For once, I’m finishing work at 2 a.m. instead of starting. And nearly eighteen hundred words tonight, no less, in two work sessions.
And I even had some fun. When in doubt, throw in a walking death-omen who really wants to say hi to one of the protagonists.
Dang it, Internets, you are suppose to entertain me, and you are failing. One thing I preferred about being on East Coast time: in the wee hours of my morning, the West Coast folks might still be updating their LJs. But alas, I’m sitting here on a Friday night with hardly anybody giving me anything to read.
Well, tonight was supposed to be a night of productivity anyway. And it has been: so far, I’ve gotten 1,007 words on the ongoing story. But I think we’ll need to have another work session tonight, because this story, y’see, it has already passed short story territory and is charging merrily through novelette on its way to a possible novella. (Which is part of last night’s whininess: I keep working on this damn thing and it isn’t done yet. Novellas: the worst of both worlds.) Anyway, while it isn’t absolutely critical that I finish it before the calendar page turns, I would like to, and that means it’s advisable to get through this damn scene tonight.
But first I need to figure out who the characters are going to talk to, and what he knows.
In my non-writing time, I’ve been entertaining myself while doing other downstairsy things by re-watching the first half of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Quibble all you like with his interpretation; I will always love it for being full-length. And this re-watch has made me realize my favorite stretch is from the conclusion of the interior play to the moment Claudius sends Hamlet off to England. Why? Because that’s probably the densest stretch of Hamlet being a smart-ass in the entire play, and I do love him when he’s a smart-ass. I’ve thought for quite a while now that he’s probably one of the literary ancestors of Francis Crawford of Lymond.
Meh. I think it’s time to practice that time-honored writerly technique known as “flopping on the bed and staring at the ceiling until I can bludgeon my brain into working.” I have to get these characters to Coldharbour somehow.
Small bit first, since otherwise it will vanish next to the other news: Shroud Magazine has purchased my twisted fairy-tale retelling “Tower in Moonlight.” (This is part of the ongoing set that includes “The Wood, the Bridge, the House”, “Shadows’ Bride,”, and “Kiss of Life.”)
***
Much bigger bits, relating to In Ashes Lie:
I actually meant to post this days ago, but it clean slipped my mind — the Science Fiction Book Club has picked it up as a main selection, as with Midnight Never Come, so those of you who got the last book in hardcover can do so with this one, too.
For the other bit, you’ll have to look behind the cut . . .
I touched on part of this last month, when I complained about how many of my short story ideas required research, but that’s only one facet of the problem:
I’m having difficulty having fun with short stories.
What I’m working on right now? Requires both research and complicated plot-juggling, a murder mystery told in two strands, one leading up to the death, the other away from it. “Chrysalis”? Was research and more structural difficulties. The various possibilities for next month? Varying degrees of research, but also plot confusion and (in one particular case) a determination to tell the bloody thing entirely in Germanic-derived words.
Too much damned work.
“Once a Goddess” was fine, because the big problem that stalled that one for seven years was almost purely a plot thing, trying to figure out where I wanted the story to go. Once I had that, it was clear sailing. “The Gospel of Nachash” was harder; I’m not sure I would have gotten through that one when I did had I not been getting input and ideas from kniedzw and kleenestar. Again, more research, and more thinkiness being buried deep into the story, plus (again) linguistic stupidity — this time, an attempt to mimic the style of the King James Bible.
I want to have this story, the one I’m currently working on. I just don’t want to write it. Here it is, almost 2 a.m., and once again I’m only now about to get started. I have a specific reason for pushing on this one, or I’d see if shelving it helps; then again, the whole idea here is to figure out how to get back into regular short story production, and quitting doesn’t help much with that. But I need more ideas that are just fun, ideas that can be good stories without requiring such heavy lifting. I wholeheartedly believe heavy lifting is good for the writerly soul, but I don’t believe work done without it is automatically bad. Sometimes the stuff that pours out easy as oil is your best work.
It would be nice to have more of that.
Is this a phase, a difficult uphill stretch on my journey through my craft? I’d like to think it signals some kind of improvement in my writing, and that on the other side of it I’ll find myself once again able to occasionally just knock something out. Unfortunately, it feels more like my e-mail inbox: I’ve already dealt with the ideas that were quick and easy, and all that’s left in the mental queue is the stuff I’ve been putting off precisely because it is too much work.
Blah. I’m cat-vaccuuming now, whining about this story to avoid actually writing it. I need to hire some West Coast or early-rising UK friends to send me chiding e-mails; it’s too easy to avoid accountability at two o’clock in the morning. Once more into the breach, etc etc, and we’ll see if we can’t have some fun tonight.
This story is coming out slooooowly. I’m not sure whether that’s because it’s a murder mystery (plot-wise; the setting is fantasy), and I’ve never written one of those before, or because I’m essentially taking two characters my brain assigns to different stories and trying to make them be in scenes together. Maybe this is why all my youthful fanfic involved original characters interacting with the casts of stories I’d read; I don’t seem to do well at the crossover thing. Hell, my brain had an instantaneous meltdown when I tried to imagine Ree talking to Nicholas after returning from Arcadia, and that was after all the Memento characters had already shown up in the Changeling game, thus establishing the bridge for me.
But! Making two characters have a conversation where they’re talking about entirely different things, and neither one of them realizes it? That’s fun.
(Actually, one of them just realized it, in the last few hundred words I wrote. What I need to decide is when the pov character will figure it out.)
Murder mysteries, man. They’re hard. I suspect this one would go easier if I’d started from a base of “here’s how the victim died and why,” but instead I’m struggling to make that be not a macguffin for the investigation, which is the real reason I’m writing this story. We’ll see how that goes. This is one of those “permission granted to write a crappy draft” situations, though not nearly to the extent that “Chrysalis” was. I just need to write my way through before I can go back and make it tidy.
Unfortunately, I’ve about hit the end of the scenes where I knew what I was doing, and now have a vast howling wilderness between me and the end, which is the other part I know. Must figure out what to fill that with.
But not tonight. I’ve done 1,325 tonight; that’s respectable enough that I can stop.
. . . to everyone who helped me out with London slang a little whlie ago. Copy-edits delayed my work on “The Last Wendy” for a bit, but I finally got that back to them, and it sounds at least a bit less American now.
(One last query, actually — does “chill out” sound too American? If so, what would be the alternative?)
I’m trying (again) for the one-story-a-month thing, which means I’m gearing up for February. This one is going to be a bigger project, and involves at least one piece of directed research. So:
Can anyone recommend to me a good biography of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham? I’m particularly interested in the last five years or so of his life; I could care less what he got up to in childhood.
(Oddly, this is completely unrelated to me reading The Three Musketeers. THAT book, I picked up because I’m trying to figure out what “The Three Hackbutters” should be about, other than its title.)
5063 words of crappy draft. Or rather, 5063 words of some admixture or good and bad; I know there are bits in it that work just fine. Unfortunately, they’re nowhere near a majority.
Doesn’t matter. 5063 words = done. I’ve finished “Chrysalis,” and before the end of the month, too.
Now it’s out of the way, and I can decide later what to do with it.
Much later.
Okay.
I have about three hours — a little less — until I need to be somewhere else.
I have a story that still lacks only one scene for completion . . . which is where it’s been for well over a week.
I have contacted my crit group to tell them not to expect this story any time soon, because it is a bad enough draft that there’s no point asking other people to tell me what’s wrong with it until after I’ve fixed the most glaring problems. I’ve also given myself permission to stash the bad draft on my hard drive and not come back to it until months or even years from now, because I’m pretty sure this really is a story that will work better once I’ve written (and published) more things in that setting.
I will finish this bloody story today or die trying. I don’t care if it sucks, I don’t care how long or short it ends up being, I don’t care about anything except finishing the stupid draft.
Because in Not Finishing this, I’ve been Not Working on a whole lot of other things, too. So it’s past time “Chrysalis” got out of my way and went somewhere it won’t bother me anymore.
O internets, I could also use someone who can spot-check me on matters of London vocabulary — specifically, the insults that would be used by a pre-adolescent girl who’s spent a fair bit of time on the streets. (E.g.: does “crackhead” sound too American?) Also derogatory terms for a police officer: what other than “copper” and “pig”?
I ask because “The Last Wendy” is being copyedited right now, and this is my last chance to catch any glaring regionalisms. I’m not looking for full-bore cockney rhyming slang here, but I don’t want the words to sound out of place.
VeriCon was lovely as always, with a smattering of enjoyable panels and many fine meals with many fine friends. I could, however, have done without the precipitous drop in temperature halfway through; I remember our discussions back in the day about whether to hold the con during intersession or spring break, and I still think the arguments for intersession are good ones . . . but man, late January is a brutal time to hold a con, especially in a building like Sever, where (despite years of our best efforts) people blithely ignore the “airlock” signs on the front doors and pass through them in such a fashion as to release gusts of freezing air upon the reg desk.
But I am, after all, a delicate southern flower.
I got to read “The Last Wendy” at Milk and Cookies, though, which pleased me immensely. I do so love stomping on people’s childhoods . . . .
***
While I was away, the ninja editors of Abyss & Apex put up their new issue, which includes the most melodramatic (and melodramatically-titled) story I have ever written: “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual.” It’s posted in its entirety for free, so enjoy.
I’ve been working on “Chrysalis,” though forgetting to meter my progress, and I hate the fact that it’s a bad draft.
Other writers have experienced this before. You have to get what’s in your head out on the page, however broken it may be, before you can make it better; you can’t fix it in your head, so that the draft is better on the first try. In the case of this story, the twin challenges of researching setting details and making the covert structure come out right have pretty much crowded all other considerations from my mind. Prose? Is whatever words will pin the narrative down enough for the time being. Actual artistry need not apply, not yet. Same goes for characterization. And description. And all those other nice things that make the story not suck.
The problem is that I’m an idiot for writing this story right now. The sum total of fiction that exists in this setting at present is: “A Mask of Flesh,” four-fifths of a draft of “Chrysalis,” and 1070 words of a so-far-plotless story about Tlacuilo. And it’s a complicated setting, where nobody is human and all the castes are different kinds of creatures and oh yeah Mesoamerica isn’t exactly familiar material for most readers. So what in the name of all that is sensible am I doing writing a story that has to blitz through five different castes in (ideally) less than six thousand words? What am I doing dropping a xera motherfather into the middle of it, when I haven’t ever mentioned the motherfather thing before and it’s extra complicated with the xera because of that thing where they can be either male or female? How am I supposed to make this work when the back half of the story is trying to grow a political context to justify what Matzoloa’s doing and why? Just when do I think I’m going to explain that political context?
All that, and a philosophical lesson, too.
This is the kind of story that works best when you’ve got a dozen other pieces out there that establish all the different bits of the setting, so maybe you can get away with just presenting those bits in passing and hoping your readers remember enough to fill it in. It is not the kind of story you want to write when 95% of the material is new even to readers who read “A Mask of Flesh” five minutes ago, and 3% of the remainder isn’t like they expect because not all xera are crazy like Neniza was.
Yeah, I know, whine whine whine. Tonight I’ll make myself figure out what Matzoloa is doing, and then I’ll write her scene, and then I’ll have my bad draft. Then I can go away to VeriCon and let it compost, and when I come back I’ll decide whether I can polish it enough to inflict on my crit croup, or whether it needs to sit for six months while I do something else with my life.
Blerg. I’m going to go read The Three Musketeers.
This month on SF Novelists, I really really wish I could go back to writing short stories that don’t require a metric ton of research.
There’s a certain pleasure to breaking into a market that hasn’t bought anything from you before. But there’s also a pleasure, of a different flavor, to selling them a second story.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which previously published (and podcasted) my Nine Lands story “Kingspeaker,” has now purchased a Driftwood story titled (surprise!) “Driftwood.” (Thanks to the vagaries of the creative process, this was the first story I wrote for that setting, but it took longer to beat into publishable shape than “A Heretic by Degrees,” which came out more or less right in the first draft.) ninja_turbo, I think this means you’re officially allowed to be a Driftwood fanboy now.
***
The Ell-Jays are going through another round of the discussion on Representing the Other, sparking some thoughts, but none really concrete enough for me to articulate them here. It does, however, remind me of a realization I had the other week, watching The House of Flying Daggers.
Driftwood being the kind of place it is, not everybody there is human-shaped, and the ones who are, aren’t necessarily human-colored. Because of that, there’s no actor who’s precisely my mental image of Last. But there’s no reason in this world or any other that he has to have European facial structure, and so it occurred to me that if you dyed Takeshi Kaneshiro the right colors, he’d be my casting for the part.
Turns out a lot of my short story sales recently have featured secondary-world characters of a chromatic nature. This is what we call “a start.” But I want to do better in this world, and also in novels.
I wasn’t going to do this because my odds of ending up on the Hugo list are vanishingly small, but what the heck. If you’re eligible to nominate for the Hugos, here’s what I’ve published in 2008 that you might consider:
Novel
Midnight Never Come
Short stories
“Lost Soul” — Intergalactic Medicine Show #7, January 2008
“Kiss of Life” — Beneath the Surface, ed. Tim Deal, 2008
“The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe” — Paradox #12, April 2008
“Beggar’s Blessing” — Shroud Magazine #2, 2008
“A Mask of Flesh” — Clockwork Phoenix, ed. Mike Allen, July 2008
“Kingspeaker” — Beneath Ceaseless Skies #3, November 2008
“A Heretic by Degrees” — Intergalactic Medicine Show #10, November 2008
Relevant links for all of the above can be found here.
“The Gospel of Nachash”
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|
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5,916 / 5,916
(100.0%) |
So it turned out to be more like 6,000 than 7,000 after all. Then again, I suspect it may need fleshing out in the latter bits. But that is not a task for tonight; tonight, I have completed a draft of this story, within the twelve days of Christmas (as I had hoped), and before the end of 2008. That makes this year’s output two novels and two short stories.
Man, my crit group is going to hate me for this thing — though I suspect one of them will expire in a fit of Judaic geekery instead.
Anyway. Draft! Yay! Critique and revision can wait until the new year, and then I get to figure out what magazines might want a piece that’s all about the style and the ideas, and not so much about characterization as we know it.
It’s all in how you count.
I don’t keep track of the words I produce each year, but I do keep a log of completed pieces, including their word counts. Glancing at that list is depressing right now: in 2006 I logged eight completed pieces, in 2007 five, and so far this year a whopping three. (It’ll be four if I can finish “The Gospel of Nachash.”) This does not look so good.
But out of curiosity, I added up word counts. So far this year? 208,800 words of completed fiction. Last year, 119,000. And 2006, the year that looked like the best of the three? A whopping 27,300.
The difference, of course, lies in what I was finishing. 2006 was eight short stories, one of them only eight hundred words long. I didn’t write a novel that year. In 2007 I wrote one (Midnight Never Come), and this year, I wrote two — Ashes and a YA project that has unfortunately gone bust for the time being. And none of those novels are carryover counts; all of them were started and completed within the calendar year. The short stories had more variation on that front, but as we’ve seen, they’re not where the lion’s share of the wordage is coming from.
Naturally, the upshot of doing this number-crunching is to make me ambitious to improve both metrics. Writing novels is all well and good, but I’m running out of short story inventory to shop, and while they may not pay much, I enjoy them, and I think they do serve a certain purpose in getting my name in front of new readers. On the other hand, years like 2006 are not something I can afford, if I’m to be doing this full-time writer thing. So really, what I’d like is to put out, oh, two novels and twelve short stories a year. That’s six months per novel, which is very much within my reach, and one short story a month.
I can do that, right?
Regardless of what I can or cannot do, I’m feeling better about what I’ve accomplished with this year. It may be only three four items (I will finish “The Gospel of Nachash,” dammit), but those four are pulling their weight.
“The Gospel of Nachash”
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4,387 / 7,000
(61.0%) |
Yes, the goalpost moved back 1,000 words.
Obviously I wrote more. I actually entertained a brief, delusional hope that I would finish tonight. But I’ve already done more than 3500 words this evening, and I might have an equal amount left to do — probably less, but I can’t be sure — so I think I’ll stop here. Especially since I haven’t put any thought into how exactly this next bit ought to happen.
Time to work on the theology some more.
“The Gospel of Nachash”
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2,709 / 6,000
(45.0%) |
That 6,000 is, as usual, a guess.
I have embraced the fact that this story will not read like normal fiction, and that attempting to make it do so would be like sticking a bird on a bicycle and telling it to migrate south for the winter. It will get there faster and more effectively by just being itself. Which will, yes, limit the places I can submit the thing. But let’s face it: I’m writing an apocryphal gospel here, and if it reads like a piece of ordinary fiction instead of the King James Bible, I am, as the lolcats say, doin it rong.
I suspect I will write more before the night is over. I drank caffeine at the Boxing Day party tonight, so I ain’t going to sleep any time soon, and the KJV headspace is hard enough to get into that I should do as much as possible while I’m here.
