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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

One day left . . .

. . . in which to finish my March story. Will I make it?

Hard to say. The last line of tonight’s writing was “We have a Plan” — which is very nice for my characters, but I wish I knew what that plan is.

Total length estimate has been revised downward; it might even be shorter than that. Funny things often should not overstay their welcome.

They should, however, have titles. And I have no idea what to call this one. It isn’t allowed to be “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” and “Dear Mom and Dad” (the current filename, because it’s the first line of the text) is not a whole lot better, but everything I’m coming up with sounds too much like “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual.” (In other words, most of my possibilities start with the phrase “Letters From.”) Possibly we will have to go with something in the vein of “The Adventures of” and then figure out what to put after “of.”

I hate being this close to ending a story, and still having no title for it.

Anyway. Enough D&D-style silliness for one night. Bedtime, and maybe when I wake up tomorrow I’ll know what the characters think they’re going to do about their problem.

Speaking of short stories

The Story That Is Not Allowed to Call Itself “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” No Matter What It Thinks:

The Zokutou site is down. Sadness.

Anyway, this is not the story I thought I’d be writing this month. It was going to be the ghost-prince story. But that one has grown Significance that I’m not quite sure what to do with, so it’s composting a while longer, and in the meantime I’m writing something I forgot to include on the previous list: a piece that I think is my first attempt at a genuinely humorous story.

(Short form is, it’s a silly take on D&D-style fantasy. It has nothing to do with summer camp, but like “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” it belongs to the micro-genre of Distressing Letters From Your Wayward Offspring.)

(Oddly enough, the quickest way to make D&D-style fantasy funny is to take it seriously.)

I’m very much making this one up as it goes along. Though I should figure out soon what was up with the temple roof thing, and also where the rest of it is trying to go.

I have a week to figure it out.

A day late

I meant to post this after getting home from ICFA last night, but got distracted. Eighty days seventy-nine days to the publication of In Ashes Lie, and today’s bit of added content . . . comes from Midnight Never Come, actually.

Long-time readers of this journal may recall that back when I drafted that book, I had to re-write a substantial chunk of Act One — basically Deven’s chunk of it, almost in its entirety. Therefore, in the spirit of the “deleted scenes” they put on some DVDs, you can read the original draft, complete with some notes about why it got replaced (and what I wish I could have kept).

There’s mild spoilers for MNC in the discussion of those scenes, so if you want to say and/or ask anything about them, I direct you to the spoiler thread for the novel; comment there instead of here.

Ninety days . . .

. . . and counting.

Since I’m aiming to spread the exciting content (i.e. the excerpts) out a bit, this time you get something a bit more dull. Unless you’re one of the people who apparently loves hearing me geek about the historical research, in which case, my research bibliography may count as very exciting indeed.

If the Midnight Never Come bibliography is any example, that list will continue to grow as I keep remembering other books that should be on it. But at least it’s something to start with.

a worthy cause

I know that now isn’t a great time for lots of people to be donating their money to a cause, but I have to give a shout-out to , an LJ community dedicated to launching a new small press, one focused on minority characters. So far there’s just a comm (I think), but you can donate money to help cover their startup costs, including website design and all the rest. Yes, they’ve blown past their initial fundraising goal, but I don’t imagine more money will go amiss, as it will help them attract attention and hit the ground running.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, afternoon edition

So, you all know me. You know my working hours: they are those of the night owl.

But apparently only when I’m writing fiction. Because I’m working on a largeish piece of nonfiction at the moment — something I’ll talk about more soon, I hope — and I’ve been happily sitting down to crank out several thousand words every day for the last several. And I do mean “day;” I’ve been known to start as early as 11 a.m. on this thing.

W. T. F.

I don’t remember if this was true when I was in grad school. I tended to have classes or teach in the afternoons, so work of any kind tended to get crammed into the evening and dead hours of the night. I know fiction doesn’t work so well during the day.

But apparently I can do nonfiction just fine.

I am surprised.

I honestly expected the two fairy-tale options in the poll to come in somewhere near the bottom — I figured people would look at them, shrug at Yet Another Fairy Tale Retelling, and vote for something else. But I woke up this morning to find them in the lead, and they’re still #1 and #3 as of this posting.

Which is encouraging, because my brain has been giving off hints that the ghost-princes story (which is currently leading by a good margin) is about the speed it’s up to this month. I was going to try and save the non-researchy stories for later in the year, but I think now might be a dandy time to relax with one.

In the meantime, today has been pretty thoroughly productive, and the last couple hours of it has involved (work-related) reading in front of the fire. It’s one of the few points on which I have no interest in being all Californian and environmentally conscious: I don’t care if burning wood is bad for the environment, I like doing it. Fake fires are not the same; you need the crackle and the conscientious tending of the fuel, or else it doesn’t count. I’m very happy to be living in a townhouse with a working fireplace, and really should have made use of it before tonight.

Tree bad. Fire pretty. ^_^

Poll time, short story edition

Okay, Internets. I’m trying to do a short story a month (February’s oversized endeavour being an exception), but I’m having trouble deciding what to commit to for March. I don’t promise to take the poll’s advice, but:

There are other possibilities, but the rest of them are too far away from being ready to go for me to consider them now.

One Hundred Days . . .

. . . and counting.

As with last year, I’m going to dole out bits of stuff to keep you all interested between now and the release date of In Ashes Lie, on the tenth of June. Expect something every ten days, assuming I can keep myself organized enough to put everything together, and alert enough to post it when the appropriate day rolls around.

Today? You get your first taste of the book.

briefly —

I’m about to run off to Potlatch again, but: Paradox has purchased a flash piece from me, “Salt Feels No Pain.” This is the same editor who previously published “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe,” so I’m very pleased to be working with him again.

But man, I really need to get some replacement pieces into my submission queue . . . .

Finit.

And that, ladies and gentlebugs, is 18,678 words of a very messy but (I think) not horribly broken draft of a novella currently titled “Deeds of Men.”

Not the most exciting title, but it’s the best we’ve got at the moment, and reasonably fitting for the story that follows it.

Oof. No more novellas for a while, ‘kay?

*Almost* there.

I stalled hard last night, not knowing what to do with the next scene. Having re-read the entire thing today, I ended up swapping the upcoming bit with the previous A-strand scene; the information the new one was going to convey really needed to go earlier in the story than where I was trying to put it. There’s a godawful Frankenstein seam thanks to the swapping — wow, is that earlier-now-later scene going to have to change — but I think it’s closer to working.

(No, I don’t expect that to mean anything to anybody, but it makes me feel better to type it out for posterity.)

1500 words tonight, two and a half scenes to go, but it’s bedtime for me, because I have to figure out how they’re going to mug this guy. Right now it’s more of a curb-stomping scenario than anything else; there’ll be no chance to do anything interesting with Our Heroes because their target will be a smear on the ground before they can say boo. Must stage it in non-obviously contrived way. But after that it’s pretty much just dual denouement time, so I think — I hope — I can finish this tomorrow.

<crosses fingers>

It may even have a title, though I wouldn’t be sure of that if I were me.

the remainder of the story

Four scenes left to write.

#4, I know what it will do and how it will do it.

#3, I pretty much know what it will do and how it will do it.

#2, I know what it will do, but have no freaking clue how it will do it.

#1, I don’t know anything about it except that the structure of this story demands its existence.

This is the downside to having a clear-cut pattern to the scenes — in this case, altering between two narrative timelines. I’ve spent over fourteen thousand words adhering to that pattern; skipping an A-strand scene at this late point would break the rhythm at the worst possible point. But filler would be just as bad, which means I need to think up one additional way for the A-strand to contribute to the B-strand, and it needs to be good.

And I need to do that before I can move forward, I’m afraid.

Hence spending the last half hour downstairs playing Canfield (with one hand of Bristol to soothe my annoyance at the piss-poor Canfield games I’d been having). I was hoping an idea would fall into my head, but it seems reluctant to do so.

Time to poke at my brain with sticks, I think.

Talk to me! And other people, too!

This is a new experiment for me, but:

Feb 27th at 2 PM EST: “Writers on Writing (Part 1)– Fangs Fur and Fey authors Yasmine Galenorn (bestselling author of the Sisters of the Moon series), Marie Brennan (Midnight Never Come), Patrice Michelle (Scions series), Marlene Perez (Dead is the New Black), and John Levitt (Dog Days) discuss the craft of writing.

This is a podcast panel/call-in show — we’ll be chatting on some preset questions for the first twenty minutes or so, then taking questions from callers, and afterward the entire thing will be available for download. If you go to Blog Talk Radio, you can apparently set up a reminder, so you’ll be e-mailed before the show starts; that’s also where you’ll go in order to listen during the show. And there will be a chat room for listeners to use, so you can discuss things while we’re wittering on via the audio. The call-in number is (347) 826-9684; that’s both for listening via phone and for asking questions live.

Or something like that. I’ve never tried anything like this before, though Blog Talk Radio and some of the FFF authors have done it; we’ll see how it goes. But I’m looking forward to it.

That’s more like it.

2258 tonight — the end of one scene, and two complete others. It’s awkward, trying to pretend I’ve already set up who this guy is and why the characters can be confident in the conclusions they’ve just drawn, but for once I care more about finishing the draft than having it make sense. I’ve already backtracked enough to fix stuff that went awry on the first attempt, and I’m tired of it.

I am liking this story well enough, but I would like it far better if it would find a title already. <sigh>

We’re about 3K from the boundary between novelette and novella, with four scenes to go. You do the math.

Stupid neverending novellas. Worst of both worlds, I tell you.

things for revision: an open letter

Dear Brain,

Yeah, you know, that character, the one who’s really important to the reason why the dead guy is dead? The character we haven’t yet mentioned once in over eleven thousand words of story?

Yeah, him.

We’re going to have to find ways to work him into these scenes — along with hints of the Very Important Relationship he has to that other character, so it doesn’t come out of freaking left field the way it’s about to in the next thousand words. Because you’ve hung a key component of this story on that character and his Very Important Relationship, and the whole novela/ette is going to fall resoundingly on its face if that gets chucked in ex machina.

This is what you get for not bothering to figure out who he was until it was time to bring him in. How were we supposed to bring him in if we didn’t know who he WAS yet? This is how we end up eleven thousand words into the story and he’s still offstage. You brought this on yourself, you know.

Ah, well. That’s what revision is for.

Still miffed,
–Your Writer

Break’s over; back on your heads.

Saturday night, I was feeling very cranky and unproductive and generally not desirous of working on the Still Untitled Novelette/a of Doom. And I was sitting at the computer trying to flagellate myself into getting started (at about one-thirty in the morning, naturally), and then it occurred to me:

It’s Saturday. I don’t have to write.

This was, after all, the plan I laid down when I started thinking about the full-time writerly life. When not noveling, I can have weekends off. Provided, of course, I’ve done at least 500 words a day during the week — which I had, several times over. I can write on the weekend, if I feel inspired to. But I don’t have to.

Mind you, that rule should probably break down if it’s getting to the end of the month and I haven’t finished the story I’m working on. Astute minds will notice that is the case here; I’m going to have to haul tail pretty fast these next few days to get it done. But in my fiction-writing life (as well as other things), I’m addicted to the opposite of the all-nighter: I tend to drive myself halfway into the ground in order to make sure I finish before deadline. This is a habit I could benefit from breaking. Let’s recharge for a couple of days, before charging onward.

It’s a nice theory. We’ll see how it works out for me this week.