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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Comet Book Report: English Society in the 18th Century, by Roy Porter

This book makes a good pairing with Picard, since Porter takes a broader view, showing societal trends rather than details of the moment. The flip side is that he’s not quite as readable; it’s harder to make generalized statements about the effects of enclosure on rural tenants as entertaining as anecdotes about Fleet weddings. But it’s far from the worst piece of analytical writing I’ve ever had to tackle — far, far from it — even though Porter’s writing from something of a Marxist perspective, which all too often would bore me to tears. He doesn’t come across as having an ideological axe to grind, and that probably makes a big difference. But he does look at societal trends through the lens of changing economic conditions, and I can take that in moderated doses.

The one place he really does shine, in terms of readability, is in the opening chapter “Contrasts,” when he does a swift-moving overview of English behavior and national character during the century. To quote a good passage:

Englishmen excused their vices as virtues and indulged them with brio. They liked being thought bloody-minded roughnecks. ‘Anything that looks like a fight,’ observed the Frenchman Henri Misson, ‘is delicious to an Englishman’ — something even a lord could confirm. ‘I love a mob,’ explained the Duke of Newcastle; ‘I headed one once myself.’ Duelling remained common among top people. […] In 1798 none other than Prime Minister William Pitt and George Tierney, a leading Whig, exchanged shots. Violence was endemic. In 1770, following a pupil rebellion, the Riot Act had to be read at Winchester School. At Rugby, the young gentlemen mined the head’s study with gunpowder. [!]

[…] The English — so foreigners saw them — ate to excess, drank like lords, and swore like troopers (among ‘cunning women’ cursing was still a fine art). Henry Herbert, ninth Earl of Pembroke, was ‘so blasphemous at tennis that the [bishop] of Ireland was forced to leave off playing with him.’ Dr Johnson ‘could not bear anything like swearing’, yet he was in a minority, since in his day even fashionable ladies habitually made the air blue. A traveller arriving in London, quipped the German pastor Karl Moritz, might jump to the conclusion that everyone was called ‘Damme’.

It isn’t all quite so engaging, but that gave me enough of a good start that I was willing to stick with it even when things took a drier (but still informative) turn.

Comet Book Report: Dr. Johnson’s London, by Liza Picard

I’ve been doing research for this novel for a little while, so I’m going to try to play catch-up with the book reports. How much success I’ll have is anybody’s guess.

As usual, I started with Liza Picard, whom I adore. She continues to be a delightfully readable source of random factoids on the daily life of London. She isn’t a perfectly objective source — despite drawing heavily on Johnson and Boswell for information, she has no compunctions about saying she deplores Johnson’s manners and Boswell’s style — but she pays attention to the details of lived experience, and particularly of women’s experience (interior decorating is as interesting of a topic to her as crime). For a starting point, she can’t be beat.

I really don’t know what I would do without this woman. Her books land precisely in the time-periods I’m writing about, and she’s got one for each novel I’ve written or contracted for. It will be a sad, sad day if I go on to write a Blitz book and have no Picard to start the ball rolling.

Stay tuned for more reports on daily-life-type books, before I move onto more specific topics.

First milestone!

I promise not to do a wordcount update every day, but it’s nice to note the important events. Tonight’s work put me over ten thousand words, which is the first milestone on a very long path. (The plan is for this book to be more like the length of Ashes, i.e. circa 140K. Ten days done; a hundred and thirty to go.)

Barely an hour for this 1K, even with a very lengthy pause to research the coat colors of Greek horse breeds. Yeah, we’re still in the honeymoon phase, all right.

it begins . . . .

Actually, it began a while ago, when my agent asked me to write a sample of the next Onyx Court book to send out with the proposal. I already had nearly eight thousand words in the bank when I announced the deal.

But today is the real beginning, the day when I sit down and start cranking out words at a steady pace. The LBR icon will come back, I’m sure, for progress posts, but this first one gets my brand-spanking-new comet icon. (It really ought to be a pic of Halley’s comet, but the sad truth is that the 1986 return did not produce any pictures half so spectacular as this one — whichever comet it is — and the various older depictions don’t make great icons. You’d all be wondering what the white smudge is, or why I have a Bayeux Tapestry icon for an eighteenth-century book.)

Anyhoo. 1093 words: a hair over quota, to cross the 9K boundary and make myself feel good. I’ll talk more later about Galen, the mortal protagonist of this book, and the ways in which I’m going to have to stretch to write him, but so far, so good. I think it’s safe to say Galen is not in much danger of being boring.

Tomorrow, I get to play with a centaur . . .

Five and Six

It’s May 1st. Do you know what that means?

Time for me to start work on the sequel to In Ashes Lie.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Onyx Court series will continue! I’m slated for two more books: one in the eighteenth century, one in the nineteenth. Technically they have working titles, but around the house, they’re known as “the comet book” and “the Victorian book.” (Exciting, I know.) The latter was first announced back in 2007 — the original plan was for me to write that one instead of In Ashes Lie, because I was going to do these things out of chronological order. The comet book goes in between: culminating in 1759, it mashes together Halley’s comet, Sir Isaac Newton (yes, I know he’s dead by then), alchemy, and the consequences of the Great Fire of London (coming in June to a bookshelf near you).

So, the series in order: an Elizabethan faerie spy fantasy, a Stuart faerie disaster fantasy, an Enlightenment faerie alchemical fantasy, and a Victorian faerie steampunk fantasy.

(And then maybe a Blitz book and a modern book, but I’d have to think up plots for those first.)

There’s a bit of a shakeup on the back end, though it won’t mean much for you the readers: the publisher for these next two will be Tor, not Orbit. No terribly exciting drama to tell you about; it’s just that Orbit wanted me to work on something new before returning to this series, but I was keen to keep going. The intent is for Tor to put out the comet book in 2010, and the Victorian book in 2011. Both will be trade paperbacks, with a possible later reissue as mass-market. And OMG I can’t wait to write these things.

I’ll in London again in early June, doing the research round. Look for Trip-Blogging Part Three then, and ongoing posts about my reading and wordcounts, which I will endeavour to make interesting. (In fact, stay tuned for revelations as to which recent questions on this journal have been secretly comet-related . . . .)

Eighteenth century, here I come!

A mixed wiktory

“Remembering Light”

Man, I finish this thing before game, only to find out game’s been canceled. Curse you, zunger! <shakes fist>

Oh well. Thanks to that deadline, I managed to get a fourth story completed before the end of April (if only just barely). It’s a flailing mess in places, because I kept changing my mind on certain details, like how Noirin’s world is falling apart and what exactly Last was trying to get out of all of this, but that is, as we say, what revision’s for.

I now have four Driftwood stories, of which two have been published; the other is a little flash piece that doesn’t mean much unless you’re already familiar with Driftwood, hence not something I’m every going to try to sell. But that’s enough for me to legitimately feel like this constitutes a set — especially once I find the time to revise this thing and get it on the market.

But right now, we’re going to go put something on the Magic Picture Box and drool on ourselves for a while. Because cramming three thousand words of this thing out of my head and onto the screen in a couple of hours has left me more than a little brain-dead.

Almost . . . there . . .

“Remembering Light”

Nearly 2K more on this story, as of this afternoon. Can I finish it before it’s time to go to game tonight? Ergo, before the end of the month? Let’s find out . . . .

last excerpt

Normally, when posting novel excerpts, I just go from the beginning until I reach a suitable stopping point a suitable way in.

In Ashes Lie, however, is a nonlinear novel: it cuts back and forth between the four days of the Great Fire, and the events leading up to that point. Because of that, I’ve decided to skip ahead, in order to give you a taste of the Fire scenes. (Don’t worry about spoilers; the only thing you really need to know is that Nicneven — mentioned in an earlier scene — has grown to be a major threat against the Onyx Court.)

I don’t really get into the mode of Blowing Shit Up until later, but hopefully that will whet your appetite just a little.

(If you missed or want to re-read the earlier excerpts, they start here.)

That’s it for IAL samples — you’ll have the rest of the book in a little over a month — but stay tuned for a few more treats . . . .

I might get this one done *before* the end of the month.

“Remembering Light”

I had about 700-800 of that already, from some work about a week ago; the rest is new. And this is, in fact, a new Driftwood story. I’m having fun riffing off the random idea I came up with for the world this one centers on, extrapolating the consequences of it. Yay for putting sunlight at the heart of a story.

Probably could finish this in two more days — possibly one — I just need to figure out how to steer the characters to the idea that got this story rolling in the first place. And decide whether I’m trying to stick that extra strand in there or not.

Today’s ponderable

I’d like to talk about portal fantasies. Or rather, I’d like you to talk about them.

By that term, I mean the stories where people from this world go into another, more fantastical world. Narnia, for example. Once upon a time, these seem to have been more popular; now, not so much. And if I had to guess, I’d say that’s at least in part because of the way a lot of them were transparent wish-fulfillment: Protagonist (who is an emotional stand-in for the author, though only in egregious cases a Mary Sue) goes to Magical Land where things are more colorful and interesting than in the real world. And maybe they stay there, maybe they don’t.

Talk to me about the portal fantasies you’ve read. Which ones stick in your mind? What was your response to them, both as a kid and now? Which ones did the wish-fulfillment thing extra transparently, and how so?

(Yes, I actually have a special interest in the bad examples of this genre. In fact, if you approach this entire question as an academic curiosity of the structural sort paired with a authorly eye toward writing a deconstruction — not a parody — of the tropes, you’ll be on the right track.)

Portal fantasies. Talk to me about ’em. Good, bad, ugly, laughably naive. What’s your take?

back on schedule

Today, you again get a Midnight Never Come tidbit, to whet your appetites for In Ashes Lie. (I have to get variety in here somehow.)

This time, it’s a look behind the scenes at the relationship between the novel, and the game it’s based on.

(It should go without saying, but: DO NOT FOLLOW THAT LINK IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK. Spoilers abound. In abundance. Of aboundishness.)

While I’m at it, I’ll also link to something that’s been up on my site for a couple of days now: the first piece of Marie Brennan fan-art that I’m aware of. (tooth_and_claw — I don’t feel I can count commissioned or Memento-inspired pieces, or you’d be the first.) It’s a portrait of Lady Lune, painted by the British artist Mark Satchwill. The original is sitting on my desk as we speak, because of course I’m going to buy it — what kind of ego-stroked author do you think I am???

Enjoy, and I’ll have something else for you in ten days.

Words I Cannot Spell, #17

Jeapordize Jeopordize Jeopardize.

I rarely make use of Wordperfect’s little “is this the word you’re looking for?” box, but man, I need it for that one. Every time.

The ghost-prince story is still refusing to tell me what I should do with its newly-sprouted Significance, so I suspect that idea, which was going to be last month’s story, will get pushed back again in favor of something else.

We’re going to see today if that “something else” can be a new Driftwood story. Something about getting more direct fanmail/fancomments from readers for the eponymous work than for any three other stories I’ve published makes me enthusiastic about the prospect — I can’t imagine why. <g>

Time to dig out the various fragments and see if I can poke any of them into growing.

One of the oddities of short-story writing . . . .

. . . is that as I’m sitting here trying to whack another hundred words out of this piece, something in the back of my brain is pointing out that by doing so, I am in fact reducing my income.

Because I am, after all, paid by the word.

Of course, it’s a tradeoff. If that hundred words makes the difference between an editor buying or not buying, then I should go ahead. But does it?

Don’t ask these questions. That way madness lies.

Off to chop out some more words . . . .

Woot!

I’ve been looking forward to this. Today, “Driftwood” went live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, as part of their fourteenth issue. This is in the same setting as “A Heretic by Degrees,” and it’s my hope that I’ll get another Driftwood story completed (I have several in various stages of started-ness) some time this year, preferably sooner rather than later.

Somewhere — I forget where — I came across a review of “Heretic” that said the reviewer would love to see me do a novel in the setting. I don’t think I could ever write one; it would run too strongly counter to the entire concept of Driftwood, which is about fragmentation. But a story collection? That, I could do. At least in theory. I need a lot more stories before I can think about it, though.

Maybe I’ll try to work on one today.

Wiktory!

On my way to bed, my imagination suggested that perhaps the Plan involved cross-dressing half-orcs, and, well, the story’s done now.

4,149 words.

But still no title, dammit.