Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Posts Tagged ‘with fate conspire’

I don’t even need to fall over!

Pssssh. That was only 2,908 words of writing. I feel like I should write something else before I go to bed; I was expecting to do so much more.

What I wrote was the climax, not the ending: this isn’t a complete draft yet. It probably won’t be for a couple of days; I have this Thing about finishing novels, where the last thing I write has to be the final scene (in this case, the epilogue), and what precedes it can’t have any holes in. There are definitely some holes in what I have at present, at least some of which I’ll have to fill before I can let myself write the epilogue — though some will probably get classed as revision-level problems, to be dealt with later. But right now, I have 133,951 words of book, and it is Very Nearly Done.

No, brain, you don’t have to write something else before you can go to bed tonight. Enjoy your victory, and get some sleep.

Um.

(Okay, maybe we’re going to write the seance AND the Giant Ridiculous Climax tonight.)

130K! (actually 131K!)

Long-time readers of this blog know that many of my metaphors for writing are related to textiles: weaving, or embroidery, or whatever. Well, the end of this book is presently the narrative equivalent of the test garments I sometimes sew, where I trace the pattern out on the cheapest muslin I can buy and baste the pieces together, then rip them apart and cut them down or stick in extra pieces of fabric and then sew the results back together again, and the whole thing ends up covered in Sharpie ink as I mark where things need to be changed or fitted together or whatever.

The comforting point to this metaphor is, doing that helps me figure out how to go about sewing the real fabric together, so I do a better job the second time around. So I’m telling myself that this “muslin draft” I’ve got going here is okay, because in the revision I will take all those Sharpie marks and translate them into a much better draft. Cyma’s train station scene will go away; Eliza will have that ability I just decided tonight that she needs; I’ll figure out what the hell to do with [spoiler] plot thread that has, at present, completely fallen out of the story. But before I can do any of that, I need to nail down the central points of this ending, and then reverse-engineer them to figure out how they should be set up. So, ragged Sharpie-covered draft it is.

At least tonight was fun writing. Tomorrow, I think we’ll have a seance, and then it’s onward to the Giant Ridiculous Climax!

Word count: 131,042. I might as well go ahead and give this book the trophy for Longest Onyx Court Novel now; I know it will win in the end.
LBR quota: A bit of (hopefully) ringing rhetoric, courtesy of one Eliza O’Malley!
Authorial sadism: Sorry, Cerenel. Of the people in that scene, you were the best mouthpiece for the elitist point of view. At least I gave you a good reason for it.

Fascinating Title Goes Here

The Internet has this magical ability to cough up stuff on whatever topic you’re thinking about, even when you aren’t looking for it*. At the moment, that’s this post by Jay Lake, which led me through daisy-chain of other posts by Seanan McGuire, Edmund Schubert, Misty Massey, and David Coe, all on the topic of titles.

I have titles on the brain right now for two reasons:

1) I just sent my crit group the most recent Driftwood story, which doesn’t really have a name yet, though my tongue-in-cheek dubbing of it as “Two Men in a Basket” might end up sticking just for lack of anything better.

2) I still don’t have a title for the Victorian book.

These two situations have different root causes, I think. Thanks to the first three installments in the series, the Victorian book is hedged about with all these requirements that I should fulfill if humanly possible: it has to be a quote, the passage the quote comes from has to work as an epigraph (ideally for the last part of the book), it should have a verb (ideally at the end of the phrase), etc. Finding a piece of Victorian literature that will fit all the requirements at once is proving much more difficult than I expected — to the point where I may well have to compromise on one or more points, though the perfectionist in me doesn’t want to. For the Driftwood story, on the other hand, the problem is that I don’t have any requirements. It’s a wide-open field, and so I end up standing around in it, not sure where to go.

And it’s made more complicated by the fact that novel titles and short story titles aren’t quite the same kind of beast. Certain things could work for either, and in fact I think you can generally port novel titles onto short stories without too much problem. But short story titles can’t necessarily go the other way. “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” strikes me as only working for the short form; “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” would NEVER go on a book. Short story titles are allowed to be wordier, because they don’t have to function as a piece of marketing in the way their novel-related cousins do. (Exceptions like The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making are just that: exceptions.) Cleverness in book titles is somewhat limited to humourous work, while a broader range of short stories can get away with it.

I’ve said before that my best titles usually show up at the start of the process; my average titles are the ones I stick on after the fact. (I have some bad titles, too, but let’s not talk about those. They’re after-the-fact efforts, too.) What makes a title good? It has to be evocative — which is one of those vague, hand-wavy descriptors I actually kind of hate, but I don’t have a better one that manages to combine the concepts of “striking” and “memorable” and “suggestive of more than it’s saying.” Lots of writers try to achieve evocative-ness (evocativity?) by throwing in nouns that supposedly carry that quality: Shadow. Soul. Dragon. Yawn. My attention is drawn more to odd juxtapositions. Queen isn’t a terribly interesting word, but the contradiction of The Beggar Queen is a lot more intriguing.

And then you have to worry about titles in a series, and how to make it clear these books belong together. I have to say I’m not a fan of the Mercedes Lackey answer to this question: Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise, Magic’s Price; Winds of Fate, Winds of Change, Winds of Fury; The Black Gryphon, The White Gryphon, The Silver Gryphon . . . well, if you dropped all the books on the floor it would be easy to sort the trilogies from one another, but exciting this is not. I prefer Dunnett’s approach with the Lymond books, where the titles may not be individually brilliant, but the running chess metaphor connects them all. This is why the pattern of the Onyx Court titles matters to me, too, because the structural characteristics are what advertise “this is part of that series!”

But you still have to come up with the title. For the Victorian book, I go looking in Victorian literature, but what about stories or novels where the title could be anything? How do you even get started? I swear, sometimes it’s harder than writing the actual stories. If you have any brilliant thoughts, please do share them in the comments.

*By which I mean that our brains have this magical ability to notice stuff that matches the pattern of what we’re interested in. But it’s more fun to say the Internet gets credit.

you brought this on yourself, you know

What’s harder than trying to write wacky made-up faerie science?

Writing wacky made-up faerie science from the point of view of a character who doesn’t know the first bloody thing about it. Especially when the education of your other major protagonist pretty much stops at her knowing how to read.

There are days when I really, really wish I’d constructed this story in a fashion that made Wrain or somebody the faerie protagonist, in Dead Rick’s place.

on reflection

Oh, that’s why I couldn’t figure out how to end the scene last night.

Because it wasn’t time to end it yet; we needed about eight hundred more words of Eliza having that epiphany I thought was going to happen later. And now it’s clear which of the next several bits of story needs to happen first, before we move along to the others. So if you’ll pardon me, I’ll get back to the book.

kitsune_den, thank you for “Owlsight”

Okay, it’s painfully obvious I had no idea how to end the scene when I finally got to it, but right now that doesn’t matter. I have, at last, written the scene that’s been in my head since before I started writing this book: since I pitched the proposal to Tor, at least. And probably earlier than that. If I had to guess, I’d say 2008, but it might be as far back as 2007.

Eliza ended up getting pov on it, which meant she got to do something unexpectedly cool. And Dead Rick got what he wanted, and now all the characters have to do is save the world.

In about the next ten thousand words, theoretically.

Shyeah right. This is so totally going to run long.

Mush!

120K! Actually, 122K!

I keep going backwards and forwards in this book, mucking around with crap in earlier scenes, then slapping words onto the end, and that’s why I’ve netted more than 2K today, not counting the words replacing the ones I cut. I think I FINALLY have a working version of Hodge’s Academy scene, which will be a bloody miracle if it’s true. And the thing in there is paying off on the back end with the new scene I added tonight. We’re getting into the Thrilling Climax now — if I can just wrangle all the parties into position.

Three weeks to deadline, and some heavy lifting to do before then. I’m very excited about what I’ve got here, but I really need a mallet to beat this damned book into behaving itself.

Oh, and if you know anything about dynamite, please do comment on the previous post.

Word count: 122,086
LBR quota: Blood. And Dead Rick loves me for it.
Authorial sadism: Aside from the Horrible Thing I Can’t Tell You About . . . Dead Rick not getting the specific blood he wants. (Not yet.)

I love the questions I ask for research

I need some kind of yardstick by which to gauge the destructive potential of one stick of dynamite. Presuming it was jammed into a device built largely of sturdy wood nailed together, how large of a device could the dynamite effectively destroy? (For values of “destroy” that equal “render it completely inoperable, such that the thing can’t really be repaired.”)

I know that’s a very imprecise description, and I’ll be getting imprecise answers, but it would be nice to know if one stick would be enough to trash, say, a car-sized target, or more, or less.

Charles Babbage and the Devil

Maybe I don’t have enough brain to be sparing any for posting some of this stuff, but dangit, I want the change of pace.

So, Charles Babbage, who I mentioned last post. Difference Engine yeah yeah Analytical Engine sure we’ve all heard about those things. If you read 2D Goggles, you’ve also heard about his one-man war against street musicians, which is a bit less well-known.

Did you know that as a kid, he tried to summon the Devil?

True story, at least according to his autobiography (which is kind of this random string of anecdotes; he says at the beginning that everybody kept after him to write his memoirs or something, and this was the only way he could interest himself in the project). Apparently wee!Babbage began to doubt the existence of the Devil, because it just didn’t make sense to him. Nor did it to a lot of Victorians, for that matter, as they started to get all scientific about their religion and demand that it make rational sense. Anyway, wee!Babbage questioned the existence of the Devil, and then he thought about all those stories where Faustus or whoever summons Satan to make a pact with him, and so wee!Babbage decides to do the same thing — minus the pact. He’s not out to damn himself, people; he’s just conducting an experimental inquiry as to the existence or non-existence of the Devil. Failure to show won’t prove non-existence, of course, but if the Devil poofs into his magic circle, well. Wee!Babbage can thank him for his time and send him away, question answered and immortal soul secure. Surely God won’t hold a little Devil-summoning against him, not when it’s for Science!

I have no intention of writing a “Babbage made a secret pact with the Devil” story — though now that I think of it, “Babbage didn’t make a secret pact with the Devil and that’s why he was constantly pestered by street musicians” is kind of an entertaining concept — but that anecdote amused me. Almost as much as the one about how he and a friend used to sneak out of the dormitory of their boarding school late at night in order to go study. And when one of the other boys wanted to join him they said no, he couldn’t, because he would just want to play. Which led to hijinks involving the kid tying successively thicker bits of string between his thumb and the dormitory doorknob that wee!Babbage kept cutting with his pocketknife until the night the kid, determined to know when he was sneaking out, used a chain.

Wee!Babbage may have been a little crazy. It seems to have been endemic to the period.

Anyway, consider this the book report for Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, which mostly ended up being irrelevant to my research, but was an entertaining read.

Edited: Comments are now closed because of ridiculous ammounts of spam.

how obscure can I get . . .

. . . before the Elljays cannot answer a question for me?

I need help from somebody who has on hand a translation of the Black Book of Carmarthen that is NOT Skene’s. (Because apparently that one is very inaccurate?) There’s a specific poem I need, not too long, and it would be dandy if I could get it sooner than my next trip to Stanford’s library. Comment here, and I’ll drop you a message via e-mail with the name of the poem I’m after.

celebrating in style

What did I do to celebrate Book Day?

I wrote 2,312 words of a scene I’ve been looking forward to since <checks e-mail records> June 25th.

See, Dead Rick? I promised it would end eventually. And now you get to RIP PEOPLE’S THROATS OUT.

Don’t say I never gave you anything nice.

everything but the kitchen sink

For a while now, I’ve been thinking of this novel as the most Tim Powers-ish of the Onyx Court series, where Tim Powers-ness is defined as ramming a bunch of unrelated things together until a plot falls out. So far, some of the unrelated things chucked into here include the Underground, spiritualism, photography, Irish nationalist terrorism, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, the West Ham disappearances, and Bazalgette’s sewers, and now my plot has decided it needs absinthe to function right.

At least for this one bit.

But it’s special absinthe, don’t you know. Because I can’t let the name “the green fairy” pass by untouched, or let or the not-as-hallucinogenic-as-advertised nature of absinthe get in the way of the effect I need. So the French fae have their own version. Are you surprised?

another question for the dog people

I know there are a lot of factors that will influence the answer to this question — dog breed, environmental conditions, etc — but as a generalized thing, how long after a trail is laid down can a dog follow it by scent?

on a calmer note

Dear Book,

Don’t think you’re safe just because I’m not using the angry kitten icon anymore. That’s Hel up there, and she will cut you.

But we may — may — have resolved the problem. By dint of doing . . . not a lot, actually. Going back to a plan that fell by the wayside, and trying to find some way to insert more downtime at a particular point. Easy enough on Eliza’s side; I just have to find some justification for why Dead Rick’s plot can skip over a month or so. If I can do that, everything else is fine; I don’t have to redate two-thirds of the book or work around historical events or anything of the sort. Just a bit of downtime, and I’m set.

So long as I can find a way to do that. Don’t ask me how; that’s a problem I’ll tackle tomorrow.

You’re still in the doghouse, though. I knew you were going to be the biggest bastard of the series — and that’s saying something, after the difficulties I had writing Ashes and Star — but you’ve been outdoing yourself, really. Any time you want to start being cooperative, feel free.

Slightly less inclined to light you on fire, but still thinking about it,
Your Writer

Not *again*.

Dear Book:

I hate you.

No, really. We’ve gotten to that stage of the writing, the stage where I really just want to light you on fire. It happens almost every book (except for the rare ones that just sail straight out of my head — of which you are SO not one), but this time, I really, really mean it. Why? Because I just figured out that I could solve about 90% of my pacing problems . . . by moving your start date back three months.

This falls into the category of “annoying change” rather than “major seismic upheaval,” since most of what I have to do is change the dates on scenes. But that’s about 100K worth of scenes I have to re-date

FUCK I just realized that doesn’t work.

Because there’s a scene that has to happen on a specific date, and that specific date is before what I thought would be the new start date. But there are other events that have to happen on other specific dates, and SON OF A BITCH I HATE YOU.

<beats head into desk>

Never again, people. Never again. I am so very done with this historical fiction thing, where I can’t just decide when stuff happens because history says otherwise. I’ve been doing this for four books, and I will never subject myself to it again*.

I’m sure I’ll find a way through this. But it is going to cost a lot of pain and suffering along the way. (It already has.) And right now, I kinda want to light the book on fire.

No love at all,
Your Writer.

*Of course I’m lying. It’s like childbirth. In a few years, when I’ve forgotten the pain, I’ll probably decide this is a good idea again. But right now, I mean it.

>_

Some nights are simply a bust.

Wrote a few hundred words. Got the sense they were probably the wrong few hundred words. Stopped. Pondered skipping to next scene. Remembered that next scene isn’t the scene we thought was next, because another scene has to happen first. Tried to figure out how to stage that one. Failed. Attempted to step back and regroup. Brain refused. Contemplated doing more reading for the book instead of writing. Brain refused that, too.

Not yet tired enough for sleep. Not sure what to do.

Today’s been one of those days. But it ain’t over until I get sleepy, so I have to find something the petulant three-year-old now ruling my grey matter is interested in doing until that happens.

I doubt it will be anything productive. Because this just isn’t a productive night.

revisiting high school chemistry class

My brain is tired, yo.

I just spent a chunk of time taking notes on a bunch of different early photographic techniques: daguerreotypes, calotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, the wet-plate colliodion process, the dry-plate gelatin emulsion, albument prints, etc. My notes are a festival of chemical terms I haven’t used since high school: silver nitrate, potassium bromide, pyrogallic acid. And I’m not yet done; now that I have all this stuff noted down, I need to figure out just how I’m going to use it in the context of the story.

What I wonder — and what my sources don’t tell me — is the extent to which the proliferation of substances and techniques was guided by an understanding of the chemistry behind them, and to what extent it was simple trial and error. I wonder what happens if I add honey into the collodion to slow its drying? What if I add beer instead? The book I’m reading points out that these things are hygroscopic, but it doesn’t say whether that was a known characteristic at the time. I think it must have been, but maybe not; guncotton (a key element of collodion) was invented when a guy used his apron to mop up nitric acid, and then his apron exploded. (Not while he was wearing it, fortunately.) Knowledge of chemistry advanced remarkably between A Star Shall Fall and this book, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t still discovering things through sheer dumb chance.

(Skills I have acquired in the writing of this series: it occurred to me I could look up “hygroscopic” in the OED to get a sense of the term’s development. It doesn’t seem to have been used in quite that manner until 1875, a good decade after the experimentation with honey et. So while the quality itself may have been recognized, it wasn’t something they were talking about in those terms — not yet.)

It’s phenomenal, though, watching the speed with which technology developed. Not quite as fast as (say) digital photography has developed today, but still pretty amazing, given the tools they had to work with. And the results are amazing, too; there aren’t a lot of photographs I can use in researching the book — what I really want are London street scenes, and those are vastly outnumbered by a) portraits and b) cartes-de-visite of random foreign landmarks — but dude. There are photographs of my period. It’s the clearest sign I have of how this book stands on the threshold of the modern age.