Sirens postponed

I mentioned some time ago that I was on deck to teach at the Sirens Studio, the workshop preceding the Sirens Conference. Well, like everything else in 2020, this has been disrupted by the pandemic; but unlike many things in 2020, it is not moving online. One of the key aspects of Sirens has always been the cozy feeling of a weekend retreat, and that is not something one can achieve online.

Instead the organizers have chosen to postpone this year’s plans to next year. So yes, I am still planning on teaching a workshop on creating fantasy religions for the Sirens Studio; it will simply happen in 2021 instead.

And with this announcement official, I can also officially say that I will not be attending any in-person conventions in 2020. It simply isn’t safe. I hope to be able to go places next year — ideally sooner than October — but that requires the United States to bring this pandemic under control, to take the measures that are necessary to restrict the spread of covid and return us to a state of normalcy where things like conventions are not recklessly dangerous.

Rook and Rose, Book 2: Chapter 18

For years now I’ve had an essay on my site about writer’s block and why I don’t like that term. The short form is, calling something “writer’s block” does not help you figure out what the cause is, nor how to fix it.

This is relevant right now because Alyc and I had some trouble with a scene in this chapter. We knew we needed to do more with a particular character, and we knew it had to function as setup for something else in the near future. So we’d come up with an idea that, structurally speaking, was exactly what we needed it to be.

We couldn’t get traction on it.

I wrote a beginning. Alyc wrote a bit more. I stared at the screen and had no clue where to go from there. Alyc felt the same. We agreed that, since the next two scenes in the chapter weren’t directly affected by this one, we could work on those and hope that when we came back the next day, we’d have more inspiration. The next day we came back and . . . nope.

When we got on the phone to hash it out (as opposed to in chat, which is how we handle smaller bits of coordination), the first thing I said was “I think we should consider whether we ought to scrap this and replace it with something else.” And that’s what we wound up doing. Because while the idea we originally had was, structurally speaking, exactly what it needed to be . . . nothing in it seemed fun. Not just in the superficial sense of “yay this is a fun scene where entertaining things happen!,” but in the deeper sense of “there is nothing here that we’re excited to write.” In fact, our idea called for some things that, while all too appropriate, we really didn’t want to write.

That’s one of the many possible flavors of writers’ block, and the solution for it was to back up and take another look: at our reasons for needing a scene with this character, at what it had to lay the groundwork for, at what it could be doing to enrich other parts of the story, and — perhaps most usefully — what had happened up to this point, which the new scene could build off. That last wound up providing us with a good hook . . . and we could tell it was a good hook because as we started working through that notion (“okay, how would this happen? Who would be involved? What tactics would they use?”), we started making those noises that happen when one idea cascades into another. The end result is a set-up and spike of two shorter scenes that land on a lot of personal and emotional buttons for the character. Buttons we would have missed entirely if we’d gone with our first idea.

Collaboration may pose extra challenges, but it also provides extra tools. In this case, when both authors are looking at a planned scene and saying “meh” . . . it helps us be sure that it isn’t just laziness talking. We’re barking up the wrong tree, and need to go find another one.

Word count: ~141,000 (and with that, I have officially fulfilled this part of my Clarion West Write-a-Thon goals!)
Authorial sadism: That character might have preferred us to stick with our original idea.
Authorial amusement: The discussion of moon eyes.
BLR quotient: Starts with love, stays there longer than any of the characters expected, then takes a hard swerve to blood.

Rook and Rose Book 2, Chapter 17

Back to something like linear progress! . . . ish, given that after we finished this chapter, we backtracked and added a scene to Chapter 9. And there’s still one in Chapter 7 that we need to redo, because it wasn’t quite pulling its weight once we changed things around it, and now it needs to be repurposed to develop a plot strand we thought up about halfway through the book.

Okay, maybe not so linear. One of the columns in our outlining spreadsheet shows what week we wrote each scene; that’s mostly there just for our entertainment (watching ourselves zoom through at an absurd pace during the drafting of the first book), but in this case it will serve as a testament to how much more we’ve ricocheted around. Because we’ve been doing a lot more of that this time through.

It does make work a little more difficult. Writing the Chapter 9 scene, we had to remind ourselves not only why we were adding it — to give some attention to a neglected plot strand, develop a necessary political element, and smooth out the big tonal shift between the preceding and subsequent scenes — but also of where it fits in the flow of things, what moods our characters are in and what thoughts they have and haven’t had already. I can already tell we’ll be doing a lot of polishing in that regard when we revise this. We have a lot of places where the right blocks have been put into position, but their edges need trimming and sanding for them to fit nicely together.

As for Chapter 17, i.e. the clear forward progress — oof. One scene in here may very well stand as the trickiest corner we have to navigate in the entire trilogy. (I hope it does. Otherwise there’s something even trickier in our future.) We had to take three runs at it to get it right, with a couple thousand words of material thrown out along the way. But we could tell each time that we were replacing it with something better, so we kept plugging away. And that effort paid off on the last complicated bit, where I kept saying “eh, that dialogue isn’t quite hitting hard enough to trigger the thing it needs to trigger” . . . and then Alyc said “how about this?” and I made a O_O face at it, which is how we knew we’d gotten it right.

Word count: ~133,000
Authorial sadism: The dialogue that made me go O_O.
Authorial amusement: The two-hundred word scenelet that is basically our giddy reward for having made it through the big scene before it.
BLR quotient: Despite the best efforts of certain characters to draw blood, in the end, it’s love.

Rook and Rose Book 2, Chapter Twelveteen

It’s been a little quiet around here because we have, uh, thrown linearity out the window for a while. >_>

Remember what I said before, about how we decided our Chapters 14 and 15 were both so short they should be a single chapter? That took what had been 13 and pulled it up to 14, leaving us with a gap after 12 — or more precisely, some scenes in 12 that might (and in fact did) get redistributed between that and 13. Hence dubbing the new material Chapter Twelveteen. We’ve spent the last week and a half sort of ricocheting between that and Chapter 17, and it was almost a race to see which one would get done first; Twelveteen won (by a nose).

I’m really glad we made this change (even if it led to one scene ping-ponging from 12 to 17 to 13, which is really inconvenient when a) you number your scenes in the document and b) you have formulas in your outlining spreadsheet that calculate both the wordcount for the chapter and the running wordcount for the novel, which get borked when you drag things around like that). Twelveteen has some stuff we really needed: a big, creepy encounter with one of the threats, a bit of character bonding in a place where it had been profoundly lacking, the reappearance of a character we haven’t seen for a while, and the reintroduction of a character who, we realized, hadn’t actually been seen since the last book. All of which do multiple duties: the reappearance also lets us move an investigation forward and set up a later scene, the reintroduction lets us elaborate on a certain political intrigue and foreshadow something else, the creepy encounter facilitated a whole bunch of exposition and also set up the aforementioned intrigue, etc. Like I said, very much needed.

Aiming for a set length, in the sense of both wordcount and number of chapters, is simultaneously a blessing and a choke-leash. It keeps us from getting too tangled in our own complexities, adding new subplots and twists until we utterly lose sight of where we’re going — but it also means we don’t have the kind of flexibility I’ve had with other novels, where eh, if I need to add in another chapter in order to deal with something, I can. I’m very, very glad that we were able to do the big avalanche stuff more efficiently, in two chapters instead of three . . . because otherwise we might have had no choice but to look back at what we have and decide what thread to yank out entirely, to make room for everything else.

Wordcount: ~123,000 (not counting the nearly-complete Chapter 17)
Authorial sadism: Look, we put Chekhov’s Magic on the mantel. We had to pull the trigger eventually.
Authorial amusement: DOOMCLAW THE YOWLER
BLR quotient: In part because these scenes are spread across two chapters, uhhhh, all three. It depends entirely on which scene you’re looking at.

Oh, and in case you missed it:

Advance reader copies of THE MASK OF MIRRORS, by M.A. Carrick

Real book!!!! (Advance copies thereof, at least.)

Advance reader copies!!!! *_*

so yesterday evening my husband says to me “two boxes just arrived that say ‘Mask of Mirrors’ on the side”

and I zoom downstairs to snap a photo to send to Alyc

and they say “I may need to come over there this evening”

and I say “I may have been thinking of asking you to do that”

(because this is my first time co-authoring a book like this, but I knew without asking that I wouldn’t be allowed to open them without Alyc present)

(don’t worry; we’re in a social bubble together anyway)

and behold, my first “unboxing” video ever:

*_*

Who left this thing on?

Going into 2020, I set myself a lower goal for short stories than before, because I suspected the election might cut into my creative energy. (Hah, what an innocent lamb I was.) But when I decided to participate in the Clarion West write-a-thon — you can still sponsor me, by the way! — I included among my goals “finish two short stories,” because I didn’t want to lose momentum on those entirely. I chose my phrasing on purpose: finish two short stories. I had one partially written, and another which in theory is done, but the first draft is so meh that it needs a white-page rewrite anyway.

Right now I’ve got three finished stories, none of which are those two. Also a semi-outline for a fourth, and a nascent concept for a fifth.

It feels like the valve labeled “Short Fiction” has somehow gotten jammed in the “open” position. It started in early June, when I went to add an idea to my file of short story concepts, and my eye happened to fall on one I’d completely forgotten about. A quick dash of research later, I had a story.

Then I turned my attention to an idea that’s been in my head for over a decade, ever since I ran the Changeling game that gave rise to the Onyx Court novels. The big stumbling block on it — as with many of my short story ideas these days, honestly — was the research; I needed to find a suitable book or two to read before I could write it. But I figured, hey, I might as well look for such a book, right? Well, I found something . . . and then I read it . . .

. . . and I was halfway through a draft when a different short story idea mugged me out of nowhere, in response to an anthology call. And let me be clear: that isn’t how this usually works. I’ve written to themes when actively solicited for an anthology, but my brain is not very good at coughing up themed ideas the rest of the time; it would rather work on the two dozen ideas already in existence. In this case, though, the theme touches on a different bit from that Changeling game — something I never brought up in the Onyx Court books, but which I’d always figured was true somewhere off in the background.

Roughly twenty-four hours after reading that anthology call, I had a draft. A couple of days after that, I went back and finished the other story I’d been working on.

Oh, and that “semi-outline” for a fourth story is entirely the product of me being in the shower and then suddenly BOOM, a three-word elevator pitch grew into scenes and a conflict and I could pretty much write this one as soon as I nail down the specifics.

So yeah. I now have “999 Swords,” “Oak Apple Night,” and “This Living Hand.” (Internet cookies to anybody who can identify what those titles refer to!) I have written my first new Onyx Court fiction since “To Rise No More” in 2013, and I’ve ordered a book that might help me nudge another one toward the finish line. Not to mention that I still have those two things that are what I expected to be working on during the write-a-thon, which I can probably finish this month.

I’m not sure what’s happened, but I like it.

Books read, June 2020

(And also one I missed in my writeup from May.)

Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword, Henry Lien. Middle-grade fantasy novel about a girl whose life dream is to become a champion of wulin, i.e. martial arts figure skating. This has great details about skating; because it’s done on a surface called “pearl” (whose creation is a closely guarded secret) rather than on ice, and the entire city that houses the wulin academy is built of pearl, basically everything Peasprout does is about skating. There was a fair bit of me wanting to smack her for being obtuse and arrogant — she sees practically everybody else around her as either irrelevant or The Competition — but she’s generally obtuse and arrogant in a way that’s believable for her age, even if I was a little annoyed at how she latched onto a certain explanation for something and basically paid no attention to the utter lack of evidence to support that explanation. And this dug surprisingly deep into the international politics of Peasprout’s country versus the one she’s in, as well as some gender identity stuff. Highly recommended, want the next book now.

An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, Curtis Craddock. Look, it’s got masks (well, masques) and mirrors in the title, plus it takes place in a sky world. As one of the authors of both The Mask of Mirrors and Born to the Blade, this naturally caught my eye. 🙂 It’s a very engaging secondary-world political fantasy with a bit of the feel of eighteenth-century Europe — there are musketeers — but some creepy as hell worldbuilding around how the various nations have ruling bloodlines descended from ancient saints, each of them possessing a particular type of magic (which they, uh, very rarely use for anything good). The main character does not carry the magic of her bloodline, plus she was born with a deformed hand, so she’s an outcast who winds up being thrust into the middle of some very complex intrigue. I’m looking forward to reading the second one of this series, too.

The City of Brass, S.A. Chakraborty. Technically this is historical fantasy, as it starts in Cairo (which made me think of Clark’s upcoming A Master of Djinn), but the bulk of it is set within djinn society, so it reads more like a secondary-world fantasy. What’s interesting to me here is that . . . all the factions kind of seem like assholes? There’s no clear setup as to who you’re supposed to be cheering on. The shafit lead the pack, because they’re the oppressed underclass of djinn/human hybrids, but they are not simplistically good and pure. This is not a story where I can see what the desired ending looks like — which, in a running theme here, means I’m eager to read the next one.

David Mogo, Godhunter, Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Post-apocalyptic urban fantasy set in Nigeria (and by a Nigerian writer). Here’s what you should know, that I didn’t know going into this: it’s really three novellas. Connected ones, to be sure, but a third of the way into the book I was thinking, “man, this reads a lot like a climactic confrontation — what is the rest of this book going to look like?” The answer was that it was going to have new plots and new enemies to fight. In fairness, the book does signal the divisions with splash pages; however, since the first novella is titled “Godhunter” and the book is David Mogo, Godhunter, the significance of that didn’t register on me until I turned a page and saw another splash page saying “Firebringer.”

Anyway, regarding the story itself: the West African gods have fallen to earth and really screwed over things in Nigeria (unclear what’s happening in the rest of the world; the story is understandably not concerned with that). The half-divine main character makes a very marginal living dealing with some of the resulting problems, and gets drawn into the bigger struggle behind the whole situation. It reads a lot like Rebecca Roanhorse’s Sixth World series in terms of its breakneck pace and the general feeling that people are just barely hanging in there. For reasons of personal taste, I think the thing I’m most interested in reading is what happens after this novel; certain things change, and the consequences of that are the sort of thing I really dig. I’m not sure if Okungbowa is planning a sequel, though.

(As a side note, I appreciate that he seems to have genderflipped a couple of deities along with leaning into the gender ambiguity of another one. There are women in this story, and while I would have liked to see more done with them, that’s true of all characters in a book with this kind of pacing.)

Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar, Robert Lebling. Nonfiction book, recommended by Ali A. Olomi, a professor who’s posted some really fascinating threads about jinn and other aspects of Muslim folklore (a term I use in the academic sense of “traditional beliefs and practices”). It’s as sweepingly comprehensive as the title implies; by far the longest chapter in here goes through a series of different countries or regions and talks about what jinn belief looks like here as opposed to there. Because of the other things I’ve read, what was fascinating was seeing the places where it echoed European faerie beliefs, or Japanese yokai beliefs, etc., without being quite the same as any other thing. I’d love to find comparable books about other regions and traditions.

Everyday Life in Early Imperial China During the Han Period 202 BC-AD 220, Michael Loewe. Continuing my tour through different periods of China’s history. This is a very slender book — barely two hundred pages — and dates back to the sixties, so it’s not nearly as in-depth or up-to-date as I would like, but after reading books about the Tang and Southern Song Dynasties, it’s still useful to go back and look at the roots of a lot of things that grew and flowered in later eras.

Wildly Romantic: The English Romantic Poets: The Mad, the Bad, and the Dangerous, Catherine M. Andronik. I went into this having read an Amazon review that pointed out a number of factual inaccuracies, so I don’t necessarily recommend it. Having said that, it did what I needed it to do, which was to give me enough of a sense of the social connections and relationships between the major Romantic poets that I could write a short story which depends on the premise of “the major Romantic poets all knew about X thing whose dissemination ultimately traces back to Wordsworth.” It also did what I wasn’t looking for it to do, which was to convince me that what I needed to do to turn my concept into an actual story was to pick one of the women around the Romantic poets to be the central character. For that I will forgive it the breezy tone, which was occasionally a little much, and also the factual inaccuracies. (Don’t worry, I’ve been checking my actual concrete facts against the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.)

The Raven’s Tale, Cat Winters. YA fantasy novel about the young Edgar Allan Poe. The cover copy does not adequately advertise that this is very minorly an alternate history; it took me a while to realize that when the characters talked about muses, they all recognized and accepted that one’s muse is an actual supernatural creature, which can be fostered and led to evolve or stifled or outright killed. The novel is about Poe’s struggle with the fact that his muse is a morbid, Gothic creature he (of course) names Lenore, which he fears will drive other people away and make it impossible to succeed in life. It’s scrupulously researched — the author dug down to the level of reading old bills from Poe’s life — and I put up with and even sometimes enjoyed the absolutely over-the-top melodrama of Lenore and her interactions with Poe, because frankly, if you’re not being melodramatic and over-the-top with this topic, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Fiyah #13
Fiyah #14 I haven’t read nearly as much in electronic format since my tablet died; my phone is much less congenial for such things. Which means I’ve gotten behind on this magazine — but, uh, it exists specifically to publish black writers, and hey, that’s a thing I want to be reading more of now. One of the stories in #13 (“The Transition of Osoosi” by Ozzie M. Gartrell) was painfully on-topic, with police brutality and a trans character running into trouble because of their gender identity, plus an overall setting where True Americans and Citizen Americans are groups with markedly different legal rights. I enjoyed it despite the flinch of “look, I’m reading in part to escape current events;” I also enjoyed “Roots on Ya” by L.H. Moore, historical fiction with a really engaging voice.

This Fourth of July

I am not proud of my country.

Not right now. Not when we have, as a nation, failed so profoundly to deal with this pandemic the way we needed to. Not when over a hundred thousand Americans have died, and the number is climbing frighteningly fast. Not when there are so many people whose personal liberties are precious to the point of sociopathy, such that they won’t even put on a fucking mask to protect other people. Not when police officers brutalize American citizens in the name of their own power. Not when the injustice against people of color continues every goddamned day, in every stratum of our society. Not when we worship the almighty dollar to the exclusion of human decency and the future of this planet.

There is a cancer in American society, and it’s killing us.

I know there are good people as well as heartless ones. I know that there are movements for change. I hope to hell they succeed — because the alternative is that we continue this downward slide.

This Fourth of July, I dream of a day where I can actually be proud of my country again.

Rook and Rose Book 2, Chapter 16

Alyc and I still need to backtrack to fill in the additional chapter for Part Three, but that’s tied in enough with the need to plan out more stuff for Parts Four and Five that we haven’t tried to do that yet. While we work on that planning, though, we went ahead and did Chapter 16, because we knew what was going to happen there.

. . . or so we thought. The first two scenes were fine, but when we started the third one, various things about it weren’t working, and one of them was the placement. While we had good reasons for intending to put the second and (supposed) third scenes both in this chapter, when the time came to actually do it, they felt too same-y — weakening the impact of the latter by juxtaposition with the former. We came up with a reason to push it back, which wound up helping to solve another aspect that wasn’t working, and so hopefully that will go better when we take a second crack at it.

This is something I keep coming back to, as we work on this series: I think one of the essential elements of collaboration is a willingness to both say and hear, “This isn’t working.” If you get too strongly attached to your ideas to let them go when they don’t click for your writing partner, or if you’re reluctant to hurt your partner’s feelings by saying an idea isn’t strong enough, or if you two are just on sufficiently different wavelengths that you’re not getting fired up by the same concepts, you’ll wind up with problems. You’ve got to be willing to bend, but also to know when not to bend — when you need to stand your ground because sure, maybe that solution to the plot problem could work, but it’s not amazing and the story deserves better. If there’s something your partner loves about the idea, circle around and see if there’s another way to keep that good bit while taking a different approach. If you envisioned XYZ happening but the other person doesn’t think that makes sense, diagnose the reasons why, and look for ways to fix it. It’s the same process I go through when working alone . . . except there’s no ego or pride at risk when it’s all happening inside my own head. When there’s someone else involved, it can be trickier.

So anyway, we punted that scene into the next chapter and took one we expected to have happen there and moved it up to this one. Only when that was done, there was plenty of room in this chapter for another scene, because neither of our big pieces here wound up being as long as we had estimated; fortunately, in the process of discussing some other stuff, we had a moment of, “oh, yeah, we need to remember to have this INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS AND NECESSARY CONSEQUENCE HAPPEN.” In the end, we wound up with a Chapter 16 that only about 2/5 resembles our original plan for the chapter we thought we had all mapped out. 😛 But what matters is that it’s done, and it works, and also we added in a useful scene back in Chapter 4 (setting up a decision we unexpectedly made while writing Chapter 14), and sure, the roadmap for how we wrote this book may wind up looking like a plate of spaghetti — but if we do our job right, the reader will never be able to tell.

Word count: ~115,000
Authorial sadism: Yep, turns out this is your fault, too. I mean, not on purpose? But that won’t make you feel much better.
Authorial amusement: Making chalk angels on the floor, and shrieking and dropping A Certain Thing.
BLR quotient: Starts off firmly with love, but then I think the plot revelations swing it pretty hard toward a blood/rhetoric mix. Gotta admit, though, it’s wonderful to finally be able to talk about these elements directly!

Rook and Rose Book 2, Chapter . . . 15?

No, you didn’t miss a progress report in there. The last report was on Chapter 13.

What happened was not that Alyc and I skipped over 14 in favor of writing the one after it. Rather, we’re rearranging things. When we mapped out what Part Three of the book was going to look like, we knew a huge pile of stuff was all going to collide at the end of it, and we divvied that stuff up across three chapters, because we estimated we had that much material.

But really, it isn’t the big climactic stuff where we tend to get wordy. That belongs more to the fiddly scenes in between, where our con artist is conning people, or some intricate political stuff is getting layered in, or — let’s be honest — the scenes where the actual motivation is us wanting to do some stuff with character relationships, but we can’t let anything get away with being pure fluff, so we have to provide some meat to go around that bone. When the fecal matter is hitting the fan? It tends to move along at a pretty good clip.

Our target chapter length here is roughly eight thousand words (. . . yes, I know; look, it’s the rhythm that fits this story). Upon writing our way through two of the four scenes for Chapter 14, we were just over 2600 — and the odds that the remaining two were going to boost that even as high 5K seemed low. Moreover, glancing ahead to Chapter 15, we agreed that it felt like that one was also probably going to run extremely short.

There’s nothing wrong with having a short-ish chapter. But two half-sized chapters in a row starts looking a lot like they should be a single unit.

We could have beefed up the hijinks that are going on here to be more complex, but honestly, that felt like it would just be padding. The problem with combining them is, we’ve also got some larger-scale structural things going on here. Because Reasons, we want this book to be divided into five parts of five chapters each. So we couldn’t just say, okay, 14 + 15 is now 14, and full steam ahead — that would leave our climactic events hanging out a chapter too early, and the end of the part would be the quieter aftermath. (There are scenarios in which I could see that working, but this isn’t one of them.) Which means 14 + 15 needs to be 15, and what was 13 needs to get bumped over to 14, and Part Three needs another chapter in the middle, circa 12-13.

Ultimately, I think this will be a very good change. We’d already been feeling like some plot strands had fallen by the wayside for longer than is ideal; now we have the space to attend to those. Of course, that requires us to figure out what intermediate steps will best help develop them at this stage in the timeline — right now the additional chapter is a fair bit of ???. And I’ll admit my brain is making grumpy faces at the feeling that we have to “go backward,” even though filling in that middle bit is still vital forward progress. Being closer to the end of the book is not meaningful if there’s a big hole behind you somewhere. But still: my subconscious wants to say “woo-hoo, we’re 60% of the way done!,” and dislikes having that achievement tugged out of reach again. (Even if it isn’t actually within reach yet anyway.)

What I can say “woo-hoo!” to is that the Super Exciting Stuff we’ve been looking forward to for aaaaaaaaaages has finally arrived. 😀

Word count: ~105,000
Authorial sadism: “What will this do?” Another instance of something we totally did not see coming until Alyc was writing it . . .
Authorial amusement: Look, this time we had a very good reason for stripping a character!
BLR quotient: That much near-death ought to be blood, but the actual takeaway here is 100% love. (Well, maybe 90%. There’s that thing Ren saw, though she won’t know the full story there until later.)

Support me in the Clarion West Write-a-thon!

I’ve been doing a lot of teaching with the Clarion West writers’ workshop this year — first an in-person workshop on writing fight scenes; then four one-hour online workshops on different small worldbuilding topics during their free offerings in April; then a six-hour online workshop on worldbuilding more broadly in May — and now I’m partnering with them in a different way, by participating in their write-a-thon. This raises funds to cover their costs, including scholarships for marginalized students, so if you can spare a little for them, please do! You can either sponsor me at that link, or browse the list of participants and choose someone from there. I’ve pledged to do a whole pile of stuff: forty thousand words on the second Rook and Rose book with Alyc (uhhhh, 40K together; not 40K for my half), revision on The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons, and two short stories completed. Wish me luck . . .

Rook and Rose Book 2, Chapter 13

Lucky number 13!

. . . maybe not so lucky for our characters.

This is the start of an avalanche; it is too late for the pebbles to vote. I recently put together a “relative timeline” for the chapters so far, marking the few scenes that take place on set dates, and then positioning everything else on the basis of “these take place on the same day,” “this is a day or two later,” “this gap can be as long or as short as we need it to be,” and so forth. (This is important because a certain event in Book 3 needs to take place on a fixed date, and until we’ve finished this book and done some amount of planning for the next, we’re not sure how much time we want to have elapse here.)

In that timeline? This chapter and the next two all take place on the same night.

And they are frickin’ loaded with narrative catnip. To the point where Alyc and I rolled through nearly half the chapter in a single day, and the only reason we aren’t already up to our elbows in Chapter 14 is that extenuating circumstances are requiring us to pause briefly. Our chat messages back and forth as we swap off writing have featured comments like “unf,” “bwahahahahah,” and “MAXIMUM WHUMP!” All the work we’ve done setting up the relationships and conflicts between our central characters? Here is where it pays off — not in the sense that after this we’re done, but rather that we’re doing a full Transformer on how those are all configured, and going forward it’s going to be a brave new world. (One in which our characters are somewhat physically and emotionally bruised, and in need of recuperation. They’ll get . . . at least a little?)

Though man, right now I have no idea what I’ll even be able to say when I report on the next two chapters. The further I go along, the harder it is to avoid spoilers, while still saying things of moderate substance.

Word count: ~97,000
Authorial sadism: Under any other circumstances, the prize would go to the punch we didn’t see coming until Alyc typed that sentence. But the unexpected turn that scene took can’t hold a candle to the “death from above” moment we’ve been planning from the start.
Authorial amusement: We’ve been waiting an equally long time to make a certain character lose his ability to language. 😀
BLR quotient: However romantically this chapter started off, there is way too much open conflict here for this to be anything but blood.

Rook and Rose Book 2, Chapter 12

Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?

Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.

Hugh Fennyman: How?

Philip Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

I wound up quoting the above at Alyc early last week, at the end of about an hour and a half of us beating our heads against the wall of a certain plot problem for this chapter. We still didn’t have an answer, but we’d both hit a point where we could tell that continuing to work on it right then wouldn’t do any good; we had to walk away and let our thoughts turn to other things, and trust — hope — that a solution would present itself while we weren’t looking. (My other go-to quote in such situations is “Cudgel thy brains no more, for your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating.”)

You see, something like eight or nine months ago, we’d come up with a way to arrange for a certain cluster of plot things to all happen at once, in maximally exciting fashion. But either we’d forgotten (and failed to write down) some of the finer points, or we’d never actually thought it through in sufficient detail, because when we came back to it . . . there were some serious unanswered questions. How were the antagonists going to find out about a certain thing happening? Why was this character going to be in that place at that time? Did the timing even work? If we had [redacted] do [redacted], wouldn’t that be bad espionage, a mistake they ought to be too intelligent to make? We fiddled with the pieces we had, trying to make them line up. We brought in other pieces to bridge the gaps. And then still more pieces. We threw ninety percent of the pieces out because it was getting too complicated. Round and round we went. We whined at each other about why we’d decided to make our villains competent and our challenges challenging, and wouldn’t it all be easier if we could just let people be idiots?

There’s a fair bit of neurological science backing up the idea that you’re more likely to solve a problem when you’re not thinking about it, and as you can tell by the fact that I’m reporting another successfully completed chapter, that was indeed the case here. Both Alyc and I woke up the next morning with fresh ideas (well, I had mine on my way to bed, which is usually how it goes), and we managed to hybridize them in some useful ways. A story element that started life as a gratuitous bit of self-indulgence is now serving a legitimate plot function; we did a major plot-and-personality transplant on a side character. (Which is also something that happened in drafting The Mask of Mirrors, so now I’m wondering who in Book Three will wind up being totally rewritten halfway through.) And we managed to close out the book with a moment that doesn’t remotely measure up to the world’s most disastrous dinner in Bujold’s A Civil Campaign, but will hopefully have a bit of that feel. Given that our original plan for that particular revelation was kind of disappointingly sedate, this is far more entertaining. 😀

Word count: ~90,000
Authorial sadism: “Hey, is that your dad?”
Authorial amusement: Beldipassi’s Incredible Can’t-Miss One-Time Offer!
BLR quotient: A surprising amount of love. Gotta soften everybody up for the beating that’s on its way.

Two months to DRIFTWOOD!

As of right now, we’re about two months from the publication of Driftwood. It’s been getting some amazing reviews: I already linked to the starred review from Publishers Weekly; now that’s been joined by a starred review from KIRKUS, of all places — I think this might only be the second or third star I’ve pried out of them in my career to date. The full text is here, but the quotable bit is:

Through these stories, a portrait of Last as a tragic figure, accidental deity, and distant friend emerges. The patchwork quilt of his acquaintances’ tales mirrors the very nature of Driftwood itself, slowly peeling back the veil to reveal the living—and departed—people who make up this strange and riveting new cosmos. Readers will close the cover aching to read more about Last and his world.

(Also, the beginning of the review calls me a “veteran author.” When the &#$% did that happen? I mean, okay, sure, my first book came out fourteen years ago . . . and okay, sure, I’ve got over a dozen novels out . . . but maaaaaaaan does that feel weird.)

I’ve also gotten some gorgeous blurbs from authors I hugely admire: Karen Lord called it “bittersweet and rich, like fine chocolate,” and both Mary Robinette Kowal and Max Gladstone referred to it as “haunting.” I could wish that the whole “hope in the face of apocalypse” thing (PW’s description) weren’t quite so timely right now, but on the other hand, it also feels like the right timing. While it’s not a great year to be putting out books, if there’s one thing I’ve written that I would want to see in the world right now, it’s this one.

And, I mean. Look at that cover. Don’t you want one of your very own?

cover for DRIFTWOOD by Marie Brennan