Birthday Egotism

Every year I feel obliged to explain this post, because it’s a little bit odd.

Some time ago — four years, I think — I was having a crappy birthday. Nothing big and dramatic; just the kind of day that makes one slouch angstily in a chair and think, “I’m twenty-three years old, and what do I have to show for it?”

This was a stupid question, and so I set out to prove that to myself. You see, I’m veryverygood at being self-critical. Not so good at patting myself on the back. Ergo, I made a post about the Awesomeness of Me: all my accomplishments, all the things I had learned, all the things I could do, everything I might be proud of in my life to date. I made myself do so publicly, because the point was to toot my own horn for once. And I didn’t let myself put in any qualifications or disclaimers — which was damn hard for me. Nothing but the positives, all in one place so I could go back and re-read it if I ever sank back into that Slough of Despond.

And this has become a tradition.

Mind you, this year’s birthday has been fantabulous so far. Lunch with friends, then a road trip out to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center — in five years of living here, I’d never managed to go. It’s sunny and the perfect temperature (as far as I’m concerned), I had ice cream, I’m relaxed and happy. But this is tradition. So here is this year’s update of Birthday Egotism: everything from the last year that I’m proud of.

So. I’m twenty-seven years old. What have I got to show for it?

WARNING: Rampant Self-Aggrandizement Within

teaching, week one

So I recently began teaching my own course for the first time. For those of you who weren’t around on this journal when I was developing the course idea last fall, it’s called “Fairy Tales in the Modern World,” and is in essence about contemporary retellings/mashups/what-have-you of a whole variety of folktales.

I’m pleased with how it has started. The class enrollment is limited to twenty; I had three people wait-listed as of Monday. One student appears to have dropped, so we’ll see if we get a replacement, or if the wait-lists have already moved on with their lives. I like the size, and since I’m only teaching the one class (instead of three sections), and we meet three times a week (instead of just once for each section), I’m much further along the road to learning students’ names than usual. As in, I can correctly guess over half of them already.

Probably the most encouraging thing is that they aren’t afraid to speak up. I’ve taught sections where people settled in quickly and got talking, and sections where getting anyone to open their mouth is like pulling teeth. (Or the latter, with just that one student who will talk when no one else does. Then I have to try and draw the quiet ones out without stepping on the enthusiastic one.) Several people seem to have come in with a pretty in-depth knowledge of fairy tales already, which should provide good fodder for discussion.

Next week we’ll be blitzing through a history of the more famous tale collectors and/or writers — Basile, Straparola, Perrault, d’Aulnoy, the Grimms, Andersen, maybe a few others. Not the most exciting thing to cover, since it doesn’t provide many hooks for debate, but it’ll be good to get everyone familiar with the basics before we dive into the nuts and bolts of tales.

I’ll probably post about the teaching experience from time to time, though of course there’s always the caveat that my students may find this journal and read it. I don’t anticipate that being a problem, but if for some reason I have a meltdown and decide I hate teaching the class (unlikely), you won’t get to hear about it. ‘sall sunshine and roses, here at Swan Tower. ^_^

and there it goes

Midnight Never Come is out the door (electronically speaking) and in the editor’s hands. Or at least her computer.

Which means I get to pretend, for just a little while, that I’m done with it.

I’m not, of course. She’ll send me an edit letter, after which my revised draft is due October 22nd. Then copy-edits some time in November or December. Then page proofs. I will be so very sick of this book by then.

But for now, I get to bask in the glow of it being (temporarily) Done.

huh.

I’ve been silent lately, haven’t I? The only two posts I’ve made in the last eleven days have been Lymond book-blogging, hence not public.

I promise, I’ll surface again soon. With all kinds of fascinating updates about teaching and wedding prep and all that good stuff. No, really I will.

But before that happens, I will Finish This Revision.

No, really I will. (Because it’s due in to Madame Editor real soon now.)

Back to the grind. I have some thoughts about revision, and what I have learned about it in the last eight years, but those can wait. Like just about everything else.

But hey — I have a new monitor stand. Remains to be seen whether I like it — god, my monitor seems high — but it’s worth trying out, at least. And it provides me with small shelves beneath said monitor, which is nice.

I said “back to the grind” a paragraph or two ago, didn’t I? <sigh> Here we go.

MNC PSA

We interrupt this revision to bring you the following complaint:

God, I hate working with non-decimal currency.

It took an irritating amount of math to figure out what £46 13s. 4d. works out to in Elizabethan marks. (Seventy, in case you were wondering.) Doing calculations where there are twelvepence (d) to the shilling (s) and twenty shillings to the pound, and a mark is worth 13s. 4d., is a good argument for modern currency systems.

I need a song . . . .

Okay, great Internets ubermind. I need a rather specific music recommendation.

I’m soundtracking Midnight Never Come, and I don’t seem to have anything appropriate for a particular scene. Of course, I can’t share the details of the scene, but the relevant thing I’m aiming for is the somewhat ominous ringing of bells. Deep bells, not little hand-bells, and it should seem like a threat rather than a triumphant sound. (What can I say? Faeries don’t like church bells.)

I know some of you listen to a great many movie scores, and that’s probably one of my best bets for finding something suitable. Any suggestions I could go looking for?

Edited to clarify: to borrow Deedop’s phrase, I need something aggressively ominous. I also need something that doesn’t sound too modern; I’m not actually using truly period music for this soundtrack (though I listened to some while writing the book), but I’m trying to avoid synthetic sounds.

The Miniscript

This is one of those working habits that probably isn’t a good idea. But it’s how I work; Midnight Never Come is the eighth iteration of this approach. I’m used to it. And it has its benefits.

When I finished writing my first novel, I took a little time off, and then I started editing. Step one, of course, was to read through the novel, at which stage I marked it up with the major changes that needed to be made: continuity errors, bits that needed tightening, awkward sections, things I had to mention earlier or not drop later. This is, in my head, the “chainsaw edit” — the stage at which I take a chainsaw to the story. I mark it up with a red pen, and the goal is to make it look like I bled on the printout. If a page gets by clean, I feel like I’m not trying hard enough.

But what you have to bear in mind is that a page, in this situation, is not a standard manuscript formatted page of novel. It’s a miniscript page.

The miniscript is the part that’s probably a bad idea, but it has historical justification. The Harvard Band was going to some away game — Princeton or Cornell or some place we took a bus to the night before. Since I was always on the Study Bus (as opposed to the Raunch Bus), I decided I would use the trip as a chance to read through the novel. But even in my usual formatting (Times New Roman 12 pt., single-spaced), that was 198 pages of book, which is an awful lot to haul around. I decided to make it smaller.

The result was something my brain immediately dubbed the “miniscript,” the mini-manuscript. Times New Roman, 8 pt., full justification, half-inch margins, delete all page breaks between chapters, print on both sides of the page. Hole-punch the edge and secure it with those little metal rings, and you’ve got yourself a novel on forty pieces of paper — less if it’s a short novel, more if I ever write something that goes substantially past the 120K mark. I have eight of these things now. Maybe more; I can’t remember if I printed a miniscript for the atrocious first draft of Sunlight and Storm, or the revised draft of TNFKASotS*. I go through and mark them up with the red-pen chainsaw edit; then I go through again with a green pen, doing the line-edit. (That’s useless in places where I’ve radically changed scenes, but I just skip over those.)

What you need, to try this at home: forty pieces of paper (give or take), three metal rings, a red pen, a green pen, and microscopic handwriting.

Is it the best way to edit a novel? Probably not. But it’s how I edit a novel. Which is why the miniscript of Midnight Never Come came with me on a plane to Dallas, and acquired a sizeable bloodstain that has nothing to do with the quality of the story; my pen exploded during the flight. For portability, the miniscript can’t be beat.

—

*The Novel Formerly Known As SotS. That’s an acronym at the end, for the original title, which I’m not using so I’ll stop thinking about the book by that name. I’m failing, but I keep trying. My problems would be much reduced if I could just come up with a title I like.

every little bit helps

Some of you may have heard that August 6th through the 12th is the second International Blog Against Racism Week.

I’d love to contribute something lengthy and thought-provoking, and maybe while I’m home in Dallas I will. But I can’t promise I’ll have the time, so instead of a substantial post born of my anthropology brain, you get a brief, personal anecdote.

You see, most of my stories are set in other worlds, where the representation of race automatically gets more complicated. (If my black-skinned people have a Chinese-style culture with a religion that looks more Sumerian, who am I “really” commenting on when I write about them?) Then there are works like Midnight Never Come, where historical reality dictates that my characters will be white. But every so often, I write something set in the modern world.

Last night, I was developing a synopsis for one such idea to send along to my agent. It’s a new idea, something I’m still very much fiddling around with, and who knows if I will be writing it any time soon, or ever. So a lot of details are still fluid, and amenable to change.

And out of nowhere, I found myself stepping back and asking, “why is every character in this white?”

It’s that easy, folks. Question your assumptions. Poke at your default settings, rather than just operating on reflex. There’s no reason the main character’s boyfriend can’t be black. There’s no reason the best friend can’t be “mixed race.” There are only two characters in this novel who have to be white, for story purposes. (I wish it weren’t the protagonist and another central character, but that’s how this particular idea is built.) Everybody else is — and should be — potentially up for grabs. I’m not going to deliberately populate the cast of characters with a carefully balanced sample of races, as that way lies tokenism, but I will make myself think twice before imagining everybody as white.

It’s that easy. I have no excuse not to do it.

SF Novelists launch

Okay, I utterly failed to announce this during the day like I was supposed to; I blame the fact that I spent half my day up in Indy. But anyway, today (or rather, Monday, for those of you who have already gone to bed and will see this tomorrow morning) is (was) the launch of the shiny! new! revamped! SF Novelists website.

It started out as a membership-restricted group for professional science fiction and fantasy novelists — a mailing list for people to ask questions, a website for us to share information. There’s plenty of advice out there for getting started in this field, but once you leap those first few hurdles, you’re often dependent on the assistance of more experienced writer-friends. And sometimes the questions you want to ask are of the sort that shouldn’t be asked publicly.

But we’re growing beyond those humble roots. If you follow that link, you will find our brand spanking new group blog. One of the side columns scrapes the RSS feeds of our own personal journals, but what you see on the left there is original content, written specifically for SF Novelists’ public face. I imagine we’ll range all over the place, from craft- or business-specific topics to things of more general interest to the SF/F community. You can also find free samples of members’ work, so if somebody makes a post that really gets your attention, it’s easy to follow up and see if you want to read their journal or fiction more regularly.

It should be fun, in the vein of Deep Genre or similar endeavours. Take a look, see if you find anything you like!

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>