novel soundtracking

I’m not sleepy yet, so you get another post about writing.

Or in this case, soundtracking.

I’ve had the habit of listening to specific pieces of music while writing since I got seriously going on what turned out to be my first complete novel. But it’s generally been a small number of songs associated with each book: usually about two. (And by “associated” I mean “I listened to them most of the time while writing the book,” which does, yes, lead to a terrifying number of repetitions.)

But since coming to grad school and getting involved in the local gaming community, I’ve picked up a local habit of making soundtracks for games: character soundtracks for the ones I’m playing in, game soundtracks for the one I ran. And I speculated, some time after I started doing so, that one day I might find myself making a proper novel soundtrack.

That day is today. Or rather, that novel is this novel; I knew months ago that Midnight Never Come would be the pioneer in this field.

The reason is obvious: as I’ve mentioned before, the novel grew out of one segment of that game I ran. I made quite a few soundtracks for Memento, and each segment basically ended up getting ten songs, which meant I had ten songs already associated with the seeds of this story. Not all of them are applicable, of course, since the novel is not identical to the game, but it gave me enough of a starting block that it felt quite natural to create a proper soundtrack for this book.

It’s an in-progress thing; I haven’t chosen songs for certain characters yet (like oh, say, Deven), and a lot of the “event” tracks are also undecided. But I thought I’d provide a sampler, so that anybody who recognizes these songs will have an idea of the mood of the book. (Mostly you need a good film score collection for this one; I’m not the sort of writer who can use a lot of modern pop music to inspire a sixteenth-century novel.)

The soundtrack to date . . . .

memery

I don’t seem to post about much other than writing these days. Maybe because writing is eating my head?

In an attempt to provide a pale shadow of variety, I give you . . . a meme about writing!

(From David Moles originally, by way of anghara.)

    Ten Things I Don’t Know About Writing
    1. How to describe people’s faces. I really, really suck at it.
    2. How to create truly broken characters. I’m getting better at incorporating flaws, but the real headcases are still beyond me.
    3. How to avoid the phrases “for a moment,” “at last,” “finally,” and their near cousins. Weasel words are showing up less in my prose, but those are still driving me crazy.
    4. How to really hack something up in revision. The occasions when I’ve been able to do this, it’s generally taken a year or more of downtime for me to get sufficient perspective. My revision tends to be more of the polishing sort.
    5. How to write sex scenes. I’m with Alma on this one; they just tend to happen offscreen. Which leads to an awkward compromise in one unpublished novel where the mechanics of what’s going on are actually relevant.
    6. How to outline. I suspect this is on a lot of lists. I’m very glad my editor doesn’t ask for real outlines. (She asked for one the other day, but it turned out to be more like “two paragraphs we can use for promotional purposes,” which is much more within my reach.)
    7. Corollary: how to estimate length. I can try, and sometimes I’m more or less right, but with The Waking of Angantyr, the last novel I wrote before selling Doppelganger, I whiplashed back and forth between “how am I going to make it to eighty thousand words” to “oh jeebus this thing is going to be at least a hundred and fifty thousand.” (It ended up at 123K.)
    8. How to describe nature. I grew up in suburbia. That’s a tree. Over there is a bird. What kind? Hell if I know.
    9. How to get really squicky. I have friends who adore the grotesque. I am not like them. Some of my stories edge closer to horror, but I’ve never managed anything really and truly gruesome or horrific.
    10. How to describe my own writing. One tip for query letters to agents and (book) editors involves saying what authors you’re similar to, or what audiences might like your novel (e.g. “This story would appeal to readers of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice“). I can’t do it. I don’t think I’m such a perfectly unique snowflake that I am beyond comparison; I just have no idea who I should be compared to. Which led to some pretty crappy query letters on my part, I imagine.

How about you all? What don’t you know? (Or any good tips on learning the things I don’t know?)

talking about supers

I don’t know how many of you are following the “Fangs, Fur, Fey” urban fantasy community here on LJ, but for those who are not, I thought I’d give a heads-up for a post I just made about supers in urban fantasy. I pose a lot of questions there that I’d love to see some discussion of, and since I know I have both urban fantasy fans and superhero fans reading this journal, plus people who are both, I thought I’d give a pointer over there and see who might like to jump in. (You don’t need to be a community member to comment.)

MNC Book Report: English Court Life, Ralph Dutton

I grabbed this book because it was on the shelf next to The English Court, which I reported on a little while ago. Unfortunately, it turns out to be the first useless research book I’ve read.

Dutton describes his purpose as “to show the influence of the reigning monarch on the way of life carried on at his court, and also how and where he lived.” Unfortunately, because it goes from Henry VII to George II (three hundred years) in just over 200 pages, the result is unavoidably shallow. And also unbalanced: Mary I, who reigned for five years, gets fourteen pages of coverage, while Edward VI, who ruled for six, gets two.

I had hoped for this book to be a good complement to The English Court, giving me a better idea of daily life during the period. No dice. It contains a few anecdotes I wasn’t familiar with before, but it ends up reading like a half-baked history, failing to really cover the events of the period (which the author admits he isn’t trying to do) while failing to dig into the practicalities of life back then (which is what he was supposed to be doing). And while the chapter on Elizabeth isn’t completely idolatrous, Dutton appears to be firmly in the camp of Gloriana, extolling her virtues and achievements while mostly glossing over her flaws.

On the bright side, I only read the Tudor section, so I only wasted eighty-five pages of my life, instead of 220.

Oh well. I can’t hit a home run with every book, I suppose.

moving in, still

Moving into our new place is proving to be more of an uphill battle than I had anticipated. I just realized that this is the first time I’ve actually moved in two people at once, the me-and-kniedzw unit; I moved into the previous Castle N about five months before he did, so that one was done in two major stages. The difference of magnitude might account for some of the slowness.

Definitely London accounts for some of it, too. We spent two weeks moving our stuff; that ended a week before I left, but the last several days of that week went to trip preparation. Then I was gone for a week and a half. Then I came back and was mostly useless for a few days. Two weeks, two and a half, more or less down the drain as far as moving in was concerned. The result is that there are still boxes unpacked, objects without a home.

But we’re getting there, mostly by dint of me tackling stuff in easy stages rather than trying to finish it all at once. I’ve hung at least two objets d’art a day for the last several days, sometimes more; it turns out we have a lot more than I realized. (With the footnote that “objets d’art” in this case means both pictures and swords.) Plus several pictures that I will be getting framed in the near future, that we’ve never actually hung before. The house is starting to look civilized, though it isn’t totally there yet.

But between that, re-reading the Harry Potter series in prep for the last one, re-reading the Lymond Chronicles for my book-blogging (which, yes, I’m behind on), and researching and writing Midnight Never Come . . . that pretty much eats every day. It isn’t a bad life, as such things go, but at times it feels like a very slow-moving one, with not as much in the way of dramatic progress as I would like.

I WIN.

Okay, I know I said I wouldn’t be making daily posts about Midnight Never Come, but if yesterday was “I had inspiration for breakfast” day, today is “And Clio has decided she loves me” day.

When writing a historical novel, one rapidly discovers, history frustrates you to no end by not lining up the way you want it to. (Dammit, why hasn’t Walsingham’s daughter married Essex yet? Or if she has — which she may — why hasn’t it become public knowledge yet? This book may be over by October 1590. Etc.)

But then, every so often, history decides to hand you exactly what you need, with a red bow on top.

Without realizing I was doing it, I set this scene in the very month when Fitzwilliam accused Perrot of treason. And — if that wasn’t enough — Perrot is Walsingham’s client.

I do not expect this to mean anything to any of you, and I will be surprised if it does. It doesn’t have to mean anything. The point is, when I went looking for some reason to have Deven investigating the current status of Irish politics in the English court, I discovered the current Lord Lieutenant of Ireland leveling accusations of treason at the previous Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, whose patron happens to be the guy I wanted to be sending Deven off on that investigation.

All hail the Muse of History. She’s a bitch most of the time, but then she does something so nice that, for a little while, you forget about all the other frustration, and you remember why historical fiction can be awesome.

Authorial sadism: making Deven talk politics while his pants are trying to fall off.

LBR quota: I’d say accusations of treason count as blood and rhetoric both.

*blink*

Dude. I must have eaten inspiration for breakfast today.

While engaged in late-night stupidity at Kinko’s (involving photocopiers, a paper slicer, metric crap-tons of scotch tape, and the Agas woodcut of Elizabethan London), I had an epiphany about the plot point my brain insists on calling the Great Misunderstanding — even though it isn’t really a misunderstanding at all.

Yes, I just found a way to make my characters’ lives suck more. Aren’t you glad? I know they’re glad. (Hah.)

I would be writing those scenes right now, but the late-night stupidity has tired me out, so to bed. But I have more leftover ham and applesauce in the fridge, which is what I had for breakfast today; maybe I’ll have the rest of it tomorrow and see what else pops into my head . . . .

oh, hey.

I figured out something fascinating about Lune today. Sometimes it happens like this: the realization just fell into my lap, out of nowhere. I don’t even think I was thinking about Midnight Never Come at the time. It was just, blar, need a break, I think I’ll read the Tiptree antho I got at ICFA, do I want a Sprite to drink?, oh, that’s what’s going on with her.

Or rather, what should be going on with her. It isn’t really in the text yet. In fact, there’s stuff in the text that probably contradicts what I realized today. I’ll need to think about how I’m going to work this in. But I will do so, one way or another — even though it will require some revision — because boy howdy is it important.

I like important. Important means the book just got one step better. (Or will, once I’ve put this in there.)

LBR tally: it’s actually been love for the last few days. With a bit of rhetoric (i.e. politics) mixed in.

Authorial sadism: the love is the sadistic thing.

MNC Book Report: The English Court, ed. David Starkey

I think my brain is melting.

This is another one of those books that you don’t pick up unless you have specific need for the concrete facts it contains. If you aren’t already familiar with Tudor politics, you’ll be lost within a few pages; hell, even I gave up on the first article after the introduction, which concerns the politics of the fifteenth century royal household, and is therefore way out of my period. But, like with the Hampton Court book, I started out by reading the chapter on Elizabeth, then had to backtrack to earlier pieces in order to understand what the hell I’d just read.

Having gone through the sections on Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary, though, I now understand a lot better just what the Privy Chamber was, and what the various titles in it meant. (I also have seven pages of notes on who was in what post when.) I can tell you the differences between the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, the Chamberers, the Maids of Honour, and the Ladies Extraordinary of the Privy Chamber; I can tell you what happened to the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, the Grooms of the Privy Chamber, and the Gentlemen Ushers when a female monarch took over. It’s a palimpsest, again; one cannot understand these things without reference to previous reigns.

Also? I may never again be able to play in a LARP focusing on noble politics; now that I have a better sense of how they really work, the vague attempts we make in those games will probably frustrate me more than they already did. (I’m not sure it’s possible to play such a game without putting in seventeen times more effort than anybody wants to, because ultimately those things don’t hinge on the big decisions. It’s all about the accretion of little favors and offices and insults and rewards and rivalries and family relations and other things that, like Rome, cannot be built in a day. Also, anything really important in politics takes weeks, months, or years to play out.)

Anyway, taking notes on the Elizabethan chapter as I went through it for the second time melted my brain, so now I’m going to go do something that doesn’t require me to think.

*koffkoff*

Anent a conversation with kniedzw last night, today I decided to run a mile.

I’ve been doing cardio workouts since the end of January, but that has involved running on an elliptical machine. It’s easier on my joints, which is always appreciated, and the machine tells me interesting things like my heart rate and how many calories I’ve burned. Working out on that, I’ve often done two, two and a half miles, maybe a little more. But that doesn’t translate directly when running on a track, so I decided to see what happens when I run a mile there.

I don’t like it, is what happens.

That was a miserable experience. Jarring and a little painful at first; soon I was breathing much harder than usual (I’m still coughing a bit now), and I became desperately thirsty (having left my water bottle next to the track entrance, since I would splash it all over myself if I tried to drink while running). By the last of my five laps, I was feeling sick to my stomach. I kept myself going through an alternating pattern of carrot and stick: “Come on, you wimp. When you pass that post, you’ll be seventy percent of the way done. It’s only a mile; a mile is nothing. One more lap! Dude, you suck. Your characters are so much harder than you are.” (Yes, I really did goad myself on with that. Mirage, I decided, was entirely an unfair comparison, so I told myself Deven could kick my ass, which is true.)

The last time I ran a timed mile would have been in seventh or eighth grade, i.e. the last time I was forced to do it for P.E. I don’t remember what the fitness standard was for a girl of my age — it might have been as high as fifteen minutes for a mile, or as low as twelve; something in that range — but whatever it was, I scraped through at something like four seconds under the time limit.

So I can say with confidence that I have now run the fastest mile of my life, at a spectacular (<– sarcasm) 10:39.

I’m not going to make a habit of doing that. I may, however, use it as an occasional litmus test of my fitness. Maybe try again in a few months and see if I can do it in less than ten. (kniedzw, for the record, has me thoroughly beat; he does an eight and a half-minute mile. Some of that difference is his length of leg, but not all, by any means.) I know now that I can actually run a mile, for values of “run” including “jog;” back in junior high I know I walked at least part of that time. The next step (hah) will be to see if I can do it a bit more quickly.

But not any time soon. Because that wasn’t fun.

putting things in order

Every so often, I enter a very visual mode of operation.

So far, I’ve been writing Midnight Never Come along three separate tracks. The two primary ones are Deven and Lune, each of whom I’ve been writing as a continuous block of scenes; the secondary one consists of flashbacks, kept in a separate file. Last night I realized I was at the point where I needed to interleave the Deven and Lune scenes and decide how this opening chunk is going to flow, which also meant inserting flashbacks where appropriate.

I used index cards for this when I did it to the first half of Doppelganger (originally it was structured as three-chapter blocks of each character; my editor asked me to change it, and was right), but I knew that book like the back of my hand, so a couple of notes on a card were sufficient to guide my thinking. MNC is much newer, so this time I printed the actual manuscript out, shrinking fonts and margins so as not to waste more paper than necessary, and putting a page break at the end of each scene.

Then it was time to use that high-tech tool known as my living room floor . . . .

MNC Book Report: Hampton Court, Simon Thurley

I slacked off on the research reading while moving, and then ended up halfway through several books at once, but I’ve finished the relevant portion of this one, so back we go to the book reports.

I picked it up on the recommendation of Alden Gregory, who gave me a tour of Hampton Court Palace; he called it the definitive book on the place, and I believe it. Which means that it really isn’t the sort of thing you want to read unless you have a specific need; the detail is fabulous, but only when there’s a specific application for it. (Even I ignored some of the information, like how much was spent on renovations and upkeep in a given year, except insofar as it helps give me a better sense of what a pound was worth back then.)

Alden photocopied for me the chapters that covered Elizabeth’s time, but I ended up checking the entire book out so I could read the preceding chapters. Hampton Court is one of those buildings that has been added to and remodeled and restored over a period of hundreds of years; my notes from my tour are a confusing jumble of details I couldn’t build into a coherent picture. (Frex, though I remembered where Alden said Elizabeth had most likely stayed when using the palace, I didn’t know why she was there, or what it meant when the photocopied chapters said she probably used the same quarters her father did, but that they don’t know what she did with the queen’s side; which bits of the building were that?) So I started more or less at the beginning, with Daubeney’s small manor house, and followed it through Cardinal Wolsey’s modifications, then the extended building spree of Henry VIII, and then finally the few changes made in Elizabeth’s time.

This took quite a while, because I was constantly flipping back and forth between the architectural plans of the different stages, making sure I was oriented, keeping track of where the new stuff went in and where things were rebuilt. But the end result is that now I can look at the Elizabethan floorplan and know what everything is, more or less, which I couldn’t do when it was presented to me as a finished product. The building is a palimpsest of earlier periods; I had to go through it chronologically to understand.

And this is relevant because, even when I’m writing scenes not at Hampton Court, my understanding of the architecture there affects my understanding of the period in general. I now grok the pattern of watching chamber, presence chamber, chamber of estate, privy chamber, bedchamber, and so on, and what those meant for how court life functioned; I know the function of galleries, and the processional route to the chapel; I have an idea of how much living space would be granted to courtiers high-ranking enough to be in residence. Even if I don’t know the precise details of how these things were laid out at Greenwich or Richmond or Whitehall, the important thing is that I understand how that stuff worked.

Which means that I’m less likely to write the Elizabethan period as if it were the modern era in ruffs. And that, ultimately, is the goal.

another milestone

I don’t want to subject you all to daily progress reports on Midnight Never Come, because let’s face it, that would be three months of numbers posts, and I can’t find a way to make them all witty. But I’ll post every so often, because public accountability is good for my productivity, and it helps me feel less like I’m writing in a total vacuum.

So this post is prompted by a milestone: the twenty thousand-word mark. A fifth of a book, that is, should I be so lucky as to have this cap out at 100K. (I’m not holding my breath.) 20353, to be precise, not counting the flashbacks that I will probably be inserting into it; in addition to the Leicester scene I mentioned before, there’s also a brief account of the Armada that I’m quite pleased with.

I’m very nearly done with the 1588 segment of the story. The shape of this is weird; I’m going to have about 20-25K in 1588, and then jump ahead a year and a half to 1590, when the rest of the book will take place. It’s weird enough for me to bear in mind the non-trivial possibility that I will have to do some Very Ugly Revision down the road, wherein I will rip out this entire opening chunk and replace it with something in 1590. I can’t just change the dates; the reason this is happening in 1588 is so the characters have time to plausibly reach the positions at Court they will be occupying in 1590, since one does not earn that kind of trust in a few weeks. If I decide to make the novel more unified in time, I’ll have to come up with a new opening entirely, that shows Deven and Lune already in place. But that’s the kind of judgment call I can’t make without writing more of the book, and I can’t do that without having written this beginning (even if it turns out to be the wrong beginning), so there’s no way to get around the possibility of twenty thousand words down the drain.

Sigh.

But that sounds overly angsty. Things are going decently at present, and I’m looking forward to some upcoming scenes. So I am not having book-angst on a grand scale. I am instead, I think, having pragmatic book evaluation, so I don’t get taken by surprise if I have to make some major changes.

There is a difference, I promise.

Authorial sadism: just describing what happened to the Armada would have been sadistic enough. But then I went and added stuff to the history. ^_^

LBR tally: mostly rhetoric, and a bit of political blood. Love is definitely going to be the underdog in this novel.

since we’re all re-reading Harry Potter anyway . . . .

Whether you’re a fanfic kind of person or not, you’ll probably be amused by this series of posts: “Eight Things That Severus Snape Isn’t”. The list is up to seven, with the eighth due tomorrow morning, but since I believe there’s a local meet-and-chat-about-Harry-Potter-books meeting tonight, it seemed an appropriate time to post it. (Fair warning: you probably shouldn’t click the link if you haven’t read the books, since there are some vague kind of sort of spoilers.)

research goldmines

Once again, I am reminded to be grateful of my position at a large university, with all the informational resources that provides. Not only do I have electronic access to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (no more reliance on Wikipedia, and far more detail than I’d ever get there!), but I have the libraries.

And a list of nine more books I want to/need to go check out and read for Midnight Never Come. Doing a lot of research doesn’t mean you reach a point where you know what you need to; it means you become steadily more aware of how much you don’t know and should. (Nor am I yet to the point where I just have to tell myself to let it go, though sometimes I really wish I were.)

Ah well. Here we go again.