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Posts Tagged ‘novels’

Done.

Copy-edited manuscript is on its way back to Tor.

Ima go fall over now. (Where by “fall over” I mean “play Dragon Age.”)

Yes, I’m copy-editing on Christmas Eve. (Don’t have much choice.) But at least I’m getting some entertainment out of it: discovering, for example, that I described someone’s manner as “both sheepless and helpless.”

Sheepish. Not sheepless. Though it’s true he has no sheep, it’s not really relevant to this scene.

the impossible favor

Back when I decided to spend 2008 writing In Ashes Lie rather than the Victorian Onyx Court book, the rightness of that decision was encapsulated by two things: I had both a title and an LJ icon for Ashes, and I had neither for the Victorian book.

Now it’s almost 2010, and I realio trulio am writing the Victorian book, and I still need those two things. I’m working on the title issue at the moment; I have possibilities, though all of the ones assembled so far have flaws.

But I don’t have an icon. And the problem there is, I’m not sure what I want for an icon. Midnight had Elizabeth, Ashes had the Fire, Star had the comet, but I don’t quite feel like there’s the same kind of central object in this book — except London itself, really, and it’s hard to pack the “monster city” with all its smog and townhouses and gentlemen and beggars into 100×100 pixels. The best I can think of is some pic of a Victorian-era train, especially an Underground train, but my attempts to find such on the Internet have not turned up anything that leaps out at me. This is the closest I’ve come, but it doesn’t crop to icon size very well.

So here’s the favor I’m asking. Make me some icons — no text needed, just an image that evokes gritty nineteenth-century industrial London. If I use your icon, you’ll get a prize. Most likely prospect for said prize, if you’re willing to wait, is an advance copy of A Star Shall Fall; if you’re more impatient, I’ll come up with something else. A magazine with a story of mine in, maybe. But some kind of prize for saving me from having no icon with which to post about this book.

It’s hard to ask for something like that when I’m not even sure what I want. But I figured I’d toss the net out there, and see what it pulls in.

on the topic of Nebulas

If you’re eligible to nominate for the Nebulas, you might be interested in an offer from Mike Allen, editor of Clockwork Phoenix 2: he’ll provide a PDF review copy to any SFWA member who wants to give the anthology a look. (Details about halfway through that entry.)

That antho, of course, has my story “Once a Goddess,” which has been getting some very pleasing attention in reviews. Other stories of mine out this year are:

Those first two and “Waking” are free to read in their entirety online; click through to find the links on their respective pages. Also, of course, I had a novel on the shelves this year.

Here endeth the obligatory Nebula-eligibility post.

it begins

Okay, so, researching the Victorian book. I’ve decided my first priority is to come up with something to call it other than “the Victorian book.”

The simultaneous convenience and inconvenience of the Onyx Court books is that I know where to go looking for a title (period literature), but I have to go look. I can’t just make one up. We therefore come to the first Request for Help of this round: what mid-Victorian literature should I read in search of a title?

My preference is for poetry over prose, because it’s more likely to have a short, evocative phrase that I can spin out; fiction (especially in the Victorian era) is rather too fond of going on at length. The book will probably start circa 1870, so I’d like material no later than that. No specific limit on how early it could be, but I’m trying to avoid going as early as the Romantics. So who was writing good (and preferably non-pastoral) poetry around 1840-1870?

State of the Swan

I don’t have to report for jury duty today — yay! So here’s an update on where I stand work-wise, in the wake of the India trip and A Star Shall Fall.

1) I do, of course, have to deal with copy-edits and page proofs for Star. Not sure yet when those will show up, though, so for the time being that work is in limbo.

2) Next after that one is the Victorian book. Due to the vagaries of my last few years, this, the fourth Onyx Court novel, will be the first one where I’ve had more than a month or two of lead time in which to do my research before I put words on the page. You have no idea how wonderful that feels. In order to give myself more time for the actual drafting, I plan to start that at the beginning of April, but that still leaves me five months for a leisurely, low-pressure campaign of prep reading. Look for various “help me o internets” posts as I figure out what I want to pick up first.

3) Writing full-time means I need to hold myself to a higher standard of productivity than I did while teaching or taking classes. Ergo, I’m also starting work on a pure spec project. For those not familiar with the term, writing “on spec,” i.e. “on speculation,” means you’re doing it on your own time, without a contract promising money when you’re done. This project, code-named TLT, is a just-for-me novel; if I don’t finish it, or if I do finish it and then decide it isn’t really for publication, then that’s okay. I’m doing it because I want to, because I think it’ll be fun. And “having fun” is an important part of this job, for the preservation of sanity. Anyway, the plan for this is to aim for 5K a week, with weekends off, and if I don’t make my goal then I won’t beat myself up over it.

4) I also have another sekrit projekt on the back burner, code-named FY. No wordcount goals for this one; I just want to play around with it and see what happens.

5) Short stories. I’m beginning to accept that short stories aren’t likely to happen while I’m drafting Onyx Court books, but the result is that my pipeline of stories has gotten fairly empty at every stage — very few upcoming publications, because very few sales, because very few submissions, because very few stories prepared, because very few stories awaiting revision. Between now and April, I’d like to make some progress in fixing that. The tentative goal is to finish both Edward’s untitled story and “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” before the end of the month; we’ll see if I can manage it or not.

Now I head up to the city for errands and the Borderlands signing tonight. India pictures later — hopefully tonight or tomorrow.

aaaaaaand we’re done.

A Star Shall Fall has been revised and sent to my editor. Now I wait for the CEM to show up. (Anybody want to start a betting pool as to whether I’ll be working on it over Christmas?)

Time to go eat the candy bar I’ve been saving as my reward.

Finit. (Again.)

Unless I end up cutting more than five hundred words from this in the copy-edits — which, I will grant, is possible — A Star Shall Fall has now squeaked out In Ashes Lie for the title of Longest Novel I’ve Ever Written.

By about five hundred words.

It’s been kind of amusing, watching the count inch upward as I add in bits here and there. I had a bet on with myself as to whether it would break that boundary, only I kept changing my wager. 🙂 Anyway, I may or may not be truly done with revisions; I’ll be looking back over it when I come home from India, before I send it off to my editor, to see if anything else has occurred to me in the interim. But for now, I declare it Done.

Time to go reward myself with a candy bar and some fun reading.

today is Thank Your Computer’s Processor Day

<pets the desktop computer>

You’ve been such a good little thing tonight. Hardly even complained at all. I promise I’ll do my very best never again to make you run not one but two massive astronomical simulation programs at the same time.

But because of your hard work, I now know that I have to rewrite one of the scenes in this book.

Er, thanks. I think.

Love,
Your Friendly Neighborhood OCD Novelist

ETA: P.S. Sorry. I lied about the “never again” thing. That’s what you get for being so cooperative.

GOD DAMN IT.

Or rather, God damn Edmond Halley. No, I really mean it this time. It turns out that one of my research books — one I’ve only been dipping into for pieces of information, rather than reading cover-to-cover — contains, squirreled away in one of its corners, the tidbit I searched handwritten Royal Society minutes in vain for.

Because I was looking in 1705. I didn’t think to ask for the minutes from freaking 1696.

Which turns out to be when Halley first said, “Oh hey, I think cometary orbits are ellipses, and the one we saw in 1682 is the one from 1607, with a period of about 75 years.”

Now, the minutes (as quoted in this book) don’t say whether he then did the basic arithmetic necessary to guess that the 1682 comet would be coming back in the mid-eighteenth century. But you have to figure he did. Which means this bastard came up with that theory nine years earlier than I thought.

Which leaves me with a choice: either I can take out all the references to the fae learning about this problem in 1705, rewrite Irrith’s personal history and the political history of the Onyx Court in a fashion that compensates for the breakup of a certain constellation of events that occurred in the opening years of the eighteenth century, and give up on the cameo appearance by Isaac Newton that I just wrote tonight . . .

. . . or I can remember that, hey, I’ve already said they learned about this from a seer, and then handwave a reason why she didn’t get that vision until Halley got around to publishing his ideas.

Guess which one I’m going to choose.

also

I would like to take this moment to damn Edmond Halley for publishing his Astronomiæ cometicæ synopsis three months before he presented on that topic at the Royal Society. Because of him, I’m having to rewrite this prologue (originally drafted as part of my submission packet for the book, i.e. before I really did my research), and it’s just annoying. Why couldn’t he have had a nice rousing argument at a Society meeting first?

census

There are at least 110 named characters in A Star Shall Fall, counting dead people who get mentioned in passing.

Oh, wait — 111. I forgot about Reginn. And Fafnir, so that’s 112.

Now begins the task of determining which ones deserve to be in the Dramatis Personae. Not all of them, certainly. But where to draw the line? That is, as always, the question.

bounced e-mail — do you know the recipient?

Back in August, I got an e-mail from an individual with the initials GH (not sure if he wants his name shared publicly) who offered assistance in translating some bits of dialogue from this book into German. I just tried to get back in touch with him, and the e-mail bounced, saying the recipient domain rejected it. If you are the one who passed my request along to GH, could you drop me an e-mail or LJ message and help me contact him?

HELP NEEDED: 18th century dancing

Totally the wrong kind of dance in my icon there, but it’s the best I’ve got.

Does anyone out there know, or know someone who knows, how to dance a minuet? Or any other kind of mid-eighteenth-century dance, for that matter. The Wikipedia entry on the minuet step is incomprehensible to the layperson, since it was written in 1724, and while the videos it links to show me the basic step, they don’t give me any sense of the shape of the whole dance, and how one interacts with one’s partner.

In other words, it’s time to replace my bracketed placeholder descriptions in the scene where Galen’s dancing a minuet, and I need references to go by. Movie scenes that depict it correctly would also work; unfortunately, the closest I’ve been able to get is Regency dancing, and that isn’t the same.

Hellllllllllp!

Oh! Yeah!

This news came in while I was out of the house a few days ago, and by the time I came home hours later, it had slipped my mind.

Francophones among you may be interested to know that Bibliothèque Interdite has made an offer for a French translation of Warrior and Witch. That’s my second foreign sale (the first being German), and a step closer to something I could actually read. (i.e. Spanish. Or better yet, Japanese — not that I could read it at anything better than a snail’s pace, but it would make for interesting practice.)

So now I get to have more adventures with international tax law. Isn’t being a writer just nonstop fun?

Revisions, Day 3

I can tell I was grappling hard with issues of plot and characterization and so on while writing this book because man, I have some awkward prose in here.

Mind you, my not-paying-attention prose of today is still generally better than my paying-attention prose of, say, five years ago, but that’s cold comfort. My miniscript has “awk” scribbled all over the margins. Relatively easy to fix; also boring as hell. It’s much easier to motivate myself to change the setting of a scene or re-order a set of conversational plot points than it is to vacuum the suck out of a paragraph.

And yeah, this is me procrastinating. My set goal is seven miniscript pages knocked off each day; I’ve done three so far. Don’ wanna go back to work. Wanna play with a new story. <whine>

Sometimes I really wish my job was something that would allow me to watch TV while I work.

134,229.

Finit.

Man, it took me a long time to write that epilogue.

A Star Shall Fall both is and isn’t my longest novel to date. In Ashes Lie clocked in at about 143K in its final draft, but only 129,682 in the first round. I have no idea whether this, too, will be the Amazing Ever-Growing Book when it comes time to revise. That, my friends, is a concern for later.

This is my eleventh novel. I’m pretty pleased with it.

things I have a profound disagreement with

But before I get to the disagreeing: I’ve been so brain-deep in finishing A Star Shall Fall, I overlooked the fact that Podcastle’s audio of “A Heretic by Degrees” has gone live. So go, listen, enjoy.

***

Right, so, the disagreeing.

I find it interesting that Dean Wesley Smith begins this post with the assertion that “No writer is the same” — and then proceeds to make his point (on the topic of rewriting) with such vehemence and absolutism that it could easily be mistaken for divine, universal law. Which is a pity, because I think he has a good point to make; but the force behind it drives the point way deeper than I think it deserves to go, and as a result, people who find themselves disagreeing with the full version may miss the value of the reduced version.

I think he’s right that rewriting can hurt a story. It can polish the fire out, like focus-testing a product until it’s bland pablum that doesn’t offend anybody, but doesn’t interest them, either. Sometimes you get it right the first time.

But. He seems to be arguing (with the force of an evangelical preacher) that your critical brain will never be useful to you as a writer. This works because a particular rhetorical trick:

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