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.

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.