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Posts Tagged ‘novels’

Comet Book Report: Dr. Johnson’s Women, by Norma Clarke

I noticed recently that I’ve been very remiss in talking about the books going into the stew that is my next novel. I’m going to try to remedy that with some posts over the next couple of days or weeks, though it’s highly unlikely I’ll go through everything I’ve been reading.

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Dr. Johnson’s Women could so easily have been The Dr. Johnson Show Featuring Dr. Johnson and Some Ladies. Thank God this is not that book. The author uses him as her starting point because he was good friends with a great many intellectual women, and occupied a position near the center of that social network, but he is important to this discussion only inasmuch as he was important to the women that are its real focus. Johnson was one of a number of men who served as advocates, patrons, and fans of women’s writing in the eighteenth century; his assistance, however, as well as that of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and other men, is never presented as a gift bestowed by a benevolent (and patriarchal) god. Instead it’s a commodity sought out, managed, and occasionally rejected by women navigating their way through the literary and intellectual sphere.

I am floored by this book. My knowledge of women English writers prior to Jane Austen consisted of maybe half a dozen names, if that, none of them seeming terribly important to literary history. I had no idea of the existence of, say, Elizabeth Carter, who spoke nine languages (including Arabic) and whose translation of Epictetus remained the standard for more than a century. Or Charlotte Lennox, who wrote hugely popular novels that grappled actively with the paradoxes of contemporary female life, and also a scathing feminist critique of Shakespeare. Or Catherine Macaulay, who produced an epic eight-volume history of England. Or Hester Thrale, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Rowe, Catherine Talbot, or anybody mentioned in the second half of this book, which I haven’t read yet. I only barely knew of Elizabeth Vesey and Elizabeth Montagu, because I knew the Blue Stocking Society was operational during the period of my novel, and I certainly didn’t realize how far the trend went. These women corresponded, networked, encouraged each other in their efforts, argued bitterly over their divergent opinions, and had a whole world that never seems to appear in the histories I’ve read.

This was the book that sparked my previous post, because I can’t help but contrast this period with the Victorian Age. “Bluestocking” wasn’t a pejorative yet; Johnson was not the only man to think an educated woman was a source of pride for her nation and family. Clarke presents this as the happy consequence of the mind/body dichotomy as it was presented at the time: women’s bodies might be weaker and more fallible than those of men, but the mind was sexless, and it could be disciplined to control the body. The argument that women’s minds are also inherently weaker and more fallible doesn’t seem to have the force that it acquired later. A learned woman may not be a common thing, but she isn’t a freak of nature, either, on par with a dancing bear or a parrot that speaks French.

Which makes this sound like a rosy paradise, free of trouble. It wasn’t. Clarke outlines a triad of vanity-coquetry-power that no woman could entirely escape; even those who, like Elizabeth Carter, repudiated it as much as possible didn’t negate its existence. The publicity attendent upon life as a writer or scholar had to be accompanied, in the female instance, by a lot of self-deprecation and disavowals of one’s own importance. Egotism was most definitely not okay, and it was easy to lose one’s reputation while gaining fame. But Elizabeth Carter was supporting herself as a professional writer at the Gentleman’s Magazine when Johnson was a wet-behind-the-ears newcomer to London, and other women made a living through either patronage or the public sphere, and were respected for it.

I had no idea that was going on in the eighteenth century.

The political dimension seems to have been mostly lacking; Carter apparently disapproved of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Still, it’s a remarkable bit of feminism I was almost completely unaware of. And the book is quite readable, so if you’re interested in literature, feminism, or the ideals of the Enlightenment, definitely take a look at this one.

Let’s play pretend

I’ve been so busy this week that it’s taken me days to get this link posted, but: a fellow named Marshal Zeringue contacted me a little while ago with what amounts to a one-question interview question, which was, If they make my book into a film, here’s who I’d like to play the lead role(s).

I cheated a bit and answered for both Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie. Head on over there to see who I have faces for in my head (and who I don’t).

(As far as the comet book’s concerned — I don’t have a good visual reference for either Galen or Irrith yet. I should try to fix that.)

whee!

1,172 words and one crash course in seventeenth-century telescope design later, I have my first flashback scene.

I’d forgotten how much fun these things are. When I was writing Midnight, flashbacks were my candy bars: nothing but a neat idea, without any need for the kind of set-up or take-down ordinary scenes require. I may try to write another tonight, if I can sort out the details; I still owe this book three others, that need to go somewhere in the stuff I’ve already written.

(There’s another reason I really enjoyed this one, but you all will have to wait until the book comes out to learn what that one is.)

half a book!

Ladies and gents, we crossed the 70K line today. Which means this is officially Half A Book, assuming I end up in the reasonable neighborhood of my 140K goal.

I may celebrate by spending tomorrow, and possibly the next day, working on flashback scenes. I haven’t written any of them yet, and while I’m not sure which ones I want to stick in which parts of the story, I’ve come to suspect I won’t be able to figure that out properly until the scenes exist as more than one-line descriptions in my head. And while part of my scheduling here involves not counting flashback writing as words toward my daily goal, the early completion of Part Three means I’m still two days ahead of schedule, and spending those filling in other holes isn’t a terrible idea.

(I would do flashbacks and forward progress, but I’m also currently being sisyphized by another project, and three tasks at once is a bit much — even if the sisyphean one is a revision. I just can’t gear-shift that much.)

But hey. Half a book. Yay!

Word count: 70,393
LBR census: It’s going to be blood, if Irrith keeps on being so mouthy.
Authorial sadism: Hey, somebody needs to represent for eighteenth-century English chauvinism.

This is kind of fabulous.

The VanderMeers, having been given a 13th anniversary ale to try out, decided that of course the thing to do was to see how it went with different books.

It kinda makes me wish I liked beer and/or wine. You could have a pretty ridiculous party, swigging down different drinks, trying to match them up with appropriate books. “I think this is more of a chardonnay kind of fantasy . . . .”

As it happens, Ashes didn’t go well with the beer at all, especially the selection Ann was reading. But she recommends a rich honey mead — Rosamund and Gertrude would approve. ^_^

60K.

Word count: 60,301
LBR census: There will be blood. (Pity I hated that movie . . . .)
Authorial sadism: Aw, shut it, Irrith. The lunatic hasn’t attacked you. Yet.

The tens of thousands matter. More than a week’s work, unless I’m having a pretty fast week, and there’s few enough of them in your average book that they feel like real milestones.

Also, the next one will be the official “halfway point” of the book, in the hopes that I’m right about it being 140K in total.

3/7

Word count: 57,857
LBR census: Love. And awkward discussions of the various forms it takes.
Authorial sadism: Not one but two characters wrestling with some unfamiliar (not to say uncomfortable) feelings.

So I’m trying something a little different with this book. Normally — by which I mean, for nine books now, discounting only my first finished novel — I set myself a daily word-count goal, and use that to measure my progress. Usually the goal is a thousand words a day, and since that’s a minimum, not an average, I build up a little overage as I go, which helps make up for the days I miss, and gives me a margin of safety re: my deadline. (Since this became a professional thing, I use that time for revision, before sending it off to my editor.)

This time around, applying that schedule produces slightly hairy results. For one thing, this book is supposed to be longer, more like Ashes than Midnight. Also, I lost four straight weeks to travel: no forward progress during that whole time. So the five months I gave myself to write a 140K book wasn’t looking like enough, not unless I made assumptions about my overage that I didn’t really want to trust — especially not when even that left no time for revision.

I could have just set a higher goal: say, 1500/day. Or whatever. But I decided to hybridize.

This book is divided into seven parts. I did Part One before leaving town, Part Two by the end of June. So rather than pacing by word-count, I recently decided to do it by narrative chunks, and moreover to do so in a fashion that would leave me a solid couple of weeks for revision. In other words, Parts Three and Four in July, Five and Six in August, and Seven in September, with the book due at the beginning of October. The “hybrid” aspect comes in where I know that each part should be roughly 20K, of which 1K or so is going to be flashback (and therefore written outside my daily quota), so I worked backward to figure out how many words I should aim for in a given day, in order to (probably) finish the relevant part by its mini-deadline.

So far, it’s working out. Beating that quota, combined with a shorter section than anticipated, means I finished Part Three tonight, three days ahead of schedule. And here’s the other new thing: rather than just saying, “Sweet, I can get a head start on Part Four!” and diving in tomorrow, I’m going to take that evening off. I may, if I feel like it, backtrack to chisel off a few of my worse continuity errors in the existing text; or possibly do a flashback. Or not. But I get to take a day to regroup and think about Part Four — and still start two days early.

I don’t know if I can keep up this pace for the next two months. It’s definitely faster than my usual; not brutally so, but enough that it may start to tell in the long term. But I’m more comfortable with this math, for whatever reason, and that’s reason enough to give it a shot.

He’s not so much a protagonist as a punching bag.

Just spent ten minutes or so talking at kniedzw, trying to figure out how to make a certain plot point happen, and at the end of it all I decided the best method is: embarrasssing Galen.

Poor boy. I so terribly mean to him.

ETA: I originally typed “humiliating Galen,” then decided to downgrade it. Now that I’ve written the scene?

I had it right the first time.

Poor boy. I’ll make it up to him in the next couple thousand words.

Once upon a time, this would have been half of a book.

Word count: 50,839
LBR census: Love. This book is sadly lacking in blood so far, but the love is shaping up to be even more cruel, so it balances out.
Authorial sadism: Did I mention the love? Also, Irrith just planted her foot so firmly in her mouth I think she stepped on her liver. If faeries even have livers.

I’m roughly halfway through Part Three, and (assuming my target word count doesn’t end up being wildly off-base) a little over a third of the way through the book. It’s hard to pace myself, in terms of expectations; this is the first time I’ve set out to write a 140K book. (Ashes got there accidentally.) Normally I’d be thinking of this as the middle span of the story, since most of my novels, both published and unpublished, fall in the 100-120K range. I’m definitely in “the middle,” broadly speaking — this isn’t the beginning anymore, and it sure as heck isn’t the end — but I’m a good 20K away from the actual midpoint.

I must admit, I’m not sure a seven-part structure was my brightest idea ever. It’s a strange number, and not one we really have a model for, as far as story structure’s concerned, but it fits in other ways. I just have to figure out what kinds of things go in which sections. On the face of it, this should not be a challenge; after all, I could just pretend the part breaks aren’t there, and pace things however seems natural. But there’s such a thing as three-part structure, and such a thing as five-part structure (which I did, for the record, pay attention to while writing Midnight), and the four days of the Fire meant I needed four spans of time in Ashes which dictated some of my structure there, too. I just need to figure out what the seven-part version is.

Well, any way you slice it, the next part is the middle one, when the book stops heading away from the beginning and starts heading toward the end. And I know some of what will be happening then.

Now I just need to figure out what happens in the rest of Part Three . . . .

still digging my way out of the hole

Wrote a cumulative 3806 today in various new scenes, rummaging around in the guts of Part Two to make everything fall into the new order. Still need to replace the scene that introduces the CR itself, and then do at least a rough polish on the Magrat conversation, the coffee-house, and Carline; then probably wholesale replace 80% of the Vauxhall scene, and I’ll finally be ready to finish the scene I was in the middle of writing when I realized I needed to redo half of what I’d done.

One of the cherished delusions of the aspiring writer is that this stuff gets easier as you go. Sure, maybe you have to rework your first novel three times, but after a while you learn to produce clean drafts, right?

Yeah, I’m going the other way. I’ve never had to hack a book apart half as much as I’ve done with this one already. Please, please, don’t let this trend continue.

Word count: 36,810 and trying not to think about how I’m running to stay in place
LBR census: I had to work really hard to find a reason why it wasn’t blood.
Authorial sadism: Yes, Galen, when you get a good idea I will make you share it with the class.

Thirty K.

Word count: 30,038
LBR census: I think fear counts as blood.
Authorial sadism: Since my last update . . . making Irrith play politics, and making Galen face down twenty-five tons of By The Way You Know You’re Mortal, Right?

Halfway through Part Two (of seven). I don’t feel like my narrative momentum has quite cohered yet, but we’re getting there. Mostly it’s still Irrith giving me trouble. Unlike Galen, she didn’t show up with her intestines on a platter, asking if I’d like to play with them; I’m having to pry useful conflict out of her.

This is what happens when you write a relatively care-free character. It’s hard, getting her to care about stuff.

But Galen’s at the Royal Society now. I wonder just how many photographed pages of minutes I’m going to read through before I decide I really don’t give a damn when Henry Cavendish first attended a meeting, and that nobody will much care if I put him there in late 1757. After all, biographical info on the guy is remarkably sketchy, so aside from the minutes, there’s probably no record at all of when he showed up for the first time. And given that I had to photograph handwritten pages out of giant leatherbound volumes you can only get by applying to use the Royal Society library and then filling out request forms, the odds of anybody being able to call me on my error are pretty low.

(If a piece of historical accuracy falls in a forest and there’s nobody qualified to notice, does it constitute an error?)

Er, nevermind. Since they helpfully put visitors at the beginning of each set of minutes, and those are easy to find, I, um, already found my answer. June 15th, 1758. Possibly not his first meeting, but the first one in the range I copied, and therefore the first that will appear in this narrative.

(If a piece of historical accuracy falls in a forest and a deranged writer runs over to prop it back up again, does it constitute grounds for involuntary commitment?)

Bedtime now. Before I go even crazier.

Break’s over; back on your heads.

On the one hand, taking a month off from the comet book gave me time to rethink some important things in Part One, which will make it much easier to proceed from here.

On the other hand, taking a month off from the comet book killed my discipline and momentum like whoa and damn.

Some of that’s the jet lag talking, mind you, which has hit me far worse than usual. (Might have something to do with me being on the road for a straight month; mostly I was in the U.S., but jet lag is as much about your general level of energy as it is about time zones.) I actually took a nap this evening instead of going to see a movie, just because I knew if I didn’t, there was no way I’d stay conscious late enough to get my work done. Another thing lost in my absence was my ability to sleep through kniedzw‘s alarm, you see, so I’ve been up since 7:30, which is just not natural for me. And my attempt to get work done this afternoon failed miserably.

I had more success just now, despite the lethargy brought on by a longer-than-expected evening nap. 1057 words, sending Galen to Vauxhall. It’s a pity the gardens there are long gone; I would have loved the chance to wander around them, instead of trying to put eighteenth-century paintings together with later plan views to understand how the place was laid out.

Word count: 21,146
LBR census: Love. Somebody in Galen’s family had to not suck.
Authorial sadism: Making it a windy night. Though that was only a little mean. (I’ll have to try harder tomorrow.)

Two things I forgot to mention

One is that for the duration of June, Midnight Never Come is available as a one-dollar e-book. You can pick up a Kindle copy at Amazon, or eReader or what have you at Fictionwise, and maybe other formats elsewhere — but the offer only lasts until the end of the month.

The other is that I will be doing a reading and signing at Borderlands Books in San Francisco tomorrow (Saturday) at 1 p.m. If you’re in the Bay Area, come on by, and hear some assortment of short stories and/or excerpts from In Ashes Lie. (I really should make a decision on what I’m reading . . . .)

Open Book Thread: In Ashes Lie

It does occur to me (now that I’m starting to get my brain back — I’ll be home this evening, yay!) that street dates are normally Tuesdays, but hey, Amazon swears blind that mine is today, and they’re never wrong, right?

Since I’m not a big enough name for bookstores to put me on the special “don’t shelve this too early or we’ll get sued” list, it doesn’t matter much one way or another. Happy Street Date for In Ashes Lie! Unless you’re in the UK, in which case I believe you have to wait just a couple of weeks longer.

Comments and questions on the book are welcome here (and you don’t need an LJ account to post). If you haven’t read the book yet — which most of you, I expect, have not — just come back later; I’ll link to this from my site so you can find it again.

(Previous discussion threads for Midnight Never Come and Deeds of Men are still open, too.)

Just a few hours left . . . .

Which is to say that you can probably already find Ashes in your local bookstore, since they’re generally on the lax side about when they shelve things. But officially, June 10th is the street date for my second Onyx Court novel. Get your dose of faerie politics + explosions today! (Or tomorrow.)

I should also mention that I’ve recovered from the delay imposed by my London research, and picked the next two winners for the Deeds of Men giveaway. I think we’re doing one more set after this, so if you want signed copies of the first two Onyx Court books, sign up now — I’ll do the last drawing next Monday.

Day Five: In which I draw bad diagrams of clocks

Last night Irrith handed me the question I need to ask about her. She didn’t hand me the answer, mind you, but that’s okay. I’ll pry that out of her soon enough.

On less of a cheerful note, last night featured a different set of idiot roommates, in this case ones who apparently don’t grasp the concept that the last one to bed should turn off the lights. I woke up at 4 a.m. to find them all still blazing away, and me in the top bunk (of three), unwilling to risk my sleepy neck just to turn them off. So less than perfect sleep, and it’s a chilly grey morning when I get up. I’m happy to enjoy the comforts of the cabin this time as I head downriver again.

This route is getting familiar.