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.

back to the recs

In the vein of “writing-related program activites,” I’m trying to catch up with my book recs. I’ve read a bunch of good things lately, so I’m going to try to post one each day this week. May not succeed, but hey, it’s a goal.

Today’s rec, therefore, is Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi. Fun and funny military SF. The short form of the rec is, I picked the book up to read five pages and see what I thought of it, and a few hours later I’d finished the whole thing. Which is very nearly the best recommendation I can give any book.

the full-time writerly life: daily edition

So, time management.

With conventional office jobs and the like, your time is structured for you. Bosses expect you to show up at a certain time and stay until a certain time, or at least to do X hours per week. Some full-time writers, I know, treat their self-employment the same way — but as I said elsewhere re: “dressing for work,” I suspect that many of them used to be in office jobs. My employment has generally been irregular; classes provided scattered points of fixity in my schedule, but the rest of my work (reading, papers, grading) was built around deadlines, so I tended to do it whenever, so long as I got it done in time.

Which is my lead-in to saying: what will I do with myself all day?

I said in my last F-TWL post that one thing I won’t apologize for is my hours. I only got my alarm clock plugged in last night — I needed a power strip in the bedroom; it isn’t just that I couldn’t be bothered — and I may start using it again, so I can regularly wake up at 11. (Otherwise there’s the occasional day when apparently my body decides it needs to keep me unconscious until after noon. On the one hand, maybe it’s right to do so, but on the other . . . even I think that’s a little ridiculous.) I wake up swiftly, in terms of being able to get out of bed, but I’m not good for much right after that. Takes a while for my brain to warm up. So my routine after getting out of bed involves spending an hour or so checking e-mail, reading blogs, etc. Which isn’t as much of a time-waster as it sounds; true, the Internets are full of procrastination, but this is my best route to random information I wouldn’t think to go looking for. Last night yhlee sent me off into the wilds of Wikipedia, reading about ocular heterochromia. This is on the list of “not to be apologized for”: I’m feeding my brain.

So while I’m not going to pin things to precise blocks of time, the general pattern is wake up, spend an hour dinking around, have lunch. After that, it’s more fluid. I figure my afternoons will be for some combination of domestic duties and writing-related program activities. Sometimes I’m in a mood to knock off a bunch of business e-mails or update my website or read for research or send out short stories. Sometimes I’m in a mood to organize a closet or go to the grocery store or sew curtains. Whatever I’m motivated for, that’s what I’ll do, unless there’s something else on a pressing deadline. Because really, that’s the great virtue of a flexible schedule: you don’t necessarily have to make yourself do something you just have no will for today. (Eventually you may have to. But I’ve learned to trust myself that I will generally grow the motivation in time; ergo, I am better off not pushing it unless I have to.)

Around about 5 p.m., I start thinking about the end of kniedzw‘s work day. If I got up early to drive him to work, I consequently have to go pick him up again; otherwise, I’m waiting for him to show up. I’m treating this as a distinct block of time because one thing I would like to start doing is cook; I feel like I don’t have much excuse beyond lack of enthusiasm and practice for making meals that involve actual preparation. So I can be doing anything that’s compatible with cooking dinner. (Do I expect myself to make a real meal every day? No. Baby steps, here. If I’m making “turn the following raw components into food” meals twice a week to start with, that will be substantial progress.)

In the evening, it’s more kick-back-and-relax time. Reading and/or watching of things, probably, though I’m looking into starting up some martial arts class, that would presumably fall in here. But in general, activities that don’t involve me closing my office door and ignoring kniedzw. He objects if I do that too much.

And then there’s late at night, which is when I will get the writing done. (So yes, the basic “work” part of my workday comes at the end.) If I feel inspired to tackle it in the afternoon, then by all means, bring on the keyboard; but if I haven’t done it earlier, this is the one really scheduled thing in my day. Because if I’m not putting words down on a regular basis, then I ain’t really a writer, am I?

I have more to say on my writing expectations for a given day, but I think that will fit better into the macro edition of my schedule. I’m posting about these things mostly for my own benefit, really, to work through them in my own mind and have a record of my plan, but I figure at least a few of you might find it helpful.

It’s raining right now.

Like, actual water falling from the sky.

. . . I now live in a place where this is an event worthy of comment.

In other words, winter is coming — but not George R. R. Martin oh my god the Others are going to come over the Wall and kill everybody winter; just Bay Area “okay, time for the year’s precipitation” winter. I’m living in wet season/dry season territory now, and this is the first rain I’ve seen since moving here.

In totally unrelated news, Monster House is kind of an awesome movie.

the full-time writerly life, pt. 1

So, I am technically a full-time writer now.

I say “technically” because I need to get in touch with some folks back at IU and handle the wrap-up for my master’s there. But the only thing paying me any money these days is writing, so that’s the only actual job I have. Ergo, I need to figure out how to structure my life to make this thing work.

And because we live in the twenty-first century, the Age of the Internet, of course I’m going to blog all about it.

Expect more of these posts. I’m not sure how many, or how often; I have at least three I want to make, of which this is the first. Before I talk about structure, I want to talk about Things I Won’t Apologize For.

A while back, I posted on SF Novelists about “Writing as Work” — about the reasons why it’s hard to view this as an actual job. The corollary there is that I feel this stupid impulse to apologize for some of the things I do, because they don’t fit the standard model of what work ought to be like. I think it’s fair to say that the first thing I need to do is jettison that impulse, and accept the fact that this is my job, and this is how it goes.

So:

1. I won’t apologize for the hours I keep. You know what? My brain turns on real good at about 10 p.m., and depending on how I’m feeling, keeps rolling until about 3 a.m. Not just in terms of creativity; heck, I have evidence my hand-eye coordination is better then, too. But it’s the creativity and discipline that matters here. There is no point in trying to fight that, not when I don’t have to. So yes: on days when I decide I don’t need the car and therefore don’t drive kniedzw to work, or all the time once we get our transportation sorted out, I sleep in until 11 a.m. or so. I refuse to feel like that’s lazy. It’s just me getting a good night’s sleep after a hard night’s work.

2. I won’t apologize for reading, or anything else that feeds my brain. In fact, when I’m done with this post, I’m probably going to go downstairs and curl up with Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s A Companion to Wolves. Because that? Is work. It gets me thinking about the story I want to write, and it keeps me aware of what’s going on in my field. If I read nonfiction, same deal. Even TV and movie-watching, in moderation, fit this bill. As long as I’m being mentally active about it, not just a mindless slug — as long as I’m turning it around and applying it to the words I produce — it’s a necessary part of the job. Not me slacking off.

3. I won’t apologize for “being lame.” By this I mean something very specific. It happens less at the moment, because I haven’t really launched Project Get A Social Life yet, but this happened all the time in Boston and Bloomington: it’s Friday or Saturday night, and I have the option to go do something social, but I decide to stay home and write. Sometimes because I have a deadline I have to meet — but sometimes just because I feel like it. I have a story I want to be writing. And then I feel like I should apologize because there’s something wrong with wanting to work. You know what? There isn’t. I have a job I love. And if it’s on a roll, I’m glad to hop on board, even if it means passing up something “more fun.”

Those are all the ones I can think of at the moment, but there may be more. In fact, I welcome additions in comments. From writer-friends especially, but frankly, any of you who find yourselves in a non-traditional relationship with your working schedule. What kinds of things do you not apologize for?

grrrr

Judging by my progress so far tonight, I have not yet found the hole that noveling buried my story mojo in.

That, or having to consult Panlexicon, the OED, or a Latin dictionary — worse case scenario, all three — every sentence or so is killing my forward progress.

Probably both.

I should just write the damn story and worry about the language later, but I hear blood vessels rupturing in all the prose-stylist writers of my acquaintance, at the thought that these two things are separable. Really, I should just write the damn story and give up on the stylistic experiment I’m trying to carry out . . . but where’s the fun in that?

Can anybody recommend a translation of Beowulf that sounds as much like the original as possible? I don’t want accessibility here; I want the linguistic knack I had back when I was translating pages of Old Norse every week, for making my English flow in different patterns. But my Norse is too rusty, and this is supposed to be Anglo-Saxon anyway. Any Anglo-Saxon text would work, I suppose; I just keep turning to Beowulf because it’s the only one I know.

three kinds of fanfic

So I’m trying to feed my brain for a story I want to write, that requires me to be jazzed up for gritty pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon goodness. Ergo, one thing I’m doing is watching lots of adaptations of Beowulf. And it occurs to me: thanks, perhaps, to the nature of the poem (which cannot be ported into cinema without changes; it would make a terrible film as written), the films I’ve seen have all taken distinct liberties with the text. As a result, I find that I can, without much hesitation, classify all three* of them as different varieties of Beowulf fanfic.

In order of release:

1. The 13th Warrior — Crossover fic. It’s Beowulf meets ibn Fadlan! Crichton apparently read the journal of an Arab traveler who met some Norsemen on the Volga river, and decided to use that as his connection point for splicing the Arab into the Beowulf story. Which probably looked utterly nonsensical to the many people out there who have no idea who ibn Fadlan was, and thought they were chucking an Arab in just for laughs. (Incidentally, the alteration of Grendel came about from Crichton imagining a relic population of Neandertals living into more modern times. I think Eaters of the Dead may be my favorite book of his, actually.)

2. Beowulf and Grendel — Sympathy for the devil, or whatever formal name it may have among fanfic writers. Grendel attacks Heorot because Hrothgar killed Grendel-Dad back when Grendel was a kid. Grendel-Dad was killed because, well, he took Hrothgar’s fish — I think that’s what Hrothgar said near the end of the film — and anyway, he’s a troll, a big hairy lug who can’t really speak, so that’s all the justification anybody needs. This story also sticks in an utterly non-canonical character, the prophetess Selma, for the purposes of illuminating its chosen theme. (Which would be annoying as hell if she didn’t get such good dialogue.)

3. Beowulf (the Zemeckis/Avary/Gaiman one) — Textual interrogation. This is the kind of story where the fanficcers screenwriters looked at the original and started asking questions. Why does Grendel attack Heorot, but not hurt Hrothgar? Why does Beowulf bring back no evidence of having killed Grendel’s mother? Why does the narrative then leapfrog over decades and end with some random dragon? Then they invented their own reasons to plug what, from the viewpoint of modern fiction, look like narrative holes.

For the record, I think The 13th Warrior still stands as my favorite, but oddly — and in direct contravention of general opinion, I think — Beowulf and Grendel comes second. They filmed in Iceland, which I think claims the Oscar for Best Supporting Landmass**, and they do a good job with the muddy, shabby nature of even kingly life back then. More importantly, it’s got the kind of smart-ass lines I like in my Norse/Anglo-Saxon/whatever epics — delivered in a veritable Babel of accents, I might add, ranging from Selma’s American to Beowulf’s Scottish and on from there. The Zemeckis Beowulf, sadly, just didn’t engage me, despite the surge of glee I felt when Gaiman described their desired aesthetic as being “a kind of Dark Ages Trainspotting, full of mead and blood and madness.” I never warmed to the motion-capture CGI or felt it justified its usage, and the rampant*** phallic imagery got to be a bit much.

Time to go read the poem, I think, and try to poke this story idea into becoming an actual story. I need to figure out who dies at the beginning; without that, I don’t have much to go on.

* “Three” because I’m not including the science-fictional Beowulf movie with Christopher Lambert. I saw it years ago, and all I remember is that it was terrible enough that I don’t want to see it again.

** First awarded to New Zealand for The Lord of the Rings.

*** Yes, I chose that word on purpose.

I guess I won’t throw this one back in

Anyone desiring a reason to say “awwww, squish” should be aware that today is my first wedding anniversary. One year in, and kniedzw and I have not had cause to kill, divorce, or run away from each other. We’re off to a good start.

. . . seriously, he’s just as wonderful a person as he was before I married him. Which is all I think I can really ask for.

close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and honorable mentions

I have not yet achieved my ambition of getting a story into a year’s best anthology, but “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” received an Honorable Mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. It also got a nod in one of the introductions, during the discussion of On Spec. I had my fingers crossed for this one, I must admit; I love all my children equally, blah blah blah, but “Nine Sketches” is one of my favorites.

(It’s actually my second HM, though. “Shadows’ Bride” got one a couple of years ago — and I can’t remember if I mentioned this, but Pseudopod has picked up audio rights for it, so you’ll get a chance to hear it some day.)

Thanks to jimhines for letting me know I could search the HM list through Amazon, rather than having to get off my duff and go to the bookstore already. Yes, the post-novel ennui+cold continues, and I am a lazy slug.

And congrats to everyone else who got a nod! Share your good news here.

best spam header evar

According to one “Redepenning Chiver,” he (or she? or it?) has a message for me re: “Crime-fighting cat now trying therapy.”

. . . anybody inspired to turn that into a story has my blessing.