is where I start talking back to my monitor. The idea that you should form your taste by reading “proper” literature. That literary merit (as judged by, I presume, highly-educated White European Males) should be our primary criterion for handing books to kids — because “relevance” and “accessibility” are silly little concerns, not something we should be wasting their time on.

How the hell does he expect anybody to learn to love reading, with that approach? How does an education in which you’re forced to read books out of duty incline anybody to go on reading them when the duty is removed?

A couple of months ago, I finally managed to articulate one of the things that bothered me about high school English lit classes: I think they force-feed students lots of things the students have no particular reason to understand or care about, and they do it because this is the last chance society has to make you read those books. So who cares if Death of a Salesman is about a guy decades ago having a mid-life crisis and you’re a sixteen-year-old barely aware that traveling salesmen once existed? Who cares if you have any reason to find Willy Loman’s pain sympathetic or even comprehensible? You’ll read it because we think you should do so before you die, and once you graduate our chance to enforce that is gone.

I don’t think any power in the ‘verse could have made me like that play, but I’ve got a tidy little list of authors I should give a second chance, because I might enjoy them now that I’m ready for them.

But I formed my taste by reading books I liked, books I cared about. It probably isn’t the taste Mr. Dellingpole thinks I should have; it’s okay for me not to read Updike, but probably less okay if the reason I’m not reading Updike is that I’m reading George R. R. Martin. But I submit that quality, intelligence, and depth exist as much in one’s interaction with a book as they do in the text itself: all the literary brilliance in the world doesn’t matter if my eyes are glazing over as I turn the pages. You want to know how I learned close reading? By obsessing over Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books and piecing together the fragments of prophecy and foreshadowing scattered through them. And it’s entirely possible I never would have become an alert enough reader to survive Dorothy Dunnett had I not gone through those baby steps first. But if somebody had convinced me I ought to be spending my time on Zadie Smith instead of Jordan, it’s also possible I would have never picked up Dunnett in the first place — or, y’know, other books in general.

If I were in charge of high school curricula, you know what? Literary merit would not be my overriding concern. I would set out to give kids books they might enjoy, and then once they’re engaged, teach them how to pay attention to what they’re reading. Everything else can follow from there, because once you’ve done that, the chances of there being an “everything else” get a lot higher.

It’s a fine irony when Mr. Dellingford decries readers who pick up literary books only out of a sense of obligation — while also telling us we should obligate kids to do just that.

for the psych folks

yhlee got me thinking about this one by linking to Harry Harlow — if I needed to read up on the social and emotional development of children, what names should I be looking for?

Specifically, the story situation I’m working with involves children raised from birth in what amounts to an orphanage: professional caretakers (well-meaning ones, not Dickensian sadists), but no parents as such, and the children have to depend on each other for affection. I’d like to know what effects that would generally have on their behavior, and also what kinds of practices the Powers That Be might institute to keep the kids from growing up too warped. (Would it help if they slept in dormitory arrangements, at least until a certain age? Etc.)

I’ll be asking my psych-major husband, too, but until he gets home from work, you guys are it. πŸ™‚

Edited to add: I’ve read enough to come across Bowlby and Ainsworth, but I’m a) looking for more recent models and b) trying to work out the behavior of an adult character raised in such a situation; the specific behavior of toddlers is of less interest to me.

small favors

It isn’t actually a good thing that some confusion on my publisher’s end means my copy-edited manuscript isn’t here yet, but as it turns out, I’m just as glad; being dilated at the eye doctor’s renders me more or less useless for anything that involves reading. I’m managing this post, but it’s hard, and to read print I pretty much have to take off my glasses and hold the page two inches from my nose.

And my current Netflix haul is all subtitled, natch.

Today’s kind of shot, I’m afraid.

rereading myself

My copy-edited manuscript is expected to arrive tomorrow, and so I spent much of today re-reading In Ashes Lie.

I’m pleased to report that I like it, after all.

You’d think that would go without saying. But I spent so long head-down in this book, and so much of that time under a series of unpleasant stressors, that I truly lost my perspective on it. It’s the longest book I’ve ever written by a margin of nearly twenty thousand words, and approximately 87% more plotty than its closest competitors, which meant I had a difficult time holding the entire thing in my head at once; by the time I finished revisions, I was making changes half-blind, trusting to well-trained instinct that what I was doing would actually work. For all I knew, I was creating a Frankenstein monster of a book. But now, with the respite of having not looked at the thing for over two months, I find that — while there are some rough edges around those last-minute changes — on the whole, the thing works.

(Even the sentences, mostly. I can pay close attention to those in short stories, but in novels they tend to happen on autopilot, while my brain wrestles with plot and character and so on. Especially in a book like this. My autopilot, however, has gotten much better these last few years.)

Don’t get me wrong: I still don’t ever want to wrestle again with the fire-breathing hydra that is seventeenth-century English politics, and I still think this book deserves its moniker of “the Beast.” But that’s the voice of the months spent writing it, not the voice of the result. I don’t love it in the same way I love Midnight Never Come — no two books are ever the same — but I honestly believe Ashes has both Giant Spectacle and character moments that far surpass the best I was able to pull out for its predecessor. (The whole “burning down London” thing helped with the former.) It is a book I can be proud of.

And that two-month respite means I (hopefully) have the will to slog through the CEM, which is my last chance to catch any errors, polish those rough edges, and fix the sentences the autopilot did a less-than-spectacular job on. The production department appears to allot the same amount of time for copy-editing regardless of book length, so I’ll have to stick to a pretty rigorous schedule to get it done. But I’m actually looking forward to starting, at least.

(Ask me again in a week how much fun I’m having.)

What’s awesome?

Getting a new computer.

What’s not so awesome?

Suffering a hard drive failure after less than a week.

At least Vista alerted me to the disk error and got me to back up the files I had changed or moved since shifting everything over, so I didn’t lose any data. And I don’t have to ship anything anywhere; a technician’s supposed to be coming by within the week to install the new hard drive.

But GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.