Ding, dong, the story’s dead

“The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe”

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3,247 /
3,247
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Okay, so it ended much more quickly than I expected.

I don’t know, at present, whether the story works. All I know is that I’ve written a story with nary a speculative element in it, and I’m not sure what to do with it. I mean, I can only think of one other time I’ve done that, and it was on commission for the Microsoft Intern Game. I guess enough writers read this journal now that I can ask: where does one send such things? (Other than Paradox, the obvious one). Are there any other spec-fic markets that are friendly to non-speculative historical fiction? What about non-speculative markets?

I should, by the way, record my gratitude to Peter Farey, for applying Occam’s Razor to the Le Doux theory and finding under the surface, not a Marlowe/Shakespeare conspiracy, but Anthony Bacon. For someone who had made a fairly scholarly and thorough argument for Marlowe as Le Doux as Shakespeare, it’s impressive to see a follow-up where he sighs and demolishes his own argument to kindling. It saved me from this turning into a Marlovian story, hence the gratitude.

Anyway. It’s written, and it can bloody well sit for a while before I deal with it again.

not dead yet (this time)

“The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe”

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2,805 /
5,000
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Stopping short of the third death because I have to go do other things. I probably won’t get a chance to write any more today, but methinks the end of the story approacheth. I’ve dropped the estimated count to 5K, and it may well be shorter than that.

Kit entertained me with his ego in this scene. I may have to go back and work that in a little more pervasively — provided I can do so in a way that won’t point me at a “then he wrote Shakespeare’s plays!” conclusion. This may be a Marlowe story, but I refuse to make it a Marlovian story.

Oops, he died again

“The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe”

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2,061 /
6,000
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Inexplicably passed out for two hours, but after I woke up, my brain was ready to tackle the second version of his death.

The 6,000 is a standard estimate, by the way — I don’t know how long this will turn out to be. Currently I think it might be shorter, but everything depends on what the hell the end of this story is supposed to be.

It’s requiring an irritating amount of mid-writing research and revision (looking up the names of the guys hanged for sedition and the members of the “School of Night,” getting rid of this reference to espionage and instead putting it in that part of the story), but at least it’s getting written. After lurking in my brain for something like a year plus.

Happy yet, Kit?

“The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe”

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1,153 /
6,000
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I expect I’ll write more before the end of the day, but it encourages me to post an update. Kit’s died once so far. There’s at least two more to come.

Does England go on Daylight Saving Time? Kit died (or didn’t die) at 6 p.m. on May 30th, and I’m trying to figure out what the light would have been like. Sunset’s at about 9 p.m. right now in London.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Outlining

I tried to outline a novel precisely once. It was the fourth novel I wrote, and I’m not sure why I tried to outline it. I think it was because the writing community I was involved with at the time had convinced me that this would somehow be a step forward in my craft. The outline bore little resemblance to the novel I wrote, and the novel I wrote bore little resemblance to quality. Whether the outline had anything to do with that, I couldn’t say. I just know that I had to rewrite the novel practically from scratch; to give you an idea of scale, it got thirty thousand words longer, and I know I wrote more new material than that. It was the Amazing Accordioning Rewrite — like a hamster on a wheel, I ran and ran and ran and never got anywhere — and I hope I never have to do its like again.

I am not a writer who outlines.

Except, perhaps, right now.

It’s a very different type of outline. As in, I’m not sitting down to outline because I think I should, attempting to make up the events before I even know what they should be. This is a story where I had some bits that I knew I wanted in it, and those bits spawned other bits, and so on and so forth until I find myself with an assortment of intertwined narrative threads that impinge on one another here and over there and that will affect that other thing. Not only that, but I know where the story’s going. I know the major plot resolution all those threads will lead towards.

What I don’t know is timing. I know the novel will start with a conversation between certain characters, but I’m not sure what stage of the relevant plot thread they should be discussing. Do I need to start at the very beginning of that plot, or would I be better served to leap into the middle of it? I know steps A, B, and E of Plot 4, and that E needs to happen after step M of Plot 2, but what about B? Etc.

So I have again Committed Notecard. I sat down and wrote every plot bitlet I had onto an index card, one bitlet per card. If it involved more than one scene, it went onto multiple cards. (There were fewer cards than I expected, though; it may be there are bitlets I’ve temporarily forgotten, which will return to me later.) Then I went through and put colored dots in the corner, marking which plot thread each card had to do with. Then I sorted them into sequences where I knew their order. The stage I’m at now is integrating the sequences — figuring out whether that development should happen before or after that kablooey, etc. The idea behind the colored dots is that it will allow me to see more easily the frequency of particular plots, and whether I’m having big blocks of one thing or another, so I can decide if I want to interleave them a little bit more.

Is it working? Hard to say. At the very least, I have a record of my bitlets, which is good. It hasn’t told me what to do with the conversation in that first scene, but if need be I’ll go back and change it. I’m just hoping that the exercise will help me time the various threads better. This novel doesn’t have full-blown subplots, precisely, but it does have threads, and (since Karina recently woke me up to my tendency to use weaving metaphors about my writing) I want to make sure they’re all spaced and tensioned correctly. It’ll save me some nightmares in the revision.

Rage Diverted

I was literally in the middle of writing a long and ranty entry about this article in the Washington Post, when I got a heads-up from Ellameena to read this entry of hers. I don’t have the motivation to wade through the actual CDC document at the moment, but the short form is, the spin the WP writer put on the situation may well be a misinterpretation of the CDC recommendation.

Which I rather hope for, since I’d prefer to live in a world where the CDC isn’t actually recommending that all women of childbearing age be treated as “pre-pregnant.”

But I thought all of you currently chewing on your desks in fury might appreciate the (hopefully accurate) perspective.

May is up

I’m back on schedule! The recommendation for this month (and it really is this month; I’m not behind any more) is John Myers Myers’ novel Silverlock. As a teaser to lure you into clicking on that link and finding out what the book is about, I have this to offer: how many novels involve a guy who variously calls himself Golias, Taliesin, Amergin, Demodocus, and Orpheus singing, in Heorot (and in properly alliterative Norse verse), the epic saga of the Alamo?

Forward Movement

As Amazon has finally posted the cover image for Warrior and Witch, and Doppelganger has been out for over a month, I took some time to update the sequel’s webpage with things like the back cover copy. SPOILER WARNING: do NOT go look at that page if you haven’t yet finished the first book.

The revisions I promised my agent got sent off yesterday, so you know what that means? Yes, little chickadees — it means it’s time for me to make good on my promise to Kit that I would pay attention to him soon. Stupid amounts of research for not a very long story, here I come. (Again.)

catching up

I’m making good on that promise to catch up with my recommendations.

For those who are new to my journal, a quick story. Last year, finding that my spare time for reading was scanty enough that maintaining a monthly fiction recommendation was getting hard, I set aside three months of the year (April, August, and December) for “primary source” recommendations (or folklore recommendations, as I call them on the page). My reason was that these sources are the bedrock on which fantasy is built, but few people seem to read them. And I particularly wanted to bring them to the attention of fantasy writers, since the genre as a whole will be well-served if its people familiarize themselves with something more than an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation, the way it so often seems to go. (Tobias Buckell has a good piece on this called “Original Source Creativity,” though at present I can’t find it on his site.)

Last year’s primary sources were Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and the Old Testament — three foundational works with a profound effect on English literature. I like the idea of organizing these around a theme, so this shall be the Classical Year, opening with the Iliad.

And with that, I’m back on schedule, provided I can get something posted for May in the next twenty-three days. That should be manageable, right?

Pretties

Herewith a post full of links to Pretty Things.

First up, horses made of driftwood. There’s something faintly creepy about a few of the shots — the arc and color of the wood occasionally gives the faint impression that you’re looking at the flayed body of a horse. But on the whole, they’re awesome.

Second — and get it while you can, since there will be a new Image of the Week soon — Kenn Brown and Chris Wren of Mondolithic (the fellows who did the cover for Summoned to Destiny) have a series of images of the Seven Wonders of the World. Even if you don’t share my giant soft spot for the Wonders, they’re still awesome pictures.

Third, some gorgeous digital artwork at Furiae. The galleries are organized by general color palette (umber, jade, azure, ruby), and while I don’t like absolutely everything in there, the work in general is stunning.

Fourth, going from the highly technological work of the last post to the beautifully primitive art of origami, we’ve got this guy’s pieces. Picking an example more or less at random (since they’re all awesome), try out the Archangel Gabriel. I didn’t think paper could do that.

Enjoy the pretties!

Mail Call

Today’s mail held not only my contributor’s copies and check for Fictitious Force #2 (with my story “Sing for Me”), but my contributor’s copy for Dark Wisdom #9 (with my story “The Wood, the Bridge, the House”). I don’t even recall proofing that latter, but whether I did or not, here it is. Neat!

Also in the mail a couple of days ago was a copy of the Romantic Times Book Club review of Doppelganger. It seems they cover a lot more than just romance — which, given that they apparently review something like two hundred and fifty books in every issue, ceases to be surprising. Anyway, much of the review is a plot synopsis, but at the end it says:

Kudos to Brennan for writing such a remarkable first novel and creating a distinctive fantasy world that poses a unique magical and ethical question. The twin heroines follow an electrifying knife-edged journey that takes readers to uncharted territory. An exceptional debut for what looks to be an intriguing series!

You can’t read the RTBC reviews online, but you can see what they rated things, and when Rachel alerted me that they’d reviewed Doppelganger, I went and took a look. They gave my book four and a half stars; I presume that’s out of five, but I can’t be positive, since nothing else in that issue got more than four and a half stars.

^_^

And, just to keep my ego in check, some rejection letters in the mail, too. But I’m used to those at this point.

A Cautionary Tale

If it should ever happen to any of you that you come up with an idea for a novel when you’re seventeen, write the novel when you’re eighteen, pull something of a strange point of view trick in it, shop it around for a while, thoroughly rewrite it when you’re twenty-one but leave the strange point of view trick in, shop it around some more, sell a different novel and its sequel, come back to the aforementioned novel with its strange point of view trick, and realize that the only way to make the strange point of view trick work is to give one of the characters more point of view scenes earlier in the novel, be warned: this is what you’ll end up with on your library floor.

I’m hoping that having the entire bloody novel laid out, chapter by chapter and scene by scene, in visual format, will help me figure out where I can arrange for the necessary scenes. Because there’s graven in stone, and then there’s what this novel is in my head.

And don’t even get me started on the need for a new title.

He’s a pushy bastard, for a dead man . . . .

Half an hour ago, “Waiting for Beauty” was the short story I was planning to write next, and “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe” was one of those ideas that sounded vaguely nifty, but had been sitting around for quite a while and was never actually going to get written.

Now, thanks to matociquala posting her new opening paragraphs for The Stratford Man, Kit’s woken up again in my subconscious. Woken up again, found an opening line, found some more lines, mugged “Waiting for Beauty” and dumped it in a dark alley, cracked his knuckles, picked up a sap, and begun casting a speculative eye at the novel revisions I promised to send my agent soon.

Uppity little bastard. The structure of the story did a brief do-si-do, and I still may not be entirely sure where it’s going, but I know what half or more of it will be, and that’s more than enough for me to get started writing. Just as soon as I, y’know, read every bit of information and crackpot speculation about May 30th, 1593 that I can get my hands on.

And do those revisions. They should get priority, and a novel’s big enough to take a short story in a fight. But Kit’s a sneaky bastard, in addition to being uppity, and I fear he may dodge through the novel’s defenses and emerge in the lead.

In which case, the only real solution will be to write his story as fast as possible, so I can get on with the things I ought to be doing.

“The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe”

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117 /
5,000
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The Book, One Month Later

My friend Kleenestar observed recently that “once you get to a certain critical mass of not-posting, the return to semi-regular posting is shockingly hard.” This is very, very true. And it goes double at the end of a semester.

So, my apologies for the silence. I’ll return to the world of the e-living by giving an update on Doppelganger.

More reviews in various places, mostly on blogs, a few on Amazon. Another negative review, too. This one, I will link to; it’s on the Green Man Review. (For the record, I didn’t link to the last one because it was someone’s journal, and I didn’t want to give the impression that I was asking anybody to go defend me in the comments thread. This one, on the other hand, is in a publication that habitually publishes reviews.)

It’s very odd, seeing the utterly contradictory nature of the positive and negative responses I’ve gotten. The GMR review doesn’t like the world or the characters all that much. Other people have spoken glowingly of that selfsame world, those selfsame characters. At least one person has found my prose terrible; others have raved in favor of it (though in the vein of “it’s nice and tight” rather than “wow, it’s really artistic”). Some of that is personal taste. Some of it, I imagine, is a matter of focus; you might pay attention to the aspects of the world that are original, while someone else is more attentive to those that aren’t. Some of it is probably perspective, since originality is partly a matter of what you’re accustomed to. Hell, thanks to my late introduction to The Lord of the Rings, I cruised happily through fantasy for many years without spotting who was ripping off Tolkien.

I’ve been getting fan-mail. Is that weird or what? <g> Over two dozen complete strangers have written to me since the book came out, telling me how much they liked it. For those of them who might be reading this journal: I am grateful to each and every one of you. No, really. As much as it boggles me to be getting such messages, this is, in a sense, why I wanted to write: not to get letters from readers, per se (especially since I feel like an idiot, trying to figure out how to respond with anything better than “um, wow, thanks!”), but to tell stories that other people care about. The letters are simply a way for me to know I’ve succeeded at that.

Sales-wise, I have no numbers yet. I won’t get anything official until the first royalty statement, I imagine, which will happen some time after June; they come to me twice a year. (I do get royalty statements, even if I’m not getting royalties yet. They let me know how far away I am from getting royalties yet.) I may get some less official numbers in the nearer future; in fact, I hope so. At the moment, I’m basically going off anecdotal evidence and sporadic checking of my Amazon sales rank against a handy webpage that translates the otherwise meaningless numbers into something like a sales rate. But that doesn’t tell me much, since my rank’s been fluctuating by as much as twenty thousand places. (I kind of wish Amazon would just abolish the bloody thing; it’s little more than a way to feed the fluctuations of my self-confidence.)

Now that the semester’s winding down, I’ll have a little time to do promotion. No concrete plans for that as yet, but watch this space for announcements.

That’s it for the nonce, I believe. Posting should resume as normal, since I’m out of classes now, and virtually done with grading. Ah, summer. How I’ve been looking forward to thee.

win some, lose some

Found my first negative review of Doppelganger today. (I knew there would be some. No book ever pleases everybody.) As I’d hoped, though, I find that I can take negative commentary in stride if what the person objects to is something I chose to do deliberately.

In this case, the reader put the book down after about twenty pages because, although they liked the swift opening, they soon found themselves confused about who the people were, and felt I was doing a bad job of introducing my characters (and the world in general). It isn’t quite true to say that’s an approach I took on purpose, since when I first wrote those scenes I wasn’t yet experienced enough to make choices like that on purpose, but through the various passes of revision, I chose to refine it in that direction. Why? Because the characters in those first twenty pages all know each other very well. Ergo, I chose to show through their behavior that they are familiar and either friendly or hostile by long habit, and to convey why and how they know each other through an accretion of brief comments, rather than an outright explanation.

For a lot of you reading this, that probably evokes a “well, of course” reaction. Not for everybody, though, and maybe not even for everybody reading this journal. Some readers prefer clearer explanations. It was a point of negotiation with my editor when I was revising Doppelganger — not the character introductions, per se, but the introduction of other information; I don’t always explain things when they first appear. Sometimes I drop them in and hope you’ll stick with me until the explanation arrives (which it usually does not long after). This is a technique that doesn’t work with every reader, and I know it. It’s my personal preference, since I find it more graceful. But it also means some people may get confused, and of those who get confused, some (like the reviewer) will not choose to stick with me.

You win some, you lose some. One of the commentators on that post went on to write a very positive review of the novel on her own blog, so hey.

(The negative reviewer also didn’t like my writing style. That aspect of fiction, more than anything, makes me roll my eyes and chalk it up to taste; you can try to make arguments for objective standards of plot or character or whatever, perhaps, but not writing style. I’ve gotten people telling me they love my writing style and I should never change it. There is absolutely no style I can use that will make everybody happy. Which is probably good, since it means I can stop worrying about it and just write in the style that the story feels right in.)

So, first negative review successfully survived. The choices I made didn’t work for that reviewer, and I’m more or less fine with that (“more or less” because, let’s be honest, I want everybody to love my book — what author doesn’t?). We’ll see what future reviews bring.

This Writing Life

The updates keep piling up, and I keep being too busy to post any of them. There was supposed to be a brief window to relax in right about now, but just as I reached it, the copy-edited manuscript for Warrior and Witch arrived on my doorstep. <sigh>

Anyway. Further reports of Doppelganger, all over the place; unless you’re in Hawaii (where my parents are right now), it ought to be in stock.

Or unless they’ve sold out. Which has happened in a few places.

<bounce>

I’ve gotten some extremely nice e-mails from readers, one of which told me to take the Amazon reviews with a grain of salt, since I’d probably end up with people declaring me the coolest thing since sliced Tolkien and others howling that I can’t write worth a rat’s ass. This prodded me to go check Amazon again (which I hadn’t done in a couple of days), where I found four reviews had been posted: the Harriet Klausner one from a while ago, Mike’s very flattering words, and two others that were entirely new to me. No Tolkien comparisons yet, but I’m entirely fine without those, and more to the point, no rat’s ass comparisons yet, either.

Having nothing whatsoever to measure this experience against, I can’t really evaluate it based on anything more than gut feeling, but so far, my gut is quite happy. Doppelganger is on the “New in Paperback” stand-alone racks in a number of Barnes & Noble stores, and an endcap display in at least one Borders, which is always good to hear; visibility can help sales along. I don’t know when I’ll first see sales numbers — whether those are quarterly, yearly, or what. I also don’t know when I’m likely to start seeing trade-publication reviews; we’ll see how those go.

Now, in writing news that has nothing whatsoever to do with Doppelganger, I just got pointed at a review of Summoned to Destiny, the anthology my first story “White Shadow” appeared in. It very nearly had me fainting out of my chair. A sample:

Brennan’s story achieves the elegance of a Bruce Holland Rogers fable, and is told in a voice as assured as Le Guin in her early Earthsea writings. The same sparse directness of scene; the same simple sentence structure, yielding prose passages of surpassing clarity and power.

I think I’m going to go hug that review and giggle until it’s time to head to class.

Director’s Cut

Okay, so I’m still behind on recommendations (having not posted March’s yet), but whatever. I’m posting something else instead: the original first scene of Doppelganger, as I semi-promised when I hit the limit of how much text I can post as an excerpt. Go see the scene I wrote when I was seventeen, and then read the commentary at the end to find out why I eventually decided to remove it entirely.