Number One Piece of Advice for Beginning Writers:
Hit “save” every single time you pause to consider your next word.
Because you never know when the power is going to blow for no reason whatsoever and lose your unsaved work.
This message has been brought to you by “gee, I’m glad I established that habit years ago” and a novel of which I have lost not one word.
1565 tonight; the previous two days have been 1415 and 1885. I may not get to write this weekend — short-notice trip to Minneapolis — so I’m letting myself charge ahead a bit, building up a surplus. I can miss two days and still be on schedule.
I would have stopped at 1259, but that put me just short of 40K. And we all know how I respond to seeing landmarks so very, very close.
Word count: 40,235
LBR tally: We all know what happens when rhetoric fails.
Authorial sadism: Failing. Lots. And not getting your final chance to speak.
The major purpose of this is to say that Orbit has announced the winners of the website competition. (If you are one, I think they’ve notified you by now, but everyone else may not have heard.) Thanks to everyone who participated, and I hope you had fun!
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Review time:
juushika was not a fan of the flashbacks, and found the characters a bit underdeveloped, but liked the book overall.
Two people in Italy also seem to be saying nice things about it, as near as I can tell from Babelfish and my own limited command of the Romance language family. (Hey, people in Italy — keep talking about it! Then maybe I can make a translation sale there.)
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Brief quasi-interview piece on Sci Fi Wire, the Sci Fi Channel’s news service. John Joseph Adams (better known to some of you as the slush reader for F&SF) interviewed me, then compiled my answers into something more like an article.
There should be a few more coming in the nearish future, too — but I want to clear these tabs, so here’s this stuff, and I’ll post again when the other things happen.
Dammit. “Idealist” is an anachronistic word for the period, and in its earliest usage, it referred to a specific philosophy. “Optimist” is also out-of-period. “Utopian” is not, but it doesn’t mean quite the same thing as “idealist,” and that’s the word I really want.
The answer to this, of course, is to say “to hell with the OED” and use the word anyway. I doubt anyone not reading this journal would ever notice the word in the novel and think, that’s anachronistic. But having established this principle in my prose, I’m remarkably unwilling to surrender it.
Maybe this will be the corollary to the use of “medieval” in Midnight Never Come. There just wasn’t a word in use back then that efficiently conveyed the period I was trying to reference, so I finally gave up and used it.
Yes, I do obsess this much. But most of you are not surprised. Those who are, are probably new to this journal.
Dear Readers of My Previous Entry,
Sorry, but the assassination attempt has been called on account of a) that scene doing enough other things already and b) me realizing what an idiotic tactical move it would be on the part of the would-be assassins. And since I want them to look tactically smart a little while later, it’s better to leave the targeted character alone.
But I wrote 1885 words tonight so I could finish that scene off and get through the bulk of an extremely pivotal scene following, so I promise you, there will be interesting things in its stead.
The principle quoted yesterday still holds, though.
Word count: 37118. I have a little less than five thousand words in which to do WAY TOO MUCH, and then Part II ends.
LBR tally: Rhetoric, with 100% chance of blood in the next few days.
Authorial sadism: Being given a chance to achieve the thing you really really want.
A sentence that really did just come out of my mouth:
“When in doubt, throw in an assassination attempt.”
Next year, when y’all are reading this book, and somebody tries to kill a character partway through Part II, you’ll know why: the rest of my plans for the scene just weren’t entertaining me enough.
I took some notes for Midnight Never Come . . . but not so many as you might think. I knew a fair bit about the period already, which makes it easier to hold onto new details, and those things were mostly in the background anyway. I did not need to know what Robert Beale was doing on February 12th, 1590, in order to make that book work.
Writing didn’t happen last night because, while I had done some of the necessary reading for this next bit, I hadn’t yet taken notes on it. And therefore I couldn’t be sure when to set the scene, and what should have happened/be happening/be about to happen in it.
So after a virtuous afternoon of note-taking, I sit down with my rapidly-filling notebook and prepare to put down the 1200 words I need to stay on schedule. It feels a bit like I’m laying track ten feet in front of the locomotive, but last night is the first time the train has had to slow or stop due to lack of track, so I guess that’s moderately okay.
It would be nice to get ahead in this game, though.
‘Cause they’re cluttering up my browser somthing fierce.
“1000 AD” — you know how music makes it easier for you to remember things? Well, here’s a song about what to do if you find yourself unexpectedly flung back in time to 1000 A.D.
Awesome photos of the northern lights.
KIZHI — if I correctly understood the link I followed, everything in this place is built entirely out of wood. Not a single metal nail to be had.
Pole to Pole — LJ of a polar expedition.
We’ll only include novels for which either I have a fragment written, or they’re connected to books that have at least a fragment written. So it’s more an “unfinished and potential novel” meme.
Books I Did Not Expect To Be Reading For A Novel Set In Seventeenth-Century England:
#1 — Táin Bó Cúailnge
Apparently I’m developing this thing for arguing with mind-melds.
In this instance, SF Signal is taking on gender imbalance in spec fic publishing. Lots of food for thought in there, but I’m at the point where my single overwhelming thought is this:
Is there, anywhere out there, a sociologist with both the necessary interest in genre fiction and the necessary methodological rigor to get us some actual data?
Because until somebody does that study, we’re arguing from evidence that is 98% anecdotes and gut feeling. Some magazines (Strange Horizons, Fantasy) openly discuss the gender breakdown of their submissions and publications; Broad Universe has scraped data from issue runs of some more. But where’s the data for novels? First novels, bestseller novels, big contracts, broken down by (admittedly fuzzy) categories of sub-genre, maybe even weighted for type of narrative if our hypothetical sociologist is good enough. Reviews, awards, hardcover versus trade paper versus mmpb publication. In a dream world we’d know the submission stats, too — but good luck getting those. Even without them, it would be a start.
It makes me regret my exit from academia, but truth is, I could never do this study. You really need a sociologist, not an anthropologist; this is not participant-observation work.
Some things we do know: that the people who say “I just buy/read good work, regardless of who wrote it” are naive. It’s well-established, in fields ranging from biology to symphony orchestras, that the perceived gender of individuals affects their reception: the percentage of women in orchestras went up after musicians began auditioning behind a curtain, with a carpet laid down so high-heeled shoes wouldn’t click on the floor. Swap the names on journal articles, and readers will rate higher the one they think is written by a man. Very few editors or readers out there are actively hating on women writers; the real problem is the inactive prejudice.
But we need data before we can get to the deeper questions of “why,” let alone “what do we do about it?” The relative absence of women in science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) no doubt arises from many factors, ranging from fewer women with the educational background to write hard SF, to less free time on their hands for the writing of it, to a reluctance to submit to markets they perceive as unfriendly to them, to editorial bias, to reader bias, and so around the merry-go-round. The relative presence of women in the current paranormal romance/urban fantasy borderland arises from a different set of factors. I don’t think anecdotes and gut feeling are without their use, but we might get farther if we had actual concrete information.
I forgot to post my landmark last night: 30K down. Not quite halfway through Part II.
We’re moving into a bit of the book where, as I told ninja_turbo this evening, I would never dare make this shit up. Certain details would look too ludicrous, too over-the-top. But sometimes history really does that; truth, on occasion, is stranger than fiction.
Also more melodramatic.
Current count: 31,258.
LBR tally: All three, unexpectedly — though it’s a rhetorical kind of love.
Authorial sadism: Sending people to Hell!
has raised over $2000 in its first day, just off the things snapped up on “Buy It Now” terms. The sales will slack off, of course, as the remainder proceed through actual bidding, but it bodes well for the totals at the end (remember, it runs for two weeks).
Go go fandom activism.
The auction over at is open for bidding now. Look in the tags for “mod note” to find instructions on what to do, and where to post when you’ve won an auction, so they can track totals. Offerings range from more customized fanfic than you can shake a slash at to cookies to personalized clothing advice for those whose bodies don’t look like the fashion industry wants them to. And all the money goes toward charities for defending gay marriage rights.
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I’m a bad writer for putting that one first and this one second, but hey, priorities. Today also marks the official release for Clockwork Phoenix, the anthology in which you can see me attempting to make Mesoamerican fantasy work. Ordering info behind that link. I haven’t read it yet myself — I’m waiting for my contributor’s copy, rather than trying to plow through it in the page-proof .pdf — but the bits I’ve seen look fabulous. Enjoy!
Remember, you have until midnight Greenwich time (EDT 7 p.m., I believe) to enter the Midnight Never Come competition, with a chance to win £250/$500 in bookstore vouchers. (It’s a pretty sweet deal. D’you think my publisher would notice if I put myself in?)
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If you want to hear me ramble on, instead of seeing it, Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing has a podcast interview up, wherein Shaun Ferrell asks me questions about writing, academia, and (of course) Midnight Never Come.
You can subscribe to the feed via iTunes, or download the file directly. If you want to cut straight to my part of the podcast, it starts around twelve minutes in; if you want to skip right past me, I think I shut up around the forty-minute mark.
Despite my best efforts, I, er, talked like I normally do. Which is to say, fast. Sorry about that.
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Review roundup! Only one of them is accessible online, unfortunately.
Our own ninja_turbo liked it, even accounting for friend bias. Being unfamiliar with the history, he was still able to follow along — yay!
Meredith Schwartz and Jackie Cassada at Library Journal call it a “deft blending” and note that, unlike many staples of the Elizabethan fantasy genre, I don’t use real people as my main characters. (Either approach, of course, can work. But they seem to have liked this one.)
And then two more good ones mailed in from my UK publisher. One appears to come from a magazine called Starburst, and wins my heart for calling Christopher Marlowe “Kit.” The other is from SciFiNow, and it tells me I hit one of the targets I was particularly aiming for: “Eschewing the use of the typical Seelie and Unseelie (or Summer and Winter) courts that appear in so many novels dealing with the subject, Brennan has created a faerie society that is quintessentially English.” Rock on! That goes up there with my UK publisher deciding to pick up a London book by an American author in the first place for evidence I’m doing something right.
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Finally, if you’ve read the book, feel free to poke your head in on the discussions going on in the spoiler thread. I’m enjoying the back-and-forth there quite a bit.
Words I can’t use to describe the Army and their supporters in 1648, because these political terms weren’t invented until much later: radical, extremist, republican, revolutionary.
What the hell am I supposed to call them, except “those guys with the sentiments that freaked the shit out of many seventeenth-century English but look pretty familiar to those of us living in modern democracies”?
(And that’s a whole separate problem — figuring out how to present Antony’s feelings on the Levellers and their ilk, when many of the things the Levellers stood for are the conservative end of ideals we cherish dearly today. The easy solution would be to make him a sympathizer to their cause, but that’s what we call an author cheesing out on historical accuracy. Most people at the time thought the Levellers were trying to destroy the fabric of society. So: find ways to say Antony thinks democracy is a bad idea, without making readers dislike him for it. Somehow.)
Dear Gods of Overachieving Authors,
If I promise to do suitable penance and grovel a bit, will you promise that I never have to study seventeenth-century English politics again? Pretty please?
‘Cause I’m increasingly convinced this flaming ball of contradictory disaster they called their government is the real reason nobody wants to write fiction about the period.
Pleadingly,
An Author Who Still Loves Her Book, But Wants to Light the Period Politics On Fire
A surprise phone call tonight from my cousin, who lives in Florida was in the area for various things, suggesting that now might be a good time for the hand-off I had e-mailed him about months ago.
That abruptly, my French horn was gone.
It isn’t my horn; it never was. It belongs to my cousin, who played it professionally before giving that over in favor of the bass. And it isn’t abrupt. I haven’t played with an ensemble since the Lowell House 1812 Overture, Arts First weekend of my senior year; I haven’t played regularly since before that. I brought the horn with me to Indiana, where it has sat, unplayed, for six years. I’ve known that I won’t be playing with an orchestra or wind ensemble again. And back in February, I contacted him to say that I should probably give it back.
I don’t know how long I had it. They gave me a single horn when we started in sixth grade, because that’s how you start off; with the training wheels. Then they upgrade you to the double horn: another valve, another layer of tubing. (Way more heavy.) Did I play a school horn at first? I think I must have, before my cousin gave me the horn he used to play, a Holton that was — so the story went — one of three or four played by some famous musician at the Holton factory, but not the one he chose to take. Good enough for him to try, though. More than good enough for me.
Three years of high school, certainly. Three years of college, before I stopped. Probably at least a year or two more than that. Long enough for me to get sentimental.
It isn’t the object. It’s the admission that I’m done: I may still remember fingerings of pieces long gone, and listen instinctively for the horn line in any piece of music that has one — why do you think I love film scores so much? — but I’m not going to play again. I’ve lost my embouchure, and probably half the abs that used to support me on the high notes. (I used to still have decent abs, even after I stopped dancing, which I think must have been caused by propelling air through more than four yards of brass.)
Why did I pick this instrument? I don’t know. My mother always wanted to play it. One of my teachers told us years later that we had all been steered toward it because we had good faces, but that was before the orthodontist got hold of me. I don’t recall making the choice.
But anybody who did band in high school knows the types. Me? I’m not a trumpet player, or a flute, a clarinet, a drummer. I am very much a horn player.
It’s hard to let go of the symbols and tools of something that used to be such a part of your life.
Dear Mom and Dad: if you get rid of the piano before I get my own, I will cry.
