Victory of Eagles

I’ve already recommended Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, starting with His Majesty’s Dragon, so the only thing I’ll leave outside the cut is that boy howdy am I enjoying this series, and why don’t we have book six yet?

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voting rights

Maybe gollumgollum can explain this one to me, since she’s studied the U.S. prison system.

I read a post recently by a guy who was convicted of a felony some years ago, did his time, got out. He apparently volunteers for political work regularly, “get out the vote” efforts — because he can’t vote. And I think that was the first time I discovered that felons in prison are not permitted to vote, and depending on the state they live in, cannot vote for some variable amount of time after they’ve been released.

I don’t understand why.

I know that our legal system is based on a principle of punishing offenders by stripping them of various freedoms and rights. On the whole, I prefer that to the principle of subjecting them to physical torment, say, or other options societies have tried throughout the centuries. But I’m not sure I get, let alone agree with, stripping them of the right to vote. Maybe it’s because I view that as a responsibility as much as a privilege. Maybe it’s because our entire prison system is kind of broken to begin with. But I just don’t get it. It isn’t like saying convicted pedophiles shouldn’t be allowed to live within five miles of an elementary school; I doubt these felons used their voting rights to commit their crimes.

Once you’ve done your time, what conceivable argument is there for not being allowed to participate in democracy again?

(What argument is there for not being allowed to participate while doing time? Are we afraid somebody will organize a prisoner voting bloc to pass some law favorable to them?)

This particular story had a happy ending; the guy in question had just discovered that in his state, he was in fact eligible to vote again. There was joy radiating from my screen, I swear. This is a guy who desperately cares about his country, who wants to do everything he can to be a part of it again. Denying ex-felons the right to vote, as far as I can see, only serves to ostracize them further, and hinder them from becoming productive members of society again.

The Littlest White Belt

I was good about going to the gym in 2007. In 2008, not so much. I managed it some of the time for the first four months; then I was out of the country for May (albeit on trips that involved much walking), and then it was the summer, with the moving and all, and I really didn’t have the time or energy for much of anything in the way of exercise.

Since last Monday, I’ve been to four karate classes and a fencing practice.

To quote my Scandinavian heritage — uff da.

I didn’t plan to dive in headfirst. It’s just that in karate, you pay by the month, not by the lesson, so it behooves me to go to all three practices each week if I can (and I really don’t have much excuse to say I can’t). And I’ve been trying to get my butt up to the city for fencing practice these last two months, so when it turned out I was actually going to manage it this week, well, “but I’ve already worked out a lot lately” didn’t seem like a very good reason to stay home.

Sheer bloody exhaustion might count, though.

On the other hand, if I can keep this up, I’m going to be fit in no time flat. Karate may be only an hour each time, but it’s all-levels, which means that tonight I was chased across the floor in sparring by a brown belt and three black belts. (Retreating is something I’m very good at.) And fencing is technically only for an hour, but if last Sunday is any example, I don’t have to worry much about the heavy fighters showing up and kicking us out of our field; I think it goes until people quit. All of it very acceptable as cardio work, too. Four or more hours of that a week? Yeah, I call that working out.

(Just don’t ask whether I’m really thinking about eventually taking up kobudo — weapons — twice a week, too.)

two links: one serious, one not

I’ll give you the serious link first, because I want you to actually pay attention to it.

Jim Hines is auctioning off an ARC of his upcoming Charlie’s Angels-style fairy tale novel, The Stepsister Scheme. Which is fun news in and of itself; I very much enjoyed his goblin novels, and this one sounds even more my kind of thing. But much more important than the ARC is the reason it’s being auctioned: Jim will be donating the money to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The more people bid, the more NCADV benefits, and also the more Jim tosses up in the way of prizes; with the numbers up over $100, he’s already promised to include other signed books in the package. I know we live in cash-strapped times (at least those of us currently shackled to the American economy), but if you’re looking for an excuse to benefit a good cause, this is a fun one.

Speaking of fun, now the silly link: book covers, redesigned to be truthful. I can’t remember if this is the same guy that brought us the hilarious Choose Your Own Adventure covers — I think it might be — but anyway, go see staples of the genre advertised with honesty.

the full-time writerly life: the big picture

So what do I do with myself all year?

(I figure this is the biggest scale on which I can usefully address the question of how I will be organizing my life. Once we start talking about multiple years at a time, too many of the variables are out of my hands.)

Historically, the answer has been that I write a novel every summer. I missed a couple in there, and sometimes I wrote one during the winter, but on the whole, novels have been summer things, because I’ve been in school.

This has also, to some extent, dictated my pace: it takes me about three to four months to complete a draft. At 1K a day, which is my standard pace, I get about 30K per month, so 3-4 months is enough to produce an average-size fantasy novel. In practice, that’s usually an under-estimate, though I miss days, I treat 1K as a daily minimum rather than an average, so over time I build up a margin of safety. I also tend to speed up as I get closer to the end of the book.

I think it’s fair, then, to divide the year into thirds: three four-month periods. It’ll do as a rough guideline, anyway.

Here’s where it gets fuzzier, because I don’t actually know what I’ll be doing for the next couple of years. In Ashes Lie is the second book of a two-book contract, so other than the revisions (which I’m working on right now) and the rest of its production process, I’m not under contract for anything at the moment. I have some educated guesses as to what I’ll be doing next, but no guarantees yet, and so I’m going to restrict myself to more general terms here.

I can certainly write a novel a year. I was able to do that even while in school full-time; I can do it now. So that’s one third of the year dedicated to writing a novel. What about the other two-thirds?

After years of having nothing much in the way of YA ideas in my head, I’m starting to grow some. So it’s entirely possible I’ll find myself publishing for both adults and teens in the future. Which works out well: a YA novel is maybe half the length of an adult one, depending. Can I write a novel and a half each year? I think so. (My average while in college was slightly better than that, in fact.) I even think I can handle prepping for an adult book — research and so on — while writing a YA. So my ideal yearly schedule would have me writing the YA in the four months preceding the block in which I’m working on the adult novel.

But of course we have to figure in deadlines, which will be dictated by my publisher’s schedule for putting things out. My own order and timing will have to shift to meet reality on the ground.

What about the last third of the year? Odds are high — one might even say certain — that I’ll be revising and copy-editing and page-proofing during that time, since it will follow on the delivery of one book or another. But that isn’t four months of daily work. And while I may be prepping for the next book, it’s hard to imagine that being a full workload, either.

And that’s fine, because I need some time to play. My hope is that the remaining portion of the year, the “vacation” in which I am not drafting a contracted novel, will be spent on playing with new ideas. It’s rare for me to produce a book from a dead halt; usually I’ve got anywhere from a few thousand to forty thousand words already squirreled away in a file by the time I officially sit down to write that book. (Okay, 40K has only happened once. But 10K, sure.) So the last third is for spec projects, things I’m not contracted for but am maybe interested in pitching, or even just stuff I want to do for the hell of it, with no certain expectation of what I’d do with that book if I had it. I’ll be a lot happier if I have a stable of such things, so that when a given contract ends and an editor says, “what would you like to do next?,” I have a bunch of little saplings ready to be turned into full-grown trees.

So the thirds are, in adjustable order: Write YA while prepping adult. Write adult while processing YA for publication. Write whatever I feel like while processing adult and prepping YA.

I think that could work. I like the sound of it, anyway, because it allows me to keep up a book-a-year schedule in both fields while still having some time for work-fun.

We’ll see what happens when I try to put this into practice.

It annoys me when a movie promises me (speculative) genre elements and then fails to deliver them.

more recs

Yeah, so I totally didn’t manage a recommendation every day last week, but I’m still plugging along. This time it’s Mary Doria Russell’s lovely “Jesuits meet aliens” religious SF novel The Sparrow.

Project Rooftop

This is old, but I just came across it last night, and since apparently Project Runway just had its finale, the timing is appropriate. Seems that a group of people (backed by Zeus Comics in Dallas) organized a contest to redesign Wonder Woman’s costume, inviting artists to submit images showcasing their ideas.

Each one has commentary from the judges, including Gail Simone, who has gotten a fair bit of respect for the work she’s done on the title. What I like about reading the comments is seeing the kinds of considerations the judges keep in mind, which range all over the board. Quality of the art, reproducibility for comic-book use, classical style, use of Wonder Woman icons and motifs, but also things like whether any real woman could move in the outfit without being chafed or eviscerated by her own clothing. And they’re broad-minded; they give props to a number of designs that aren’t remotely appropriate for standard-issue Wonder Woman, but would be great for an Elseworlds or historical or manga-style character, or one of the side characters from the series.

The closest I’ve come to reading a Wonder Woman comic is seeing her in Kingdom Come, since I’m not so much with the superhero titles. But I found this fun to look over nonetheless.

Narrative tropes that annoy me, #17

Characters who automatically, unfairly, and without much in the way of supporting evidence, put the worst possible spin on Our Hero’s actions and blame him for whatever bad thing has just happened.

I’ve read two books lately with that trope. There better not be a third one any time soon, or that book will probably get dropped and not picked up again, regardless of what else it may be doing right.

the full-time writerly life: the work week

I’m late posting this one because Project Get A Social Life involved going to my first karate class this evening, at the dojo where kniedzw has recently started attending and my future sister-in-law is a black belt/sensei.

So, my schedule on a larger scale. The next thing to talk about is the week. When I’m noveling, there is no “work week;” I write every single day, unless something prevents me from doing so, because if I don’t a) I lose momentum and b) it’ll take me even longer to finish the damn book. This is a schedule that functions pretty well, but it gets depressing on occasion: after two months of writing every single day, I know I have another month or two of that to look forward to before I can take a break. “No time off for good behavior” is how I usually start characterizing it, around about month #3. And that does suck a bit.

When not noveling, my schedule has heretofore been much more sporadic. Write every day, many advice-givers tell you, but the truth is that I don’t. I write a short story when one is sufficiently developed in my head to go, or play around with new novel ideas, but you need to put this all in the context of the academic year; novels were what I did during the summer, and the other nine months I at least tried to make other things my priority. (You may deduce my incomplete success, which is to say increasing failure, by my departure from graduate school.) But if this is my full-time job, then it makes sense to try and be more productive.

I figure, then, that I should make use of this concept of “work week.” Monday through Friday, with weekends off. If I’m not noveling under deadline, then how’s about some relaxation time? I may write on the weekend, of course; see the first F-TWL post for my refusal to apologize for that. But only if I feel like it. Other jobs give people time off, after all. I deserve some, too.

Monday through Friday, though, my goal is to put down at least some words. The daily novel quota is a thousand; I’d like to shoot for five hundred in the downtime, at least to start with. Five hundred a day for two weeks (with weekends off) would give me a decent-sized short story. Higher productivity would be great, but baby steps; I think I’d rather ease into my workload, rather than leaping headfirst for a big target and finding out the hard way that it’s too much. (That’s how I crashed and burned on the first novel I tried to finish, in high school. Not sure how much I was trying to write per day, but it was a lot more than a thousand. No great loss, mind you; that was an apprentice idea, cobbled together before I leveled up and started having ideas worth my time.)

I figure that goal is flexible. If I spend a day revising a story — real revision; not just rearranging the commas — that’s real work, too. So is world-building, if I get on a kick for that. Maybe I don’t need to put down words those days. But I should still try, because when all is said and done, the production of words is the baseline requirement for this job, without which none of the rest of it matters very much.

parliamentary question

The short story is going better, but by “better” I mean I now have pliers to pull the teeth with, rather than just my bare fingers. So I’ve decided, screw it, I’m going back to polishing the novel while I wait for my edit letter.

To that end: are any of my readers here familiar with parliamentary procedure for the House of Commons? Things like, what phrases do they use to summon the Commons up to meet with the Lords (assuming that still happens), and how do they announce a division?

(The nice thing about the UK Parliament is, I can with reasonable certainty assume these details haven’t really changed in three hundred and fifty years . . . I mean, they still drag the Speaker to his chair, and a Speaker hasn’t been murdered or executed in centuries.)

So, yeah. If you’re enough of a British political geek to answer those kinds of questions, let me know, and I’ll give you the list.

Yesterday was crazy-busy, and I totally spaced on posting a recommendation. Have it now: Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear’s bloody-minded Norse troll-fighting animal companion fantasy critique, A Companion to Wolves.

recommendation #2

Next up to bat: The Magicians and Mrs. Quent, by Galen Beckett. Nutshell description is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell meets a whole host of nineteenth-century literature in an alternate England that, now that I think about it, reminds me weirdly of George R. R. Martin.

Which should send at least a few of you leaping to follow that link. <g>

my kind of outline

I know some writers who outline their novels . . . after the first draft is written. They go back and look over what they’ve got, outlining it to help themselves figure out what exactly they’re trying to do, and where it doesn’t yet work. And it came to me just recently that, you know, I do the same thing.

It’s called making a soundtrack.

I talked about this a bit with Midnight Never Come, which is where the practice jumped from RPGs to novels. It started as a mood-music thing, but when you think about it, sitting down to figure out what characters and events deserve songs, and what kinds of songs they require, is basically like creating a musical outline of the novel. Trying to make my choices, I find myself pondering what mood a scene is trying to communicate — is it more ominous or mournful? Is that thing that happens an end-punch to a sequence, or a turning point halfway through it? I’m mostly working from film scores, which are great for this kind of thing; I can be finicky about the shape of the songs I pick, trying to find one whose contours match the events I want it to describe.

Those are my major requirements in picking a song, but there’s a secondary game I sometimes play, hidden beneath the surface. I used a track from Henry V for this particular thing, so if I use something else from the same score over there, will that create an appropriate thematic connection . . . I end up pondering linkages in an unexpected way. And there’s a wealth of ironies hidden in some of the source titles, too; I don’t pick songs based on their original names, but when those line up, it amuses me. (Two non-spoiler examples: Lune’s song this time around is “One Mistress, No Master” from Elizabeth, and the High Court of Justice, which put Charles I on trial, is “The King Is Dead” from Ennio Morricone’s Hamlet score.)

Oh, and then there are the utterly obscure musical in-jokes from Memento. This book bears only a distant relationship to the game — it pretty much consists of the Great Fire being more than just a bunch of flames — but I re-purposed several pieces from that soundtrack to appropriate effect. I mean, if a song is good for the Black Death, why not use it for a later outbreak of the plague? Not that 99.99% of the world will ever know those connections are there.

Some of it, though, is annoyingly difficult. I don’t know why, but I have a devil of a time picking songs for certain characters, protagonists especially. I’m not happy with my current choices for either Antony or Jack, though Lune’s is good. (It’s like trying to pick for the Merrimans in Memento. I never liked about three-quarters of my choices there, but they were the best I could do.) Maybe it’s just that characters are too complex in my head to be reduced to a piece of music — I don’t know.

Anyway, this gives me something to do while I wait for my edit letter. Though I’d be making faster progress if my computer would stop choking on iTunes . . . .

I’m just full of postiness today. (Except for the two-hour span where I PTFO’d on the couch. I forgot to include napping in the list of things that I sometimes do in the afternoon or early evening. Though two hours was particularly appalling.)

Anyway, if you’ve been looking for a nutshell description of IAL that tells you more than “Stuart faerie disaster novel,” there is now a small blurb on my site. I’m not fully satisfied with it, since the Civil War and its surrounding troubles are an ongoing concern in the book, not just backstory, but that’s the way the blurb came out, so that’s what you get for now. It’ll do as a placeholder, anyway, until we get some actual cover copy written.

thinky thoughts, Indian edition

Vandana Singh is currently guest-blogging over at Ecstatic Days, and she linked to this piece on the navarasas, or nine emotions — “emotions” being a simplification for a concept described more fully in that piece, since it includes both the causes as well as the effects of feelings. It’s a neat structure, I think, and in reading through it, I found myself placing each rasa in the context of the Bollywood movies I’ve seen, since that’s the most familiar Indian frame I have. (I have heard some Indian music, and read the Ramayana, but those aren’t fresh enough in my memory.)

In particular, I like adbhuta, which makes me think of the “sense of wonder” we often say is at the heart of SF and fantasy. The description given there is more focused on the mystical, but I can easily imagine it stretching to cover the wonder SF evokes with its technological flights — as well as things like human beings walking on the moon. Those are, after all, part of “the world and all its wonders.”

This makes me want to build a whole Western genre system around the rasas. Speculative fiction would be the genre of adbhuta, while romance, clearly, is the genre of shringara. You’d get two types of horror for bhibatsya and bhaya — splatter and thriller — hasya for comedies, which don’t get their own genre in the bookstore but certainly do in the theatre . . . I’d probably put litfic with karuna. Adventure fiction, drawn from across traditional genre boundaries, would be veera. That leaves me with rowdra and shanta, and the latter may not have a genre, unless it’s self-help books. (Which sounds more derogatory than I intend. They just set out to evoke shanta, as fiction generally doesn’t.) Not sure what to do with rowdra. Apocalyptic fiction? I’m not sure where mysteries would generally end up, either. Scattered across many, perhaps, dependent on whether they set out to scare you (bhaya) or make you curious (adbhuta) or what.

It’s an interesting lens, anyway. And I like the adbhuta connection, at least.