I need a hobby.

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.)

Hee!

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.

Hah!

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.

I guess I’ll have to entertain *myself*.

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.

More icon love needed

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.

collected writing news

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 . . .

more short story whining

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.

medical advances, and the missing thereof

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.

Welcome to Fantasyland

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.”

I haven’t done a meme in a while . . . .

-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.

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.