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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Took the damn thing long enough.

I spent a stupidly long time wrestling with the last paragraphs of this bloody thing — write two grafs, delete one, write another, delete both, write one, delete it, replace it with the two previously deleted, wipe the first one out but leave the second, etc — before I finally hit something I was willing to hit “save” on.

But “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” is finally complete, at 3100 excessively difficult words. I suspect there’s some interesting theme buried in there, that I can try to unearth when I go back to revise, but for now, we’ll call that a draft.

Look! It’s, like, actual short story production!

1663 / 4000

I miss the Zokutou meter. <sniff>

If I weren’t getting sleepy, I might try to finish “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” (the story I blame mrissa for) tonight. But I’ve done more than 1300 already, and I suppose it’s just as well to spend a little extra time pondering just what Hel might say to Loki, especially while there’s a snake dripping venom on his face.

(Or more to the point, while there’s a snake dripping venom into the bowl above his face. Because Sigyn’s going to be sitting there during this whole conversation. And won’t that be interesting.)

But hey. It’s like I’m actually writing a short story or something. I’d forgotten what that feels like . . . .

State of the Swan

I don’t have to report for jury duty today — yay! So here’s an update on where I stand work-wise, in the wake of the India trip and A Star Shall Fall.

1) I do, of course, have to deal with copy-edits and page proofs for Star. Not sure yet when those will show up, though, so for the time being that work is in limbo.

2) Next after that one is the Victorian book. Due to the vagaries of my last few years, this, the fourth Onyx Court novel, will be the first one where I’ve had more than a month or two of lead time in which to do my research before I put words on the page. You have no idea how wonderful that feels. In order to give myself more time for the actual drafting, I plan to start that at the beginning of April, but that still leaves me five months for a leisurely, low-pressure campaign of prep reading. Look for various “help me o internets” posts as I figure out what I want to pick up first.

3) Writing full-time means I need to hold myself to a higher standard of productivity than I did while teaching or taking classes. Ergo, I’m also starting work on a pure spec project. For those not familiar with the term, writing “on spec,” i.e. “on speculation,” means you’re doing it on your own time, without a contract promising money when you’re done. This project, code-named TLT, is a just-for-me novel; if I don’t finish it, or if I do finish it and then decide it isn’t really for publication, then that’s okay. I’m doing it because I want to, because I think it’ll be fun. And “having fun” is an important part of this job, for the preservation of sanity. Anyway, the plan for this is to aim for 5K a week, with weekends off, and if I don’t make my goal then I won’t beat myself up over it.

4) I also have another sekrit projekt on the back burner, code-named FY. No wordcount goals for this one; I just want to play around with it and see what happens.

5) Short stories. I’m beginning to accept that short stories aren’t likely to happen while I’m drafting Onyx Court books, but the result is that my pipeline of stories has gotten fairly empty at every stage — very few upcoming publications, because very few sales, because very few submissions, because very few stories prepared, because very few stories awaiting revision. Between now and April, I’d like to make some progress in fixing that. The tentative goal is to finish both Edward’s untitled story and “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” before the end of the month; we’ll see if I can manage it or not.

Now I head up to the city for errands and the Borderlands signing tonight. India pictures later — hopefully tonight or tomorrow.

aaaaaaand we’re done.

A Star Shall Fall has been revised and sent to my editor. Now I wait for the CEM to show up. (Anybody want to start a betting pool as to whether I’ll be working on it over Christmas?)

Time to go eat the candy bar I’ve been saving as my reward.

Finit. (Again.)

Unless I end up cutting more than five hundred words from this in the copy-edits — which, I will grant, is possible — A Star Shall Fall has now squeaked out In Ashes Lie for the title of Longest Novel I’ve Ever Written.

By about five hundred words.

It’s been kind of amusing, watching the count inch upward as I add in bits here and there. I had a bet on with myself as to whether it would break that boundary, only I kept changing my wager. 🙂 Anyway, I may or may not be truly done with revisions; I’ll be looking back over it when I come home from India, before I send it off to my editor, to see if anything else has occurred to me in the interim. But for now, I declare it Done.

Time to go reward myself with a candy bar and some fun reading.

idea: good, timing: less optimal

Dear Whoever Puts the Inspiration Juice Into the Shower Water,

I appreciate it — I really do. But couldn’t you have waited to give me the opening paragraph to that Onyx Court story until after I was done revising this Onyx Court NOVEL?

Love,
A writer who was trying to stay focused

***

On the bright side, now that I know this and “An Enquiry into the Causes” aren’t the same story, I can write this one without doing any particular research at all. I’ll have to look some details up, sure, but I’ve read the necessary books already.

It’s kind of refreshing, after Deeds of Men.

today is Thank Your Computer’s Processor Day

<pets the desktop computer>

You’ve been such a good little thing tonight. Hardly even complained at all. I promise I’ll do my very best never again to make you run not one but two massive astronomical simulation programs at the same time.

But because of your hard work, I now know that I have to rewrite one of the scenes in this book.

Er, thanks. I think.

Love,
Your Friendly Neighborhood OCD Novelist

ETA: P.S. Sorry. I lied about the “never again” thing. That’s what you get for being so cooperative.

GOD DAMN IT.

Or rather, God damn Edmond Halley. No, I really mean it this time. It turns out that one of my research books — one I’ve only been dipping into for pieces of information, rather than reading cover-to-cover — contains, squirreled away in one of its corners, the tidbit I searched handwritten Royal Society minutes in vain for.

Because I was looking in 1705. I didn’t think to ask for the minutes from freaking 1696.

Which turns out to be when Halley first said, “Oh hey, I think cometary orbits are ellipses, and the one we saw in 1682 is the one from 1607, with a period of about 75 years.”

Now, the minutes (as quoted in this book) don’t say whether he then did the basic arithmetic necessary to guess that the 1682 comet would be coming back in the mid-eighteenth century. But you have to figure he did. Which means this bastard came up with that theory nine years earlier than I thought.

Which leaves me with a choice: either I can take out all the references to the fae learning about this problem in 1705, rewrite Irrith’s personal history and the political history of the Onyx Court in a fashion that compensates for the breakup of a certain constellation of events that occurred in the opening years of the eighteenth century, and give up on the cameo appearance by Isaac Newton that I just wrote tonight . . .

. . . or I can remember that, hey, I’ve already said they learned about this from a seer, and then handwave a reason why she didn’t get that vision until Halley got around to publishing his ideas.

Guess which one I’m going to choose.

also

I would like to take this moment to damn Edmond Halley for publishing his Astronomiæ cometicæ synopsis three months before he presented on that topic at the Royal Society. Because of him, I’m having to rewrite this prologue (originally drafted as part of my submission packet for the book, i.e. before I really did my research), and it’s just annoying. Why couldn’t he have had a nice rousing argument at a Society meeting first?

census

There are at least 110 named characters in A Star Shall Fall, counting dead people who get mentioned in passing.

Oh, wait — 111. I forgot about Reginn. And Fafnir, so that’s 112.

Now begins the task of determining which ones deserve to be in the Dramatis Personae. Not all of them, certainly. But where to draw the line? That is, as always, the question.

bounced e-mail — do you know the recipient?

Back in August, I got an e-mail from an individual with the initials GH (not sure if he wants his name shared publicly) who offered assistance in translating some bits of dialogue from this book into German. I just tried to get back in touch with him, and the e-mail bounced, saying the recipient domain rejected it. If you are the one who passed my request along to GH, could you drop me an e-mail or LJ message and help me contact him?

HELP NEEDED: 18th century dancing

Totally the wrong kind of dance in my icon there, but it’s the best I’ve got.

Does anyone out there know, or know someone who knows, how to dance a minuet? Or any other kind of mid-eighteenth-century dance, for that matter. The Wikipedia entry on the minuet step is incomprehensible to the layperson, since it was written in 1724, and while the videos it links to show me the basic step, they don’t give me any sense of the shape of the whole dance, and how one interacts with one’s partner.

In other words, it’s time to replace my bracketed placeholder descriptions in the scene where Galen’s dancing a minuet, and I need references to go by. Movie scenes that depict it correctly would also work; unfortunately, the closest I’ve been able to get is Regency dancing, and that isn’t the same.

Hellllllllllp!

sale!

My Hel icon isn’t normally what I’d use for a story sale, being as how she’s not a very happy-looking goddess. But when the story in question is “The Waking of Angantyr,” based on an Old Norse poem of the same name, and the bastard child of my senior honors thesis on weapons in Viking Age Scandinavia . . . how could I use any icon but Hel?

So, yeah. “The Waking of Angantyr” has sold to the new magazine Heroic Fantasy Quarterly for (I think) their second issue. If berserker ghosts and cursed swords float your Viking longship, check it out when the story goes live.

Revisions, Day 3

I can tell I was grappling hard with issues of plot and characterization and so on while writing this book because man, I have some awkward prose in here.

Mind you, my not-paying-attention prose of today is still generally better than my paying-attention prose of, say, five years ago, but that’s cold comfort. My miniscript has “awk” scribbled all over the margins. Relatively easy to fix; also boring as hell. It’s much easier to motivate myself to change the setting of a scene or re-order a set of conversational plot points than it is to vacuum the suck out of a paragraph.

And yeah, this is me procrastinating. My set goal is seven miniscript pages knocked off each day; I’ve done three so far. Don’ wanna go back to work. Wanna play with a new story. <whine>

Sometimes I really wish my job was something that would allow me to watch TV while I work.

gathering fodder

My recent SF Novelists posts, and a related series of posts by Kate Elliott and Ken Scholes over on Babel Clash, have turned up several male writers saying they’re nervous about writing female characters because they’re worried they’ll get it wrong. And I point at the second my posts I just linked as proof that I don’t think it’s so hard — but I’ve realized that’s a bit disingenuous. There are ways writers (male and female alike) screw it up. They just aren’t the ones people seem to be worrying about when they say “but I don’t know how to write women!”

So I’d like some help gathering fodder for more posts on the topic, this time looking at the common pitfalls. (And how to avoid them, but really, 90% of that is noticing the pit before you fall into it.) I’m thinking of things like Women in Refrigerators and the Madonna-Whore complex. What other things can you add to the list?

short story meme

You know what? I think my short-story-producing brain needs a kick in the rump. So I’m going to meme for the first time in a while, with something I picked up by way of yhlee and mrissa.

Give me the title of a story I’ve never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got submitted to magazines, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I’d been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.

(Incorporated Mris’ edit — the original phrasing had to do with “posting” stories, because it seems to have started among fanficcers. Also, as per Mris, I make no promises that these won’t turn into real stories. In fact, I’m kind of hoping they will.)