. . . the time of year when I am the laziest laze-about to ever laze.
Seriously. Late January, early February? It’s all I can do to pause the Buffy DVDs long enough to go feed myself so I don’t die of starvation. I had things I was going to do tonight. I have things I’m going to do tonight.
. . . right?
Maybe if I watch all the rest of Season 7 really fast, then the lack of additional Buffy to watch will compel me to be productive.
Maybe.
In the days of old, back when writers used typewriters and typesetters lost fingers to their hot-lead monstrosities, story acceptances used to be sent by post.
That was not the intent of Christopher Cevasco, editor of Paradox, but since his e-mail appears to have vanished into the ether, the first I knew of my sale there was when the contract showed up in my mailbox today. The arrival of an envelope from them had me sighing in disappointment, thinking I’d been rejected, but as I felt the heft of the thing, I was reminded of the old maxim that bad news comes in fat envelopes, good news in skinny ones. I had a fat envelope, but then again, we’re long past the days when writers asked for their manuscripts to be sent back to them, so it just might be a contract inside . . . .
And so it was. Yay!
So good news for all you Kit Marlowe fan-boys and fan-girls; “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe” will be in Issue Twelve of Paradox, which is slated for April. I’m exceedingly glad to see it find a home there, since it’s more a historical fiction story than a speculative one, and Paradox is explicitly a historical fiction mag with an interest in historically-related spec fic. This was pretty much the best matchup I could imagine for this particular story.
Edited to add: Hah. Five minutes after posting this, a rejection for a different story arrives in my inbox. Good ol’ Gmail, keeping my ego in check . . . .
We’ve been joking for a while that I should come up with some book idea that would allow me to write off the upcoming Mediterranean cruise as research, and therefore a business expense. (We aren’t paying for the cruise itself, but y’know, the expenses that go with it.)
On the way to Boston for VeriCon, my subconscious coughed up just such an idea.
The best part is, I wasn’t trying to think of any such thing. I’ve been toying with some YA ideas lately, trying to think of what else I could do to ensure an ongoing YA publishing career, and one of my ideas (archaeological in nature) hopped from Mesoamerica to Egypt to the classical world, and then did a neat little do-si-do and came back out as a story about archaeological looting, the black market in antiquities, and supernatural happenings on board . . . you guessed it . . . a cruise ship.
Right now, my subconscious appears to be made of win.
I love the fact that I have trained my memory decently well to hold onto ideas I have while falling asleep.
Because last night I came up with a short story that, if I can pull it off, might just be brilliant. Not just my usual, fairly plot-driven fare, but something much deeper, and more unusual in its structure. And it has an awesome title. (Though you have to know the story to know why it’s awesome.)
Then I went to sleep and forgot about it.
But partway through today, while I was thinking about other things, my brain tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Oh yeah, don’t forget about this.”
I have it down in notes now, and who knows? I may try to write some of it this weekend. I wrote “Nine Sketches” half at VeriCon, and I’m damned proud of that one; maybe this one can get in on some of that mojo.
So, yeah. “Chrysalis.” Might be my next story, if I can hold onto Mesoamerica and teen-angst urban fantasy at the same time.
Update: Well, now I know what all the people in the story are called. (Or at least most of them. Depends on whether I only name the pov characters, or whether folks like Konil’s daughter will get named, too.)
From Slacktivist’s list of 7 biblical women’s names that deserve wider usage:
2. Jael. You meet plenty of people named after Mary, the other biblical character praised as “most blessed of women,” but I’ve never met or even heard of anyone named after Jael. Maybe it’s because the name translates, literally, as “mountain goat.” Or maybe it’s because “bad-ass” isn’t what most parents are looking for in a name for their baby girl. Jael was bad-ass. She took out Sisera, the general in charge of the invading army:
Barak came by in pursuit of Sisera, and Jael went out to meet him. “Come,” she said, “I will show you the man you’re looking for.” So he went in with her, and there lay Sisera with the tent peg through his temple — dead.
Don’t mess with Jael.
I need to read the more interesting parts of the Old Testament someday.
If I had the time, I’d post a picture of the thing I’m currently wearing. Not because it’s pretty — far, far from it — but because it is the result of my first-ever attempt to draft a piece of clothing completely from scratch, with nothing more than my dress form, some muslin, and lots of pins and markers.
I doubt I’ve done a very efficient job, mind you; there’s been a lot of wasted muslin along the way, as I reinvented the wheel of things like arm holes and Redesigning Men’s Garments For People What Have Breasts. It would have been easier had I used darts, but weirdly I decided to avoid them, as they were not used in the days of doublets. I say “weirdly” because I’ve got another design element in here that is likewise not period, but that decision was made long after I’d progressed beyond the darts decision, so oh well.
It doesn’t have to be period. It just has to be functional. When I get time to work on it next, I’ll be cutting it out of some leftover taffeta from another project, to see if it still hangs okay when rendered in a stiffer fabric. If that works, then the next step is to take both the taffeta and the brocade I’m ultimately going to use and have them punch-tested, because y’see, what we are making here is a fencing doublet. (Or two, if the taffeta works out acceptably.)
And once we know whether I’m safe from being skewered, then we make the final version. And then I will have a hood and a jacket, and if I stick underarm patches on some old shirt the only loaner-wear I’ll still need is a gorget.
Which I can’t make myself. But I can make pretty-please eyes at other people, and think about buying my own blade (since I’m not using the ones I have), and then I will be loaner-gear free. Huzzah!
Once upon a time (a time known as “last summer”, I embarked upon a project to re-read the Lymond Chronicles and blog my way through, performing a craft-oriented close reading as I went. I made it a goodly way through The Game of Kings before I discovered that I couldn’t write one sixteenth-century novel while reading another, and then after that there was the wedding and all, and what with one thing and another it ground to a halt.
Now it’s starting up again.
For those of you who have borne with me all this time, I’m most grateful; thank you for your patience. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, follow that link and you’ll see. For those newcomers to this journal who have read all the books, or those who have in the meantime finished the books, comment here if you want in on the action, and I’ll add you to the special Lymond filter, so you can see what’s gone before and join in the discussion as we go on forward.
I think that may be my pivot point, right there. I’m in the middle zone — 30K to 37.5K, depending on where the book falls in 60 to 75K — and today’s writing, which more than made up for yesterday’s lack, puts me right at a neat 33,333 words.
(Okay, it was 33,334 words. I deleted one to make the number pretty. It didn’t need to be in there, I promise.)
And this chunk of writing — this whole chapter, really, which was all tonight’s writing — may very well be that pivot point at the center of a book, when you stop moving away from the beginning and start moving toward the end. Things get a lot worse for Val from here on out. But she knows most of the major pieces now, at least about herself; the second half is what she decides to do about it.
I’d been wondering what my pivot point would be. Or if this book would have one. But all is well; I think I found it.
Dear Barry,
You remember how you tried to teach us Olympic-style foil? And how you failed miserably to get us to attend to right-of-way, stay linear, and leave our off hands out of it? Until you just gave up and taught us rapier and dagger instead?
Well now, ten years later, I’m fighting rapier again — and I’m staying linear, forgetting I have an off hand, and behaving as if right-of-way somehow protects me.
Apparently your lessons just kicked in late.
But I’m sure that if you faced me and kurayami_hime off against each other, we’d still launch the exact same attack at the exact same instant and stab each other in the guard again, just like we used to. So the world hasn’t flipped totally on its head.
Hugs and kisses,
Your Token Righty
Hey, look — I remembered to link to this on time, rather than after the fact! Go me.
This month’s post at SF Novelists is me dissecting “The Use and Misuse of Prologues.”
Screw it. This scene is just not happening tonight.
Nor is any other scene, apparently, despite my attempt to skip past it. Unless I want to write something totally disconnected that I’ll probably have to replace completely anyway when I get there. And I don’t actually want to do that, as I’d be pulling teeth and then throwing them out.
As much as I hate missing a day outright, I think that’s the better part of valor, here.
I only just recently remembered that this is supposed to be my icon for stories-in-progress. So out it comes, even though it’s less apropos for this YA book than it was for MNC. (Said YA is shambling towards a title, btw, though it hasn’t settled on one yet.)
I had an epiphany while long-distance driving yesterday. Gotta agree with Bear on this one; drives really are the bomb for story pondering. Anyway, I realized that I could probably reduce the suck in the early part of the book by taking three scenes whose intended purpose was to postpone a certain event by developing a different part of the plot, but which never quite justified their existence like they were supposed to, and moving them to just after the bit I’m writing now. Not only does this work (I think), it also looks like it will solve several unrelated ancillary problems. In fact, it feels kind of like this is the way it was always supposed to go, and I was just too dumb to realize before.
My hindbrain is smarter than I am, nine times out of ten.
So the scenes are relocated, though there are still Frankenstein seams where they got cut out and where they got pasted in that need fixing. Oh, but I just realized there was supposed to be [redacted] in the scene I wrote today, to set up the lead-in for the relocated scenes. Well, that can be tomorrow’s work. I’ve put in a good day’s effort inflicting pure, unadulterated high school trauma on Val; the physical blood, instead of the social kind, will have to wait.
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My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Her Noble Excellency Swan the Lachrymose of Lower Slaughter Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title |
Given how I tend to treat my characters in both games and stories? Yes.
Why is my brain so messed up?
Why, as I was toasting frozen waffles, did it randomly start trying to map Jesus and King Arthur onto each other? Why did it start trying to work up a Sekrit Truth of Jesus wherein Mary Magdalene was in the Guinevere role and Judas was probably Lancelot unless he was Mordred or maybe both?
What is wrong with my brain?
Well, that’s it. Page proofs are in the mail, headed back to the publisher.
It isn’t exactly true to say I’m washing my hands of this book until June, because of course I’ll need to do things to promote it. But work on the book itself is done.
And so, at last, the giant map of Elizabethan London has come down off the wall in the upstairs hallway . . . to be replaced by a new one, of course. I have a partial 1828 map, which is about forty years on the early side, but it might go up for now (once I get it flattened out). Especially since I’m not sure how best to go about getting a more contemporary one.
I just hope I can find some method that doesn’t involve three hours at Kinko’s with a bunch of tape again.
Tonight’s writing revelation: I keep trying to pretend I will somehow trick my readers into not noticing the obvious. When instead I should embrace the obvious (since they’ll notice it anyway) and move on with the story.
So yes, hypothetical readers, that subplot you think is there? Is there. And yes, I know it’s a standard-issue subplot. I have faith that I’m going interesting places with it, but I will not get there by pretending I’m not going anywhere.
