dichotomy

Still copy-editing.

It’s been two months or so since I looked at the book. Some bits, I find myself seeing with fresh eyes. Oh. Huh. Those two paragraphs really don’t need to be there. Or, that dialogue echoes a nursery rhyme you really don’t want in your readers’ heads. Fix it.

Others? Are familiar beasts I’ve been battling with since the first time I committed them to the screen. And so I wrestle with them yet again, trying to find that one word that still eludes me — the right word — or how to make that paragraph flow the way it needs to.

Mostly I’m fighting with Tiresias. God damn. How many times have I chipped away at this stupid scene, trying to make the punch land right?

Note to self: don’t put a crazed seer in a story EVER AGAIN. They are uncooperative bastards.

One downside to my decreased short story production this year has been a corollary decrease in short story sales.

So it is with great pleasure that I announce Shroud Publishing has bought my horrific fairy tale “Kiss of Life” for their upcoming anthology Beneath the Surface. The blurb over on their site says there will be thirteen stories in the antho, so it’s especially flattering to be one of such a small number.

I’ve got a couple others I’m keeping my fingers crossed for. We may end this drought with a small flood, if I’m lucky.

This?

Is exactly what I need to keep in my head as I ponder this upcoming Victorian book.

(A book which really needs an icon of its own, and also a title. And that other book over there needs a title too. Why are all the things I’m working on remaining obstinately nameless? “Victorian steampunk faerie fantasy” and “Super Sekrit Project CHS” get old pretty fast.)

last reminder

We interrupt this copy-editing slog to remind you all that the deadline for the “Baby Got Back” contest is at the end of the day tomorrow. Prize is a signed and personalized ARC of Midnight Never Come, and fame and fortune if you let me post your mockup cover on my website.

Now I go back to fighting with my copy-editor over capitalization. The life of a writer is thrilling, let me tell you.

obvious things

One of the difficulties of getting farther into your field of study is, you start to take certain ideas so much for granted that you don’t remember anymore where you picked them up. And then you find yourself wanting to cite a source for one of those ideas, and you don’t have the slightest clue who writes about such things.

Where by “you” I mean “me.”

So, O my fellow anthropologists, please help me out: I need a good citation for two particular concepts in acculturation. One is that you learn by imitation, following the examples of the people around you. The other is that when you behave in a certain way, non-explicit social feedback tells you it is Good Behavior or Bad Behavior, and thus you are subtly encouraged toward the good behavior. (I’m pretty sure Judith Butler hits these ideas in the context of gender — am I right? I still haven’t gotten around to reading her — but it would be good to cite someone who talks about it more broadly.)

Failing sources, I’d even appreciate being reminded of what formal terms there are for those two concepts. I know the ideas, but I’m failing to sound official about them.

Man, I have missed LARPing. And if I can say that after the costume I wore last night, it really must be true.

(Short form, for those who I’m very glad didn’t see it: think truck stop diner waitress. I’ve done skin-tight and low-cut costumes before; now, with the crossing of the short skirt boundary, I’ve got about as far as I can in terms of revealing costumes without violating public decency laws. You know there’s a problem when you put off getting changed until game’s right about to start.)

Beforehand, gollumgollum and I were running a scene for a different (tabletop) game, and we ended up half-LARPing it, with me stretched out on a couch and her in a chair at my side, because it just wasn’t possible to get into the right headspace without doing the spatial positioning the scene required. And we both felt underdressed for playing those characters. Once you get used to physically performing things, it can seem weird to not do so; I know I’ve been frustrated in tabletop games when I’m having an important, personal conversation with someone and we’re on opposite sides of the room. It just isn’t the same. I like the physicality, the way that posture and stance and clothing and everything else can change the way you behave.

But there aren’t any LARPs in town I feel particularly inspired to join right now. (OTOH, maybe this means the boy and I will get off our butts and run “The Dance and the Dawn” like we’ve been saying we will.)

huh.

For the first time in my life, I find myself realizing that academic papers can have different voices, just like stories.

Maybe this was obvious to some of you. But while I knew I wrote papers differently for conferences (where I read out loud) than I do for classes or publication (where they’ll be printed on a page), I tended to think of those as two faint variants on Academic Voice.

That stories have different voices has always been obvious to me. I can’t tell you what “my” voice is, because “Calling into Silence” has a deliberately earthy, grounded tone to it, while “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” is more high-flown Victorian and “The Snow-White Heart” is a pale lavender imitation of Lovecraft’s purple prose. And I’d need an outside eye to tell me what, if anything, is “my” voice in all of that, the common thread in the prose that links them together.

But here I am, plugging away at an article for kleenestar, and the silly thing has found a voice. I wasn’t making much progress on it yesterday or earlier today, but then tonight I hit upon the thought of structuring it loosely around the experience of “our hypothetical newcomer,” a stranger to RPGs who is getting into one for the first time. From the moment I put that phrase down, something changed. This article is just the slightest bit tongue-in cheek. I’m addressing my subject soberly enough, but hardly a paragraph goes by without some little thing to liven it up: a faintly snarky comment about the “What is a role-playing game?” section in rulebooks, a passing jab at GURPs and its rules for digging holes. Yesterday and earlier today, this paper had no voice, and I was getting nowhere with it. Now I’ve found the voice, and I have over three thousand words down, from about 800 two hours ago. I keep telling myself I’m going to bed, and then coming back to put the next bit down.

It’s just like a story. I can’t really progress on it until I’ve found the plot/organization and the voice. Once I do? Zoom.

We’ll see what kleenestar thinks of the result. If I have to, I can go back and make it more straight-laced. But right now, I’m going to run with what I have.

Man, the weirdest thoughts pop into your head while you’re scrubbing every bathroom in the house.

I’ve known for a while now that I don’t tend to write characters who are deeply broken inside. On the whole, while the people in my books have their problems, those problems are more side notes in a tune that is generally well-adjusted. To the point where I’ve thought for a while now that this is something I should maybe push myself on more.

Then it occurred to me: I don’t seem to write such characters very often, but I have been known to play them in games.

A few case studies . . . we won’t even start with Ree. Ree’s problems weren’t just psychological, they were metaphysical, in a way that isn’t just Changeling-based but dependent on certain individualized quirks of that game. Let’s just say that dealing with fear by deciding the world’s just fucked anyway (and then helping to tear it down) is a bad plan. Allegra was of necessity broken to begin with — that’s a prerequisite for characters in Mummy — but being reborn fixed her, as it does in that game. Michael’s death broke her very badly, though, in that “he died because you couldn’t defend him/you should have died defending him” cue self-loathing kind of way. Ash was physically marked as a freak, so took the “hey! you’re a Slayer! congrats!” thing very, very badly; she felt like the victim of curveballs in a game she never signed up for. Catherine managed the feat of possessing a superiority complex and an inferiority complex at the same time, coupled with a tendency to lose her human cognitive abilities when she felt too seriously threatened. Oh, yeah, and the loss of identity that went with being too good of a shapeshifter. Sess was scared of everything that came within a hundred feet of her, and very nearly incapable of non-spastic conversation. Odette/Fionnuala . . . I’m not even going to count her, since kitsunealyc is the one who decided crossbreeding “Swan Lake” with “Donkeyskin” was a good idea.

Lessa might be the most stable, functional, well-adjusted character I’ve played in a while.

I wonder why the difference. The major thought that occurs to me is, when I’m playing in a game, I’m only working on one character instead of a whole cast. I can focus on the quirks and dysfuctions of that single person more intensively. Also, maybe it’s that as a writer or GM I can generate plot out of situations and external threats, whereas from a player position I really only have that one character to work with.

I can’t even remember how this thought occurred to me. But it made me realize I do create characters with internal breakage — just not so much in fiction.

Which is encouraging. It means I know how; now I just need to apply it.

okay, try this

I have a more specific research request for all you Victorianists.

I’m looking for poetry written no later than 1871, on the topic of the London Underground. Yes, I know that leaves only a narrow window of time in which the Underground even existed. Failing that, poetry (also before that date) about railroads.

No, I don’t have a title yet. I have any number of awesome phrases, but none of them are my title.

Suggestions?

another open letter

Dear Brain,

Put the Victorian Age down and back away from it, slowly.

Why? Because you aren’t ready to write that book yet. You know it and I know it; there’s no disagreement there. But do you know what will happen if you do another nosedive into research like last time? You will get sick of the Victorian period, before you even start writing the book. So slow down. That deadline is not for another ten months.

Play with this shiny over here instead. Wouldn’t you rather be reading YA urban fantasies than books about the Victorian sewer system?

Wouldn’t you?

I’d appreciate more than just a grudging nod, Brain. Or else I’m going to start thinking there’s something deeply wrong with you.

That’s better. The Victorian Age will still be waiting when you come back, don’t worry. And in the meantime, we’re going to have fun with some other things.

Affectionately,
Your Writer

panel, take two

This past weekend I was on the following panel at WFC:

Urban Fantasy—Beyond the Usual Suspects
It seems as if most urban fantasy uses the familiar European myths. What other possibilities are there? Which authors have successfully exploited them?

A number of us had grievances with the direction the panel ended up going in, so I’m officially hosting Take Two right here. We hammered the “cultural appropriation” angle to death — again — so I’m not looking to hash that one out. Instead, here are some of the things I wanted to talk about and didn’t really get to. I’ll put my questions up front, then my personal views behind a cut (for length); feel free to respond to the questions and/or pose your own in the comments.

1) What are the benefits of going outside “the familiar European myths”? What do we gain, as writers or readers, by looking to other parts of the world?

2) What are the downsides? Aside from the issue of appropriation, what drawbacks or challenges result from going further afield?

3) I posited briefly in the panel that you can imagine a spectrum, ranging from American Gods-style globalized, multicultural cross-over, to setting-specific approaches that firmly ground the supernatural and mundane elements in a locality. Benefits and drawbacks? Preferences, and if so, why?

4) Who has done this well? What other cultures do they draw on, and why do you say they’re done well?

5) Who’s done it badly? Even if you don’t want to name names, what kinds of mistakes bug you?

6) If we’re moving away from European sources, where are we moving to? (We touched on this briefly at the end of the panel, but I’d like to discuss it in more detail.)

My answers . . . .

Baby Got Back

Feeling artistic? And/or entertained by the notion of putting someone’s rear end on the cover of a book?

Check out the “Baby Got Back” contest I’m running over on the “Fangs, Fur, and Fey” community. Short form is, do me one of those urban fantasy covers you’re seeing everywhere these days — you know, the ones with a woman’s butt prominently on display — but with the butt in question buried under a pile of Elizabethan clothing. The most entertaining will win an advance copy of Midnight Never Come.

after-action report

I think I enjoy World Fantasy more every year, as I learn more of how I best operate there. When I first show up, I’m pretty useless: bad at recognizing faces I haven’t seen in a year, bad at worming my way into conversations, bad at social small talk. Warming up takes a while. But I know that now, so I don’t feel stressed by the usual “oh god I can’t find anybody I know and my foot is looking for opportunities to get into my mouth and I’m not having fun yet.” I’ll get there. It just takes time. By Friday I’m doing better, and now I know that my mental list of panels I’d like to see doesn’t even reach the status of guidelines, let alone actual rules; I’ll go if I feel inclined, but if on my way there I get waylaid by a conversation, whatever. I said this weekend, and I really mean it, that I go to WFC for the conversations. For the lunches and dinners and hallways and relatively quiet corners of room parties where I can get into discussions of Mesoamerican kingship, recent TV series, Kit Marlowe’s sexuality, butt-shot urban fantasy covers, gender issues in SFWA, and the abominations of Leviticus, to name a few topics of the last few days.

By Friday night I’m doing pretty good. Saturday’s usually a swimming success. At some point on Sunday I’ll start to hit my limit: I’m ready to put on my headphones and bury my nose in a book for the trip home. And that’s okay, too.

But it isn’t all cookie-cutter routine, either. Every year I expand the circle of people I know. And this year featured the new experience of increased contact with folks from my publisher, specifically members of the publicity departments in the US and UK. I got trotted out for a lunch with some of the book-buyers for Borders, not as the featured attraction, but to smile and make small contributions to the conversation; mostly I learned quite a bit about how the publisher sells the books to the store, before the store sells them to the customer. And I discovered that the publicity guys Have Plans for Midnight Never Come. Not national-tour level plans, but we all agreed that’s not even a good idea for someone at my stage of things. Cool website plans, though, most definitely. I don’t know how much of it will turn out to be pie-in-the-sky, but I love the notions we were batting around.

Speaking of that book, I got anecdotal proof of the quality of its cover: people were very eager to pick it up and look at it, including some total strangers during the autographing session. (And with nearly a dozen people spontaneously approving of the author photo on the back, I am finally reassured I managed to get a non-crappy picture of myself. Readers will expect me to look like that for the next thirty years, I imagine.)

And hey! Amazon has it listed for pre-order. I was going to say “at last,” but really, the book isn’t coming out for seven months. They’re plenty early. So anyway, that’s one benchmark passed. (And apparently that thing I wrote up for my editor back in June was the cover copy. Wish I’d known that then . . . though it holds up okay, despite having been written when less than a third of the book was done.)

Put all that together with a royalty statement that tells me Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch are both still doing bang-up business, and right now? Things are looking pretty good.

almost-real book!

Originally the plan was for me to revise Midnight Never Come in October, copy-edit it in November, page-proof it in December, and then they’d print ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) in January.

Then I got that “hey, could you revise this sooner?” request in September. Turns out that was because they wanted to print ARCs in November.

(This, incidentally, meant copy-editing would be pushed back to January. Or so I was told. Until three hours later, when I was told that no, the freelancer who does that work was available, so we’d be doing it on November after all.)

Anyway, you may have noticed that today is still October. So, oddly enough, was yesterday — the day a box full o’ ARCs hit my doorstep.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!! Booksiesbooksiesbooksiesbooksies!!!!!!!!!!

Ahem.

I held off on posting about it until I could surprise a few people who needed to be surprised with the ARCs I was giving them (the last of those being tooth_and_claw, but I’m not shipping it to Italy when you’re coming back here before too terribly much longer). I have more I need to send out, of course, but those people already know they’re coming.

I’m going to be curious to see how this ARC ends up comparing to the real book. Remember, we haven’t copy-edited the thing yet; it’s printed straight from the manuscript I sent my editor, but typeset like a real book. Only I’m not sure whether that will end up being the real typesetting, or whether it’s just something temporary they threw together while the final typesetting gets worked out. The cover, though, isn’t just full-color (something they don’t always do for ARCs) — it’s the full-blown really real cover, with the foil for the title and the spot gloss. Even color ARC covers often lack the special effects the finished deal will have (the title on the Warrior and Witch ARC, for example, isn’t embossed).

So it looks almost exactly like a real book, except for the big white notes saying it’s an advance copy of yadda yadda and here’s how it’s being promoted.

June is so terribly far away . . . .

research question #1

Must ponder what I want in the way of a Victorian icon. For now, I shall use the MNC one.

Anyway. The real point of this post.

This question is particularly aimed at d_aulnoy, since I know she’s a Victorianist, but if any of the rest of you happen to have familiarity with nineteenth-century literature, please feel free to jump in.

I’m trying to come up with a title for the Victorian sequel. I want to do something in the vein of Midnight Never Come: that is, a poetic phrase taken from the literature of the period, which is also (of course) applicable to the substance of the novel. Mind you, I’m still working on figuring out what that substance is — but you’d be surprised (or maybe not) how much having a compelling title can help shape a story.

But of course there’s a lot of Victorian literature out there; I need to narrow it down. Specifically, I want things apropos of London, industrialization, urbanization, maybe the underworld . . . you get the drift. Soppy poems about love and/or how pretty nature is need not apply. Random odes to a hat the poet saw someone wear to the opera, ditto. Stuff that’s a little grittier and grimmer. What poems/poets should I look at?

please update your bookmarks

I have no idea how many, if any, people have bookmarked things off the webpage for Midnight Never Come, but if you have, be aware that the URLs will be changing. Since I’m doing more than one Onyx Court novel, I’ve created a directory for that series, and moved the MNC material off into it.