mark

Three parts revised. Three days’ worth of London burned down. One hundred twenty thousand, three hundred and thirty-six words.

I’m nearly done.

Observations: I have lots of great epic battle music. “Holocaust” not only was a word back then, but originally meant a sacrificial offering that has been completely burnt, which is a fabulous thumbs-up to me using it here. I am spoiled by the internets, getting mad at them for not giving me a high-enough-resolution image of Hollar’s 1658 plan of St. Paul’s Cathedral for me to clearly read where Sir Christopher Hatton’s grave monument was. (What do you mean, I have to actually go to the library? And that I can’t do so at one a.m.?) I am, however, pleased all over again by history’s obliging tendency to drop perfect bits of story in my lap. St. Faith’s was right where narrative logic says it ought to be, and I didn’t have to go at all out of my way to smash Sir Francis Walsingham’s grave.

Destroying things is fun.

(Even if I’m running out of ways to describe stuff burning without just repeating myself over and over and over again.)

random movie query

I need recommendations for a movie with a really epic fight scene in it. But the fight has to be of a specific variety: something in the “two-handed broadsword” or “double-headed axe” family. Y’know, the sort of fight where a guy plants his feet and starts whaling away at something at least twice his size with a weapon that’s at least half his size. As much as I loves me some rapier duels, or dexterous hand-to-hand throwdowns, I’m not after that kind of thing right now (and I’ve got plenty of it on my shelves anyway). We’re looking for mighty-thewed, stamina-of-an-aurochs kind of combat here, or at least as close as I can get to it.

Suggestions?

(N.B. — I would like suggestions of such scenes done well. Bonus points if the movie containing said fight doesn’t suck. I’d rather not watch crap, thanks.)

eee!

Some short story sales make you happier than others.

Back in (I think) 2006 — maybe 2005 — a friend of mine named Crystal Black presented a paper at ICFA on the visual representation of Peter Pan, specifically with regards to his apparent age. She made some comment during the course of her talk that had nothing to do with that topic, but got my brain spinning on the ending of the story, where Peter comes back and takes Wendy’s daughter Jane to the Neverland, and then after Jane gets too old he takes Margaret.

The hindbrain, source of all truly good ideas, coughed out the phrase “The Last Wendy,” and left me to play.

I got maybe a thousand words in and stalled. Normally I start at the beginning, go on until I reach the end, and then stop, making it all up as I go. In this case, I knew where I was trying to go, but I just couldn’t see how to get there. One late-night Christmas conversation with kurayami_hime prodded at the unmoving mass of stuff in my head, and a couple of weeks later I called her up to say, “hey, I think I’m trying to make this be the wrong story. What if it was this instead?”

Her response, as I recall, was something along the lines of “That’s horrible. You have to do it.”

The result is one of my favorite stories . . . which came equipped with a little problem. See, the U.S. copyright status of Peter Pan and all his related materials is a tangled, bleeding mess. I’m pretty positive my story is in the clear, but not all magazine editors see it the same way. The solution? I mailed it to Canada. On Spec, the lovely magazine that published “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” (one of my other favorite stories), has just agreed to buy it. You won’t get to see the story in print terribly soon, due to constraints on the number of U.S. authors they can publish, but it’ll be there eventually, and I don’t mind waiting. I think that’s a great home for it, and Peter Pan is firmly out of copyright in that country, so everybody wins.

But copyright or no copyright, I’d like to state publicly that I intend to donate my check from this sale to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, which controls the weird quasi-perpetual-but-not-really rights to J.M. Barrie’s works. They do good work, and I didn’t write this story for the money. I wrote it because my hindbrain latched onto some problematic points in the original and would not rest until it thrashed through them in narrative form. Secondary to that was the hope that the result could find an audience. Now that I have that, I’m happy.

(Actually, now I need to figure out some way to make my even-more-problematic Narnia story happen. I wonder if that’s out of copyright in Canada?)

morning linkery

(Quick question: I’ve told Livejournal that I’m in the Pacific time zone, via my profile, but it keeps time-stamping my posts for Eastern. Where do I fix that?)

A variety of amusements from my morning webcrawl . . . .

First, behind the cut: one of the more original book-promotional videos I’ve seen. Successful? Who knows. But the Little League team and the retirement home folks are brilliant. (Via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.)

Embrace your reviews!

what we like to call a marathon

Over 4K words today (all of the London Go Boom variety), and over 8K of revision. We’re nearing the home stretch.

This book feels more raw to me than Midnight Never Come, in a way I find hard to describe. It’s not simply that I think I’m being meaner to my characters — though that’s part of it. (I think Irrith is the only viewpoint character I haven’t done anything horrible to. I wonder if I can fix that before the end?) Partly it’s that I think the politics are less polished; whether it’s a genuine difference of time period or a result of the rough edges being worn off the Elizabethan era, the seventeenth century just feels messier, with more sharp corners sticking out. And I’m really going all-out on the explosions, which no doubt contributes in its own way.

Raw. That’s the only word I can find for it.

112K of book at present, with two days of Fire yet to be added.

In which the moving castle moves house

Castle N 3.0 is up and running!

Well, not running. Groaning under the weight of boxes, perhaps. But our stuff is here; I’m sitting on my own couch, facing my own TV, and nothing is obviously missing, though as we unpack we may find something has gone astray. Right now, though, I ain’t worried about that.

(Unless the thing that has gone astray is the DVD player. kniedzw and I are bound and determined to be mindless couch potatoes tonight, if we can possibly manage it.)

It’ll take a while to settle in. But at least now we can start.

special landmark

I finished revising Part Two last night (in a marathon session made possible by the fact that it’s been revised once already), but here’s the real landmark:

I’ve killed a pen.

Yes, dear readers, I have taken so many notes for this novel that they have single-handedly killed a pen. The thing was new when I took it to London. But in the midst of scribbling down some details about how the wells and conduits in the City were running dry in the Fire, I noticed my ink doing the same thing. So we just took a break to walk to the store and buy a new one.

(Because I couldn’t just go to the ammo box and pick out another. Why? Because our stuff isn’t here yet. But the latest forecast is that it should be arriving tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed.)

I’m just hoping I don’t run out of notebook before I’m done. That would be very inconvenient.

BOOM.

I am up stupidly late, but I have 2325 words of Fire and — more importantly — precisely 100K of book.

There will be no LBR measurements taken here. It’s all Fire, all the time, exactly as it should be.

milestone

Revisions of Part One are done. At least in the broad, chainsaw, “this scene can just die already” sense.

Tomorrow? I start blowing shit up.

on the fourth hand . . . .

Other writing-related news:

While in Dallas, I sold “Kingspeaker” to a new magazine called Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’m really pleased by this one; I quite like that story, and am glad to see it find such a pretty home.

***

This month’s post at SF Novelists is about characterization — specifically, how being an introvert affects the way I write characters, and therefore the way people read them. (i.e not everybody will interpret the tightening of a character’s fingers on her wine-cup as a sign of growing anger.)

***

More reviews of MNC lately, but most of them are saved to my desktop, which is on a truck right now. Several negative ones, though. There may be a faint logic to seeing the negative reviews now; people who read and liked my previous work probably make up a greater percentage of those buying the new book right when it comes out, and those readers are more likely to give it a thumbs-up. Strangers to my work may come across it later, and with them it’s a toss-up as to whether they’ll like it or not.

***

I have all kinds of other writing-related program activities I want to do, but the truth is, AAL is consuming pretty much all of my spare processing cycles. So until that’s done, it’ll be pretty quiet on other fronts.

Part the Third

I’m sure you’ve all been dying to know how the novel’s going.

The answer to that is complicated. Have I been getting work done? Yes, almost every day. How many words do I have? 96,224 — which is not so much, given that I was at 86K back on the 7th. But this discrepancy comes about because I’m doing something different from usual.

As I’ve said before, I’m structuring this book so that it cuts back and forth between long sections skipping forward through the years I’m covering, and days of the Great Fire. So I wrote Part One, then Part Two, and so on, with the intent of going back to write the Fire days once I finished Part Four. This is more or less what I’m doing, but I realized that a) given the massive revision Part One needed and b) the advisability of making sure each part flowed properly into each day, when I got near the end of Part Four, I went back and started revising Part One. I’m 13K+ through that and making good progress; you would have to see it to believe just how much less it’s sucking now. (I’ve lost all perspective as to whether it’s good, but it’s definitely better.) When I finish that, I’ll write the first day, then revise Part Two and write the second day, and so on to the end.

I haven’t quite finished Part Four; it needs maybe one or two scenes, which I will have to get done before I write any Fire stuff. (The night I was supposed to tackle those, I just didn’t know what I wanted to do with them, so I went back and started revising instead.)

Some of the revision has been polishing; some has been wholesale replacement of scenes. It helps that now I know, as I did not when I wrote this, that I don’t have to stay below 110K for the whole book. Antony’s got a series of three incredibly short scenes coming up, where I all too obviously am trying to keep my word-count in check, to the detriment of the story. So expansion of existing material is the third leg of this process, and possibly the most important; only a couple of scenes have been chucked out in their entirety.

I’ve become a moderately better writer over the years, but a substantially better reviser.

Mush!

Update #2

Next up, housing.

We managed to finish packing in time for the movers’ arrival last week (though I had to abandon kniedzw to the task of handling them, since by then I was on my way to Dallas). More importantly, we managed — right before he left — to secure a sublease for our apartment, which we were on the hook for through April. Praise Be to the gods of housing, indeed. This is particularly worth noting because the subleaser we had lined up backed off at the last instant, leaving us with nothing. (I was caught somewhere between despair and murderous rage when I found that out, because I got the e-mail at 4:30 in the morning, right before we left to drive to the hospital for my father’s surgery. Can you say bad timing?) Anyway, all is well.

So now our stuff is somewhere in the Midwest, on its way here, and in the meantime we’re living at my brother’s house, which is where kniedzw has been all this summer. Our new place has a number of lovely things going for it, chief of which are the three skylights in the upstairs ceiling; combine that with big windows in the master bedroom and living room, and high ceilings and big rooms in general, and I am a happy cat with many sunbeams to nap in. (Once I have furniture instead of just a floor, that is.) My office is noticeably pink in the daytime, though, owing to the sun on the red roof tiles across the courtyard. Oh well. I can put up with pink.

Even better, it’s within walking distance of all kinds of fantabulous things. (Yes, d_aulnoy, such things do exist in California. Just not the part of it you’re living in.) After six years in a town with no Vietnamese food whatsoever, I now live within two minutes of some — most of those two minutes being spent getting out of and around my own apartment complex; if I could leap over the roof I’d be there in less than a minute. Had lunch there yesterday, and it wasn’t great, but you know what? There’s another one a block away, and more if I go looking. Yes, I am in the land of Asian Food Galore, particularly if you’re looking for Japanese. The Japanese population in San Mateo is dense enough that the restaurants don’t even have to call themselves “Royal Tokyo” or “Mr. Sushi;” they can be more obscure things like “Kaimuki” or even just “Liquid.” Y’know, like a normal restaurant, that can call itself whatever sounds nice.

Wandered on foot around downtown San Mateo for a little while this afternoon. It’s quite pleasant, and there’s Shakespeare in the Park this weekend, which always makes me look kindly on a town. (It’s Pericles, no less; this place has enough confidence in its outdoor Shakespeare to do the less-familiar plays.) The movie theatre is damned expensive, but it’s within walking distance, and it doesn’t suck like the Kerasotes monopoly in Bloomington, so hey.

More to come on this topic, I’m sure, once I actually start moving in.

First in a series

Didja miss me?

I haven’t been out of Internet access, but I’ve lacked the energy to post. Which has, of course, resulted in an incredible build-up of things I ought to or would like to post about. Rather than cramming them all in one monstrously long entry that nobody would read, I’m going to tackle one general topic at a time.

***

First off, health. As some of you know, my father went in for bypass surgery last week, and I flew home for it. He is doing very well — out of the hospital already, with only minor complications so far, knock on wood. So that’s one of my stressors deleted off the list.

Speaking of stress, though — funny story. My father gets out of surgery, I go in to see him, and come very close to passing out next to his bed. Which is odd, because I’m not generally a squeamish person, and standing in the ICU did not distress me in ways that typically result in fainting. Then I remember that I’ve been having problems with light-headedness lately, for about a week or two. When we get home that night, my mother trots out a home blood pressure cuff, in order to test a theory.

Now, I know those aren’t the most accurate things in the world, but even with a margin of error, 84/43 is kind of on the low side.

I’ve always had fairly low blood pressure; 100/60 is my usual. 84/43 is putting me in the territory of the bridesmaid who fainted at my wedding. (I suddenly understand how these things happen. And hey, add it to the list of things I can write about effectively.) Anyway, this is something I will consult a doctor about if it continues, but right now I’m curious. I mean, I thought stress was supposed to raise one’s blood pressure, not lower it. Does anybody have insight on/experience with this? Is it likely to be connected to a blood sugar issue? I’ve never had problems with hypoglycemia, but I kept testing myself with that cuff, and food most definitely affects the results.

I really don’t know what to make of this, except for a detached, intellectual interest every time my head goes kind of floaty and I feel like I’ve been hyperventilating.

So, yeah. Anybody with useful info on this matter, feel free to offer it in comments. I am, as I said, quite curious.

This?

Was not supposed to be a 4200-word night.

In fact, I think I even promised kitsunealyc that it wouldn’t be.

But, um, that promise, it got broke real good. There are just bits of story that you cannot stop in the middle of, and this turned out to be one. Not because of explosions — the usual excuse — but because I really didn’t enjoy going some of the places I had to go, and once there, I’d rather just stay and get it all done with. Suffice to say that we are at the height of the Great Plague, at this point, and I feel obscurely that I owe it to the hundred thousand Londoners who died to do everything in my power to communicate just how horrific that was.

Horrific enough that people committed suicide rather than wait for the plague to finish killing them. Horrific enough that they threw themselves into the mass graves, already wrapped in their winding-sheets, as if they were corpses before they even died.

Imagining that is not exactly fun.

4200 words for seven scenes, most of them deeply unpleasant. It’s a good thing tomorrow’s scene will be . . . not exactly enjoyable, but a breath of air after this suffocating passage, because otherwise I’d be sorely tempted to take the day off. And then perhaps another, and then moving eats me alive, and the next thing I know I’m behind schedule and out of the novel’s headspace.

I’m making good progress, at least.

Word count: 85,888
LBR quota: What do you think?
Authorial sadism: See above.

and there goes the benchmark!

Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. Tonight’s work was supposed to be a particular scene, which would take at least my 1K quota to finish.

2,411 words later, the bloody thing is done at last.

I didn’t think I would reach 80K tonight, what with being over 2K away from it. Well, hello, you novel-thing you. We’re still a long way from the end, but 80K is traditionally minimum real novel length, so the number still looks a little magical to me. Crossing that line means we’re approaching the end. (Even if it’s still 50K away — which I hope it isn’t.)

Oh, and that’s with having skipped over one bit, because I’m not sure what to put in it. Dear Merlin: no, you cannot be in this book. Please go away.

Word count: 80,277
LBR quota: Blood. And how.
Authorial sadism: The funny thing is, Lune believes that was less mean than the alternative.

T3

We’re going into the last week of “pack to move halfway across the country while also going full-steam ahead through the novel,” and I’m trying to be as good as I can about policing my sanity. I can, you see, be very bad about figuring out when I need to take breaks, and when those breaks need to involve human beings not inside the Magic Picture Box.

To that end, I wandered down to moonartemis76‘s place this evening, and we finished our tour through the Terminator movies by watching T3: Rise of the Machines. I wanted to see it mostly to bridge between T2 and the upcoming Salvation, but I have to say: surprisingly, it was not nearly as bad as I was expecting. In fact, I don’t think I would call it bad. Not as good as the first two, and overly self-indulgent when it comes to the special effects — but they did a nice job of finding ways to rotate their ideas* and develop motifs from the previous movies. The call-backs were pretty thick on the ground, but that’s kind of a feature on the franchise. (“She’ll be back.” Etc.)

I’m interested to see the fourth movie, and I do want to give The Sarah Connor Chronicles a shot at some point, since apparently that isn’t half-bad, either. As far as franchise survival goes, this one is maintaining a better average of quality than most — which is to say, not phenomenal, but not a steady downhill slide, either.

*By “rotate their ideas,” I mean things like how Schwarzenegger was the bad guy in the first film but the good guy in the second — and if you watch T2, they do an excellent job of faking you out on that front. The series works very conscientiously to set up your expectations and then do something new. The “something new” isn’t always brilliant, but I give them points for trying.

ha!

Historical serendipity strikes again. I chose Antony’s ward more or less at random; basically I decided to put him on Lombard Street, which meant either Langbourn or Candlewick, and I chose the former. Turns out — if I’m correctly translating from a modern map of ward boundaries; King William Street wasn’t there back then — the first City plague death in 1665 was in Antony’s ward.

I should double-check this in Stow, but not tonight.

the magical amazing ever-expanding book

Part III is done. Which is something of a miracle, since it’s about 5K longer than my original estimation for the length of each of these sections.

Word count: 72010
LBR tally: Lately, rhetoric is winning.
Authorial sadism: I’ve slacked off on that for a few scenes, actually. They need some breathing room before the things I’ve got in store.

***

So here’s how me and deadlines work.

The book is officially due October first. I got started June first. At one thousand words a day — my standard pace — I can therefore write 122K by my deadline. I was aiming for a 110K book, so that gives me breathing room, as does the fact that I tend to accumulate overage; 1K/day is a minimum, not an average.

But I knew going in that this summer would involve more non-working days than usual, thanks to everything else in my life. So that margin of safety shrinks. Then I realize the book needs to be longer. How much longer? Don’t really know. I’d be surprised if it goes past 130K, but 120K is pretty much a given at this point. Suddenly, that margin of safety? Not so much with the existing.

Ten days before the end of July, I realize I’m about six days ahead of the base schedule. I decide to see if I can’t up that to ten by the end of the month — that is, to close out July with 71K instead of 61K. (Consequence: I work through Conestoga, tapping away on my laptop in my hotel room at night.) And then I decide on this trip to Dallas, and figure that we can do a bit better with that goal; I’ll finish Part III by the end of the month.

And so I have done. In the last three days, I’ve written over six thousand words. But this afternoon’s scene was only 402 words, so we’ll probably sit down and poke at the beginning of Part IV later tonight.

In a truly delusional world, I would try to do Part IV and then the bits covering the Fire by the end of this month. But that’s going to be another 40-50K words, and the middle of August will be shot all to hell, so I won’t lock myself into it.

(I won’t lock myself into it. But anybody who knows my working habits know that the minute I think of something like that, my subconscious decides I’m going to try for it anyway.)

This is how I do it. Not with carrots dangling in front of me, but a stick behind. I drive myself hard early on because that’s better, in my mind, then driving myself at the end; I’d rather push through and have breathing space than find myself in a crunch right before deadline. Who knows what else might crop up to delay me? Who knows how many additional words this book will need in order to be fully itself? If it caps out at 140K, I need to know I’ll have enough time for those extra words.

Yes, it is crazy-making. But now doesn’t seem like the time to fiddle with my habits. So Part III is done, and we’ll write more tonight — just to be safe.

I meant to do that . . . .?

It may look like I’ve been cherry-picking reviews that speak positively of Midnight Never Come, but the truth is I post everything that makes a substantive comment on the book. (I don’t figure you all want to see every post that mentions it in passing; possibly you don’t even want to see what I do post.) Anyway, as if to prove that, this roundup is a mixed-to-negative bag — for some reason I hit a run of less enthusiastic reviews lately.

occultatio read it right after finishing Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, which is the fastest way I can think of to make my book suck. I will be the first in line to admit that, by comparison with her, my writing is lightweight. But if I work very hard and eat my vegetables, one day I may grow mighty enough to equal her first novel. (Pardon me while I go cry again over the fact that she was that damn good right out of the gate.)

meganbmoore liked it in the end, but found the opening overly political and slow-going.

Trinuviel at FantasyBookSpot loved the premise and structure, but the execution just did not come through for her. Despite that, I recommend you go read her review if you like digging past the surface; she clearly knows her way around the Tudor period, and says many intelligent things about my structural choices.

And then a glowing review, to wrap this set up: Lory Hess at the Green Man Review stayed up way past midnight reading it. (And made my day by being the only person so far to make mention of the alchemical allusion at the beginning of Act I. That was a shout-out to my Memento peeps.)

***

Here’s the funny thing about Trinuviel’s review, which I’d like to discuss more. As I said, she knows her history, and brings up the motif of doubling in Elizabethan thought, connecting that with my mirroring of Elizabeth and Invidiana.

If I were smart, I’d let you believe I planned that all along. Truth is? I didn’t. At the time that I thought up Invidiana, I had no idea that doubling was a thing back then, and I’d never heard of the king’s two bodies. I came across it later, certainly — I don’t think I could have done that much research and missed it — but even then, it never occurred to me to turn around and connect that to the idea already in place.

All the things she says about the way the doubling plays out were most definitely deliberate, but the idea itself was a felicitous accident. Which is something I’ve wondered about ever since I started writing seriously enough to think about the kinds of things we tend to say in English classes and research papers: how much of what we see in a story is deliberate? This gets into the whole “the author is dead” notion in literary criticism, and I’m on the fence about that. On the one hand, being an anthropologist and a writer myself, I always want to know about the person behind the words, the ways in which the author and the context of creation can shed new light on the story you read. On the other hand, sometimes you can find perfectly legitimate meanings in a text that were created completely by accident. It’s why I’m always careful to phrase things as “you can read this out of it” unless I know for a fact that the author put it in there on purpose.

At any rate, her comments are food for thought — especially since I’m currently trying to decide how seventeenth-century fae, influenced by contemporary mortal ideas, might handle the issue of legal justice. I think we have a tendency to cut our fantasy creations slack, to behave as if absolutism and arbitrary sentencing are somehow more attractive when they’re done by a faerie, but this strikes me as a fine time to poke holes in that idea. (Now I just need to figure out how to follow a different model without making it mundane and boring.)