Dangit — I forgot to post a last reminder about before bidding closed. But thank you to everybody who offered or bid for something, or just spread the word; turns out it raised over ten thousand dollars, all told.
Not bad for a little online fandom effort.
So I’m reading Neil Gaiman’s journal, and he mentions that he’s friends with Jane Yolen, and I think oh my god, he’s friends with JANE YOLEN. Which is more or less the reaction I get any time I see/hear somebody mentioning their friendship with someone I consider to be a Big Name. (It still takes a while to sink in that Big Names are ordinary people, too.)
Sometimes we dream of striking up a friendship — a real, honest-to-god, going to their place for dinner kind of friendship — with the luminaries of our fields. But out of nowhere, my brain pointed out to me that what’s really boggling is, thirty years from now, we will have those friendships . . . because some of the people who are real, honest-to-god, going to their place for dinner kinds of friends of ours right now will have become the Big Names of the field.
And for some reason that really made my head spin around for a moment.
Which is to say, all y’all newbies and neopros I call friends these days? I’m TOTALLY name-dropping you once you’re famous.
The Minneapolis trip derailed me from posting in a more timely fashion about William Sanders of Helix, who made offensively racist comments in a rejection letter (thus sparking ickiness elsewhere), and subsequently responded rudely to yhlee when she asked for her story to be removed from the Helix archives — but if you’ve missed the storm about this one, follow those links and you’ll get the gist.
The purpose of this post is to spread the word that Sanders will be accepting requests for removal from the archives for a limited time only. I can actually understand that — though it would be nice if he specified an actual time limit — because it’s annoying to have to field those kinds of things, and technically the Helix contract (I am told) grants him the right to keep it non-exclusively in the archives.
On the other hand, any tiny modicum of professionalism exhibited in that message (and it was small to begin with) was obliterated when he replaced yhlee‘s story with the message “Story deleted at author’s pantiwadulous request.”
So. Y’know. Helix apparently was invitation-only anyway, but it’s officially a place I don’t want to be invited to.
ETA: Nevermind. Scratch anything positive I said or even implied about his decision to confine deletion requests to a narrow window. He’s apparently decided to charge forty bucks to any author asking for their story to be pulled down on account of his recent behavior.
Sweet gibbering monkeys, I thought Part Two would never end. 2549 tonight, and I’ve been batting well over a thousand for a week now in an attempt to put paid to this thing before I go to Minneapolis.
Antony’s way over on word-count. It’s his fault Part Two is over quota. But that’s a problem to fix in revision — somehow.
It came so very very close to “rocks fall, everyone dies” tonight. Or at least one character dying. But dropping the ceiling on him would have raised the question of why all the problems couldn’t be taken care of that way, so I had to use another method.
Two dead people in the first part; three in this one. (And one in the Prologue.) Will the number keep going up?
Word count: 45767
LBR tally: Blood. Blood, blood, and more blood.
Authorial sadism: This is one of those “all of it” moments.
Normally I would wait until I have a few more things to post, but two of these, fresh as of today, are the ones I was waiting for before, so what the heck.
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I’m today’s Big Idea over on John Scalzi’s blog “Whatever.” It’s a feature he runs, where authors lay out what story/setting/conflict seed they started with, and how it developed during the course of writing.
Also, Fantasy Book Critic has posted the world’s most in-depth interview with me. The Midnight Never Come-related parts are probably familiar to those who have seen or heard me talk about it before, but Robert asked a lot of other questions pertaining to academia, short fiction, the future of publishing, and more.
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In more review-like territory, I made yhlee cry. (In a good way.)
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There will, I think, be an awesome piece of news to relate soon, but that’s still sitting in the box of Things For A Later Post.
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!
