yay water!

Yesterday I went swimming for the first time this summer. I was in London when the pool here at my complex opened, and then I was busy, and then it was closed, and then I was busy, and then it was closed . . . but we went and swam for about half an hour or so last night, and it was glorious.

A few observations, in no particular order:

1) If you need goggles, get thee to a specialty store or look online and get yourself some Barracudas. To quote the jargon from the website I turned up, they’re a positive-pressure seal instead of a negative-pressure one, i.e. they don’t operate by glomming onto your face with suction, which makes them much more comfortable than Speedo’s product. The frame is molded to fit the eye orbit more closely, and the foam on mine has held up for over a decade; only now are they starting to leak a bit, leading me to decide that it’s time to get some new ones.

2) My form on various strokes has undoubtedly degenerated, but a lot of it came back very quickly. (Though it did take me most of that half-hour to remember I was doing the wrong breast-stroke kick. Oh well; now that I’m not competing, I’ll go back to the one that doesn’t make my hips and knees hurt.) I think I can still justifiably call myself a strong swimmer.

3) I can still do fly!!! In fact, despite the loss of form, I probably swim butterfly better now than I did when I was fourteen, on account of having some actual upper body muscle. I may consider adding a once-weekly swim session to my exercise routine, because if you want gorgeous shoulders and back, ain’t nothin’ like swimming fly to give it to you. And I like swimming a lot better than running, even on an elliptical.

4) Did I mention I love the water?

5) I think I made almost this exact post (minus the commentary on Barracudas) a couple of years ago, after another long hiatus of not swimming. But most of you weren’t reading this journal then, so I can pretend it counts as new content, right?

Swimming good. I just wish I didn’t have to go to so much work to keep my hair from becoming chlorine-damaged. Otherwise I’d be in the water every day, like I was when I was nine.

turning point

I shouldn’t have stayed up this late, but I couldn’t stop in the middle of either of those scenes.

I’ve passed the halfway point in the novel. It came just shy of 60K — I’m at 60,210 right now — which might or might not be precisely half the wordcount; I think not. It’s probably about three-quarters of the way through Act Three. But it’s the point at which the novel pivots, at which it stops moving away from the beginning and starts moving toward the end.

Things went boom, as one might expect.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. Technically I wrote the crucial moment a month ago, on my way back from London, but it wasn’t real until it went into the novel. Now all the stuff that created this situation will start to come out. Now the depth of backstory — the reason I’m writing this novel — will become apparent.

Now my characters are scroooooowed.

It seems the right place to leave them for tonight.

Authorial sadism: All of it, of course. But the “forgive me” lines are the ones that hurt the most.

LBR quota: Love led to blood. As it so often does.

Totally random gripe, but you know what? I’m not actually a fan of the way the web is getting more multimedia. (This gripe brought to you by the Onion, which has too much video and audio content these days for my taste. I miss when it was mostly text.)

Why does this irritate me? Because 95% of the time I’m at the computer, I’m listening to music. My own music. If a website loads up some song (MySpace, I’m looking at you) or I click on an innocuous-looking link and find a video starting to play, I have to go pause my music — or, as I more often do, just back up to the previous page and go find something else that won’t interrupt me. Also, I can read text at my own pace, whereas a video makes me go at its pace — and when it’s seven minutes long, I generally decide I don’t care enough about whatever it is, and I go do something else.

Which is not to say I never want to watch videos. I just want to know that’s what’s coming. A lot of people these days put a (pdf) warning when a link leads to an Adobe file, since many of us dislike having Adobe launch out of nowhere, and don’t always remember to check the url we’re being pointed at before we click on it. I’d love to see a similar thing for videos, so I don’t get ambushed by them. Then I can decide whether I want to go watch a video right now or not. Also? Don’t just link saying “This is awesome” or some such. If you do that to a webpage, I can skim the content briefly and decide whether it’s something that interests me. If I don’t know what a video’s about, I’m not going to sit around and wait to find out, then decide whether I, too, think it’s awesome. (It usually isn’t anyway.)

I also don’t follow any video podcasting on blogs. I’d follow audio podcasting if I could be bothered to put it on my iPod (and video too, maybe, if I had an iPod that supported it), but not watching or listening on my computer. Again with the wanting to move at my own pace thing. And being able to skim over the stuff that doesn’t interest me.

In the grand scheme of things, this is not an epic problem; I’m far more concerned with writing my novel and catching up on my e-mail and what our legislators will do about the White House thumbing its nose at them. But it’s a minor irritant, and I thought y’all might like a post that isn’t about MNC.

So warn folks when you’re linking to a video, and give some sense of what the video is. Or Angry Kitten will come after you.

bloody heck.

When I don’t know a fact for this novel, I can make it up, within the limits of what I do know. So, for example, I don’t actually know which palace Elizabeth was living in during April 1590. But I know St. James’ was a royal palace, and that various other palaces were usually occupied in the summer or autumn or winter, so I can put her in St. James’ that spring and be content.

My problem is that, once I learn a fact, I can’t make myself ignore it.

The solution to this ought to be for me to stop researching. If I hadn’t dug through my books for more detailed information on Elizabeth’s coronation procession, I never would have found a reference to a text which some kind soul (hah) put online which lets me know exactly the route she took, and therefore I wouldn’t know she never went near Candlewick Street, and therefore the flashback scene I had in mind that requires her to be there during her coronation procession would be just fine and dandy in my mind.

But now I know. And I can’t make myself ignore her real processional route just because I want her to pass by a certain significant half-buried rock on Candlewick Street.

<grumble mutter hmpf>

Okay, fine. I’ll work this differently. But my life really would be easier if I could either stop researching, or ignore what I read. (But then what would be the point of reading it?)

uncertain

I read what looked like pretty official confirmation the other day, that they’ve started filming another Indiana Jones movie.

On the one hand: yay! More Indiana Jones is generally a good thing. (I say “generally” because of Temple of Doom.) They’ve been talking about doing this for literally over a decade, and it’s kind of impressive to see it finally become reality.

On the other hand: they’ve made changes.

I had heard a rumour some time ago that they were going to deal with Harrison Ford being older by moving the series forward a decade or two. According to what I read, this is true; the movie will take place in the 1950s. And I’m not sure what I think of that.

Maybe my knowledge of pulp is limited, but to my mind, the 1950s is not the classic pulp adventure era. Also, no more Nazis; will it be communists instead? How will that change the flavor of the movie? (Especially since these days we tend to look on communists with pity rather than fear.) And then a more nit-picky detail, but one that will bug me: while archaeology in the 1930s was not like it is in the movies, archaeology in the 1950s is even less like that. I mean, Christ, by then you’ve got Binford on the horizon. The “grab the gold statue and run” era is more nineteenth century than twentieth, anyway, but by the 50’s you’re about to hit the era of “archaeology is a science, dammit,” complete with charts and graphs and equations to prove it.

In other words, there are issues of logic and colonialism and politics and so on to consider that I can generally let go of in the pulp genre — but moving the setting to the 1950’s may make that harder for me to do.

It may be great. I’d be thrilled if it is. But I am a little leery. Anybody have more information on the production?

50K!

Tonight, I passed fifty thousand words.

The problem is, once I pass 40K, I enter the dreaded Middle Of The Book. It’s a wasteland in which the initial momentum of starting a novel has worn off, the end is not yet in sight, there are a variety of things to be juggled that range from inoffensive little balls to flaming chainsaws, and there won’t be any more meaningful landmarks of progress until I hit 80K, which is the lower limit for what one might reasonably expect to publish as a fantasy novel.

So it turns out that an unexpected benefit of dividing this book into five acts is, I get other landmarks. Somewhere between about 60-65K, I will finish Act Three, and that is a closer thing to look forward to than 80K is. And it mitigates my usual difficulty at estimating total word-count; when I finish Act Three, I’ll be three-fifths of the way through the story, though not necessarily the work.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to hit 50K until a couple of nights from now, but this afternoon I wrote the other flashback Act Two needed, and stuck that in where it belongs.

<examines the flashback>

Apparently this novel is about people figuring out what it is they really want, and then deciding what price they’re willing to pay for it.

Most of them are paying too much.

Authorial sadism: Deven’s turn to be wrong wrong wrongitty wrong. (Except for the bit where he’s right. And that’s even meaner.)

LBR quota: Both blood and rhetoric, with love gasping for air as it tries not to get crushed to death.

Supernatural

It’s kind of a writing-related post, in that I’m dissecting the writing choices of a TV show. But that counts as a change of pace, I think, after what this journal has been like lately.

I don’t know how many of you watch the TV show Supernatural, but I just saw the end of the second season, and I am continuing to be pleased by it. Not the most complex character development, or the snappiest scripts, or the most amazing concepts I’ve ever seen, but there’s a solidity to the writing that pleases me, particularly on a macro story-choice scale.

Talking about this without lapsing into spoilers is of course problematic. But I can hit at least the broad points.

(more…)

MNC Book Report: The Queen’s Conjurer, Benjamin Woolley

Note to self: do not take hiatus of several weeks in the midst of reading a book for research. You will forget most of what you read in the first half.

This book, as some of you might guess, is a biography of Doctor John Dee. I also need to pick up Dee’s diaries, probably, and give those a read-through (especially the parts around my time period), but first I figured I needed an orienting framework, a simple biography that would give me the context of the things noted down in those diaries.

If that’s what you’re after, this book seems pretty good. It has the virtue of acknowledging not just Dee’s mysticism, but also his scientific work and the political context in which he was operating. (That latter aspect in particular cemented my dissatisfaction with Lisa Goldstein’s novel The Alchemist’s Door, which I very much wanted to like but didn’t.) I suspect that balance might be a legacy of Dame Frances Yates, whose work I’ll be taking a look at — hopefully — if I have the time. From the overview given toward the end of this book, it sounds like a lot of biographies of Dee more or less write him off as a deluded crackpot, which does not serve my purposes at all.

Oh yes, I have a purpose in reading this. (Are you surprised?) I will admit that Dee is likely to show up in Midnight Never Come. For those of you — i.e. mrissa — who grimace at the thought, I promise to try and put him in right, up to and including reading Yates if I have the time. (I solemnly swear to depict John Dee as a Christian Cabalist, not as some kind of cracked-out mother-goddess-worshipping Elizabethan neo-pagan. Mris, who the hell did that to him?) The difficult part will be grokking Christian Cabalism well enough to try and depict it, and balancing that out with the ever-unanswered question of what the hell was going on with Edward Kelley. I can think of all kinds of interesting possibilities; I just don’t know which one will serve my purposes best.

Now, let’s see if I can finish off one of the other three or four books I’m halfway done with.

Finit Act Two.

A little while ago, I made a rambly post about how it might be problematic that a sizeable but not sizeable enough chunk of the book takes place in 1588, while the rest of it is in 1590. It’s about twenty-one thousand words, which is way too long to be anything like a prologue, but not really a third of the book, which I could justifiably label “Part One” and move on from there.

It is, however, approximately a fifth of a book.

And the five-act structure was, y’know, really popular back then.

So despite the fact that this book may end up having nothing to do with theatre aside from a title ganked from Marlowe, Midnight Never Come will be delivered in five Acts, possibly with a prologue and an epilogue, despite the usual shortcomings of such devices. I read up on five-act structure, so the book wouldn’t just be arbitrarily chopped into fifths, and it seems like it will fit very well. This was a pretty suitable Act Two, at least, and the next one will most definitely be an Act Three.

Anyway, I expected to be making this post tomorrow night or possibly the night after. But the Lune scene I was finishing ended about thirty words short of my 1K quota, and rather than falling into the bad habit of padding it out to make my goal (or letting myself stop, like a sane person might), I decided to get at least thirty words into the next scene.

. . . only, in the act of typing the scene header (I’m identifying where and when each scene takes place, since the story covers so much of both time and space), I changed my mind entirely about what the scene would be. Deven can do all that stuff I was intending at the beginning of Act Three. The last scene of Act Two ended up being less than three hundred words long — which is why I just wrote the whole damn thing. It seemed silly to get thirty words in and stop. So instead of starting a scene that would have taken at least one night to finish, probably two, I’m done right now.

Two Acts down. Three to go.

It’s a good place to be.

Authorial sadism: Swift kicks to the kidneys, and the unexpected replacement scene.

LBR quota: They’re all blood, you see.

poll time, but not mine

I thought about reposting this poll here on my own journal, since I know people are less likely to click through a link to take a poll elsewhere, but then I’d have to do the work to collate my data with Mindy’s. So instead I will ask all of you to take a minute or so and go fill out Mindy Klasky’s poll about book promotion, and which kinds of things have induced you to buy a book. She put it up because a group of us author-types are discussing how to promote books effectively, so the data will benefit a large number of people, myself included.

omg i love computers squeeeee

Why do I not have an icon for hopping up and down in glee?

Earlier today, kniedzw posted about a program called Stellarium. Alas, it seems to base its Julian/Gregorian switch on the continental one in 1582, so in order to calculate anything for Midnight Never Come I have to do the adjustment myself — England didn’t switch calendars until 1752, on account of viewing calendar reform as some kind of sketchy papist plot. But with that done, I could, if I chose, find out what phase the moon is in and where it stands in the sky when Lune goes sneaking outside on March 6th, 1590, to meet with someone in the orchard at Richmond.

Computers are awesome.

But the biggest help is much less impressive. All I have to do is type “ncal -J 1590” into my unix prompt on sundell.net and I can find out what the dates should be for certain events I have taking place on Fridays, because my computer obligingly spits out a Julian calendar for the full year. And if I stick “-e” into that command, I can find out the date of Easter that year, which is actually relevant to the plot.

Computers are freaking awesome.

The fact that I can get this kind of information without leaving my office chair — okay, so at the moment I have to walk into kniedzw‘s office for Stellarium, since I haven’t installed it on my own computer — it’s just phenomenal. I said last year that I couldn’t imagine running Memento without the Internet, since even if it was occasionally inaccurate, it offered me a far greater wealth of information with far greater ease than anybody could have dreamt of ten years ago. I likewise couldn’t imagine writing Midnight Never Come without computers. Aside from the issues of writing a hundred thousand words longhand, I wouldn’t have Stellarium, the unix cal command, online access to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and dozens of other resources I make use of every single day.

Computers are the most awesome things EVAR.

stopping hate

I wish my motivation for a non-writing-related post were more cheerful.

Came across two things today. The more recent is this post about a murder that took place not too far from where I live. A couple of guys spent literally hours beating a man to death, dragging him out into the middle of nowhere, leaving him to die, then coming back to find and shoot him, and so far their defense for this has been “he was gay.” Which he wasn’t. But his actual orientation is in a sense irrelevant; what’s relevant is that it’s being claimed as a justification, that Indiana has not passed any anti-hate-crime legislation, and that this story has been buried. Almost nobody reported on it when it happened. Not nationally; not locally. Just a couple of smaller, more independent papers. But when a ten-year-old girl was killed, it made news everywhere.

Turning to gender, I’m sure many of you read Joss Whedon’s . . . I don’t want to call it a rant, or a diatribe, because those words invite you to dismiss his words as undirected anger. Nor was it a manifesto, per say. His post — a bland word — about Dua Khalil, a young Iraqi woman who was beaten to death in a so-called “honor killing,” and about how spectators stood around and filmed her death on their cellphones, doing nothing to try and stop it. (Those videos are online. I have not gone looking for them. I’m sure you can find them if you try.) Skyla Dawn Cameron and others are putting together a charity anthology of essays, short stories, poetry, artwork — anything relevant to the issues Whedon raised, regarding misogyny and violence against women. I don’t think they’ve specified yet which charity the proceeds will go to, but it’s not for profit.

I figure both of these are issues near and dear to the hearts of some of my readership here. Both links contain information on how you can take action. If you’re an Indiana resident, you can particularly help out with the Hall case. Either way, I hope these efforts can do at least a little bit of good.

book! (sort of.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a novel.

Not a complete novel, mind you. I didn’t somehow magically finish Midnight Never Come when you weren’t looking — though it would be awesome if I had. No, all I’ve done is pass the 40K mark, which is the official lower end for novel-hood, according to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula award guidelines.

The things you see on the shelf will all probably be 80K or longer (sometimes much longer). My contract specifies 90-110K, though this is generally flexible (within reason). I’ve got my own vague estimate of something between 100-120K, though as I pointed out in that meme, I’m crap at such estimates. In other words, this benchmark means something, but I don’t really know what it is.

But it seemed a good time to make a progress post.

Stuff’s starting to go more seriously ka-splody for the characters. Lune’s in trouble. Deven’s in trouble but doesn’t know it yet. [Names withheld] will be dying soon. Boom!

I can feel that I’m stretching myself with this book. Stretching myself with description: it’s the Renaissance, it’s fae, it’s stuff that demands more verbal embroidery than Doppelganger did . . . but while I stretch for that added detail, I also have to make sure I don’t wander off into elaborate prose that will alienate my readers who appreciate the simpler style. (And for my next trick . . . .) I’m stretching myself with the politics, tossing extra pieces onto my chessboard so this isn’t a story about half a dozen characters with clearly defined and obvious goals. I’m stretching myself with historical research, with depth of backstory, with attempts to make sure the things my characters achieve carry real prices, costlier than the ones I would normally subject them to.

And I need to make sure I don’t stretch so far that I crash and burn. Because I don’t really have the time to pick up flaming pieces of novel and scrub the soot off them for an in-depth repair job. Not if my publisher is going to get this thing on the shelves when they’re hoping to.

But stretching, of course, is good. Because I’m at the point where I look at my own past work and think of it as mediocre — well-loved mediocrity, mind you, and not without its good points, but I Can Do Better. And pushing to do better is how we succeed in this field.

Edited to add: I almost forgot these.

Authorial sadism: Oops, somebody overheard that?

LBR quota: Lately it’s been all about the rhetoric, of a particularly backstabby sort.

MNC Book Report: The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli

Technically this book doesn’t have much to do with the Elizabethan period, as it was written in early sixteenth century Italy, not late sixteenth century England. But I figured, y’know, I keep referring to Invidiana as Machiavellian (in descriptions of the novel, not within the novel itself), and I’d never read this book, so I figured I should.

Not a lot to say about it, except that it’s, um, less Machiavellian than I expected. Yeah, there’s the whole “ends justify the means” approach, and he does say it’s safer (not “better,” at least in my translation) to be feared rather than loved, but he also points out that you shouldn’t make your subjects hate you. (Which would be where Invidiana has gone wrong.) It’s a short book, and a quick read, especially if (like me) you skim over the examples he chooses from recent Italian politics.

The other major reason I picked it up is that I may put brief epigraphs at the beginning of each section, and I suspected this might provide me with some good ones. I have a couple of strong possibilities marked down now. Unfortunately, the other two things I want to read through in search of quotable quotes are The Book of the Courtier and The Faerie Queene, neither of which will be half so quick to get through.

meanwhile, in Weird-Metaphor-Land . . . .

While dozing off last night, I came up with another weird metaphor for writing.

When sewing, if you stitch together two pieces of fabric whose seam edges are of equal length, you get a nice, straight, perfectly functional seam. But if you need more fullness in the garment — as you do when making skirts or shoulder seams for sleeves — then one technique is to cut one piece so its seam edge is longer than the edge you’re joining it to, and then pleat or gather the longer edge until it fits against the shorter one.

It’s important for me to take my time in writing something, to not leap on my ideas too quickly, because by taking it slowly, I give myself time to pleat or gather the story.

Here’s what I mean.

This came into my head because I had an idea while dozing off. It wasn’t a big idea; actually, it was just a complication of an idea, a way of adding depth (or in this metaphor, fullness) to the next bit of story. I knew from a while back that a scene would come when Lune would convey a certain piece of information to another character: that’s like the dots or notches you use to line up two pieces of fabric before stitching them. This needs to go here. And had I been sprinting through this book more quickly, that scene probably would have happened more or less straightforwardly, with no frills. But in between deciding I needed that scene and writing it (which I’m in the middle of at present), I had some time to think — and so the idea got more complicated. Lune isn’t going to want to convey that piece of information: there’s a bit of fullness. But she’ll end up having to: more gathering. And she’ll be in trouble for having tried to conceal it: now we’re getting somewhere. And she’ll owe someone a favor for not causing that trouble: that was last night’s pleat. Bit by bit, I’m adding these complications (and other, more spoilery ones I won’t describe) that don’t really create subplots or anything — I’m not adding in new pieces of fabric — but create more fullness in the subplots I already have, packing a greater amount of fabric/story into the space/seam provided.

Okay, now raise your hand if that made any sense to you.

(I suspect most of you with your hands up have experience with both writing and sewing.)

It’s good to let ideas sit for a while. Not only does it mean you have a chance to notice when they aren’t good ideas and replace them with better ones, it gives you time to improve on the ones that are already good. Other metaphors come to mind — I’m embroidering the idea, for example (what is it with me and textiles?) — but I like the three-dimensionality of this one. Because that’s what it feels like I’m doing: making the story more three-dimensional.