Deferred rewards

One of the things that makes a writing career difficult is that all your payoffs are deferred.

Let’s say you’re writing a novel. Each day, or whatever schedule you work on, you add some more to the pile of words. Go you! But if you’re not someone who lets people read the draft in progress (I’m usually not, though there have been exceptions), then you do that work in a void. And it’s a long, long road to having a completed draft, so you’re in that void for quite a while.

Then you finish your draft. Go you! Now maybe you let somebody read it. But you know, in your heart of hearts, that this isn’t the end of anything; it’s just an intermediate stage. There’s revision, and that’s before the novel even heads out into the wide wide world.

Ah, but surely you get payoff when you sell the novel, right? Go you! Except . . . what “selling a novel” actually looks like is generally that your agent sends you an email saying “here’s what they’re offering,” and you say “that sounds great, let’s do it!” Whereupon your agent haggles for a while, because that’s their job. Or maybe this is the next book in a multi-book contract you already signed, at which point this stage doesn’t even really happen, because it happened years ago.

Assuming it’s a new deal, eventually somebody sends you a contract to sign. This comes probably weeks after the offer you said yes to, if not months. Is this the payoff? It doesn’t feel much like a payoff. On the one hand, you kinda sorta sold the book a while ago; on the other hand, you haven’t been paid yet, much less seen your book in print.

Some number of days or weeks after you signed the contract, money shows up. This used to be in the form of an actual check, but these days lots of people use direct deposit instead. So instead of a Real Live Check, you get an email saying “hey, we’ve deposited this money in your account.” Is that the payoff? Literally, yes; emotionally, no.

Edits.

Copy-edits.

Page proofs.

Somewhere in here, you get a cover. Awesome! It mostly has nothing to do with you, since at best you got to offer some ideas that your publisher may or may not have listened to, but at least it’s shiny! Meanwhile you’re busy with something else.

And then, one day, FINALLY, months after you got paid, months after you sold it, months or maybe even years after you wrote the book . . . it’s on the shelves! Everybody is so excited!

Except for you. I mean, sure, you’re happy. I’m not trying to say that it isn’t cool to hold your very own book in your hands and see your name on the cover. But . . . as a payoff for the long marathon of writing the thing, it isn’t much, because it comes way too late. By the time it arrives, you’re already doing something else. You’re in the void of a different book, probably, and when people talk about “your new book,” you have to remind yourself which one they’re talking about. To them, the one that matters is the one they can buy. But that’s not the one eating your time and attention anymore. And psychologically speaking, a reward that’s massively deferred from the behavior that earned it is pretty much useless.

This is why I’m coming around to the opinion that it is hugely important to set up some kind of ritual for yourself — in whatever form works for you — that celebrates the milestones. Two years may go by between finishing the rough draft and seeing the result on a shelf, but if you’ve done something meaningful to mark the achievement of that draft, or the other landmarks along the way, then you won’t run as much risk of the job starting to feel meaningless. If the way the circumstances work isn’t going to reward you in a timely manner, then you’ve got to do it yourself.

Things they never teach you

Writing advice books tend to go into great detail on things like how to structure your plot, or develop character, or describe things, or whatever.

They do not — in my limited experience; hence this post — bother to say much about how to decide where to break chapters, scenes, or paragraphs, apart from telling you to start a new paragraph if you’re switching speakers in dialogue. Maybe a vague nod at “cliffhangers are exciting!,” but that’s about it. You’re just supposed to figure that stuff out as you go, apparently. Or else (and this is entirely possible) it never occurred to the writer of the writing advice book that there’s an actual skill buried in there.

But I haven’t read a huge number of writing advice books, so I’m perfectly willing to believe that someone out there has at some point unpacked this stuff for the reader. Any recs? Because it’s one of those things that I do instinctively, without much ability to articulate how the decision-making process goes — and since I enjoy teaching writing, being able to articulate it would be useful.

I need noodle soup!

There is a sad lack of noodle soup in my cooking repertoire. What recipes do you guys recommend? The main requirement is that it be non-spicy, in the peppers/chili sense; other things are easy to leave out (cilantro) or substitute (eggplant for squash).

Lightning in the Blood!

Following on the heels of the republication of Cold-Forged Flame, now Lightning in the Blood hits the shelves!

cover art for LIGHTNING IN THE BLOOD by Marie Brennan

Once she had nothing: no name, no memory, no purpose beyond the one her master bound her to fulfill. Now the wandering archon known as Ree must walk an unseen path — one that will lead her toward the untold story of her origins. But the road to the truth is paved with blood . . .

It’s on sale now, at Book View Cafe, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Kobo, Indigo (Canada), and Amazon US and UK.

Loving-kindness

One of the mediation apps on my phone (yes, I have several . . . I am the walking stereotype of “I really want to make a habit of this! Maybe if I find The Perfect Program, I’ll succeed!) is running a New Year’s Challenge, with a goal of meditating at least fifteen days in the first twenty-one, i.e. five days a week for three weeks. So far I’m 11 for 11 (it started on the 6th, not the 1st), which is good, and I sort of wish they’d launch another challenge after this one, because seeing that little gold medal does help with motivation and persistence.

But it’s gotten me thinking about a bunch of things. Like New Year’s resolutions, and the ways in which that whole concept tends to set us up for failure. One of the “ohhhhh” moments for me in trying to practice mindfulness meditation was when it finally got through my skull that those moments when I realize my attention has wandered away from my breath? That’s not me failing at meditation; that’s me succeeding. Because the point is not to achieve perfect tranquility from start to finish, but rather to be mindful: both to pay attention to a thing (my breath), and also to notice when my attention has strayed. “Begin again,” as several of the meditation teachers in this app have said — and as one of them pointed out, that applies to the practice of meditation in general as well as any individual session again. Missed a day? Begin again. Missed a week? Begin again. Missed six months? Notice that you’ve stopped. Be mindful of what you’re doing. And what you’re not doing.

I have a poster on my wall with the text of “An Invocation for Beginnings”. It’s one of the few “motivational” things that’s ever spoken to me on an emotional level. And to quote one pertinent bit: “Let me realize that my past failures at follow-through are no indications of my future performance, they’re just healthy little fires that are going to warm up my ass.” New Year’s resolutions, though . . . we treat them as rigid. If you resolve to do a thing, and then drop the ball, you’ve broken your resolution. Game over. Stop trying.

No. Begin again.

The app has been providing a meditation lesson for each day, which I recognize is so they can advertise the various series that require a paid account to use. But I’m still appreciating it as a tour of different things, like deep breathing techniques to reduce stress. Today’s was on “loving-kindness” meditation, which is about developing compassion toward yourself and other people. Chesed, maitrī, agape in its less-religious sense. What really struck me was the brief video beforehand, with Dan Harris (the guy behind the app) and Sharon Salzberg (the teacher for that session) discussing the concept of loving-kindness — and how we as a society tend to disparage the idea, as if compassion and kindness make us weak. The video was only a few minutes long, so I’m not surprised they didn’t attempt to unpack the gender dimension, but it’s there: loving-kindness is a trait associated with femininity, and therefore men are discouraged from developing it. Harris straight-up admitted that he was embarrassed to be seen reading Salzberg’s book — that he literally hid the cover when he was reading it on planes, etc. How messed-up is that? But he’s a white dude in America, which means he’s not supposed to be squishy and touchy-feely and nice.

Hello, toxic masculinity. And yet, so many of our religions praise this quality, not just for girls but for everybody. But it’s hardly news that we’re historically bad at actually practicing what we preach.

I don’t really have a point here that I’m trying to arrive at, except that getting back into meditation (begin again) is prompting a variety of thoughts in me. And that I’m hoping it will help me develop the internal equilibrium I’m going to need to survive 2020. Our whole society could use a mega-dose of loving-kindness, if only we had some way to inject it.

I return to the teaching fold!

Temporarily, at least. 🙂

I’m currently slated to do two teaching stints in 2020. The first is coming up soon: Pen, Paper, Action!, a one-day workshop at Clarion West in Seattle on February 8th. There I’ll be covering not just fight scenes in specific, but action more generally.

The second is later this year, during the Sirens Studio that takes place before the main conference. I’ll be teaching a writing intensive on creating religions for fantasy worlds — going beyond deciding who the gods are, and delving into how beliefs can be integrated into the daily lives of the characters. Sirens is a beautiful event focusing on women in fantasy; I haven’t been to the Studio before, but I was one of the Guests of Honor at the conference in its second year, and had an amazing time.

Registration for both of these things is limited, so if you’re interested, sign up soon!

belated Yuletide post

I never did post about Yuletide, did I? I blame the chaos that was the last several months of 2019 — I’m still picking myself off the floor.

I lucked into three (!) gifts this year. The first was “the three Chrestomancis,” the prompt for which was borne out of me realizing that Cat arrived at the castle before Gabriel passed away, meaning that for a while there were three nine-lived enchanters running around at once. (Not that any of them still had nine lives by that point, but it doesn’t affect their power.) Then I received “as wine pervades water,” which features exactly the kind of wedding I’d expect Rick O’Connell and Evy Carnahan (from the 1999 Mummy movie) to have, i.e. ad hoc and done at speed to save the world from a supernatural threat. I also got the Madness treat “When a Body Meets a Body,” and it amuses me how many Mummy fics I’ve seen involve bog bodies over the last few years; I credit Sovay and her comment that I quote in my Yuletide letter. 🙂

For my own part, I dove deep into the history of D&D for “Third-Party Supplements,” a fic for The Order of the Stick. My thanks to the various people who helped me research old editions, and especially whoever it was on Twitter (too difficult to dig back that far now) that linked me to the infamous Random Harlot Table. 😀 I legit rolled dice for this story, y’all.

Recent TV: The Witcher

Like many people, I recently inhaled the first season of The Witcher. I enjoyed it a lot, even if in some ways I think it’s a bit of a mess?

One part of the messiness is that the show does not do an excellent job of communicating to you off the bat that the various plotlines are not all happening at the same time. I found that out because I looked at a summary of the first episode after I watched it (which I did because often either the actors are not great at enunciating the names, or the sound editor is not great at making sure those moments are loud enough, so I was having trouble figuring out what anybody or anywhere was called), and there are a few hints here and there about the non-simultaneity, but I think it’s entirely possible not to realize what’s going on until Geralt meets up with some characters you saw die several episodes ago in someone else’s plotline.

And the structure is kind of choppy in general. Lots of Geralt’s plots are basically monster-of-the-week deals which appear to be drawn from short stories, and while they do end up echoing forward in a few places, it means he doesn’t have a lot of through-line except “I’m a monster hunter and I wander around being paid to kill monsters.” I’m told the second season and onward will be more cohesive, with the central characters interacting more frequently, so that will probably help.

Finally, the ending . . . kind of isn’t. An ending, I mean. It’s a stopping point with some amount of cliffhanger, but — if you’ve watched Nirvana in Fire, you know how the episodes there often seem to go to the credits at absolutely arbitrary points? It feels a bit like that. There’s not no payoff, but if you’re expecting a clear narrative shape to the season (as I was), you won’t really find it here.

But! Having said that, I still enjoyed the heck out of it, and that is about 98% due to the characters, dialogue, and performances. I am much more willing to put up with a main character who is stoic, grim, and frequently cynical when there’s no shortage of other characters ready and willing to take the piss out of him at every opportunity — and many of those characters are women. My impression (from those who know the source fiction and/or the games) is that this is largely an innovation of the TV show; certainly the presence of characters of color fits under that header. I’m glad of both things. The first episode alone has four women playing significant roles in the plot, and that’s before Yennefer shows up to be a protagonist. And while there’s a lot of nudity, most of it female, the show (mostly) isn’t nearly as exploitative about that as it could be — I could have done without Stregebor’s illusion of naked women wandering around his garden. They do put Geralt naked in a bathtub not once but twice, though, plus a number of shirtless scenes.

Also, Jaskier is hilarious. Geralt’s “rarr I don’t have friends rarrr” attitude means we don’t get as much of him as we might otherwise; hopefully he’s returning for season two. Even if he has earwormed us all with “Toss a coin to your Witcher.” 😛

Fair warning: do not start a drinking game that involves taking shots when somebody says “destiny” or when Geralt says “hmmm.” Not unless you want to court liver failure. Taking a shot when Geralt looks at something for a moment and then delivers a deadpan evaluation of “fuck,” though, might be entertaining.

The show is very violent, and like I said, the overall narrative structure isn’t all that hot. But I find it very pretty — the costumes are way better than on Game of Thrones — and fun on the level of smaller plots, and I’m looking forward to what future seasons do now that the component pieces are in place.

The best and worst of the Star Wars sequels

Opinions on the Star Wars sequels have been polarized from the start, and from what I’ve seen, that’s no less true of Rise of Skywalker. I don’t see much point in wading into that — if you liked it then you liked it (I did), and if you didn’t you didn’t (I’m not liable to change your mind) — so I thought I’d post about something different. Instead I’d like to step back and evaluate what I consider to be the strongest and weakest narrative decisions made overall.

Spoilers for Rise of Skywalker, since both of these things play into the final episode.

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Scholarship in antiquity

I know I have at least a few people reading this journal who know a bit about this topic. 🙂

Scholars in the ancient world: what exactly did they do? What sorts of things did they write? “Commentaries,” according to the references in the things I’ve read, but what exactly was the content and purpose of those things? What other kinds of works did they produce?

What sparked this question was thinking about the Library of Alexandria and the scholars who used it, but I’m also interested in answers from other parts of the world (since the purpose to which I’d be putting this is not historical fiction). Ancient Confucian scholarship, ancient Vedic scholarship, those and more would all be interesting to know about, too.

The kinds of things I ask about . . .

I belong to an online writer’s group where I can post research questions. For my own entertainment, I made a list of the things I’ve asked about in the last two years. Some of these are for works that are out now (e.g. Turning Darkness Into Light, The Endless Knot, “Vīs Dēlendī”); others are for works I have written but not yet sold; others are for back-burner projects.

Some are more about soliciting suggestions of things of a certain type:

  • Mythological thefts (for the good of humankind)
  • Perfume blends
  • Near Eastern tales and myths
  • Folksongs
  • Archaeology-based plots
  • Celtic battle music recs
  • Slavic music recs
  • Card games played with non-numerical decks
  • Words that fit a specific pattern

But others were more about getting references or facts:

  • Scholarship in antiquity
  • 1930s British university structure
  • Life on a Saturnian-type moon
  • Bronze forging and casting
  • Probabilities for a card game
  • Ancient Roman magic
  • Length of the lunar day and orbital mechanics considerations for launch
  • Historical Chinese cuisine
  • Jewish religious law and literary genres
  • Short-term cons to build trust
  • Treasonous activities
  • Social models of friendship
  • Charting a horoscope
  • Basics of lunar landing
  • Lunar calendar based around two moons
  • Moons and tidal mechanics
  • Punishments for Buddhist monks
  • Tattoos
  • Latin gerunds [I wanted somebody to check my grammar]
  • Putting gold inside clay
  • Fire scenario: starting it, dealing with it, and fighting it
  • Russian-to-English grammatical quirks
  • Cuneiform

. . . apparently I’ve been thinking about moons a lot lately? Oddly, though, those questions are for three completely unrelated projects. Anyway, it’s an amusing cross-section of some of the things I’ve been researching over the last two years, and I’d say it’s a fair snapshot of what my fiction is like in general!

A different short fiction resolution

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times here, in both 2018 and 2019 I set myself the goal of writing six short stories. I came up one short in 2018, and then in 2019 succeeded despite making a mess of that count with flash fiction and a novelette that wasn’t intended for the submission treadmill and etc. etc. etc.

I’ve decided to change my goal for 2020.

My reasons are threefold: First, I have quite a lot of novel work pending for this year, which is going to eat a fair bit of my time and energy. Second, I rather expect politics will send me into at least a few mental tailspins before we ring in 2021, and allowing some slack for that seems like a good idea. And third, the best way to head my overachiever tendencies off at the pass before they can tell me I Have to Write Even More Than Last Year is to deliberately aim lower.

So my goal for 2020 is actually just three stories — but three specific(-ish) stories. See, a few years back I sorted my short fiction into groupings based on subgenre, and discovered that basically every grouping was either in the range of 30-40K words, or could reach that easily if I got off my duff and wrote some of the ideas that had been hanging around unwritten for years. Three of those — Maps to Nowhere for secondary-world fantasy, Ars Historica for historical fantasy, and The Nine Lands for stories in that setting — are out now. A fourth, the urban fantasy collection, is on the road to publication later this year. (Monstrous Beauty and Never After are a different ballgame, being micro-collections rather than novella-sized.)

That leaves me with three within striking distance of completion: one for folksong retellings, one for stories inspired by other kinds of folklore and mythology, and (in a surprise speed-run) another secondary-world collection, because I’ve accumulated nearly enough since publishing Maps to Nowhere in 2017 to hit that topic again. All of these are still pending the sale of multiple stories — with the exception of Never After, which was a special case, I’m only collecting reprints — but more to the point, they also each need me to write one more story for them to be complete.

Ergo, that’s what I’m going to focus on this year. My goal is not merely to write three stories, but to write stories that fit the following parameters:

1) One story based on a folksong. I have a song in mind; I just need my subconscious to cough up some interesting answers to the questions the song leaves me with. Technically I only need this to be 620 words long to get myself across the self-imposed 30K bottom limit, but I’d like a full-length story, since there are already two flash pieces in here (and those are why, despite writing two new pieces, this collection still isn’t complete). Given the song in question, though, and what I feel like the story it produces might be, I don’t think that will be a problem.

2) One based on Near Eastern mythology. This technically isn’t necessary, since the collection’s currently at 33K. But the story I unexpectedly wrote before Christmas left me in a situation where the regional groupings within the collection have four stories each, with the exception of the Near Eastern one, which has only three. So dangit, I want one more. Not sure what, though — so hey, if there are any Near Eastern myths or bits of folklore you think are crying out for poking at in fiction, feel free to suggest them in the comments!

3) One secondary-world. This is wide open; it could be anything, as long as it’s at least 3700 words long. (Which usually isn’t a problem for anything that requires me to do worldbuilding.) I have an idea I originally thought might go here, but further thought made it apparent to me that it’s going to be at least a novelette and maybe a novella, so . . . probably not? Because my imagination is fun of playing annoying and self-inflicted games, my inclination is to not have the additional story be a repeat in any of the settings currently slated for the collection, even though I have multiple ideas in that direction. I might take a crack at the story that’s the sequel to “Love, Cayce,” but that presumes I can figure out a way to write it without the sequel-ness being an obvious barrier to entry. But on my way to bed last night I realized I could take the opening incident of a potential future novel that currently has nothing but an opening incident and turn that into a stand-alone story — what I think of as a “proof of concept” story, poking at a setting and a character in short form before attempting a novel — so despite being a brand-new concept, right now that’s leading the pack.

Those are my goal. Let’s see if I can make ’em happen.

Book View Cafe’s Boxing Week Sale!

As we’ve done for the past several years, the authors’ publishing co-op known as Book View Cafe (of which I am a member, and which hosts my Patreon essays) is running a Boxing Week sale! From now through the end of the year, everything in the store is 25% off — no coupon needed. You can browse by author, or check out the different genres in the sidebar; we publish everything from science fiction and fantasy to romance, mystery, horror, and nonfiction on a variety of topics. Check it out!