Most of you reading this probably sleep on mattresses on bed frames in dedicated bedrooms, with soft pillows and nobody else in the bed except possibly a spouse. But this week the New Worlds Patreon explores a wide variety of sleeping arrangements. Comment over there!
Happy book day to me! It feels a little strange saying that on a Friday. 🙂
Driftwood goes on sale today. If you’re getting a print book, I heartily encourage you to order it from a local bookstore; they need your support more than ever right now. I also recommend making use of IndieBound or Bookshop.org, both of which can help you support a local business (in the latter case, either directly or through your purchase going to a general pool for participating stores).
I’m . . . frankly astonished at how good the response to this book has been. I could wish it hadn’t hit at the right time for “how do you decide what matters to you and hold into that in the face of destruction?” to be such a resonant question, but here we are, and it’s gotten a trifecta of starred reviews from Publishers’ Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus, along with positive mentions from a score of other venues so far. The premise may be bleak — worlds crumbling en route to their final destruction — but ultimately this is a book about friendship, community, and not giving up. If that sounds like something you would want to read, maybe not today, but some day, then I heartily encourage you to pick it up.
Oh, and also? I GOT A FRICKIN’ 3D AR COVER HOW COOL IS THAT. 😀 😀 😀
I’m not being hyperbolic.
This post is addressed to every American citizen of voting age. (If that doesn’t apply to you, carry on with your day.)
We have a presidential election coming up in November, and every. single. sign. points to this being a clusterfuck of not only epic but criminal proportions. Right now — literally right now — Donald Trump is attempting to wreck the U.S. Postal Service in order to interfere with mail-in voting. He has stated this openly. The damage to the USPS has already meant people are receiving things like critical medications too late. And it means that mail-in ballots will be in grave danger of not being counted.
But this isn’t just about the USPS. The pandemic means people may be afraid to go to the polls — and the people least afraid to go will be the ones who are convinced this is all just a Democratic hoax or something. And when you get the man who holds the highest office in the land openly talking about interfering with the voting process, that is an excellent recipe for getting other people to decide it’s open season on electoral interference, whether that means “losing” a box full of ballots (a thing which has actually happened) or trying to prevent people from going to the polls.
I remember a time when people around me said things like “eh, the two parties are just the same, there’s no real difference between them.” If this was ever true, it is not true now.
Normally I’m all in favor of simply telling people to vote, without actively campaigning for one side. But this is not a case where we have two legitimate options and I just don’t like one of them as well. The United States is leading the world in “worst handling of the coronavirus;” the last number I saw was 160,000 Americans dead from covid. We have an actively criminal president who will do any goddamned thing he can get away with to hold onto power. Given the way our system works, there is literally only one viable option in 2020 for putting the brakes on this downward spiral, and that is to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris into the White House.
And to do that, it isn’t just enough to say “get out there and vote.” If you are not registered yet, do that now, at this link. Right now. It won’t take you long. If you are registered, make sure that’s still true — especially if you live in a Republican-controlled area, because they have carried out a number of efforts to purge the voter rolls. Find out when early voting begins in your area, because you don’t have to wait until November 3rd, and the sooner you go, the better. (And when you do, wear a mask.) If you have mail-in voting, fill out your ballot immediately, and then, in descending order of preference, 1) deliver it personally to your Board of Elections, 2) put it in a dropbox, or 3) mail it. In that order because of the aforementioned attempt to fuck with the postal service, and because are you sure some fanatic isn’t going to interfere with the dropbox?
Finally, don’t just pay attention to the top of the ballot. The Republican Party has for years now been descending into ever more blatant greed, bigotry, cronyism, and incompetence. We cannot reward them with other forms of power. Vote for state offices and local ones. Vote for people who don’t think “science” is some inconvenient thing that will go away if they ignore it hard enough, or a roadblock between them and piling even more grotesque profits atop the ones they already have.
No, not finally — one more thing. You also have to spread this message. Not necessarily this specific post, but its salient points: you have to vote, and you have to do so in a fashion that minimizes the risk of both health consequences and your vote note being counted. You aren’t safe. None of us are.
As I mentioned before, Chapter 22 was almost done by the time I reported on 21, so here, have another one!
This is basically our last bit of fun, in the sense of having some scenes where our characters get to deal with smaller problems in a more lighthearted way. In fact, what we originally conceived of as being some kind of caper wound up instead being two characters literally toasting each other with wine glasses while they watch a small farce play out: we could have made it something more involved and energetic, but the ironic effect of dialing it back makes for a fun change of pace.
With all the rearrangement and changes of plan we’ve done, this chapter also wound up having a plot beat that was originally in Chapter 18, now stripped of half the characters who used to be there, moved to a new location, and simplified. As much as it sucks to scrap two thousand words and replace them, I think this version is much better — even if I spent way too much time thinking about methods of execution only to have the scene not even reference that aspect. Oh well, waste not, want not; maybe in the third book we’ll have some reason to refer to the idea I came up with, which is horrifically gory and also culturally appropriate.
Or, y’know, in a future series. Because yes, we’re already tossing ideas around for doing more in this setting, if we get the chance. We’ve spent so much time building up a rich world for this story to take place in; it would be downright thrifty of us to re-use it for another plot.
Word count: ~176,000
Authorial sadism: It’s a surprisingly non-sadistic chapter! I guess we pummeled our characters’ hearts so much last chapter, they needed a quick breather.
Authorial amusement: Too many to count. The wine glasses, the reaction to a name, someone putting her foot down, a gibbering fanboy moment, “go ahead and finish your breakfast.”
BLR quotient: Rhetoric makes a strong comeback.
I’ve been so busy writing, I’ve forgotten to report!
We’re in the home stretch now, the fifth part of a five-part book. It would feel more like the home stretch if we didn’t keep retooling our plans; the Chapter 21 we wrote is neither the original Chapter 21 we had planned, nor quite the Chapter 21 we replaced the original plan with (though the second redesign was more about changing the sequence of stuff so that its context was different, rather than swapping it out wholesale). We’ve got so many threads we’re trying to pull together now, and we have to balance the demands of exposition against emotional weight and still try to have some kind of action going on.
But that’s my thoughts being colored a bit by the fact that we’re almost done with Chapter 22 and have actually started 23 (because linearity, what is that?). 21 is really more of the feelingz wrecking ball hitting the characters from several directions at once, not all of those good. They finally know, in full surround-sound smell-o-vision technicolor glory, just how much danger they’re in. And they’re not getting out of the woods this book; following the grand tradition of sonata structure, this movement is the one in a minor key. Final resolution will have to wait for the next volume.
Word count: ~168,000 (we also added in the earlier scenes we needed)
Authorial sadism: The worst thing is when you start to doubt your own mind.
Authorial amusement: Look, you can’t set up a character to be afraid of X and NOT inflict X on them eventually.
BLR quotient: What if the love is actually just more blood?
One of the great benefits of my line of work is that I can take a nap if I need to. Which is pertinent to the new topic for the New Worlds Patreon, because my patrons have voted for me to talk about sleep! Comment over there.
I’ve mentioned both of these on Twitter, but since that medium is so ephemeral, it’s easy to miss things:
Both Apex Magazine and Uncanny Magazine are running Kickstarters right now. Both of them are award-winning publications, with lots of stories winding up on shortlists or nabbing the honors. Apex was on hiatus for a little over a year, but is now starting up again, which is really great news for the short fiction field. Their Kickstarter has been running longer and they’ve hit their main goal already; they’re almost to the stretch goal that will mean the entire next year of issues is fully funded. (After that there are a few more stretch goals for things like an indigenous and native creators special issue and an international creators special issue.) Uncanny’s Kickstarter just launched and is aimed at funding the whole year in one go; their stretch goals are for original cover art, paying a small stipend to staff, and increasing the pay rate for nonfiction essays. If you’re able to back one or both, that would be really amazing — I know there are so many things that need money right now, and for many people that’s in short supply, but these magazines are both vital parts of this corner of publishing. And both Apex and Uncanny have a lot of fiction online for you to check out, if you want a taste of what they do!
If you missed yesterday’s Twitter giveaway for Driftwood, never fear; Beneath Ceaseless Skies has another opportunity for you. All you have to do is go to this post and leave a comment naming your favorite short story of mine (whether published in BCS or elsewhere). There are already a number of comments — and I confess, it’s fascinating to see what people choose! You have until midnight Pacific time on Wednesday, August 12th to toss your hat into the ring.
As the theory post for this fifth Friday, the New Worlds Patreon is turning its attention to another useful anthropological concept: marked and unmarked categories. Comment over there!
August is just around the corner, which means we are a mere two weeks from the release of Driftwood! I’m frankly astonished at how good the reviews have been so far: stars from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus, and a whole flood of glowing posts in the last week or so from independent bloggers. I knew the short stories tended to attract fans from the very start, but the nature of this novel is peculiar enough (being a fix-up of those short stories) that I wasn’t sure how it would be received. So far the answer is “really, really well” — and come Friday, August 14th, everybody will be able to get their hands on it!
In the latest adventures of the Tin Chef . . .
My sister is amused that her contributions to my cooking repertoire have both been a matter of saying “well, we could do this half-assed thing I used to do when I lived alone,” and then me getting ambitious about it. Last time it was Upgrade Pasta; this time it’s fried rice.
I have made it before, but I think only once, and then all I really did was scramble some eggs, dump in the rice, dump in a packet of store-bought seasoning, and call it a day. This time I started asking myself “what could I toss in to bulk that up?” Which is why this is now in my recipes folder as “okonomichahan,” a play on okonomiyaki. Because my goal here is to get myself to a point where I feel comfortable throwing this together with whatever odds and ends we happen to have around (“okonomi” kind of meaning “whatever you like”). Tonight that was not just eggs but some onion, cubed pancetta, a red bell pepper that would otherwise have gone to waste, and peas because it turns out I have two unopened bags of them in the freezer, in addition to the one I finished off here. And for seasonings, I used the powdered crack we bought from Red Robin, which in addition to garlic and salt has paprika and who knows what else, plus some soy sauce. I took a small amount of guidance regarding quantities of cooking oil and rice and such from a recipe my sister sent me (a recipe in Japanese >_< — thanks for the reading practice, I guess?), but the process overall was a lot of educated guesswork, including doing things like removing the various add-ins from the pan before I cooked the eggs so those would remain a distinct element rather than just glomming onto the other bits.
It wound up pretty good! Honestly, the only thing I screwed up was one very basic step: I didn’t remember to break up the big mass of day-old rice before it went in the pan, so there was some very frantic breaking and smooshing to try and get it to separate into grains of rice before the ones on the outside got too cooked. In the end it did as it was told, though, and now my large container of leftover plain rice is a much smaller one of fried rice with assorted bits in. And in the future I can experiment with carrot and whatever else might be lying around looking for a dish to be cooked in.
THIS &#$#@$%! BOOK
I say that with love. 🙂 But I had a progress report all written up on Tuesday night, ready to post the next day . . . and then I woke up on Wednesday to a slew of emails from Alyc, the bulk of which boiled down to “I think we should throw out most of the plot we have planned for the last fifth of the book.” You know, the stuff we spent Monday outlining with multicolored index cards all over the floor.
They had good reasons. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t be posting this progress report instead, the one that starts with the keysmash profanity. The plot we had in mind isn’t a bad one — but it’s one that would benefit much more from being delayed to book three, where it would have stronger logic backing it and a lot more room to breathe. And by chucking it, we bought ourselves room to do some other things in its place. But it meant that instead of waking up, posting my report, and getting started on Chapter 21, I got in the car and drove to Alyc’s place to do the outlining thing all over again. (Side note: I promise we are both taking pandemic precautions as we should, but for several reasons Alyc has essentially been counted as a member of my household for quarantine purposes. That’s why we were sitting on the same futon for the unboxing video for The Mask of Mirrors, why we’ve been getting together in person for book planning, etc.)
That work barely affected this chapter at all — we just had to cut the very brief ending scene that existed to launch the plot we scrapped, and we may alter the sequencing of the remaining ones. But the things I had written for my old progress report were all about us figuring out how to ring the changes on certain conflicts, keeping them from having too much the same shape as the things we did in the first book. Instead we’ve decided to go a different direction entirely — which is another reason why this shift of plans is a good one. I think one of the cool things a series can do is revisit core conflicts or themes from new angles, so it wasn’t inherently bad that there were similarities, but we like this version much better.
However. It isn’t just a matter of snipping out that one scene and proceeding into the new map. This change means that the narrative strand which was going to have its big climactic thing in part five just lost that; it needs a new climax. Which means taking the thing we did in Chapter 18 (where it honestly felt too cramped anyway) and pushing it back to 22, now in new! improved! form!, then figuring out new things to do in 18, and changing the fallout that it had in 19. And those other things we now have room to do? As I said in the last post, we’d already marked a few places where we felt like we needed to go back and add scenes; well, the things we want to do rest on the foundations of those unwritten scenes. So instead of starting Ch. 21 this week, we’re taking a few days to make some revisions and backfill some new material.
It’s all good stuff. Which is why, even though one of Alyc’s emails started with “Don’t kill me, but…,” my reaction was “yeah, we should probably do that.” But still. This &#$#@$%! book.
Word count: ~158,000
Authorial sadism: Someone’s worst nightmare come true.
Authorial amusement: She doesn’t have a first name. (Er, not that other character over there, whose lack of a first name is not amusing at all.)
BLR quotient: Since we snipped out that one scene, I’ll give it to love. Even if some of that love is really twisted and in need of help.
I forgot to write up a progress report for this chapter when we finished it! Well, that just means you’ll get the update for Chapter 20 not long after this one, since we have only two more scenes to write for that.
Though actually, we decided today that Chapter 19 isn’t really done. It needs a scene added to it, because there’s a side plot that has been kicked so far down the street, we’ve wound up with an unconscionably large gap between its beats. Not just that, but the plan we had for how it was going to start will no longer make much sense at all in its new context. So we’ll be writing the start as its own scene here, and the rest will become a scene of its own all the way down in 22. But I’m not sure when we’re going to fill that in, so since I normally would have written this post last week when I considered Chapter 19 complete, we’ll pretend that’s still true.
We’re doing kind of an astonishing amount of backtracking and changing things this time around. I’m not sure why — as in, will the third book be the same way? Or is it something about this particular tangle of plots that’s making the process of sorting them out so non-linear? There’s no way for me to tell right now, but today we came up with two more scenes we need to backfill, again to develop something that’s a little underbaked right now. Those are scattered all over the place, in Chapters 7 and 13, with a plan to also add something on that front to an existing scene in Chapter 5. Our spreadsheet outline is littered with comments reminding us to change little and not-so-little things when we revise. We had a similar list for The Mask of Mirrors, but I feel like less of it involved “rewrite the beginning of this scene to account for the subplot retconned in halfway through the book.” For someone like me, who’s used to an almost completely linear writing process, it’s a little unnerving.
But the good news is that I believe all these changes really are making the book better. And as of today, we have what passes for a complete outline through the finale of the book — so the end is in sight!
Word count: ~149,000
Authorial sadism: Really, that character can only blame Alyc. I didn’t write any of that journey.
Authorial amusement: Gloves!!!
BLR quotient: Sometimes love means bleeding on someone else’s behalf.
The New Worlds Patreon has spent the whole month talking about religious topics, and we’re wrapping up (for now) with the idea of syncretism: the borrowing of traditions or even whole gods from one religion into another. Comment over there!
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.
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.
The New Worlds Patreon tour of religion continues! Real-world polytheisms feature a dizzying array of gods, but many of them fall into certain recognizable categories. Comment over there!
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.
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:
Real book!!!! (Advance copies thereof, at least.)
Polytheism! It’s all over the place in fantasy, and frequently feels all too much like D&D. This week on the New Worlds Patreon, we talk about how polytheism actually works.
