I’ve decided to give away an ARC of The Tropic of Serpents to one lucky respondent. To enter, all you have to do is name your favorite dragon, either in the comments or @swan_tower on Twitter. You have until I wake up tomorrow, so say roughly 11 a.m. PST.
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Ganesha is a popular Hindu deity, particularly known for his connection with obstacles, particularly the removal thereof. As such, you find images of him everywhere. This one was sitting somewhat randomly in the park behind the Halebidu temple in Kerala; it was not the only piece of sculpture that seemed to have been parked out there until the people maintaining the temple decided what to do with it.
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Shrines in Japan have fountains at which you are expected to purify yourself (by pouring water over your hands at a minimum). Some of them are pretty plain, but others — such as this one at Fushimi Inari — are sculpted in awesome ways. Inari, being associated with foxes, naturally gets a fox fountain.
More a question for the legislative eagles, I suppose. This has nothing to do with the Memoirs of Lady Trent; it’s a question for the modern-day U.S. (Because when I’m on the home stretch of a book is a great time for totally unrelated stories to mug me!)
Suppose there is a federal law to deal with Topic X. Ambiguous Situation B arises, sparking disagreement over whether the law applies in this instance or not. This is the first time Ambiguous Situation B has occurred, but it likely won’t be the last, and Topic X is a pretty serious issue, so people are very invested in getting the matter settled beyond question.
Quite apart from the fact that there would be presumably be a legal brangle over the applicability or irrelevance of Law for Topic X, I imagine that there would also be a rush to amend the law and render that question permanently moot.
My question for you all: how would this proceed?
Assume that Congress is very interested in getting the law amended ASAP, but that it is divided as to whether it should be amended to say “nope, definitely doesn’t apply here” or “hell yes it applies.” Would there be competing bills, one for each side? (I imagine there would.) Different bills in the House and the Senate? How do those get started? What process do they go through before they come to a vote? How rapidly could all of this unfold, presuming there is a compelling reason for trying to make it happen quickly? How would Congress deal with there being two bills in direct opposition to one another, if that’s actually what would be going on? What effect would the ongoing legal brangle have on the legislative process? (The lawsuit being settled in favor of “yes, it applies” could theoretically render unnecessary any change to say that yes, it applies, but Congress is now worried about the possibility of Ambiguous Situations C, D, E, and everything else they can think up. And if the lawsuit gets settled the other way, the side that wants Ambiguous Situation B covered could say “well, we just changed the law, and this version definitely applies.”)
I know only slightly more than zilch about the legislative process in this country, so this is one of those “talk to me like I’m five” questions. I need to know the procedure here before I can judge what it would do to the rest of the story.
So as I mentioned before, I think this book is going to run a little long.
How exactly do I know that?
Nobody ever talks about this in books of writing advice, at least not that I’ve ever seen. Nor have I heard it being discussed in creative writing classes (though if your teacher taught you this, I’d love to hear about it). We all know writers need a variety of skills, things like characterization and plotting and the ability to string together an interesting sentence . . . but nobody talks about how you learn to tell how much story you’ve got in your hand.
I thought of this because I was doing some calculations, trying to figure out how hard I would need to drive myself to get a draft done by the end of the month. It’s a little tricky, doing that math when you don’t actually know what goes on the other side of the equal sign. I knew I couldn’t fit the remaining plot into ten thousand words; fine, that means I’ll overrun my target length of 90K. By how much? Not sure. Well, okay: if I wrote two thousand words a day instead of one thousand, then I could write 26K by the end of the month. Ooof, no, way overkill — there’s no way this is 26K of plot remaining. Somewhere between 10 and 26. 15-ish, maybe? That sounds about right . . . .
How do I know this? I can’t even really tell you. I am not the sort of writer who says “this chapter will consist of four scenes, two of them one thousand words long and the other two five hundred.” The scenes are as long as they need to be to get the job done, and I find out how long that is by writing them. I keep forgetting to put in chapter breaks, because for four years I wrote Onyx Court novels that didn’t have any; now I go back and drop them in wherever there’s an appropriate point within a certain range of wordcount. But I can only forecast by approximation: can I get Isabella off Lahaui in a thousand words? Definitely not. Two thousand? Ehhhh, maybe . . . (Verdict as of tonight’s writing: nope, definitely not.) I won’t need five thousand, that’s for damn sure. Somewhere between 2 and 5.
I have to do this all book long. I want to write a 90K book; that means I need to be able to judge how much stuffing goes into the sausage. I sort of weigh it in my hand as I go, looking at the casing, trying to decide whether I should pack more in or not. Eventually I start to feel like okay, we’re at the point now where it’s time to pull things together and wrap them up, rather than adding in new stuff. Within a certain margin of error, I’m right. (When Ashes ran 30K long, I saw that coming a mile off. I hadn’t even finished writing Part One when I e-mailed my editor to say, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.)
Nobody taught me how to do this. I don’t know if it can be taught, because the answers can vary so much from writer to writer. What one person knocks off in five hundred words, another might spend two thousand on. Even if you’re the sort who outlines ahead of time instead of making it up as you go along, you need a sense for how many words it will take you to say something. And I’m not sure how you acquire that sense, other than by writing a lot and seeing how many words you end up with.
All of which is just sort of me rambling, because wordcount has been on my brain lately. But it’s one of those things I never really see discussed — a skill nobody tells you you’ll have to acquire.
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I feel rather bad for the lions in these murals (which are hung in the British Museum). But the murals themselves are splendid: a whole series of Assyrian works, depicting warfare and a royal lion hunt, full of action and excitement. They aren’t easy to photograph — the images run on continually, making it hard to choose a useful framing — but the diagonal line of this one worked out well, I think.
Oh god, book. You’re going to run long, aren’t you?
Of course you’re going to run long. We’re at eighty thousand words, and Isabella has only just reached Lahaui. There’s still [spoiler] to recognize, [spoiler] to steal (again), [more spoilers] to find, and then [great big spoiler] before we can have our denoument. I don’t think I’m going to manage that in the next ten thousand words.
. . . bugger.
Has any author anywhere in the world ever written a series that got shorter as it went along? (Probably.) But the natural tendency of series seems to be to acquire a few thousand extra words here, a few thousand there, as you get more accustomed to the characters and the setting and find more interesting (and complex) (and wordy) things to do with them.
Oh well. I suppose I should just be glad this isn’t In Ashes Lie, running thirty thousand words over my original estimate. NEVER. AGAIN.
131 more words to go tonight, and then I can stop. Because three 3K days in a row is fun! >_<
(Actually, it kind of is. But only because I’m filling those 3K wodges with pulp-tastic adventurey goodness.)
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A lot of temples in Japan are built on a traditional format, involving lots of wood and ribbed roof tiles and the usual thing you see in photos. Every so often, though, you find one that’s . . . different. Like this one, where the roof is carved to look like a giant turtle, with Kannon riding its back and a bunch of children looking up at her adoringly. This is the head of that turtle, and it’s really just . . . odd, man. π
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I’ve had a soft spot for sailing ever since I went on a trip with my family and some family friends to the British Virgin Islands. We chartered a 40′ sloop and went sailing around for about a week, I think, and I’ve never forgiven myself for being nine at the time and not appreciating it the way I would now. π Anyway, this photo was taken off the coast of O’ahu, and really, it’s all about the light.
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Redevelopment in the main market square of Kraków turned into a massive archaeological dig which was eventually conserved as an underground museum. This knife is one of a huge number of items on display. Although ordinarily I consider reflections in the glass to be a flaw in a museum photo, in this case I liked the starry effect it creates around the knife.
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You can’t take photographs inside most of Westminster Abbey, and the exterior is hard to capture because of the sheer size. But on my research trip for Midnight Never Come I gave it the old college try. This is the north entrance, where you purchase admission and audio guides, and I have an odd fondness for the patchwork appearance of the stone — not to mention a general love of Gothic architecture in the first place.
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A friend took me on a day trip to Yosemite National Park in late spring, when there was still snow here and there, but it was warm enough not to freeze your fingers off. It was my first visit to a major national park, and, well, see for yourself: absolutely stunning. (Also, this is a splendid example of what Lightroom can do, because the picture as it actually came out of my camera had the sky badly washed out for some reason. The intense blue you see here is much closer to what my eye saw at the time.)
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Sravanabelagola is a fair hike to get to: not only do you have to climb the hill (which is fairly steep), but you have to do it barefoot. And even in October, the stone was quite warm. But the view from the top was absolutely splendid, and dotted with various shrines, buildings, columns, and more.
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When I went to the Museum of London to research With Fate Conspire, I discovered they have a charming little mockup of a Victorian city street, including this penny-farthing leaning in a corner. It’s just about the only bit of that mockup I managed to get a decent photograph of — the light there was not forgiving to photographers without tripods . . . .
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Near the end of our time in Paris, we spent an afternoon at the Chateau de Vincennes, which is a castle in the Parisian suburbs. The donjon closed at 4 or 5, but the area as a whole stayed open, so my husband sat on a bench to write postcards while I prowled around and took Yet More Pictures. I’m glad I did: the light became beautifully dramatic, silhouetting the castle against the bright clouds behind.
‘Tis the season — the season in which every writer-blog you read features a list of what that writer published in the previous year, in case you’re looking to nominate things for awards. π
I had a book. You may have noticed me talking about it once or twice. π A Natural History of Dragons feels like forever ago, since I’m nearing the end of a draft of #3 in that series, but it was in fact just last year.
I also had two short stories, both courtesy of Mike Allen’s editorial efforts:
“The Wives of Paris,” which was in Mythic Delirium and can be read in its entirety at that link, and
“What Still Abides,” which was in Clockwork Phoenix 4 and has gotten a surprising amount of praise. (I guess there’s a bigger audience for stories written in Anglish than I expected.)
Not a vast quantity, but I’m quite pleased with all three.
My assignment this year was for Diana Wynne Jones’ A Tale of Time City. My recipient wanted something worldbuildy, but also had requested fic about Elio in several previous Yuletides, so I wrote Elio-centric fic with some worldbuilding crammed in around the edges: “Historical Curiosity,” which looks at his hundred years in the city.
I also picked up two pinch-hits. The first, “Wisdom and Power,” is another Wheel of Time story; the requester asked for several things, so I went with backstory expanding on the first time Nynaeve channeled the One Power without knowing it. The other one I grabbed because I was already halfway through a treat for the recipient: “The Life and Times of a Crusader King,” for the historical strategy game Crusader Kings 2. I don’t think you need to have played the game to read that fic; just know that it’s kind of like Risk, if Risk involved you playing a dynasty as your character and focused on things like marrying off your unattached relatives, hatching espionage plots, persuading the Pope to declare somebody a heretic so you can annex their territory, and tearing your hair out because (to quote the request) “your heir is an inbred bastard with no diplomatic or military prowess to speak of while your daughter is a grey eminence with claims on half the titles in Europe, yet you canβt switch the succession laws because you arenβt Basque”. It’s kind of absurd fun to play, and I tried to show some of that in the story. π
The last full-length piece was a pure treat, based on a cracktastic request for Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet: “Nothing But One of Your Nine Lives.” The fic itself is less cracky, since I didn’t actually go so far as to make Tybalt a werecat, but, well. π
Then there were four stocking stuffers, because at one point I was feeling grumpy and Grinch-ish and not at all in the holiday spirit, so I decided that I was going to write random things for people, dammit. π They are, in order, “The Faces of Halloweentown” (Nightmare Before Christmas), “No Man Needs Nothing” (Lawrence of Arabia), “One Spark” (Banlieue 13 | District 13), and “Clearbrook vs. the Strangleweed” (Elfquest). That last one is pure silliness: teleidoplex always says I am Clearbrook, so when I saw a request for a story about her learning to braid her hair, I couldn’t resist.
As always, much fun. I look forward to next year. (And if you’re looking to dip your toes in the water, not only is there New Year’s Resolutions — an ongoing collection for people who want to write to a Yuletide prompt after Yuletide is over — but this year I’m helping to organize Some Day My Fic Will Come, which is a challenge for prompts that have gone unfilled for at least three years. You could make somebody very happy . . . .)
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The first day we were in Krakow, we wandered around the Stare Miasto taking pictures of everything there. My last day in Krakow, I wandered around the Stare Miasto taking pictures of everything again . . . because this time it had snowed, just enough to frost everything in a bit of fluffy whiteness. I had liked this lion (at the base of the Town Hall Tower) the first time I saw him, but he was even more charming in the snow.
A bit belated — I didn’t want to post anything in the first days of the year because I was busy getting my WordPress setup functional.
Mother of the Believers, Kamran Pasha. A novel about the founding and early days of Islam, from the perspective of Muhammad’s wife Aisha.
It’s always tough, reading a fictionalized account of something like this: I find myself going “oh look, another enemy has converted to their side, geez, this ‘Messenger of God’ guy is such a Gary Stu.” Which, you know, missing the point. At the same time, though, it gestures in the direction of an actual problem, which is that it’s Pasha’s responsibility to sell me on the events he’s describing, and he didn’t always succeed. He could have done it one of two ways — either by emphasizing the numinous and miraculous, or by digging into the motivations of the people involved to help me understand why they acted that way. I would have been fine with either. Sadly, Pasha didn’t quite manage to do that consistently. Couple that with the fact that I really disagree with his handling of Aisha’s age (I think his reasoning is flawed and he failed to follow through on it anyway), and it’s surprising that I found this as engaging and readable as I did. But: engaging and readable, so recommended if you want to read a novel about the founding and early days of Islam.
A Tale of Time City, Diana Wynne Jones. Re-read for Yuletide (look for a post about that soon). It is still a lovely book. And I have even more fondness for Elio than I did before — writing fanfic will do that to you.
Ancient Hawai’i, Herb Kawainui Kane. Read for research, on the recommendation of Kate Elliott. It’s a brief and abundantly illustrated book about pre-contact Hawaiian society, ergo useful to me.
Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch. Once again, I feel like the two plots in here were just happening to share a book, rather than tying together very well. I was also deeply uninterested in Peter’s romantic relationship — or rather, his sexual relationship, since I got very little sense of any substance to it other than bedplay. (In fact, that skew had me convinced for a while that his fixation was going to prove to be a Significant Thing, to a much greater degree than turned out to be the case.) Having said that, I still enjoy the general feel of this series, and I very much liked the way the consequences of the previous book played out. To some extent, this is the denouement I felt was lacking before — though I still would have liked more at the end of Book One.
Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch. Better plotting! In part, I think, because the B plot here is actually just a continuation of what got set up in #2, and isn’t looking to be resolved any time soon, so it tooled happily along being its own thing and I didn’t expect it to interlock with the A plot the way I kept wanting before. Mind you, I found the thing they uncovered at the end to be a little O_o . . . but I may be okay with that, if the series follows through on what it’s been hinting about for a while now. There’s a point at which you really start questioning how much longer the world can go on failing to notice all the weird shit going on — I’m just sayin’.
(Ten points from Ravenclaw, though, for atrociously misleading cover copy. I expected this book to heavily feature Peter working with Agent Reynolds and having to dodge around her evangelical faith. Instead Reynolds just shows up sporadically and shows virtually no signs of being the “born-again Christian” she was billed as. I’m not sure the former would have actually been good, but it’s what I was led to expect, so the lack was annoying.)
Also: more Quicksilver. Because I have always been reading Quicksilver. And I will always be reading Quicksilver.
One of the reasons I pushed to get the WordPress thing started up finally is, this project is much easier to wrangle through here than through LJ/DW.
As some of you may have noticed, I’ve gotten more interested in photography lately. I’ve been taking better pictures in general, then cleaning the results up in Lightroom. I’d like to share them with you, and so I give you: A Year in Pictures. Every weekday from now until the end of the year, I’ll post one of my favorite shots, with a brief note about what it is and why I like it. (The order will be randomized, so you don’t get giant wodges of Italy or Japan or wherever all at once.)
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This is a statue in the Golden Gate Park Tea Garden. On this particular day it was typical San Francisco weather: mildly gloomy, raining a little, i.e. not generally the best for photography. It worked well for this shot, though, because of the statue’s slightly melancholy air and the vivid green of the bamboo. Plus, by this point I was starting to learn something about good framing, which is a concept that really escaped me in my earlier years . . . .
