In which I help to launch THE DRAGONS OF HEAVEN

You may recall that my good friend Alyc Helms just published her first novel, The Dragons of Heaven. Well, this Saturday at 3 p.m. she is doing a reading and signing at Borderlands. And if you come to that event, you will get to see something special . . .

. . . which is to say, a cast of thousands* performing a certain scene from Alyc’s novel. Including yours truly, in the role of a fox spirit, for which I will trot out my best “bored Cate Blanchett” voice (as Alyc tells me that’s what all of her fox characters sound like in her head). So come at 3 p.m. to see the extravaganza!

*by which I mean about half a dozen

My Westercon Schedule

I’ll be at Westercon this weekend, and around a fair bit for programming. I may not have a huge amount of time to socialize outside of scheduled items, though, because I also have a copy-edited manuscript that’s due back on a very tight timeline, and the only way to get it done is to bring it with me to the con.

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The Urban Supernatural: Open vs Hidden (Thu 7/2 4:00 PM)
Most urban fantasy assumes a hidden underworld of paranormal beings, but in some works the general populous [sic] knows about the supernaturals. How do these two assumptions play out differently in the storylines?

Bring Me That Horizon: Exploration as Fantasy and Science Fiction (Fri 7/3 12 Noon)
Sometimes the goal is not to bring down an enemy or win a war. Sometimes it is to voyage into the unknown to see what you find, to explore uncharted territories for wealth or country or even for knowledge.

Etiquette for Gamers (Sat 7/4 12 Noon)
A lot of the problems of RPG groups may actually be problems in etiquette. Panelists will talk about situations they’ve encountered and ways of solving them. Are there rules for good gaming manners?

Adapting Victorian Science (Sat 7/4 3:00 PM)
What are some of the more interesting Victorian scientific concepts and potential technologies that can be adapted for Steampunk?

Readers as Detectives-Invented Worlds as Mysteries (Sat 7/4 5:00 PM)
Since the canned lecture went out of style in science fiction, readers have had to figure out its imaginary settings from clues and hints. How much information is too little or too much? How do you make sure your readers will figure things out, without hitting them over the head?

Narrative and Dramatic Structure of Role Playing Games (Sun 7/5 11:00 AM)
(no description)

THE DRAGONS OF HEAVEN is out today!

Cover for The Dragons of Heaven, by Alyc Helms

Full disclosure: I’m not going to pretend I’m anything like objective here. Alyc Helms and I have been friends for fifteen years; we met at an archaeological field school in Wales, the same field school where I wrote a sizable chunk of Doppelganger. She’s one of about half a dozen people who read the original draft of the book that eventually became Lies and Prophecy, way back in the day. She crits most of my short stories; when I’m working on a novel and my plot runs headfirst into a wall, she’s the one I fling the manuscript wailing at her to hellllllllp meeeeeeeeeeee. I critiqued this book in an earlier draft — heck, I was a player in the game where Missy Masters first got created — and so when I tell you to go read it, I am very, very far from being an impartial judge.

You should still go read it anyway. 🙂

Cover copy:

Missy Masters inherited more than the usual genetic cocktail from her estranged grandfather. She also got his preternatural control of shadows and his enduring legacy as the legendary vigilante superhero, Mr Mystic. After a little work the costume fits OK, but Missy is far from experienced at fighting crime, so she journeys to China to seek the aid of Lung Huang, the ancient master who once guided her grandfather. She becomes embroiled in the politics of Lung Huang and his siblings, the allegedly mythical nine dragon-guardians of all creation. When Lung Di – Lung Huang’s brother and mortal enemy – raises a magical barrier that cuts off China from the rest of the world, it falls to the new Mr Mystic to prove herself by taking down the barrier. It’s a superhero novel, a pulp fantasy novel, with lashings of kung fu, immense kick-ass dragons and an unfailingly sympathetic heroine – yes, it’s another wonderful Angry Robot title.

Alyc talked a while ago at Fantasy Faction about the trope of white protagonists going to the Far East for their training montage and coming home essentially unchanged. This is not that kind of book. Nor, for that matter, is it what I think of as the “Eat, Pray, Love” kind of book, where the exotic locale definitely changes the protagonist — because that’s its sole purpose in the story, to play catalyst for the outsider. Missy goes to China, yes, to learn from the dragon who trained her grandfather . . . but she gets caught up in his story, rather than the other way around. “It falls to the new Mr. Mystic to prove herself by taking down the barrier” not because the Dragons of Heaven need a white person to save them, but because somebody has decided that Missy makes a useful pawn in their game. She’s not so much rescuing anybody as trying to fix the mess she inadvertently helped create.

Style-wise, it’s like a mashup of The Shadow with Big Trouble in Little China, with a narrative structure that goes back and forth between “then” (when Missy, realizing she didn’t have the skills necessary to operate as Mr. Mystic, went to find her grandfather’s teacher) and “now” (when the repercussions of that decision are playing out). It is available in many lovely formats, from many lovely retailers. It is a very fun book (actually, I believe my description that wound up on the front cover is “a hell of a lot of fun”), and I highly encourage you all to go check it out!

Reading to the T

When I was in grad school, I got a small amount of instruction in pedagogy: the art of teaching. Not a lot, because grad school tends to just chuck you into the deep end of being a TA and leave you to figure out swimming on your own, but a little. And one of the pitfalls I remember being warned about is “teaching to the T.”

Imagine your students are seated in rows of desks. Two groups will fall naturally under your gaze: the students in the front row, and those in a column through the middle of the room. That’s your T. By default, you will call on those students more often, give them more of your eye contact and attention, notice more quickly when they’re dozing off or misbehaving, because they’re in the places you will most commonly look. Students on the sides of the room and at the back, by contrast, will be neglected. In order to counteract this bias and be a good teacher, you have to remind yourself to look outside the T, to keep the entire room in your mind and distribute your attention equally.

Why do I bring this up? Because in the brouhaha over the Hugos, I’ve seen a lot of accusations to the effect of “all you PC liberals are the ones Doing It Wrong, because care more about the skin color or gender of the author than you do about the story.” And the other day I thought, no: it’s just that we’re trying not to read to the T.

The publishing industry — really, society at large — is a classroom with assigned seating. And you, the reader, didn’t assign it. Somebody else decided to stack the front row and that center column with mostly straight white guys: to give them more in-house backing, more marketing support, more reviews in major outlets. If you let your gaze rest in the default spot, those guys are the majority of the ones you’ll see. And they may have good things to say! Excellent contributions to the class! . . . but so may the students who have been relegated to the sides and back of the room. The ones you’ll wind up ignoring, if you aren’t conscious of the problem and taking steps to counteract it.

These calls to increase the attention paid to minority writers aren’t about prioritizing the identity of the author above the story. They’re about being aware of our tendency to read to the T, and working to overcome it. They’re about recognizing that being seated in the back corner of the classroom doesn’t mean a person has less in the way of interesting things to say than the writer who got put front and center. You can pretend all you like that publishing is a pure meritocracy, that the authors who get the bulk of the support and attention earned that purely on the basis of their own awesomeness — but doing that requires two things: 1) ignoring a heap of evidence to the contrary, and 2) concluding that yeah, all those women and minorities and so forth really just don’t write very good books compared to the straight white guys.

Don’t read to the T. Look at the whole room. See what’s out there, that you’ve been overlooking all this time.

random stats for a Friday night

There’s a certain margin of error in this, because the word counts I record are for final drafts (when I remember to go back and update them from the original number), and sometimes final drafts don’t happen in the same calendar year as first drafts. But I just crunched the numbers, and while last year was my worst for short fiction* since I started actually writing short fiction — only 7700 words in two stories, one of which is a Bad Draft that needs a complete rewrite — it was my best year for total wordcount since 2001 . . . which was, not coincidentally, the last time I wrote two novels in one year. (I also wrote ten short stories that year. It was not long after I figured out how to write them, and I was on a roll.)

I like crunching these numbers occasionally because it puts things in perspective. My default tendency would be to mope and castigate myself for not writing more short stories in 2014; ergo, it is useful to be able to look at the number 192,700 and tell myself that no, actually, that was a pretty good year. I will never be one of those people who cranks out half a million words a year: trying would kill both my hands and my brain. But that’s two full-length novels and some short fiction. It ain’t bad.

. . . of course, it also makes me ambitious to top both of those metrics this year. I’ve already written two pieces of short fiction, so it’ll only take one more to cross that threshold. And with one of those “short” pieces being a novella, and a novel already under my belt with another one planned for this summer, I might actually make it. Depends on how long this second novel turns out to be . . . .

*not counting fanfiction

A Rose by Any Other Title

I have this novella I’m trying to title, and the search . . . isn’t going well.

In the course of hunting for a suitable title, I’ve been thinking about the structure of such things. And, of course, having thought about that, the next thing to do is look at my own ouevre and investigate what sorts of patterns I use more or less frequently.

(What? I may not be a biologist, but Isabella gets her scientific turn of mind from somewhere. Also, procrastination.)

The material below the cut is a breakdown of every title I’ve put on a piece of fiction — and in one case, a piece of nonfiction — since I produced my first piece of theoretically professional work, leaving out those where the title was not wholly up to me. (Mostly pieces that amount to work-for-hire.) I’ve included unpublished works and fanfiction in the mix, since that expands the data set by quite a bit, but not titles that ended up being discarded along the way.

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bright doesn’t have to mean flimsy

My husband and I are finally caught up on both Arrow and The Flash, which means I can finally make the post I’ve been drafting in my head for a while. The following contains mild spoilers for both shows, as well as Daredevil. It also contains a fair bit of complaining about how much The Flash disappointed me, so if you really love it and don’t want to see someone dissect its flaws, you may not want to click through.

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Books read, May 2015

Read a good deal less than I expected to last month, mostly because my free time on tour was devoted much more heavily than usual to actual writing. I did get through a few things, though!

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, Usman Malik. Novella on Tor.com. I liked it well enough while reading it, but just a few weeks later I can’t remember much about it. I’ll note that I’m making an effort to read more short fiction this year, though (including short stories, which won’t get logged here), so I can have some idea of what to nominate when the Hugos roll around next year.

The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard. Read for blurbing purposes; this will be out soon. The blurb I sent in was “If you think the image of Lucifer sitting on a throne in the ruins of Notre Dame sounds awesome, this is a book for you.” 🙂 Post-apocalyptic angel war fantasy in Paris. First, I believe, of an intended series.

Writing Fight Scenes My own books don’t count. Skimmed back through this one as a refresher for my own brain.

Hostage, Rachel Manjia Brown and Sherwood Smith. Sequel to Stranger, which I posted about here. This one moves somewhat away from the decentralized nature of the first one, which gave equal weight to something like half a dozen different pov characters; the structure of this one means there’s a stretch where the focus rests heavily on just two. Which entirely isn’t a bad thing; as I said about Stranger, having to shift between characters every chapter often risks losing my immersion in the story. It does give this one a different feel, though. I liked how Hostage was about the characters learning to live with the scars of what happened to them, and I also liked the ways in which Voske’s kingdom is dystopian without being wholly awful: the ruler is a terrible person, and terrible things happen there, but the residents also have things like electricity. I can look at that and see the possibility of major improvements in the future, if the cities start working together.

Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai, Michael Dylan Foster. Academic book on the supernatural creatures of Japan, and the changes in how they’re viewed between the Edo/Tokugawa period and the present day. Read for research purposes, and interesting, but way less about the details of actual yokai than I anticipated; he tends to pick out a couple of examples and explore them in depth, mostly through the lens of “here’s how this fits in with the zeitgeist.” Fortunately, I have other books headed my way that will take care of the other aspect.

thoughts on the depiction of rape in fiction

WARNING: this post is about rape in fiction, and considerations to bear in mind when including it.

Last week I posted some thoughts on Twitter about rape scenes in fiction — specifically, thinking about the possibility (the likelihood, sadly) that someone in your audience is a rape survivor, and contemplating what effect you want to have on that person. Those thoughts are the epiphany I arrived at while thinking through the larger issue; I want to write about that larger issue now.

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another fundraiser — this one more serious

I posted a while ago about one of the stops on my book tour, an event hosted by the Oregon Regency Society. During that weekend, I met a lovely lady named Nora, a friend of Mary Robinette Kowal’s.

Last week, while on a trip with her husband to celebrate their anniversary, the two of them were in a horrific car accident. As in, the sort of thing where they’re lucky to be alive, and Nora is still in the ICU. (Her husband Bob was there, too, until recently.) They have insurance . . . but not a lot, and this is major enough that it’s going to blow through their coverage. It won’t help them with the months to come, during which neither of them will be able to work.

There’s a fundraiser underway to help them. And to sweeten the pot — not to mention create some spots of brightness in what is otherwise a dreadful moment — Mary is organizing Acts of Whimsy, as sort of milestone bait for the fundraiser. You can check out her blog for the full list, but my contribution is that I will perform a karate kata in the Victorian dress I used during the tour. I don’t promise to perform it well; in fact, it would be more honest to say I promise to perform it abysmally, given the constraints of the dress. But you will get to see it. And when that goes up, I’ll write a post about what I learned about trying to perform martial arts in Victorian clothing, for the edification of all who might write such a scene one day.

Please do contribute if you can. I didn’t get much chance to talk to Nora that weekend, but we did meet, and it’s appalling to look at the photograph of their truck (in the first update; click and scroll down to see it) and think of her going through that. The fundraiser is about 60% of the way to its goal right now; that’s fabulous, but there’s a lot more to be done.

My Hugo Reading Rules (and a good proposal)

Now that I’m back from tour, I’m downloading the Hugo Voters Packet and embarking upon a read of its contents.

. . . some of them, anyway. I’ve laid down a set of rules to guide me in deciding where to spend my time and energy. In the interests of full disclosure, I’m listing them here — but please do not take this as anything other than my rules for the process. Nobody is obligated to copy my example. In fact, the only universal rule for Hugo-Packet Reading I would support is one that says, read it any damn way you want. I spent a while this weekend reassuring somebody who had been told repeatedly that she absolutely had to read everything in the packet, no matter what, which simply is. not. true. As you will see from my own rules:

  1. I will at least look at everything that was not on a slate. (Time permitting.)
  2. I will not look at anything published by Castalia House. I am not obligated to give Theodore Beale and his cronies any real estate in my brain.
  3. Ditto the piece from Patriarchy Press. The name, coupled with everything I’ve heard about the work in question, tells me enough to make that decision right now.
  4. Other slate-based nominees may get a look from me, depending on how much time I have to spare.
  5. If any nominated work, from a slate or not, doesn’t hook me, then I’m not obligated to finish it. If I have to use the leverage of “but it was nominated for a Hugo!” to motivate myself to read the whole thing, then clearly I don’t like it enough to rank it very highly anyway.

Since I’ve said it in a few places, I should add: my own way of handling the problem of slate-based nominees who might have gotten there under their own steam is to keep an eye on them for next year. My supporting membership gives me the right to nominate for 2016; if I like a slate candidate’s work here, I’ll give them high consideration for a nomination next time around. It’s the best balance I can personally find between not rewarding slate tactics, and not punishing those who didn’t sign on for this train wreck.

And where countering slate tactics is concerned: there is quite a good proposal here for altering the Hugo nomination process in a way that will counteract that problem, without too much in the way of negative consequences. Scroll down for the plain-language version and the FAQ — that’s the post where they’re trying to work out the official language — but the short form is, it’s a way to make nominations work kind of like voting does right now. Nominate as many works as you like; as the lowest-ranking candidates are eliminated, their support gets reallocated to other works on the nominator’s ballot. It minimizes the power of bloc voting, without punishing works or individuals who also have strong support outside of the bloc, and it does all of this without disenfranchising anybody — which is the major flaw of many proposals, e.g. the ones that say you should have to buy a full attending membership to nominate or vote. I haven’t followed the entire technical discussion of voting systems that led to them choosing this one, because that discussion is enormous and full of math I can’t follow . . . but it looks good to me. I hope it can get enough support to pass.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I have some stuff to read.

CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 5 Kickstarter is nearly there . . . .

We’re down to the last couple of days, and CP5 is within striking distance of its goal. This is the anthology series that previously brought you “A Mask of Flesh,” “Once a Goddess,” “The Gospel of Nachash,” and “What Still Abides” — along with, of course, a host of stories from other writers, ranging from newcomers to Tanith Lee.

There’s an AMA underway on Reddit, where you can (as the name indicates) ask editor Mike Allen anything. Check that out, check out the Kickstarter, and let’s get this over the line!

most adorable fan art ever, Y/Y?

So yesterday I’m on my way to Borderlands Books for the last reading/signing event with Mary (the tour isn’t quite over, as I have BayCon yet to go, but I’m almost there), and I see that somebody has mentioned me on Twitter.

That someone is Victoria Ying, an artist at Sony Pictures Animation, who has worked on a couple of films you might have heard of: Tangled, Wreck It Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6 (OH MY GOD HOW MUCH DID I LOVE THAT MOVIE). She has apparently read A Natural History of Dragons . . . and this is the result.

. . . it’s wee!Isabella. With a jar of vinegar. And Greenie pickling away in it.

<melts on account of adorableness>

Seeing that, and then reading to a packed crowd at Borderlands (it’s always a good sign when they run out of chairs), and then meeting this lady, who showed up with a dragon on her shoulder:

Honeyseeker at Borderlands Books

It’s a good way to (almost) end the tour.

The Story Revealed

Final guesses on the novella I finished last week included “Haitian loa” and “kitsune” — both incorrect. But then two people guessed correctly! So when I get home, tooth_and_claw and sarcastibich, I’ll send you a list of what books I have on hand, and you can tell me which ones you want signed and mailed to you.

This was actually even harder of a question than I thought, because it turns out that one of the giveaway details has never been mentioned on this incarnation of my LJ. If you conducted a search (which wshaffer almost did), you would have had to do so on my old blog, the one I was using up until 2006. The number of people who have been following me since all the way back then is quite small . . . hence admitting this was a difficult challenge, one I didn’t necessarily expect anybody to get. The best chance for the rest of you was to have a good enough memory to remember that I linked to one of those songs last year — in fact, precisely one year to the day before I posted it again as part of this series. That, I believe, was the last time I said anything on here about Ree Varekai.

I mentioned her before and during my tour last year, because music had put her back into my head, and I found that the core of the concept still held a lot of power for me. Enough power that I started poking at it . . . and coming up with a cosmology where she could exist without copy-pasting the game world she came from . . . and then working out a plot for a novella that I really need a title for, so I can stop thinking of it as the “proof of concept” story where I’m test-driving my idea to see if it works. And then during this tour I decided to buckle down and try, and now I have a draft of the novella and this is a thing that might actually happen.

So what were the clues? Well, that fourth song was from the Cirque du Soleil show Varekai — that’s why it wound up on Ree’s game soundtrack, because of her name. (I didn’t realize I hadn’t posted her full name since the old journal. Mea culpa.) The third one, as I said, I linked to precisely one year previously; it’s also from her soundtrack, and stood for the moment when she hit utter rock bottom, just before the transformation that made her whole once more. The other two are recent additions to her score: “Bad Moon Rising” for the way her fatalist aspect is linked to the lunar cycle, and “I Will Not Bow” just because it fits. That’s what she sounds like when her fatalist aspect is dominant over her survivor aspect, when a pragmatic understanding of the obstacles has become “fuck everything; I’ll just take you all down with me.”

If you didn’t guess, don’t feel bad — you basically have to know Ree to guess most of those songs are pointing at her. (Both of the people who did guess were players in that game.) But hey: the bright side is, now I have all kinds of other things that apparently you all think I should write about! 🙂

As for the novella, I don’t know what will happen with it. I need to revise it, and then see about trying to sell it somewhere. News on that when I have any to share.

My BayCon Schedule

I’ll be at BayCon this upcoming weekend; here’s where to find me!

1. Themed Reading: Women’s Work on Friday at 3:00 PM in Stevens Creek
(with Laurel Anne Hill , Amy Sterling Casil, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff)

In honor of the Bicentennial of Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, hear authors read from stories about women that have jobs in a STEM (science, technical, engineering, and math) field.

[I will probably be reading the Lady Trent short story I wrote last weekend for this one.]

2. Themed Reading: Mythical Creatures on Saturday at 11:30 AM in Alameda
(with Cassie Alexander, Deborah J. Ross, Sinead Toolis)

Dragons. Unicorns. Centaurs. All different, yet all are creatures from the genus Mythical. Hear authors give their spin on tales about mythical creatures (also known as “cryptids”).

[Not sure precisely what I’m reading yet. Could be a bit from one of the Memoirs, but I may pick a short story instead.]

3. The Biology of Mythical Creatures on Saturday at 2:30 PM in San Tomas
(with Emily Jiang, Kevin Andrew Murphy (M), Cassie Alexander, Kathleen Barthlomew , Tex Thompson, Seanan McGuire)

The storytellers who originally invented the mythical creatures of legend didn’t have an understanding of biology, genetics, or evolution. When writing a mythical creature into a new story for a modern audience, how far does a writer have to go in re-imagining the creature’s biological backstory? Does providing biological details add to the story, or does it throw off readers because those details clash with their expectations? What are some successful examples of mixing realistic biology with mythic animals?

4. Themed Reading: Historical Fantasy on Saturday at 4:00 PM in Saratoga
(with Tex Thompson, Diana L. Paxson)

It’s our world, in the past, and yet it’s not. Hear authors read from stories set in Earth’s history, but spiced with an extra element of the fantastic.

[I’ll be reading an Onyx Court short story about Ada Lovelace, one I haven’t yet shopped around.]

5. The Joy of “Vic Spec Fic” — Victorian Era Speculative Fiction on Sunday at 11:30 AM in Bayshore
(with Norm Sperling, Lillian Csernica, Jim Partridge, Margaret McGaffey Fisk, Brad Lyau)

Even without any steampunk trappings, the Victorian Era (or a fantasy world’s equivalent), is a rich landscape for imaginative fiction. We know about life in this era through the writings of authors as widely different as Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. In this period someone could still be both a student of art and a student of science, before specialization took those fields in separate directions, but at the same time enough advances in technology had been made that it could become the era of steam and of Charles Babbage. In this era women had many constraints, yet it still had the example set by Ada Lovelace, Babbage’s programmer. And it’s also an era of exploitation, colonization, and grinding Dickensian poverty, and the moral quandries that they raise. Hear authors and fans of historical settings discuss why the Victorian Era is such a great setting for science fiction and fantasy. With or without steampunk clockwork.

6. Celebrating A Woman of Wonder: Ada Lovelace’s Bicentennial on Sunday at 5:30 PM in Bayshore
(with Karen Brenchley (M), Edward Kukla)

Girls, do you think it would be hard to become a mathematician? Imagine how tough it would have been in the Victorian Era! This December will mark the 200th birthday of mathematician Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, whose work with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine has led to her being called the world’s first computer programmer. Usually referred to as Ada Lovelace, her Victorian Era career has inspired modern efforts like the creation of Ada Lovelace Day and the formation of the non-profit Ada Initiative. Learn more about why she is such an amazing role model and why people have been inspired by her example to work towards getting more girls into science, technical, engineering, and math careers.

Guess That Story, Part 4

I’ve had two more guesses, one non-serious (but it made me think I should write a Medusa story someday); the other was “werewolves” — which is amply suggested by “Bad Moon Rising,” but alas, is not correct.

So: last shot! This is about as obvious as it’s possible for me to get — which means still not that obvious, but enough that there’s a fighting chance:

A change of pace from the three depressing songs I posted before. 🙂 It isn’t all grimdark over here at Swan Tower . . . .

Any takers? There’s a signed book in it for you, if you guess right . . . .

Guess That Story, Part 3

I’ve had two more people take a stab at guessing, but no successes. One was in email, and wasn’t so much a guess as “I feel like I should know the answer based on X context” — which was, sadly, off-target — and the other was a tongue-in-cheek guess of “Lune,” made by someone who knows exactly what I’m writing about. 😛 A third person said the songs would be appropriate to Supernatural, but they don’t think I’m writing fanfic; indeed I am not. This is a piece of original fiction, written in the hope of selling it, and not for an official tie-in anthology or anything like that.

Since nobody has nailed it yet, it’s time for a third hint! If you missed the first two, they are here and here.

Getting less subtle as we go along; if this doesn’t do it, I have one more I’ll post on Monday, that’s about as blatant as I can get (at least as far as musically-based hints go). Which still isn’t that blatant: you need a pretty good memory to recall the pertinent details and think “oh, so that’s what she’s writing.” But there are people reading this blog who might be able to pull it off — and besides, I’m entertaining myself posting these songs. And isn’t that what really matters? ^_^

Remember that I’ll give a signed book away to the first person (if any) who correctly guesses what I’m working on. You don’t need to guess the exact plot, just a general description of who or what I’m writing about.

Guess That Story, Part 2

I finished a draft of the story in question last night. It’s officially a novella: 18,100 words. I need to add in a few bits, but I also need to tighten up other bits, so I expect the word count will stay in that general ballpark.

Someone on the previous post said that “I Will Not Bow” made them think of Julian, which was eye-opening for me: I firmly associate that song with a different character, but upon listening to it in that frame of mind, I can see where there’s a resemblance. But no, the story in question is not about Julian, which means you get a second musical hint!

This is less subtle than the first one, though still obscure enough that the list of people who could spot the connection is pretty short. (And several of the people on that list are disqualified on the grounds of too much insider knowledge.) I will say, though, that if anybody manages to guess what I’m working on before I run out of hints, I will send that person an autographed book of their choice out of my pile of author copies — subject to availability, of course.

If you still can’t guess, never fear — there are more hints to come . . . .

Let’s play “guess that story!”

While I’m on tour, I’m taking a crack at drafting something new. I’m pretty sure it’ll be either a novelette or a novella, but if this piece works, it might also be a launching-point for something bigger. And I figure, to keep you all entertained while I bounce from city to city, I’ll give you a chance to guess at what it is!

Here’s your first hint:

Ignore the visuals; it’s the song itself that’s the clue. It rather perfectly encapsulates the character this story is about. Mind you, it’s a bit of a long shot that anybody might guess this one; you kind of need insider knowledge to put it together with things I’ve said before and realize there’s a connection. But don’t worry; if nobody guesses it from this, I’ll provide another hint to make it easier.

(If you’re one of the people I’ve talked to in person about wanting to do this story, then you are disqualified from guessing, for obvious reasons.)