book suggestion needed

I would like to open each of the five acts of Midnight Never Come with an epigraph.

(What, you thought I would actually be taking a really-and-truly break for any substantial length of time? Hah.)

I have sources picked out for four of the five, though in three of those cases there are several potential quotes I might use — which means they haven’t been firmly assigned to particular acts, except for the last one. In no particular order, therefore, they are: The Faerie Queene, The Book of the Courtier, The Prince, and Dr. Faustus.

I need one more.

So I’m opening the floor to suggestions. My requirements are as follows:

1) The book/poem/play/whatever must be contemporary to the period of the novel. That is, published no later than 1590. (The first three books of TFQ came out then, and since nobody seems to have conclusive proof as to the date of Faustus, I’m going with the argument that puts it some time 1588-1590.) If it’s foreign, it needs to have been translated into English by 1590. If it’s substantially older than that period, my ideal would be for it to have been popular in the Elizabethan era; Beowulf wouldn’t cut it.

2) No Shakespeare. I haven’t bothered looking up what, if anything, of his got written before 1590, but even if there is something, I’m making a point of not shoehorning him into this novel.

3) I’d like to avoid repeating any of the authors I already have. Ergo, no Discorsi, no other plays of Marlowe’s, no Shepherdes Calendar or whatnot.

I know some of you are thorough-going Elizabethan geeks; any suggestions as to sources I could mine for that last epigraph?

thoughts on superhero prose

What with the book being done and all, one of two things will happen.

1) All the thoughts that have been piling up in the back corners of my head will finally come spilling out in a bunch of posts on topics I didn’t have the energy for while noveling.

2) I will sit here like a zombie, clicking “refresh” on various webpages, being terribly disappointed by the lack of updating to entertain me, while all those thoughts die on the vine.

I’m aiming for #1, so here’s a step in that direction.

First up: superhero fiction.

(more…)

a million words of hopefully-not-crap

I realized yesterday that I have now completed eight novels: two of them published, one en route to publication, one in need of substantial revision before it could be sold, one not worth trying to sell anymore, and three that I’d love to see in print someday.

Assuming a ballpark average of about a hundred thousand words for each novel, that gets you to 800K words. (In reality, it’s more like 858K.)

I mentioned before the “million words of crap” notion, the idea that you have to practice to get good. Well, yesterday’s realization got me wondering how many words I’ve written since I first started writing well enough to seek publication. And it turns out that if you add up everything I’ve sold, everything I had enough faith in to submit but ended up retiring without selling it, and everything I could probably sell if I got off my butt and revised it like I’ve been meaning to do, then I have written 1,018,970 words of completed and theoretically publishable fiction.

Huh.

So I’ve written my million words of crap, and another million of hopefully-not-crap. Only counting the stuff that I completed, of course — there’s many more words locked in unfinished stories.

I wonder what the next million will bring?

Did I loan somebody my copy of The Unstrung Harp? You know, the little Edward Gorey book about the writing of novels, and the aftermath thereof.

I’ve been promising myself for a while now that I would get to read it when I finished Midnight Never Come. But now I’m finished, and I can’t find it.

<sad swan>

two things that amused me last night

I did not want to stop writing long enough to invent names for the two random knights guarding Invidiana, which resulted in the insertion of [Sir Whoever] and [Sir Whoever2] into the story.

I did, however, pause to look something up. ‘Twasn’t the looking up that amused me; it was that in the middle of the Exciting! Climax! of the Book!, the information I needed had to do with a Renaissance dance maneuver.

You’ll understand when you get there, folks. Sometimes, when stuff is blowing up around you, the only answer is to dance.

Kee. Rist.

I was right.

There weren’t any good stopping points between the start of the explosions and the end of them.

6299 words later, all I’ve got left in Act Five is the denoument. Plus — as before — two dreams, two flashbacks, and an epilogue.

You’d think I would take tomorrow off, but you would be wrong.

Authorial sadism: You know what? There wasn’t any. Which isn’t to say nobody suffered. But no sadism.

LBR quota: As the icon says — concurrent.

Edited to add: BTW, cancel that thunderstorm. I don’t need it anymore.

informative linkage

Since it seems like half the people around me have gone on some kind of health kick since the beginning of the year, I thought I should pass along this link I just came across, to a post analyzing studies of weight-loss dieting.

Money shot: “the more you diet, the harder losing weight becomes over the long term, and the harder your body will fight to retain fat.”

Mind you, I have issues with that post. First and foremost is that the writer doesn’t define what s/he means by “weight-loss dieting” — which lack of clarity makes it easy to hit the end of that post and believe that there’s nothing we can ever do to significantly change our body weight over a long period of time, and even if we do succeed all we’ve accomplished is to increase our risk of mortality.

I doubt that.

I’m going to presume that, by “weight-loss dieting,” the writer means restricted-calorie diets, and/or diets focusing on eating very restricted sorts of foods. (Grapefruit diets, etc.) There’s some good stuff further down about the idea that fat people overeat, and skinny people eat “normally;” I’d love to see a proper statistical analysis on a cross-section of the American population, but the attempted weight-gain study (or rather, its failure) was interesting. Short form is, I’m willing to buy the idea that overweight people are not necessarily overweight because of overeating, and therefore that restricting their eating is not and never will be a successful strategy.

I’m also going to presume that the writer doesn’t mean this information to refer to what we might otherwise call “a healthy diet.” Whether or not reducing refined foods and eating more fruits and vegetables will induce substantial weight loss, I’ve got to believe it’s a good idea for health reasons. Otherwise, we might as well fire the entire medical and nutritional professions en masse, and all go out for ice cream.

My final presumption is that the data there does not apply to an exercise-based weight-loss program. Do you suffer increased risk of heart disease if you lost your twenty pounds by walking more and driving less, or going to the gym three times a week? It doesn’t make sense to me that you would, but even if that’s the case, I will bet that the statistics and charts and graphs would be different than the ones for simple dieting. Are you more likely to lose weight and keep it off if you do it via exercise? If not, then there really isn’t anything a person can do to successfully and healthily shift their weight downward. Again, we need different statistics for that. I don’t expect the diet stats to apply there.

Because if weight loss is actually that bad for you, regardless of whether you do it by calorie restriction or healthy eating or exercise, then we’re even more screwed than we knew.

Anyway, there’s been a million discussions in my social circle about dieting and the Bad Idea-ness thereof, so I wanted to link to something that cited actual studies, complete with a bibliography of peer-reviewed articles at the end. Short form is, I stand by what I’ve said all along: eat better food, not less food, and get thee to a gym.

If somebody knows a reason why that’s a bad idea, please share.

grar

I don’t suppose anyone can work some weather magic and summon up a good thunderstorm for me? Sometime late tonight, or anytime tomorrow?

Anyone?

Bueller?

<sigh>

“dismembered be thy name . . . .”

Bunch of landmarks tonight.

The numerical one is 100K. Ladies and gents, we’re into six digits, and the explosions are truly beginning.

One of tonight’s scenes involved Deven being a righteous ass. Another one is of a sort where, to really prepare and get it right, I would have to go get a Ph.D in Renaissance theology. (And probably another one in Renaissance occultism.) Instead, I speed-read Frances Yates, and yes, that’s exactly as bad of an idea as those of you who recognize that name think it is. My brain nearly melted.

The third scene is the one I’ve been looking forward to since I sat in a cafe down the street from the British Museum, with my shoes wet and my hot chocolate getting cold, and wrote a line in my notes that had me giggling for days afterward. Yes, we finally got there, and it amuses me just as much today as it did two months ago.

I have two Tiresias scenes, two flashbacks, about half of Act Five, and an epilogue to go. (Yes, this book needs an epilogue. Also a prologue. Trust me.)

I’m saying “yes” a lot in this post.

It’s a downhill charge from here to the end.

Authorial sadism: For once, it was all the minor spear-carrying characters I was the meanest to, instead of the main ones. I like to mix things up a bit, don’t you know.

LBR quota: Love. No, really. I promise.

. . . okay, I admit, there’s a whole lotta blood just on the other side of the horizon, and the love is going to bring it down.

MNC Book Report: All the Queen’s Men, Neville Williams

This book came to me courtesy of the inestimable Delia Sherman, along with several other works. I am most grateful to her.

It’s interesting to me that this project has, more than anything else I’ve ever done — including college and grad school — liberated me of the notion that I need to read a book cover-to-cover. I mainly read two chapters out of this one, those being the chapters that focused most generally on the relationship between Elizabeth and her courtiers. The rest of the book is broadly both chronological and focused on particular courtiers in particular scenarios; there’s a chapter, for example, on Norfolk’s downfall. Since a lot of that stuff predates the period in which I’m writing, and I’m running out of time for research, I decided to bypass it. Looks good, though.

Not much else to say on this one, I think. But look out for more posts later today, probably, as I knock off reports on a few other books I’ve read lately.

good news, of a minor sort

In the first part of this year, I did a good job of writing new stories and getting fresh material out the door, but I should have foreseen that the novel would kind of destroy any prospect of keeping that up all year long, as I originally intended. Anyway, between the death of that plan, a coincidence of assorted delays at places I’ve sold stories to (meaning nothing’s actually appearing any time soon), and a general lack of sales in the last few months, I’ve had no short story news to report.

So, like a TV program broadcasting random “human interest” stories when news is slow, I’ll mention that “Kingspeaker,” one of this year’s accomplishments, has been passed along to the senior editors at Baen’s Universe. It now stands a still small but non-trivial chance of selling, which is cool.

And I’m not just saying that because they pay well, either. <g> I made an impulse decision to subscribe a month or so ago, said impulse being driven by reading the first part of Elizabeth Bear’s “Cryptic Coloration” and wanting to read the rest. (matociquala, I blame you. It was the vividness of Matthew’s description that hooked me in — that, and the subsequent classroom scene.) Anyway, I’m patchy about subscribing to things, because I have yet to find a magazine I like consistently enough to stick with for more than one subscription. Baen’s hasn’t hurdled that bar by any means; in fact, most of the SF I read for a scene or two and then gave up on. But the nice thing is, they publish a lot of both SF and F every issue, plus articles and the like, and don’t cost much at all relative to what you get; six bucks for an issue, thirty for a year, and every issue is about the length of a Robert Jordan novel, with far more happening in it.

I liked enough out of this current issue that I’d say it’s worth the price of a subscription. We’ll see what I think of future issues. But it would definitely be an awesome market to appear in.

a recipe for madness

I seem to have hit upon a workable method for writing the Tiresias pov scenes.

Talk to people about dreams and madness. Come up with core concepts for two of the four that need to be written (the other two I’m still uncertain about). Let these compost for a while. Late at night, put Tiresias’ music on loop. Make sure there will be no interruptions (this includes closing e-mail, of course). Turn off all the lights; leave about three small candles burning. Reset the computer display so Wordperfect gives you white text on a black background; this minimizes the light from the screen. Turn the screen off and lie on the floor for a while, thinking about Tiresias as if preparing to role-play him. When the scene starts to take shape, get up, write the scene longhand on the backs of random scraps of paper. Write hunching over the paper to see in the candlelight. Don’t worry about mispellings or other mistakes. Let your handwriting go to hell. (Bonus points for using the black-and-silver fountain pen you already and will forever associate with this novel.) Toss the sheets aside the instant they’re done and grab a fresh one; stream of consciousness is important. When you have one completed, turn the monitor back on, type it in. Go back a few steps and start on another one.

I had one done already; did two more tonight, for just shy of nine hundred words of present-tense madman point-of-view. I haven’t yet decided what the other two will be about, but I think — not that I have any distance on them at the moment — that I like the two I’ve done. (And the progenitor of them all, the original Tiresias scene, which I did ages ago.)

Drop that on top of 1556 words of forward progress on Act Five, and it’s a good day’s night’s work.

Authorial sadism: Calling in favors.

LBR quota: I loves me some bloody rhetoric.

research question

This may possibly take the cake for Most Arcane Research Question I’ve Ever Asked Because Of Writing.

Is anybody out there familiar enough with Terrestrial Dynamic Time to tell me what if any conversions I need to make for a timestamp from 1547? As in, was 12:54 TD roughly noonish back then? The Wikipedia article on Terrestrial Time leaves me entirely unclear as to how closely that timestamp matches normal person time.

Edited to add: astroaztec has been kind enough to verify my math for me. It turns out the difference is truly negligible, so I needn’t worry.

Finit Act Four. (And *how*.)

My resolution of this morning has led to rank stupidity, of a probably necessary sort.

I had one scene left in Act Four. In keeping with the need for a higher pace, my goal for the night was not one thousand words, but that scene. I wasn’t sure how much that would be.

2169, in case you were wondering.

But wait! There’s more! You see, at that point I was over 89K. And that nice, tasty 90K landmark looked so close. I could write part of the first scene of Act Five, and feel really virtuous.

. . . except that the first scene ended up dropping me a hundred and fifty words shy of 90K, because it was so short.

So, in a fit of sheer bull-headedness, I started the next scene, praying I would get that 150 before I got into the meat of it, since I haven’t yet decided how [spoiler] is going to happen. I should have had two more days to make that decision, going at a normal pace, but tonight was not normal; tonight was 3041 words of headlong charging.

The novel is now 90005 words in length.

Act Four ran long, by a couple thousand words; that isn’t the end of the world, but when I revise I’ll see if I can’t tighten it. Act Five . . . you know how sometimes people say, “I know how long my legs are; they’re long enough to reach the ground”? Act Five will be long enough to reach the end. It may be short. I don’t kow. I’m just praying it doesn’t head too firmly in the other direction, because that would muck up this whole August 8th plan.

Unless I wrote 3K every day. But that would be a bad idea.

In fact, why am I still at my keyboard? Good night.

Authorial sadism: They figured out the plot.

LBR quota: Love and blood — my favorites.

MNC Book Report: John Dee, Richard Deacon

This book wins, hands down, the prize for Coolest Piece of Random Trivia Discovered While Researching This Novel. (The downside is that the trivia in question appears a few pages in, and seems to have dominated the author’s thinking for the remainder of the text.)

The trivia is this. Elizabeth loved to nickname the people around her; Walsingham, for example, was her “Moor,” while Burghley was “Sir Spirit.” Three men in her reign got nicknamed “Eyes.” The first was Leicester, who signed his letters with a little glyph: two circles with dots inside, representing (of course) eyes. The second was Hatton, who ended up being called “Lids” to distinguish him from Leicester; he signed his letters with dotted triangles instead.

The third was John Dee. His special sign for his nickname was two circles guarded by a mark Deacon describes as “what might have been a square root sign or an elongated seven.”

The book then obligingly shows you a picture of the mark, and yes: it looks like “007.”

I have no idea if Ian Fleming knew this, but Deacon doesn’t miss the chance to draw the connection for his readers. And this sets the tone of the book; while the last bio of Dee I read emphasized his scientific and magical work, this one runs with the idea that Dee was an intelligence agent in service to the royal government.

I’m not entirely certain what to do with Deacon’s claims. He’s not as good as he might be about telling you the basis for his conclusions about Dee’s activities, so I can’t be sure when the missions he outlines are things we definitely know happened, and when they’re educated speculation. That Dee occasionally passed information along to Walsingham and/or Burghley and/or Leicester, I can believe with no problem, but Deacon’s biography more or less positions that as the overarching purpose of his life. Dee, according to him, refused jobs he might have taken because they would have limited his ability to engage in intelligence work. His trips overseas were as much for spying as for anything else. And the angelic conversations . . . in Deacon’s view, Dee’s work with Kelley is most easily explained by assuming that much of it was used as a cover, a ciphered means of passing information to those who could act on it. Who would look for intelligence reports in the middle of one of those?

Um. I’m not sure what to do with this. Certainly there seems to have been at least one occasion that an angel informed Dee of something in cryptic terms, Dee passed the report along to the authorities, and they subsequently discovered Spanish agents attempting to burn down the forest which supplied timber to the royal navy, under conditions which matched the cryptic message of the angel. I’m not sure I buy into the thesis that spying was such a major focus of Dee’s work, though.

I’d have to read more about Dee to say for sure. But the nice thing about this research is, I’m doing it for a novel, not a dissertation. Which means I can appreciate Deacon for the details he gives, and discard his overall point if it doesn’t suit my purpose.

Edited to add: Hah. A footnote from Peter J. French’s John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus:

“Richard Deacon’s book, John Dee: Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer, and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I (London, 1968) does regrettably little to establish Dee’s true importance. In a rather sensational way, Deacon portrays Dee as ‘a roving James Bond of Tudor times’ [not, so far as I’m aware, an actual quote from that book — me], the master of a massive espionage system. He considers the ‘Spiritual Diaries’ a form of enciphering used for spying purposes. Deacon’s argument is tenuous at best, and his book is riddled with factual inaccuracies.”

I guess I’m glad I only read selections from it. But it’s good to hear someone else evaluate that thesis and find it to be kind of bunk.

. . . can I pull it off?

On August 9th, I’m taking a trip to Dallas.

My current pace of work puts me neck-deep in the Giant ‘Splody that is the end of the book right around the time I’m supposed to be out of town. While this is what I have a laptop for, those are not the ideal conditions under which to be finishing a novel.

Nor is it ideal to take a lengthy break from writing said novel while in the middle of the Giant ‘Splody.

To this awkwardness, I can see only one solution:

Finish the book before I go.

. . . which I think I can do. Maybe. It will mean I’m even more head-munched over the next two weeks than I would be otherwise, but the bright side is, I could then relax while in Dallas, take a break, and come back refreshed to polish it up and get it to my editor. These are Good Things. But they are Good Things that would require me to work at something like pace-and-a-half to double-pace from now through August 8th.

I think I can do it. Maybe.

I’m going to give it a shot. (Yoda, get out of my head.) I know almost everything that lies between me and the end of the book, which is the usual metric for whether or not I can safely speed up. This should be feasible, right?

If you don’t hear from me again, please come find my headless corpse in my office and give it proper burial.

I would have posted this earlier, but LJ and the lack of power and so on. Y’know.

If you were one of the people who hated the trailer for The Dark Is Rising, I invite you to clean your palate as I did, by re-reading the book. (It’s this month’s recommendation.)