A couple of pieces of news

Book View Cafe is fifteen years old! Which means we can trust it in the kitchen. Long-time readers of the blog know that we’ve had a tradition of posting recipes; now two dozen of us have come together to publish a cookbook. For my own contributions, I chose dishes that have acquired odd names in my household; buy the book to discover the delights of Lorem Ipsum Salad, Garbled Pasta, The Four Cs, Yoon Stew (yes, named for Yoon Ha Lee . . . though not made with bits of him), and The Transitive Property of Marjoram!

And in other news, I finally have a publication date for the audiobook of The Waking of Angantyr! It will be out on December 19th, just in time for Christmas (you know, if the holiday season makes you crave bloody Viking revenge epics — well, given family stresses, it might . . .). The pre-order links haven’t yet gone live at retailers, but I will remind closer to the pub date!

Books read, October 2023

Noting here for posterity: in October I started reading the Shahnameh. I mention this because my edition (which isn’t even complete!) is nine hundred and sixty-two pages long. I will still be reading it next month. I will still be reading it next year. I will always be reading the Shahnameh. I will always have been reading the Shahnameh. O_O

But on to the things I finished this past month . . .

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In Quest of the Work-Life Balance Unicorn

Ironically, my intended final post for this informal series — the one where I talk about reducing the burden on myself and taking some time off — got delayed nearly three weeks because, um, I was too busy.

So if you’re wondering how that “work-life balance” thing is going for me now, the answer is apparently “still very much a work in progress.”

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(Almost) Called to Serve

For the first time in my life, I had to report for jury duty recently.

Up until I was twenty-eight, I was excused on account of being a student. After that, I lucked out: on the occasions when I was sent a summons, I wound up not having to report in. But this year, the bullet I’ve been dodging for fifteen years finally hit me.

And oh, was it very nearly a doozy.

The case in question was a murder trial, and projected to run for seven weeks — from now into early December. The judge kept optimistically saying they hoped to conclude it more quickly, but given that they also projected testimony to start today and in fact were still wrestling with jury selection when that date rolled around, I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in that hope.

So yeah: on Tuesday I reported in, sat around for a while, got sent up to a courtroom, filled out a form, and went home, for two and a half hours total. Thursday I was back in the afternoon for the start of voir dire, as the judge began questioning the initial pack of potential jurors. We didn’t even get as far as the bit where the prosecuting and defending attorneys asked their questions until Friday, which was an all-day affair that saw eleven of the initial twenty-two dismissed and replaced by a new set who then had to go through the whole process again. Late this morning they finally swore in twelve seated jurors and then started on the alternates . . . and mine was the first name called.

Five minutes later, I was out the door.

Why? Because of my sleep schedule. Since I started writing full time, I’ve been free to shift to my natural schedule, which has me going to bed circa 3 a.m. and waking up at 11. I’ve been on that schedule for fifteen years now. If I want to go to sleep earlier, I have to drug myself, and then when I get up I am definitely not firing on all cylinders: if I have a morning flight and I’m trying to stay awake in the boarding area, I might have to read a paragraph several times before the words actually stick in my brain. I didn’t even have to get to the part where I was planning to say “if I were on trial for murder, I would not want someone like me for a juror” before the judge dismissed me for reasons of hardship.

I honestly expected I’d meet with more resistance than that. It is entirely possible I am diagnosable with delayed sleep phase disorder, but since I haven’t actually been diagnosed, I didn’t know how much sympathy I’d get from the judge. And if I were empaneled, I would certainly have done my best — god knows I am in other respects ideally suited to being stuck in a trial for seven weeks, because I have a life that can accommodate that kind of disruption. But a scenario where I have to sit quietly and pay attention to something, with no ability to talk or move around or be out in the sun or anything else that helps keep me alert when I’m up at a bad hour . . . yeah. I would not have felt great about my ability to pay attention to and evaluate evidence about whether the defendant murdered someone.

There’s a tiny part of me that regrets this. In the future I’ll know that I can at least attempt to claim hardship on Day One — I didn’t try because the judge didn’t list “you work a night shift” as a valid reason — but while I wasn’t super glad to spend multiple days in the courthouse listening to other prospective jurors be questioned, this was my first look at the actual process of selection and voir dire. Partly to keep myself awake, I took copious notes on procedure and what sorts of questions jurors were asked, and a part of me would have been fascinated to see a real-life murder trial (as opposed to the . . . less than accurate depictions we get from TV and movies).

But that fascination would not have been able to keep me focused for the first couple hours of testimony. And so, to the relief of all involved, I will not be spending the next seven weeks as Alternate Juror #1.

Happy (belated) (UK) book day to me!

Vaki þu, Angantýr,       vekr þik Hervör,
eingadóttir       ykkr Sváfu;
selðu ór haugi       hvassan mæki,
þann er Sigrlama       slógu dvergar.

My god, I was so busy yesterday that I didn’t even manage to post here about The Waking of Angantyr coming out in the UK. In my defense, I was not busy by choice; instead I got called in to jury duty for the first time in my adult life — all my previous summons have resulted in the website telling me the day before that I don’t have to report in. Well, I suppose it’s fitting that publication day for my bloody Viking revenge epic began with me waking up early enough to induce homicidal feelings . . .

But even if I’m a day late in posting this, the good news is that book is still out! Yes, in this day and age where we place an unhealthy emphasis on how everything performs in the first twenty-four hours, I think it is just dandy for people to buy a book on day two! Or even day two hundred, for that matter. And Titan Books have given it such a lovely cover, how could you resist:

If the answer to that is “because I want a print copy and dear god international shipping now costs both arms and a leg,” don’t worry, a US edition is in the works. (As is an audio edition, if that’s your preferred narrative delivery method.) But look at that cover! You know you want it, and all the bloody grimdark vengeance within.

(Even if it’s a day late.)

Another story sold to SMT!

I have sold another story to Sunday Morning Transport! This will be my third, coming out some time next year.

The thing that pleases me the most here is, this short story was originally supposed to be a novel trilogy. One for which I came up with the concept over fifteen years ago — but I didn’t sell it then, and now both the genre and I have moved on enough that I recently faced up to the fact that I’m unlikely to ever write it. For an assortment of good reasons . . . but it made me a little sad, because there were key beats in the concept I really liked, which can’t be transplanted to a different story without basically re-creating the thing I had good reasons for not writing.

And then, while I was being sad, I read some of Borges’ short fiction for the first time.

Which is how I wound up condensing that trilogy down into 2500 words of testimony from the interrogation of a character who was there for all the events of the novels I’m not writing! Not only did this let me keep those key beats, but it also let me skip the hard work of coming up with all the details of the clever, long-term plans laid by the characters; I can dispose of that in a sentence or two of “we spent years setting that up.” Win-win! <lol>

No Time Off for Good Behavior

Continuing on from my post about tracking the time I spend on work . . .

It used to be the case that while drafting a novel, I would write seven days a week. “No time off for good behavior” was my rueful motto: even if I already had 7K words thanks to some energetic days earlier in the week, I would still write on the weekend. Stopping, even for a day, meant a loss of momentum, my grip on the trajectory and shape of the narrative slipping a bit from my mind. So for the few months it took me to draft the book — three or four for most books; maybe five at the outside — I worked every single day.

That only applied to novel-drafting season, though. Outside those spans of time, I am not and never have been a “thou shalt write every single day” kind of writer. I can’t pivot directly from one book to a new one, or chain-smoke short stories so that I’m always actively working on something. I’d also spend stretches of time revising the book, of course, but I had months in between projects — months during which the next one would compost in my mind, prepping me for my next burst of work.

As near as I can tell, the last time that was true for me was 2016.

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Timey-Wimey Metrics for the Writing Life

A little way into the covid lockdown, I spent two weeks tracking how I use my time.

My reason for doing this was the realization that . . . I really didn’t know. Specifically, I didn’t know how hard I was working at my job of being a writer. On the one hand, part of me felt like the answer was “pretty hard;” on the other hand, my inner puritan — which is always ready to doubt whether it even counts as work if you enjoy what you’re doing — really likes to tell me I’m being a slacker. The only way to judge which one was right (if either) was to actually pay attention.

Of course, any such tracking runs immediately into the challenge of finding where the boundaries of my job lie. My sister has a story about her college philosophy professor who was late to class one day because he was busy thinking; while on the face of it that sentence sounds ridiculous, the truth of it is that some kinds of work can indeed take place entirely inside your skull. And that doesn’t look like work, does it? I’ve told my husband that if I’m lying across the bed staring at the ceiling, that means I’m working, and he believes me. But sometimes it’s hard for me to believe me. And often the signals of me working aren’t so obvious, because what’s going on is that I’m driving somewhere or I’m in the shower or I’m otherwise engaged in some non-work task . . . but my mind is bubbling away, combing the tangles out of a plot or composting different elements until an idea sprouts out of them.

How do I track that, when half the time I’m not even really conscious of it going on?

For this particular project, I didn’t really try. Instead I tracked more observable categories of activity, which were (in descending order of how much my brain wants to accept that they’re “work”):

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The Shining Moon Podscast

I have been incredibly remiss in posting about this!

An online friend of mine, Deborah L. Davitt, recently started up a new podcast called “Shining Moon: A Speculative Fiction Podcast.” She’s got a really interesting format; each episode gathers together a few writers to discuss first a topic, then their own stories that relate to the topic, then someone else’s story that similarly fits the theme.

I’ve been on two episodes so far, hence being incredibly remiss in taking this long to mention it. (I blame the fact that I was first running, and then recovering from, the Kickstarter.) The good news is, that means you now have multiple episodes to sample! My two thus far are “Literary vs. Genre” and Alternate History vs. Secret History — I swear, they’re not all framed as “X vs. Y;” I’ll be on one about worldbuilding about a month from now. There are two episodes on translations and writing in English as a second language, one on hard SF, one on game writing, one on speculative poetry; there’s also one on “Reading and the Working Writer,” as the podcast also touches sometimes on the life of a writer as well as the craft itself.

If you are someone for whom podcasts make up part of your media diet, I highly recommend this one! Even if you’re not a writer yourself, you might find interest in hearing people dissect different angles of the speculative fiction genres.

Possibly of Use: Autogenic Training

Second in a series of random posts on things that might be of use to others, with the usual disclaimers that nothing works for everybody.

Autogenic training is a technique recommended to me by my trainer/PT-ish guy in the course of trying to fix my ankle problems. He’d given me some exercises that should have helped deal with a nerve issue; when they didn’t, he advanced the theory that at least part of the problem is not mechanically neuromuscular but rather driven by stress, which is preventing my nervous system from downregulating like it should. (He was very concerned that I might read his words as “it’s all in your head and therefore fake” — I assured him I didn’t take it that way. Our minds can absolutely affect our bodies, and that doesn’t make the effects any less real.)

The basic idea of autogenic training goes like this:

1) Train yourself to induce certain physical markers of relaxation on command.
2) Brain says, “oh, if the body’s relaxed, then I guess there’s nothing for me to worry about.”
3) Profit.

This page has the script I’ve been using. You repeat those phrases to yourself, out loud or in your head (or record and listen to them), and try to create the sensation being described. The heaviness is about getting the muscles to relax — without the clench-and-release method that I’ve always found deeply counterproductive — while the warmth is about increasing circulation, since in times of stress or anxiety the body will reduce blood flow to the extremities in order to save it for core functions. Then you move onto controlling the heartbeat, etc.

It takes some practice. At first you may not be very successful at creating the sensations described, and getting a long-term benefit requires more than just a few sessions. But I do find it has short-term benefits pretty much right away, i.e. when I’m done with a round of this, my body definitely feels more relaxed. And it’s kinda neat, being able to just tell myself “my arm feels heavy” and boom, it’s suddenly made of lead? I stupidly fell out of doing this while running the Kickstarter (i.e. right when I needed it the most), but I’m going to try to get back into it.