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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

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.

My brain, let me show you it

Apparently I am the sort of person who thinks, “hmmm, I need to eat lunch,” and also “hmmmm, there’s that thing I’ve been meaning to watch for research,” and therefore sits down to enjoy some teriyaki salmon while watching a documentary on London’s sewers.

Complete with re-enactment video of what things looked like before the new system.

What can I say? I have a strong stomach.

a question for the Londoners

If you were to talk about where Pelham Crescent is in London, what district name would you use? Kensington? South Kensington? Is it close enough to count as part of Knightsbridge? (Not according to Wikipedia, but.) Or something else entirely?

It’s a beast, trying to sort out the boundaries of intra-urban place-names for a city you don’t live in. And for all I know the areas were defined a little differently in 1884, but that officially falls into category of “if you can prove me wrong, Dear Reader, then you bloody well deserve your victory.”

Three!

Fans of Driftwood, rejoice: I finally got around to writing and revising and submitting a third story, which are usually the prerequisite steps to selling anything. Which is to say, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has bought “Remembering Light.”

That’s three, which means Driftwood officially gets its own category in my site organization. I hope to have quite a few more than that in the long run, though.

what should I do?

So I’ve mentioned before that I’ll be one of the GoHs at Sirens. But I’m allowed to submit my own programming proposal, apart from the stuff I’m already slated for, and I kind of think I would like to do something.

The question is, what?

I have a few ideas floating around my head, but none of them have really leapt up and convinced me that’s what I should go with. I therefore turn to you, The Internets, and ask: if you were coming to hear me do something at a con other than give a keynote address and present on my own writing (which are part of my GoH duties), what would you want it to be?

They have a good outline of different programming models here. The first two are out (paper and pre-empaneled paper set; I’ve had enough of those for now), and I’m unlikely to assemble a panel discussion in the remaining time. But that leaves everything from workshops on down as a possibility. And while this year’s theme is faeries and the conference is generally focused on women in fantasy, neither of those is a straitjacket. Practically any interest of mine could fit into this — though I don’t think I inkle-weave well enough to teach anybody else, and I suspect there would be liability issues with a “Stage Combat 101” class.

So help me brainstorm. If you could have me host a discussion on any topic, or teach a workshop on some skill (writing-related or otherwise), or anything else random, what would it be? I’m not sure if I want to riff off some of my website essays, or talk about the role of violence in fiction, or how to write politics, or fight scenes, or whatever. Too many ideas, not enough decision. Halp?

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.

BCS anthology

One of the victims of me falling behind on e-mail has been this announcement: Scott Andrews, editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, has released an anthology of the magazine!

The Best of BCS, Year One features such authors as Marie Brennan, Richard Parks, and 2009 Campbell Award finalists Tony Pi and Aliette de Bodard. It includes “Thieves of Silence” by Holly Phillips, named to Locus’s 2009 Recommended Reading List, and “Father’s Kill” by Christopher Green, winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story of 2009.

(My contribution is “Driftwood,” for those who are fans.)

If you’ve been meaning to sample the magazine, this is a good way to do it: a $2.99 ebook available in five different formats. Proceeds get funneled back into keeping the magazine going — and since BCS is that semi-rarity, a magazine that pays its authors more than a token amount, I’m all in favor of that! Table of contents and other details here.

further adventures in foul period language

My apologies for continuing to discuss profanity here, but it’s just funny.

New seventeenth-century insult for my vocabulary: “windfucker.” Which, bizarrely enough, was apparently a northern term for a kestrel. (They also called it a fuckwind.) And then it got borrowed as an insult. From which I conclude that the seventeenth-century mind? Really not so different from the twenty-first century mind.

This is why I should not be let within three miles of the OED historical thesaurus. It’s bad enough when I find these things by accident, looking stuff up in the ordinary OED; if I had the thesaurus to play with, I’d never get the book written.

Anyway, now I want to revise Ashes to put the term in there somewhere. Antony probably wouldn’t say it, but Jack totally would.

things that make me happy

. . . because this is the kind of language geek I’ve turned into.

According to the OED, I am now permitted to use “fucking” as a intensifier in sentences (e.g. “Get out of my fucking house”). It’s certainly attested by 1893 — in a slang dictionary, which suggests it wasn’t brand-new — and likely appeared as early as 1864. Which is delightful, because outdated vulgarity just doesn’t carry as much impact, and right now I need Dead Rick to be as forceful as I can possibly make him sound.

I’ve fudged my word choice a little in the previous books, in cases where I just couldn’t find an equivalent period term. (Like the use of “medieval” in Midnight Never Come: that’s a nineteenth-century word.) And a few of those instances were slang-related, because it’s so hard to find evidence of truly casual and non-standard speech from more than a couple of centuries ago. One of the lovely things about moving forward in time with this series is that my available vocabulary, standard and otherwise, gets larger with every book.

We now return to the scene that is causing Dead Rick to swear.

more researching

I’m about to go pick up a mess of books on Irish immigrants in Britain, and I’ve recalled a couple of Scotland Yard histories from Stanford’s auxiliary library facility, but in the meantime: does anybody have a specific recommendation for a history book that would talk about the Fenian bombings of the 1880s, and the early history of the Special Branch in investigating them?

I tell ya, my brain . . . .

I rarely remember my dreams, but I know that last night my brain decided it should mash together the two big things sitting around in it. Which is how I ended up trying to find my orthopedist’s office in the V&A.

I don’t know; I just work here.

Speaking of work, time to finish Eliza’s adventures in Regent Street and get to the bit where Special Branch is breathing down her neck.

things I have not been able to suss out

Hey, historians! Can anybody tell me when the north bank of the Thames was properly embanked/walled/whatever, east of the Victoria Embankment? That one formally ends at Blackfriars, and I’m trying to figure out what the riverbank would look like to someone standing a bit further east (between Blackfriars and Queenhithe) in 1884. As in, is it a mess of wharves and wooden pilings and what-have-you, or has someone built a nice tidy stone wall by then?

Why yes, I am obsessive about my details. How could you tell?

Anyway, my books don’t say, and I can’t get the Internet to help me. Possibly my fu is just not on tonight. And yeah, Peter Ackroyd has that whole book on the Thames, but it’s 11 p.m. and even Amazon Prime can’t teleport things to my desk. So I figured I’d ask and see if anybody can answer the question without me having to add to my research shelf.

Okay, I’ve got one.

I found something new to post, that didn’t require much jinking to make it web-ready: “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?”

This originally came out in Talebones, whose fourteen-year run came to an end last fall, much to my sadness. Patrick Swenson published three of my stories in total: this, “The Twa Corbies,” and “The Snow-White Heart,” which was in their final issue. (You can still buy back issues here.)

. . . you know, posting this has reminded me of something I forgot. Namely, that this story tried to turn into a ballad as I was writing it. You can see that in the style — this was the first real stylistic experiment I ever tried writing — the rhythm of the “But who shall lead the dance?” suggested the end of a ballad stanza to me, and everything else followed from there.

Maybe I’ll revisit that, and actually try to write it as lyrics, just for fun. No doubt I’ll fall on my nose; poetry and related forms are not something I’m good at. But hey, it’ll be good exercise. And the silly thing’s halfway there already.

Victorian Book Report: Strange and Secret Peoples, by Carole G. Silver

I first read this book just because I owned it. Then I re-read it three years ago, when I thought the Victorian book would be the next one I wrote in the Onyx Court series, before detouring through In Ashes Lie and A Star Shall Fall. Now I’m re-reading bits and pieces of it for reference, because this, ladies and gents, is the nineteenth-century answer to Katherine Briggs’ Pale Hecate’s Team. Briggs was analyzing fairy folkore and its literary expression in Shakespeare’s day; Silver is doing the same for the Victorians.

She breaks it down thematically: the origins of fairies, changelings and abductions, fairy brides, “racial myths and mythic races,” fairy cruelty, and flitting, the departure of fairies for their own lands (or sometimes Australia). Furthermore, she questions what these things meant to the Victorians, why these kinds of stories became popular; in the case of changelings, for example, she talks about disease (both physical and mental), and about social response to deviant behavior, and about the class-based and racial tensions within Victorian society, that strongly affected the way these stories were told and received, and who was doing the telling and receiving.

In other words, pretty much everything you’d want to write a Victorian fairy novel.

If I have one complaint, it’s that I want this book to be bigger. Only 234 pages, counting the endnotes; I’m sure there’s more to be said here, and I wish Silver had said it.

10K!

Thanks to April’s “500 a day” rule, missing several days has not prevented me from arriving at the 10K milestone on schedule.

For the record, the title hunt is still on. If you’ve sent me e-mail and not gotten a reply yet, I promise to take care of that soon. In the meanwhile, keep on suggesting; I appreciate all the help.

Word count: 10,025
LBR quota: It’s the River Fleet. I think it counts as blood.
Authorial sadism: Leaving Dead Rick standing knee-deep in the aforesaid Fleet, wondering whether he’s going to run into a tosher or Blacktooth Meg first.

Advice from the pro side

Keep notes.

Keep notes from the start. Write down what the characters look like, and where things are. If you invent a town or something along those lines, make a map, even if it’s just chicken scratches on the back of an envelope.

By taking such steps, you will save yourself the effort of having to reconstruct these things by scrounging for details in the three novels, one novelette, and one novella you have already completed. And when the thing you’re trying to map is a faerie palace which (you have abundantly established) doesn’t correspond in a logical fashion to the city above it, you will be very grateful that you have saved yourself this tedious and problematic work.

If you fail to keep notes, you will use up all your scratch paper trying to find a way to make it all fit together, so you can then decide where and how to break it for the purposes of the fourth book. So be smart from the start.

In other words, don’t be like me.

GOT YOU.

Okay, fine, I was totally wrong about the remaining wordcount; you’re 7,410 words and obviously want to be a novelette since I know I rushed the ending. FINE. You can be a novelette.

You can be a novelette later, once I’ve mustered the will to revise you. But for now, “Mad Maudlin,” you are DONE. And that’s all I care about.

I go fall down now.

so. close.

Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh I am thisclose to being able to finish “Mad Maudlin” (no, I didn’t get it done last month) and the end of it is driving me batty. (Which is a funny joke, given the subject matter.) I just need to figure out what message Maud gives Peter, and then how to make the next bit happen in a dramatic way, and somewhere work in Peter doing that thing he shouldn’t do (moreso than he’s done already), and then it’ll be the tag scene and I’m done. We’re at 5,698 words, and there can’t be more than a thousand left, and WHY IS THIS STORY NOT DONE ALREADY.

Because I haven’t threaded my way through the last few twists yet, that’s why. Come on, brain, help me out on this one, and then we can sack out and watch Dexter. But until you do, we’re not going anywhere other than this chair, except maybe the bed to roll around and stare at the ceiling and try to figure things out. Work with me, here. We’re almost done.

Updated with revelation: Duh. You promised yourself this was a hack draft. This is you getting the framework down on the page, so you can go back and have experts help you make it better. So all that crap you’re worrying about is stuff you can fiddle with later. You’ll run it by three or four people to get the research stuff right, and then once you have that you can apply writer-brain and make it more exciting, and then you can have your crit group look at it and tell you where it still needs improvement. Obsessing over the finer points now may even prove to be a waste of time, as your clever ideas might get cut on account of being Wrong.

So just write the end, and let it suck, and worry about it later.