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Posts Tagged ‘novels’

back in the saddle

I didn’t write while in London, nor did I revise. The first was expected, but the second wasn’t; unfortunately, the cold drained me of too much energy to be useful on that front.

So I haven’t technically written since May 27th, which is a remarkably long break for me while noveling. I think it was a good idea, though. The latest iteration of my much-revised timetable for this book focuses not on words per day, but on larger units than that: the book is in three parts, I have six months to write it, therefore I need to write one part every two months. I can technically take off as many days as I like, so long as I complete Part Two by the end of July. Since it’s supposed to be about forty-five thousand words, and there are sixty-one days in June and July, that’s eminently doable, even with a long break.

Mind you, I also need to revise. And Part One, as mentioned in my last status update, needs a lot of work, especially on the Dead Rick side. The good news is that one of my semi-sleepless nights in London brought with it an outline for something like 75% of Eliza’s PII scenes, so I can cruise along writing those while I figure out where I went wrong with Dead Rick, and where I’m going next. It might be a little <sarcasm>fun-tastic</sarcasm> from here to the end of June, while I pull double-duty on revision and writing, but I think I’ll survive.

Anyway, 1393 words today, because I wanted to clear the 40K mark I should have hit back in May. I’d revise a bit, too, but Jet Lag Brain utterly scotched my attempts to think about Dead Rick earlier, so I think I’ll take what I’ve got and get to bed. Time enough for the rest of it tomorrow.

Word count: 40, 026
LBR quota: Blood; Mrs. Kittering’s on the warpath.
Authorial sadism: Sorry, Ann. I have to make good on the claim that servants in that house get treated like shit.

ARC giveaway winner!

Congrats, landofnowhere; you’re the winner of an ARC of A Star Shall Fall!

(No, it isn’t Harvard bias. I rolled a d30. Yes, I am enough of a gamer geek that I own a d30.)

E-mail me at marie[dot]brennan[at]gmail[dot]com with your address, and I’ll send the books along! Everybody else, stay tuned; I still have a stupid number of ARCs, and will be finding a variety of creative ways to get rid of them.

Victorian Book Report: The Rise of Scotland Yard, by Douglas G. Browne

This book is a bit dated, having been written in the early 1950s, but it’s one of only two I could conveniently get that addressed the early years of policing in London. As far as readability goes, it’s on the dull side of the middle of the road; not too much of a slog, but not a shining example of nonfiction entertainment, either. (Which is a pity, because I expect this history would bear a much livelier retelling.)

Its virtue, though, is that it begins by summarizing the systems that preceded the Metropolitan Police — and not just the Bow Street Runners. Chapter 1 covers 1050 to 1600, talking about sheriffs, Justices of the Peace, watchmen, constables, etc. Then there’s a chapter about corruption among magistrates, that led to the Fieldings and Bow Street, then some very useful information about the Runners if (like me) you’re thinking about writing a short story in that period; then it dives into the politics of founding and developing a police force in London.

It still isn’t what I really need, which is a book that will give me details about how the Special Irish Branch went about dealing with Fenian conspirators in the 1880s. But I’ve e-mailed the Metropolitan Police Archives to see if I can get help there, and in the meantime, this at least gives me some background to work from.

translation question

I don’t suppose anyone reading this journal speaks Castilian Spanish? (i.e. the Spanish of Spain, not Latin America.) I could use some help with incidental words of a casual variety, like endearments and insults, that probably vary from culture to culture (and therefore shouldn’t just be pulled from a dictionary).

The List (mostly)

For those who have been following the Adventure of the Book I’m Totally Not Working On, I Swear, here is the present list of knightly names:

  • Audacia (Courage)
  • Castimonia (Purity)
  • Justitia (Justice)
  • Misericordia (Mercy)
  • Obedentia (Obedience)
  • Patientia (Patience)
  • Reverentia (Reverence)
  • Sollertia (Skill)
  • Sophia (Wisdom)
  • Temperantia (Temperance)
  • Valentia (Strength)
  • Vigilantia (Vigilance)

I may end up tweaking it, but for now, that’s the set.

Now I’m off to see if I can convince myself to do my Victorian writing now, making my evening simpler, and also leaving me time to play with this . . . .

Victorian Book Report: The Victorian House Explained, by Trevor Yorke

I never wrote up a report on the first book I read out of this series, Georgian and Regency Houses Explained, but this can stand for both; they’re pretty similar works. Skinny little books with a lot of pictures, seemingly intended for a market consisting of people who occupy or otherwise have an interest in the houses of different periods: there’s a timeline at the back, showing when different features came into and went out of fashion, so you can try to ID your house (or renovations thereof) by time period.

But in the course of serving this need, Yorke does two very useful things: first, he gives an overview of how styles changed over time (between the Georgian and Regency periods, or throughout the loooooong Victorian period), and second, he breaks the houses down by class of room, giving sample floorplans, and talking about how those rooms would be decorated. He’s much more interested in fixtures than furniture — with this book in hand, I could probably date a coal grate to within about twenty years — but where the actual structure is concerned, his books are a minor goldmine. (The Victorian book of this series lacks the stultifyingly boring section showing different kinds of drainpipes and door styles that the G&R book had; I tried to pay attention to that bit last time, but really, unless you’re trying to date the house you live in by the depth of the window-box, its use is limited.)

He’s done a whole series of these things — “England’s Living History” — not just for houses but also bridges, churches, even narrowboats. They’re all fairly small, but based on the data sample I have so far, clear and useful for the topics they cover.

Okay, new question

My brain is blurring out from staring at lists of Latin nouns, so I’m going to throw this a bit wider open and see what the commentariat can suggest.

In this totally hypothetical story that I’m totally not working on, there is a group of female knights under holy orders, in a secondary-world setting modeled on medieval Europe, serving the Queen of a place that will probably look like France. I want their names to form a list of the virtues they are supposed to uphold. (There is room for irony here, as they will not always live up to those names.)

What virtues would you expect to see on that list?

I need a total of twelve; suggest as many as you like. Bonus points if you can provide me with Latin nouns matching your suggestions, ending in either -tas or -ia — I’m trying to see if I can get a satisfactory set without having to rejigger any of the Latin. (I can put together twelve on either pattern, but not without leaving out some concepts I think I’d like to include.)

a question for the Latin geeks in my readership

Imagine you are reading a story wherein members of a particular group are all named with Latin nouns for virtues or good qualities. (This is not simply a meta trick on the author’s part; the meaning of those names is acknowledged in-story. The setting is, however, a secondary world, wherein Latin is being used to fulfill a role more or less like it does in reality.) Most of the names are genuine third-declension nouns following the -tas, -tatis model — e.g. Pietas, Honestas — but a few are clearly adapted from first declension nouns so as to make for a consistent pattern — e.g. Justitas from justitia. The rest of the Latin in the story is grammatically correct.

Feel free to elaborate on your perspective in comments.

NO.

Dear Brain,

No. No, no, no, no, NO.

There are many things we need right now — an answer to the question the stranger just asked Dead Rick, a precise outline for how Eliza and Miss Kittering are going to achieve a state of conflict-balance, some sense of what’s going on with the Society — but NONE of them are the premise for a random secondary-world YA fantasy series.

Even if it involves an order of holy lady knights who run around spying for the Queen they’re sworn to protect.

You know perfectly well what this is. We’ve entered into the Stage of Oooh Shiny, where everything looks enticing except the book we’re supposed to be writing. Put the shiny down, and get back to Victorian England.

(After all, I’ve already written half a page of notes for the YA-knights idea. Maybe we can do more later tonight.)

Er, I mean, NO! No new shiny. Work on old shiny instead. I promise, there’s plenty of fun to be had there.

Not nearly as cross as she should be,
Your Writer

Admittedly, there *is* a downside.

Not counting a one-shot LARP, I’ve run two games in my life: Memento and the Scion game currently in progress.

The year I ran Memento was the year I did not write a novel.

If there’s a causal relation there, it goes in the direction of “no novel, ergo free time for a game.” I was in negotiations with my editor for what I would write next, and reluctant to commit to a spec project just to fill time, when odds were good that I’d have to drop it halfway through in order to do something contracted instead. The causality was not that running a game ate the energy which would have otherwise gone into a novel.

(And the negotiations ended up settling on Midnight Never Come anyway, which grew directly out of Memento. So.)

But it is true that I did not write a novel while running that game. This year is the first time I’ve tried to do both at once, and the result is . . . interesting.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to find a way to build some downtime into my noveling process. The usual way of things is that I work virtually every day for three or four months straight, and at the end of it I have a book. But that’s exhausting, and after two months or so I start getting really bitter about not having weekends or days off.

One idea I’ve toyed with is giving myself a break on Thursdays. That’s the day I run the game, and it turns out to be singularly difficult to get anything done then — especially since I have physical therapy appointments Thursday afternoons, too. So I spend part of my afternoon at PT, and the rest of it prepping for game; since I am not a morning writer, that leaves me with only the time after the session ends to do any work. Which requires a rather massive change of gears in my head: game and book may be only about nine years apart temporally speaking — 1875 and 1884, respectively — but one’s in the Western frontier and the other’s in London, and their vibes are VERY different. Last week I managed 733 words after game because I knew where the scene was going, but last night I did jack, because the scene needed chewing and my brain already had its mouth full.

I’ve built in enough margin of safety that I could afford to take Thursdays off and still finish the book on time. But it does eat a large portion of that margin of safety: if the book runs long, or I miss days for reasons of backtracking or being sick or whatever, I’ll still end up with some crunch time — though hopefully not as bad as it was for Ashes and Star. On the other hand, once PT is done, odds go up substantially that I’ll be able to do at least some writing during the day, so I can then give my brain over to Scion with a clear conscience. So I think what I’ll do is this.

Until PT is done, I have permission not to write on Thursdays. I should, however, try to make up that lost ground in subsequent days, if I can do so without too much trouble. After PT is done, I’ll try to write something every Thursday before game, even if it’s not the full quota; if I manage that, I’m not required to play catch-up afterward. Put that together with the more complicated background math (involving certain things that add to the word total of the book, but don’t get counted toward quota, etc), and this should work out.

But yeah. Unsurprisingly, running a game eats many of the same processing cycles in my brain that book-writing does. (Moreso than if I’m just playing in a game, by quite a bit.) I do believe I can do both — I will certainly try — but this is going to require some awareness and planning on my part.

20K! Finally!

It took me ten days to get here instead of five (thanks to five days spent backtracking on Eliza’s scenes), but I’m at twenty thousand words. Dead Rick is learning things about his own past — nice things, which are actually more painful in their way than the bad things would be. (Don’t worry; we’ll get to those, too.)

I’m approaching the midpoint of Part One, aiming for three parts in total. I may spend part of tomorrow working backward for where I want Eliza at the end of this section, to figure out what should happen between now and then; I should definitely spend part of tomorrow trying to figure out where I want Dead Rick to be headed. I know you can get to your destination by the headlights, but it would be great if I knew a few of the landmarks that lie beyond their beams.

Word count: 20,375
LBR quota: A brief hint of love. Even if Dead Rick can’t actually remember it.
Authorial sadism: Writing a whole scene of Dead Rick doing what he’s supposed to, then deciding to arrange things so that he actually wasn’t supposed to do it.

almost . . . there . . .

Come on, brain. We only need 150 more words, and then we can stop for tonight. And yes, that does mean you’ll have to figure out just what Dead Rick thinks he’s accomplishing by going to La Madura, but we’ve got to make a decision on that sooner or later. If it’s sooner, that means we can spend tomorrow thinking about its ramifications, and that will make tomorrow’s writing easier.

Of course, it would help if we knew what Dead Rick is supposed to be finding. And we already skipped over that one to start tonight’s work. This skipping-details thing, it is not working out so well for us.

15K! Still! Or rather, again!

Yesterday, when I sat down to write, my total wordcount was 15,085. When I stood up again, having written 1,092 words in the interim, my total wordcount was 15,085.

This has, with minor fluctuations in those last two digits, been my wordcount for the last five days. You see, the plan was this: I would write roughly 500 words a day throughout April, for an ending count of 15K, and then when May began I would kick it up to my regular pace of 1K.

But on May 1st, heading off to a friend’s concert, I finally had to face facts: I’d written the wrong beginning for Eliza. I was sitting there wondering what kind of plot complications I could think up to delay the event I wanted to end Part One with until the end of Part One, given that at present there was nothing stopping it from happening two scenes later, and nothing interesting to fill the intervening time with . . . and then it occurred to me that her immediate backstory had a number of complications that I’d just sort of skated over as a fait accompli. In part because one of those complications was something I didn’t have a detailed solution to, and it’s easier to get away with a non-detailed solution if you don’t show it onstage — but that was a pretty weak justification.

I had plot for Eliza. I’d just started her portion of the narrative after half of it was already done.

Now, the good news is that at least some of what I’ve already written for her might be salvageable. (I’ve already re-used one scene.) The rest will need heavy revision, since those scenes are full of the kind of establishing work that one puts into opening scenes, and that’s no longer needed; what’s left will probably be shorter, so I’ve still lost wordcount. And god knows it’s been frustrating to write a thousand words every day, then delete the obsolete scene and find I’m still at 15K.

But not nearly as frustrating as having to invent plot for Eliza because I skipped over the stuff I already had. So I cut the old scenes, and I write new ones, and the numbers look like I’m treading water — but they’ll start moving forward soon enough.

London volunteer needed

Do you live in London, or close enough that you could make a day trip there without too much inconvenience?

Do you have an aversion to foul smells?

If your answers are respectively “yes” and “no,” then I have a psychotic request to make. One of the things I want to research in London is Bazalgette’s Victorian sewer system. Since his work is still in use, access is limited; my one shot, pretty much, is the “Sewer Week” visit (yes, really) that Thames Water hosts each year. Unfortunately, the tour is on May 18th, which is still inside my four-week physical therapy window after I get out of this boot. In other words, too early for me to go wandering around surface London, let alone its sewers.

So I can’t make it. But maybe you can.

I’m seeking one (1) volunteer who loves me and/or the Onyx Court books well enough to spend the evening of Tuesday, May 18th tramping around the West Ham trunk sewer, taking notes and photographs and questioning the guide on my behalf. If you’re able and willing, e-mail me (marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com), and one lucky winner will get to endure dreadful smells in the service of historically accurate writing.

Reward is a signed advance copy of A Star Shall Fall, which I will hand-deliver during the dinner I buy you when I come to London in (probably) June. Or else mail to you, if dinner doesn’t work out.

Feel free to pass this request along to friends who might be able to help, if you yourself can’t (or don’t want to!) do it.

Not sure how long I can keep this up . . . .

. . . but it’s good while it lasts. I’ve spent a couple of weeks now bouncing between more narrative projects than I would have thought possible: the Victorian book, a Sekrit Projekt I can’t talk about, “Mad Maudlin” (not done; so close), the revision of “Remembering Light,” and my Scion game. It’s been a pleasant surprise, how much I’ve been able to gear-shift from one to another, but I feel like I’m nearing my limit: the brain can only be flexible for so long. Fortunately, the Sekrit Projekt thing pretty much just needs one more push from me, so if I can knock that and “Remembering Light” off the list I might have enough brainpower for “Mad Maudlin,” and then I’ll be down to two, the Victorian book and the Scion game.

Which is good, because both need a little more attention than I’ve been able to give them. I do want to get moving on another short story once “Mad Maudlin” is done, but I think it’s going to be a new draft of “On the Feast of the Firewife,” which will take less brainpower than a full-blown new story. I’ve figure out what I want to do with it; now it just wants doing.

street date!

Yes, it’s odd that I usually get this first from Amazon — but it looks like the publication date for A Star Shall Fall will be August 31st. (The day before my birthday!) For those who have been champing at the bit to get this one, at least now you know when to expect it.

wrong project, but oh well

Man, I don’t know what it is. All I have to do is decide, “I’m working on Thing X!,” and I will without fail come up with ideas for Thing Y instead.

In the current instance, that means I decided I would try to finish “The Unquiet Grave” by the end of the month, and promptly put down 1,022 words on “Mad Maudlin” instead. Not really complaining — I don’t care which short story I make progress on, so long as it’s one of them — but I really wish I could find a way to leverage this for novels. As I said on matociquala‘s LJ the other day, it seems to me like there should be a way to do it. Contract for Book A, write Book B instead; then contract for Book C, somehow convince yourself you’re working on that one for realz, whereupon you write Book A. Or something. But I fear deadlines might make that tough to wrangle.

Time to go think about “The Unquiet Grave” some more, in the hopes of finishing “Mad Maudlin” in the near future.

that’s part of the job done

I haven’t yet gone through my site and scrubbed the Amazon Associates links from my book recommendation pages, but I’ve done the pages for my own novels. Which made me realize how lazy I’d been with those; I was pretty much just linking Amazon. I’ve replaced that with a much more comprehensive set: Powell’s, IndieBound, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Fictionwise (for ebooks), Chapters (for Canada), and Waterstone’s (for the UK).

Having done that, I now put it to you, my loyal LJ readers: are there other stores I should include? I can’t list every store on the planet, of course, but if there are other major online retailers — especially for Canada and the UK — let me know what I’ve missed.

a decision at last

ceosanna, you won the icon sweepstakes. Many thanks to everyone who provided me with icons, especially all the ones that fit my description of what I thought I wanted; it’s just that my brain went sideways and decided this one had the most suitable vibe. Foggy and dark and a little bit mysterious. So what if bridges aren’t really a major plot point in the book; it works.

Expect to see a lot more of this image in the upcoming months.

I really am deranged.

I’ve composed many an odd research query for the Onyx Court books, but the one I just sent off takes the cake.

No, you don’t get to know what it is. Not yet. (Aside from the fact that has to do with the Victorian period — duh.) I’ll let you know once it succeeds or fails, either way.