Today’s snow has — without much trying — tipped me over the edge of laziness, thus canceling all of the errands I was going to run this afternoon.

Instead, I’m at home, being very unexpectedly writerly.

I’ve been plugging away on the Sooper Sekrit Project, a bit here, a bit there, 2355 words so far today. WTF? Okay, it helps that I was writing my way toward a scene I was really looking forward to, which is now officially on the page (as opposed to the fragmentary bits/notes I had before). But I’m just feeling very writerly.

Okay, so it isn’t the kind of productivity I need the most. But I’ll take it.

I still have no idea how to pace this thing. I have a better beginning, though, and Karen’s onstage now (sorry, khet_tcheba, you’re not the one she’s named for), and Ethan’s developing just as problematically as I had hoped.

This, by the way, is violating my “never write every bit I know at once” rule. But technically I’m still in the “play around with this and see where it goes” stage, rather than the “thousand words a day until I’m done” stage, so if I find myself at a dead halt tomorrow it’s no biggie.

you know . . . .

It occurs to me that there are probably any number of people in the world who are convinced I ripped Doppelganger off from the Buffy episode “Doppelgangland.”

Which I did not see until years after I had written the book.

(I mean, two red-haired girls who are alternate reality versions of each other? And one’s a witch? And the other wears black leather and kicks ass? Make Mirage a vampire, and you’re set.)

curiosity

Did anybody actually go see The Movie Formerly Known As The Dark Is Rising?

I’m noticing all these posts about The Golden Compass, various people and blogs discussing what they thought of the movie, and I don’t recall seeing one about The Seeker. Which rather suggests to me that nobody I know went to see it.

This probably isn’t so, but at the very least it doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention. Can anybody who saw it tell me what they thought? How bad was it, really?

permission to suck

One of the pieces advices new writers get is that you have to give yourself permission to suck.

The logic behind this is not that sucking is okay; rather, sucking right now is okay. Too many people get paralyzed the moment they set finger to key, thinking that if what comes out right then isn’t brilliant, they might as well not bother. So you tell them it’s okay to suck: that’s what second drafts and revisions are for. Much easier to fix an existing story that sucks than one that doesn’t even exist.

I never really had to go that route, not because I never sucked, but because I did most of my suckage before I got self-conscious about it. When you’re twelve, fourteen, sixteen, it’s easy to get lost in the fun of it and not worry about the flaws. I was just self-critical enough to improve, not enough to paralyze. So I’ve never had much personal use for that advice.

Now, for the first time, I’m having to embrace it.

I’ve got this thing, the Sooper Sekrit YA Urban Fantasy Project, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time pondering ways to start it off that won’t look like every other YA urban fantasy I’ve read (having devoured half a dozen or so recently, as research). Finally the other night I said, screw it. Let’s go ahead with the standard opening, and start getting this thing on the page. Maybe it will suck. Maybe I don’t quite have the voice yet, maybe I’m going to have to radically revise the thing later to fix its pacing, because I have no idea how to structure a 60K-word novel instead of a 100K or 120K one. Maybe I don’t yet know how to get Brian and Ethan into that fight, and what I’m about to put in for that will be kind of dumb and useless.

It’s okay. I’ve given myself permission to suck.

I’ve also given myself permission to write out of order, though I know most of the bits I’m scribbling down are actually long-form notes, not the scenes themselves. In fact, I think I’m throwing much of my process out the window, here. It may be an experiment doomed to failure; we’ll have to see. But this is a spec project, something I’m doing on my own time because I want to, and because I don’t have any other book I should be writing just now. The Victorian novel has to wait for the summer because if Midnight Never Come is any example, it will eat my head, and I can’t do that while I’m also teaching.

This, I hope I can do. Maybe I’m right. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ll produce the crappiest first draft since Sunlight and Storm, or realize that my process is a good one after all and I should go back to it. But for the first time since July of 2003, I’m tackling a novel without any deadlines on it I haven’t imposed myself.

If it sucks, nobody will ever have to know.

And besides, that’s what revisions and second drafts are for.

CEM is mailed off back to the copy-editing director.

What have I learned lately? That I’ve gotten more concise, but I still find random words and occasionally entire sentences that just don’t need to be there. That I’ve gotten better at the “that/which” distinction, though I still screw it up occasionally. That since I haven’t the faintest clue about the “further/farther” distinction, I’ve apparently decided to use “further” for everything. (And that 99% of the time, that’s the wrong choice.)

The slog took a while in part because I read the entire. book. out loud to myself. (In a whisper, to save my voice.) It’s amazing how much more you catch, doing it that way. It’s also amazing how much longer it takes. And I find myself questioning whether it’s really worth the effort, whether changing that one word or removing that repetition or eliminating “that” or “had” from a sentence really makes any difference at all.

This falls into the category of “If you start asking those questions, you’d better find another job.”

Now I get a month or so before the page proofs land on my doorstep. And, for those who were wondering (by which I mean my brother), no, the ARC typesetting isn’t final. They’re changing the font on the title page and the epigraphs, and the Tiresias sections will probably be italicized. Which are all changes I’m glad to see.

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.