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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

trying something entirely new

I don’t know how to get from where I left off last night to the end of the story — so instead I’m seeing if I can get from the end of the story to where I left off last night.

That is to say, earlier tonight I sat down and wrote a chunk of the final scene, then came back after a break and started writing the scene that comes before it. I’ll see how far I can get with that, then probably write the next one forward, and at that point I’ll have pretty much everything I know about this story. Whereupon I will hopefully figure out how to splice the two together.

This is utterly backwards for me, both literally and figuratively. I don’t write this way. But the other way wasn’t working, and hey, it’s only a short story; if I end up chucking out everything I wrote tonight, and everything I write tomorrow, it’s no huge loss. This may, like “Chrysalis,” be a story I need to write wrong before I can figure out how to write it right.

(I’m hoping for a result less broken than “Chrysalis” is. Fortunately, I’m also not attempting anything a tenth as arty as that story.)

1,173 very tangled words tonight. I think tomorrow I need to re-read chunks of my reference materials and get this crap straight in my head.

ETA: another 400 or so more. I remembered, or reconstructed, the way I wanted to handle what’s probably the most crucial turning point of the story; again, it may need replacing later, but at least I have it nailed down for the moment.

time lapse

Driving around today, my brain wandered — like it does — and this time it wandered onto the topic of time elapsing in fiction.

Twenty-seven years go by between the beginning and ending of In Ashes Lie. I noticed, while working on that book, how few models I had for stories like that: even on a series level, genre fiction tends toward plots that zoom by much more quickly. It’s a function of the type of stories we tell; lit-fic may explore one person’s growth over their lifetime, the gradual change of their relationship with a family member or whatever, but fantasy and SF usually feature a more immediate conflict, one which must be resolved soon or the consequences will be dire.

I think one of the things that endears Mercedes Lackey’s Last Herald-Mage trilogy to me, unexpectedly, is the way it breaks that model. Sure, in the first book Vanyel is an angsty teenager with incredible power — you could so turn that into an anime without half-trying — but when he shows up in the second installment, it’s twelve years later and he’s an actual adult. One with responsibilities and experience, who’s grown into his power and discovered what problems it can’t solve for him. I don’t know what the causal order was, whether the time-lapse created the Stefan plot or the Stefan plot required the time-lapse, but I honestly think the passage of those years is what redeems the series from being purely standard-issue crackfic. The changes with Jervis and Withen always struck me as particularly satisfying, and I think it’s because they aren’t sudden conversions. The moment of transformation may be sudden, but it’s years in the making, as both characters see what kind of man Vanyel has grown up to be, and weigh that against the prejudices they began with. Likewise, I much more readily buy Vanyel as the legendary Herald-Mage half the Collegium’s afraid of, because half the Collegium’s too young to remember his days as a snot-nosed brat. It’s harder to make that kind of role pay off believably in the short term.

But the tradeoff, of course, is that you lose the sense of conflict immediacy if you have years flying by. Also, you can (paradoxically) get away with either an essentially static character, or one who suddenly undergoes a major change of heart, if only a month or two elapses within the story. If a decade passes, on the other hand, you have to find ways to show the effect of that on your protagonist and those around her, and those effects will be both small and gradual-large. It’s all the challenge of writing an adult with a real history behind him, plus the challenge of showing that history in progress.

So who are some authors that do this, and do it well? I don’t mean stories like the Wheel of Time, where maybe a year or two has gone by but it’s all continuous plot; I’m looking for books or series that leap over intervening spans to show you a real percentage of a character’s life. Fantasy and science fiction books, specifically — I know lit-fic does this a lot, but it just doesn’t hold my interest.

first you put the left down, and then the right

Since several people have suggested new wordmeters to me: does anybody know of one that, like the old Zokutou meter, allows you to show the new material you’ve added on since the last update? As in, yesterday I had 2064, today I wrote 1028, now I have 3098. I liked seeing the different-colored bit on the end of the bar, displaying your forward progress.

Anyway, that’s where I stand, after being not at all sure I was going to get anything written today. I know where I want the story to go, but getting there is proving to be the hard part.

John Johnson showed up in today’s work, for those of you sufficiently versed in your 1605 history to know who that is. (The real trick will be figuring out a sensible way to reveal him later, for those who don’t already know. I’m not trying to be terribly coy in-text about the fact that this is a Gunpowder Plot story, but since my protagonist doesn’t know that yet, there’s a fair bit of obfuscation happening as a consequence.)

Nggggh. Needs moar action, and also some way to use the eclipses. Surely I can come up with something.

antho update

As posted by squirrel_monkey, our esteemed editor Ekaterina Sedia:

INTRODUCTION
WILD RIDE, Carrie Vaughn
SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE, Steve Duffy
COMPARISON OF EFFICACY RATES FOR SEVEN ANTIPATHETICS AS EMPLOYED AGAINST LYCANTHROPES, Marie Brennan
BEAUTIFUL GELREESH, Jeffrey Ford
SKIN IN THE GAME, Samantha Henderson
BLENDED, C.E. Murphy
LOCKED DOORS, Stephanie Burgis
WERELOVE, Laura Anne Gilman
IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING, Molly Tanzer
ROYAL BLOODLINES, Mike Resnick
DIRE WOLF, Genevieve Valentine
TAKE BACK THE NIGHT, Lawrence Schimmel
MONGREL, Maria Snyder
DEADFALL, Karen Everson
RED RIDING HOOD’S CHILD, N.K. Jemisin
ARE YOU A VAMPIRE OR A GOBLIN? Geoffrey Goodwin
THE PACK AND THE PICKUP ARTIST, Mike Brotherton
THE GARDEN, THE MOON, THE WALL, Amanda Downum
BLAMED FOR TRYING TO LIVE, Jesse Bullington
THE BARONY AT RODAL, Peter Bell
INSIDE OUT, Erzbet Yellowboy
GESTELLA, Susan Palwick

Running with the Pack is available for pre-order now; looks like it will be released in late May.

a decision at last

ceosanna, you won the icon sweepstakes. Many thanks to everyone who provided me with icons, especially all the ones that fit my description of what I thought I wanted; it’s just that my brain went sideways and decided this one had the most suitable vibe. Foggy and dark and a little bit mysterious. So what if bridges aren’t really a major plot point in the book; it works.

Expect to see a lot more of this image in the upcoming months.

racing the deadline

<misses the Zokutou word meter>

1280 words on “And Blow Them at the Moon” today, plus a hundred or two fleshing out the first scene I’d written, for a current total of 2064. I really want to finish this by the end of the month, which is doable if a) I figure out how to get Magrat to learn some but not all of what’s going on and b) the story doesn’t balloon out of control. The idea is to keep it below 10K at all costs, and preferably shorter than that, since the markets for such a length are limited.

Also, I need to figure out what to do with the eclipses. There were two of them, one lunar and one solar, in the weeks leading up to the Gunpowder Plot going kablooey; surely I can come up with something interesting to make out of that.

Will ponder that as I go to sleep. Maybe I’ll wake up with an idea.

should have posted this before

If you make money from your writing, take a look at the petition that Ursula Le Guin will be sending to Judge Chin re: the Google Book Settlement. I’m not positive if there will be a revision of the section where it complains about the “opt in to object” thing — which is a feature of class-action law, not really alterable in this case — but anyway, this is at least one channel by which to say “the Authors Guild representatives do not speak for me.”

necessary sacrifices

I’ve started over on “And Blow Them at the Moon.” As much as I like the opening scene I’d written, it just doesn’t fit the story; it introduces an additional pov (a bad decision, if I want to keep this thing short) and the tone is too light-hearted. This is not, I fear, going to be a light-hearted story. Not given what happened to Father Garnet, and to the conspirators, in the end.

(Man, reading about the Gunpowder Plot is depressing. Especially Sir Everard Digby. Talk about a waste.)

So that’s 614 words of a new start, and already I think it’s better. Father Garnet praying in Thames Street, and Magrat confronting the fact that she is displaying conduct unbecoming to a church grim. I need to find a way to say more about him, but maybe that will fit into a later scene.

Why I Want to Hit Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by Marie Brennan, Age 29

Because the man keeps having bits of poetry that are allllllllllllmost what I want for the Victorian book, but not quite — either because they don’t contain any phrase I could use for a title, or because they go astray in some fashion that doesn’t make them work. Take these two lines:

To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm
Of sound and smoke

It’s got grit! And a city! And a Queen! Surely this will work, right?

Except that here’s the full passage:

Take, read! and be the faults your Poet makes
Or many or few,
He rests content, if his young music wakes
A wish in you
To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm
Of sound and smoke,
For his clear heaven, and these few lanes of elm
And whispering oak.

In other words, yay nature. Which, no. There’s what this book is about, and there’s that passage, and the two are pretty much at opposite poles to one another.

The problem, I’ve decided, is that the Victorians are insufficiently angry. My impression is that they wrote about nature’s beauty as a means of hiding from industrialization; what I want is poetry that is mad as hell about industrialization and not going to take it anymore. The few things I’ve found that come close to fitting that bill have failed to provide me with a good title quote.

So I keep searching. And I glare at Tennyson, because I just speed-read HIS COMPLETE POETIC WORKS and still don’t have a title. <fume>

charity update/repost

Since I know people sometimes miss things posted when they’re away from the computer, let me recap: I’m participating in the charity auction, offering a bit of Onyx Court history for an event or individual of your choosing. More information here, and bidding here. It’s up to $20 already (I’m flattered!), and all going to a very good cause.

Help Haiti

Once again, LJ fandom is organizing a charity auction, this time to raise money for organizations responding to the earthquake in Haiti. The community is , and there are many offers for original fiction, fanfiction, art, music, editing services, and more.

I’ve decided to try something new with my own contribution: a kind of fanfiction of my own work. If you give me an event or individual in English history, I will tell you how the fae of the Onyx Court were involved. Not a full short story, but at least a couple of paragraphs about Blacktooth Meg and the Great Stink of London, or the time Charles Darwin almost wrote a book on the evolution of faeries. (Or whatever.)

Depending on what you pick, I may end up liking the result enough that I’ll ask your permission to make it canon. 🙂

Bid here; read the post for details on how the auction is being run. And look through the rest of the community for other things you might be interested in. The money is going to a very critical cause, after all.

since I’ve been given the all-clear . . . .

“Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes” — aka the Fake Werewolf Paper — will be in Ekaterina Sedia’s upcoming anthology Running with the Pack, coming out from Prime Books. I don’t have a full ToC yet, but the cover here lists Laura Anne Gilman, Carrie Vaughn, and C.E. Murphy, and Erzebet Yellowboy just announced her own sale, so that’s a total of five authors you can expect.

This was so totally not the story I intended to write when I sat down, but it’s the story that came out, and I’m very glad that it hit the target anyway.

and so the help requests begin

This one perhaps goes out to my British readers more than others, but in theory anybody’s capable of answering it for me.

What authors — ideally spec fic, just because of my reading preferences, but not necessarily — have done a good job of representing cockney speech? I need authors, not media sources, because I’m curious about the methods people have used for showing it on the page. Like any dialect or accent, it’s really easy to fall into the territory of “really annoying and borderline unreadable,” and I’m keen to avoid that, while still conveying the distinct flavor of the pattern. Probably I’ll rely more on phrasing and quirks of word choice than phonetic representation, but I’d like to see how other people have tackled this issue.

So who’s writing good cockey-centric fiction? Bonus points if it’s Victorian, but since my concern is on the sound more than the vagaries of rhyming slang, modern-day stories are also acceptable.

talk about misplaced effort

Dear Brain,

Did we really need to run upstairs so as to type out 563 words belonging to the third book of a trilogy for which we have not yet written the first book?

Did we really?

I mean, what you interrupted was the cleaning of the living room, so it’s no big loss, but still. Devoting that energy in a slightly more productive direction would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Swan

there’s always more you don’t know

These two threads on Making Light?

Are why I have my “help me o internets” posts.

Because some of the bad books can be spotted a mile off — but not all. Some of them you’ve got to look at to identify. Some of them have to be read through. And some of them you can read through and still not know they’re untrustworthy resources, because you don’t know that field well enough to spot where the facts are wrong or there’s evidence being overlooked or whatever.

And at that point, you have two choices. You can either read a lot about the topic, so you become well-informed enough to spot the bad stuff on your own; or you can ask around and get the benefit of other people’s wisdom.

Since I have this terrible habit of being interested in lots of different things, rather than sticking with one and making it my stomping ground, I’m dependent on the assistance of others. So thank you all for your suggestions, and stay tuned for more cries for help. For this next book, I’m going to need to research topics ranging from the history of the London Underground to Chinese folklore, and many other things besides.

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.”)

Three things

1) I’ve made two additions to the previous post, for interested parties to read.

2) Congratulations to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which has been vetted as a SFWA pro market! (This means they have been publishing long enough, and regularly enough, and pay their authors enough money, for SFWA to accept sales to them as qualifications for SFWA pro status. Doesn’t matter much to readers, but it’s a nice touch of certification for the magazine.)

3) Since I know I have some aspiring writers in my readership: Nalo Hopkinson is offering mentorships this spring. She is a lovely woman and an excellent writer; I’ve never worked with her in a professional capacity, nor gotten any critiques from her, but what I know is enough to make me recommend this wholeheartedly to folks looking for some guidance and feedback. I’m sure she’ll put you through boot camp, but you’ll come out the other side much better for it. (And unlike Clarion et al, this is novel-focused, and you don’t have to leave home for six weeks.)

Poll time!

I am debating a small point of spelling in my copy-edits, brought about by the change in English spelling standards over the centuries*. In this particular case, it is the variation between faerie and fairy (and also faery and fairie, but those are less common and I haven’t messed with them). The possibility on the table is that, as belief in the aforementioned creatures declines, I’ll use the “fairy” spelling when the speaker is talking about them as superstition, and “faerie” when talking about the real thing. But I can’t make up my mind whether I want to do that or not, and so you get a poll.

This will also have relevance for the Victorian book, by which point “fairy” had far surpassed “faerie” as the most commonly-used spelling for the word (and belief had also sharply declined, at least in urban areas).

*This has been an unexpected problem for me, in the Onyx Court books. For example, the general pattern is to spell the surname of the Queen of Scots as Stewart, but the surname of her grandson Charles as Stuart. Etc. And nobody, so far as I’m aware, formally changed the name of Candlewick Street to Cannon Street; it just kind of cruised along being one but occasionally the other until eventually it was the other all the time. Which are issues I didn’t consider when I wrote what I thought was going to be a standalone Elizabethan book.

Edit: So I’m leaning toward deferring the problem. The poll results so far have “pleased” winning by a noticeable margin, but a lot of “confused” votes as well, with a good discussion down in the comments of how this could be resolved by drawing attention to the difference up front. Unfortunately, there’s no graceful way to do that in my narrative as it stands — I’d have to a) horribly interrupt the first relevant scene or b) stick an out-of-narrative note at the front of the book. Neither of which sits well with me. But it doesn’t become a real issue until the Victorian period, when their rampant fairy obsession makes the use of a decidedly non-Victorian form distracting, and so I think for now I’ll stick with my usual spelling. Then, once I start drafting the next book, I’ll see if I can’t build in something that addresses the difference properly.

Edit 2: To give you an idea of why this issue sticks in my brain like a burr — the Onyx Court books are edited to American spelling, except in cases where I’m referencing something British. So ships are in the harbor but Henry Ware got murdered in Coldharbour, and the characters are looking at colors when talking about Newton’s essay “Of Colours.” Despite the fact that the entire thing is in Britain, with British characters. This annoys the snot out of me, but short of strong-arming my publisher into giving me a UK copy-edit (my preference), I can’t do much about it.

step by step, we’ll get there

While I was in Boston, I finally figured out what “And Blow Them at the Moon” wants to be about. The Gunpowder Plot, obviously; but that’s a long and complicated tale to fit into a short story, and could easily turn into a tedious history lesson instead of an interesting piece of fiction. Ideally, this will not be like Deeds of Men — i.e. not pitched primarily at people who have already read one or both novels, and please God not twenty-one thousand words long again — what I want is a short story I can try and sell to a proper market. Which means I need some frame I can put on the Gunpowder Plot, a frame that consists of a character and an engaging emotional arc for same.

While being an Onyx Court story. And it needs to explain some of the weirdnesses in the history, most notably the Monteagle Letter. That’s not too much to ask for, right?

So I think I found it, and my 599 words I had in December are now 1,105. Not a huge amount of progress, but I think I’m going to have to do a lot of wrangling to make this thing happen; I suspect there will be a great deal of infodumping that later gets scrubbed out, as I sort through what actually matters to a) my protagonist and b) my reader. Which means my progress will likely remain slow. But I’m going to try to get this done soon; today I ordered a metric ton of research material for the next book, and I need to get my head out of the seventeenth century and into the nineteenth asap.

And, y’know, it would be nice to get a story done in the first week or two of the year. Good omens and all.