gyargh

And then sometimes, even though you read your copy-edited manuscript out loud, even though you had the online OED open in a tab almost the entire time you were writing your book, you get to the page proofs — the stage when alterations can have expensive consequences — and you realize your Elizabethan novel has the word “thug” in it.

Which comes from the Thuggee cult in India, and didn’t enter English until the nineteenth century.

Here’s the thing about this kind of work, the obsessive checking of word histories to root out any glaring anachronisms. It’s like being the CIA. Nobody will notice when you do your job right. Nobody will look at a paragraph and say, “Good on her! She didn’t refer to this character as paranoid, because we didn’t have that word until Sigmund Freud* came along!” Success is utterly invisible. They’ll only notice when you screw up, when you call someone a thug two hundred and twenty-five years too soon.

This is one heck of a thankless job.

—

*Yes, I know the word didn’t actually originate with him. Remember, I have the OED. It just sounded better that way.

things you don’t think about

One of the changes I’ve noticed with Warner turning into Orbit is that now my CEM and page proofs come with cover sheets that explain those parts of the process in more detail. (Page proofs arrived yesterday.) I always knew changes at this stage were expensive, and that if I made too many I’d have to pay for them myself, but this time around I’ve got concrete info: the allowance for author changes is generally somewhere between $200 and $800 dollars, depending on the book, and changes cost about $1.50 a line.

Which led to me noticing something. Thanks to the way I chose to structure it, MNC has a grand total of (I think) seven hard page breaks in the text. Things like the act openings with their epigraphs get their own pages, but the narrative itself leaves white space at the end of a page only seven times — at the end of each act, plus the prologue and epilogue.

Why does this matter? Because changing at the page-proof stage has a ripple effect. If the alteration I’d like to make in the first para of the prologue shortens it by one line, that will pull a line from page 2 onto page 1, and so on back until you hit a hard page break.

Of which there are only seven in the entire book.

There are many reasons to ponder things like chapter structure — how many, how long, etc — but this is a new one by me. Building the book this way means I have to be even more economical with my page-proof-stage changes, or next thing I know they’ll have to reset the entirety of Act Four. So I’m very glad I made myself read the entire CEM out loud, to catch as many verbal infelicities as possible; now is not the time to fix broken sentences. But even so, I find myself wanting to delete two words from the first paragraph, and I have to be really careful about that.

Note to self: chapter breaks are your friend.

what to do with the recommendations?

So, the July-to-December delay in posting recommendations probably made it clear that I’m having trouble with that whole endeavour.

Keeping up with the recommendations has always been difficult. I have a limited amount of time for reading; I have an even more limited amount of time for reading novels. Then, even when I am able to spend time on fiction, not everything I read is suitable. Some of it is re-reading, instead of new material. Some of it, I don’t like enough to recommend. And even when I find something new and good, maybe the thing in question turns out to be a six-book series, which still only provides me with one month’s worth of material. Is it any wonder finding twelve a year proved tougher than it looked?

Adding in the “primary source” recommendations (folkloric material I thought fantasy writers might enjoy/benefit from/make use of) was supposed to lighten my load, and it did. Nine novels or series a year, instead of twelve. But because of the way I chose to approach the folklore recs, those ended up being even more work than the novel ones. It’s no accident that I slammed to a halt this year during August: that was the Prose Edda, and I just kept on not finding the time and energy to put that one together. My solution ended up being not so solvent.

With five years of this under my belt, I’m wondering what to do now.

I know that I don’t want to change over to straight reviews instead of recommendations. I think reviews serve a purpose, of course — negative ones included — but what I want to do here is point people toward good books, not away from bad ones. So I figured I’d turn to you lot and see what your preference would be for, among my various possibilities.

Feel free to make other suggestions in comments.

lessons learned

Yesterday’s writing lesson: when at a loss for plot, crash a car.

Today’s writing lesson: when at a loss for plot, I can always get Ethan and Val to fight.

I shan’t be at a loss tomorrow, because I know what to write.

here we go; there we went

Today, I officially stop dinking around with this YA project, and start working seriously on it.

Let’s hope it doesn’t blow up in my face.

It’s hard for me to do the end-of-year writer-meme, because I don’t track exactly how much I’m writing all the time. The best I can do is to say that I wrote about 160K of novel last year — Midnight Never Come, plus about 33K of ANHoD (a back-burner project) and not quite 15K of this YA thing. But that doesn’t count bits and pieces of other things. And I can’t check my short story output because that file isn’t available to me at the moment. And then there’s nonfiction and formal blogging (i.e. things like SF Novelists posts, rather than random crap here), and so on.

I had five short stories hit print (“Execution Morning,” “A Thousand Souls,” “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?,” “Selection,” and “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood”). I sold three. Note for 2008: try to increase short story output. (While also writing more novels? Yes, I recognize the problem here.)

The sad lack is no novel out, since Warrior and Witch got put out so soon after Doppelganger, and settling on Midnight Never Come took so long. But I’ll make up for that: MNC this year, plus a reissue for that first pair.

Anyway. That’s an informal roundup of last year’s writerliness. But rather than dwell on it more, I’m going to go work on the YA.

::snarl::

Seven hours of travel delays is not how I wanted to close out my year.

But I made it home with three hours remaining. Now I try to get in a party mood, to end on a better note.

Nearly 2500 words on the YA today. I’m starting to get into a groove with these scenes, but man am I sucking the beginnings and endings of them. I can has good transitions plz? Apparently not.

A voice in the back of my head is singing “Tonight I’m gonna write like it’s 1999.” Because it really does feel like I’m writing my first novel all over again, facing all the same hurdles I did then. They’re both first person, too, which I don’t normally do for more than a short story at a time. I wonder if that’s why my transitions are sucking so hard.

But earlier today I read Paul Graham’s essay “How to Do What You Love,” which is an excellent reminder of why I’m in the right field. “You have to like what you do enough that the concept of ‘spare time’ seems mistaken” — indeed. If you decide to forgo a movie or hanging out because you’d rather be writing — not all the time, but if it happens — then you’re doing something right.

And, as he points out, it’s good to try the thing you think you’d rather be doing, and see if you really do like it and can be productive on it. To that end, I should mention that is starting up a new round January 1st. It’s 750 words a day — a much saner pace than NaNoWriMo’s 1500+ — for 90 days, for a total of 67,500 words, which need not (and depending on your genre, should not) be the entirety of your book. I’ll be there, since I’m noveling anyway, and so will any number of other writers ranging from rank newbies to experienced pros. If you’re minded to try writing a novel, and external motivation is something that works for you, it’s a good place to go.

milestone

Ten thousand words of YA book is rather different from ten thousand words of adult book. I have to keep reminding myself I might be as much as a sixth of the way done already. And that I need to plan accordingly.

Used to be, I would decide that a certain thing needed to happen at (say) the 20K point in the book. With that staked down a little way in my future, I’d find stuff to fill the intervening space. But as you might imagine, that led to padding, scenes going on too long or existing when they didn’t need to simply because, in my mind, it wasn’t time yet for that important thing to happen.

This wasn’t good, of course, but it was a useful learning stage in my early novel-writing days. And to some extent, I’ve made the obvious change of just getting to the good stuff sooner, rather than postponing it to some semi-arbitrary future point. (That happened very distinctly at the end of Act Two in MNC, for example.) But more often, what I find myself doing is focusing on that in-between stuff. Okay, if for pacing reasons thus-and-such needs to happen at the one-third mark in the book, and I’m aiming for about 120K of book, then what kind of meat can I pack into that first 40K?

I still end up with some fluff. But increasingly I’m ending up with a more complicated story, because I have to invent subplots and complications to justify 40K of book before That Thing happens.

Only in this case, I’m not aiming for 120K. Or even a hundred. I want 60-75K, and that means I have to keep a close eye on how many threads I’m flinging out there in the early part of this story. Too many, and I’m going to end up with more book than I can fit into my allotted space. But too few, and it will feel flimsy. And the last thing I want is to write a flimsy book just because I’m aiming at a younger audience.

So far it feels flimsy. But I know I want to backtrack and put in more Brian stuff, and more family stuff, so they’ll have a real presence in the story. And I think that will help a lot.

But man, it feels like I’m having to learn how to do this stuff all over again.

We interrupt this holiday to bring you two pieces of updatery.

The first is that there’s a new service in town, folks: Anthology Builder. So far it’s still in beta, but here’s the general idea: authors upload stories, which you can then purchase, iTunes-style, and assemble into a print-on-demand customized anthology which gets shipped to your door soon afterward. I’m not sure how well it will fly, but I really like the idea, and so far have uploaded “Calling into Silence”. That’s the same story I made available online for IPSTP Day, so you can read it for free, but consider it me dipping my toes in the water of Anthology Builder. My hope is that the site prospers (or something like it does), and in the long term I can use it as a way to make all of my published short fiction available for custom reprinting. Otherwise it tends to sink without a trace, and short story collections are hard to sell via traditional commercial publishing.

The second update is that I’ve made a big push to atone for my suckage since July. What suckage is that, you ask? Why, the suckage of not having posted any book recommendations. I’ve taken advantage of my enforced free time, and thrown up all the rest of them in one fell swoop. The two remaining folklore recommendations are for the Prose Edda and the Volsunga saga; the three novels are Avalon High by Meg Cabot, The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones.

Stay tuned for a later post, wherein I will discuss the future of those recommendations. You can probably guess, based on that huge gap, that I’m thinking of making some changes.

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.)