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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Hee!

From a review of my short story “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual”:

“. . . has the feel of a counterfactual, but I Googled it and there is no such person.”

It wasn’t my explicit intent to present this story as some kind of alternate history, but the instant I read this line, I realized that was the general vibe I wanted it to have. So: wiktory! The reviewer calls the story “very elegant,” too, so a win all around.

***

Yesterday, while deleting “Tower in Moonlight” from my submissions tracker, I realized I have fewer than ten short stories out on the market. I don’t think that’s been true since spring of 2002, when I went on a big story-writing binge and knocked out six in eight weeks; my stubbornness about selling those early stories, plus other binges on later occasions, have kept my inventory pretty well stocked. But my recent short-fiction drought, coupled with the tendency of my newer pieces to sell faster (yes, Swan, you are getting better at this game), means I’m down to nine.

Which, y’know, isn’t a small number. But it keeps shrinking, and I keep not putting new stories on the market; other than “Once a Goddess,” — which sold three weeks after I finished the draft, not helping the problem — I haven’t put anything new into circulation for over a year.

I think that when I complete this current piece (and give the stupid thing a title), I’m going to make myself revise “On the Feast of the Firewife” before I start anything new. Or “Footsteps,” which last time I checked just needed a better last line or something. Or give “The Memories Rise to Hunt” to my new critique group and see if this time we can figure out what that story needs in order to work — a question I’ve been pondering for far too long now. Or even “Sciatha Reborn,” except what that one needs is for me to finish fixing its world, and that might be more work than I can really do right now.

<scrounges through list of completed stories for other things that ought to have gone out the door ages ago>

Righty. All of that is a good idea, but first, this stupid novelette-maybe-novella needs finishing. I’m pretty sure I have at least six scenes left, which means we’ve still got a ways to go.

Hah!

For once, I’m finishing work at 2 a.m. instead of starting. And nearly eighteen hundred words tonight, no less, in two work sessions.

And I even had some fun. When in doubt, throw in a walking death-omen who really wants to say hi to one of the protagonists.

I guess I’ll have to entertain *myself*.

Dang it, Internets, you are suppose to entertain me, and you are failing. One thing I preferred about being on East Coast time: in the wee hours of my morning, the West Coast folks might still be updating their LJs. But alas, I’m sitting here on a Friday night with hardly anybody giving me anything to read.

Well, tonight was supposed to be a night of productivity anyway. And it has been: so far, I’ve gotten 1,007 words on the ongoing story. But I think we’ll need to have another work session tonight, because this story, y’see, it has already passed short story territory and is charging merrily through novelette on its way to a possible novella. (Which is part of last night’s whininess: I keep working on this damn thing and it isn’t done yet. Novellas: the worst of both worlds.) Anyway, while it isn’t absolutely critical that I finish it before the calendar page turns, I would like to, and that means it’s advisable to get through this damn scene tonight.

But first I need to figure out who the characters are going to talk to, and what he knows.

In my non-writing time, I’ve been entertaining myself while doing other downstairsy things by re-watching the first half of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Quibble all you like with his interpretation; I will always love it for being full-length. And this re-watch has made me realize my favorite stretch is from the conclusion of the interior play to the moment Claudius sends Hamlet off to England. Why? Because that’s probably the densest stretch of Hamlet being a smart-ass in the entire play, and I do love him when he’s a smart-ass. I’ve thought for quite a while now that he’s probably one of the literary ancestors of Francis Crawford of Lymond.

Meh. I think it’s time to practice that time-honored writerly technique known as “flopping on the bed and staring at the ceiling until I can bludgeon my brain into working.” I have to get these characters to Coldharbour somehow.

collected writing news

Small bit first, since otherwise it will vanish next to the other news: Shroud Magazine has purchased my twisted fairy-tale retelling “Tower in Moonlight.” (This is part of the ongoing set that includes “The Wood, the Bridge, the House”, “Shadows’ Bride,”, and “Kiss of Life.”)

***

Much bigger bits, relating to In Ashes Lie:

I actually meant to post this days ago, but it clean slipped my mind — the Science Fiction Book Club has picked it up as a main selection, as with Midnight Never Come, so those of you who got the last book in hardcover can do so with this one, too.

For the other bit, you’ll have to look behind the cut . . .

more short story whining

I touched on part of this last month, when I complained about how many of my short story ideas required research, but that’s only one facet of the problem:

I’m having difficulty having fun with short stories.

What I’m working on right now? Requires both research and complicated plot-juggling, a murder mystery told in two strands, one leading up to the death, the other away from it. “Chrysalis”? Was research and more structural difficulties. The various possibilities for next month? Varying degrees of research, but also plot confusion and (in one particular case) a determination to tell the bloody thing entirely in Germanic-derived words.

Too much damned work.

“Once a Goddess” was fine, because the big problem that stalled that one for seven years was almost purely a plot thing, trying to figure out where I wanted the story to go. Once I had that, it was clear sailing. “The Gospel of Nachash” was harder; I’m not sure I would have gotten through that one when I did had I not been getting input and ideas from kniedzw and kleenestar. Again, more research, and more thinkiness being buried deep into the story, plus (again) linguistic stupidity — this time, an attempt to mimic the style of the King James Bible.

I want to have this story, the one I’m currently working on. I just don’t want to write it. Here it is, almost 2 a.m., and once again I’m only now about to get started. I have a specific reason for pushing on this one, or I’d see if shelving it helps; then again, the whole idea here is to figure out how to get back into regular short story production, and quitting doesn’t help much with that. But I need more ideas that are just fun, ideas that can be good stories without requiring such heavy lifting. I wholeheartedly believe heavy lifting is good for the writerly soul, but I don’t believe work done without it is automatically bad. Sometimes the stuff that pours out easy as oil is your best work.

It would be nice to have more of that.

Is this a phase, a difficult uphill stretch on my journey through my craft? I’d like to think it signals some kind of improvement in my writing, and that on the other side of it I’ll find myself once again able to occasionally just knock something out. Unfortunately, it feels more like my e-mail inbox: I’ve already dealt with the ideas that were quick and easy, and all that’s left in the mental queue is the stuff I’ve been putting off precisely because it is too much work.

Blah. I’m cat-vaccuuming now, whining about this story to avoid actually writing it. I need to hire some West Coast or early-rising UK friends to send me chiding e-mails; it’s too easy to avoid accountability at two o’clock in the morning. Once more into the breach, etc etc, and we’ll see if we can’t have some fun tonight.

Fun Things to Do to Characters, #277

This story is coming out slooooowly. I’m not sure whether that’s because it’s a murder mystery (plot-wise; the setting is fantasy), and I’ve never written one of those before, or because I’m essentially taking two characters my brain assigns to different stories and trying to make them be in scenes together. Maybe this is why all my youthful fanfic involved original characters interacting with the casts of stories I’d read; I don’t seem to do well at the crossover thing. Hell, my brain had an instantaneous meltdown when I tried to imagine Ree talking to Nicholas after returning from Arcadia, and that was after all the Memento characters had already shown up in the Changeling game, thus establishing the bridge for me.

But! Making two characters have a conversation where they’re talking about entirely different things, and neither one of them realizes it? That’s fun.

(Actually, one of them just realized it, in the last few hundred words I wrote. What I need to decide is when the pov character will figure it out.)

Murder mysteries, man. They’re hard. I suspect this one would go easier if I’d started from a base of “here’s how the victim died and why,” but instead I’m struggling to make that be not a macguffin for the investigation, which is the real reason I’m writing this story. We’ll see how that goes. This is one of those “permission granted to write a crappy draft” situations, though not nearly to the extent that “Chrysalis” was. I just need to write my way through before I can go back and make it tidy.

Unfortunately, I’ve about hit the end of the scenes where I knew what I was doing, and now have a vast howling wilderness between me and the end, which is the other part I know. Must figure out what to fill that with.

But not tonight. I’ve done 1,325 tonight; that’s respectable enough that I can stop.

a belated thank-you . . .

. . . to everyone who helped me out with London slang a little whlie ago. Copy-edits delayed my work on “The Last Wendy” for a bit, but I finally got that back to them, and it sounds at least a bit less American now.

(One last query, actually — does “chill out” sound too American? If so, what would be the alternative?)

I need to understand these people . . . .

Before I get to this question, I should clarify one thing: unless I specify otherwise, when I post here for research help, I’m not asking people just to provide me with relevant-looking titles. That would be lazy of me in the extreme, since I’m usually capable of finding relevant-looking titles on my own, and I don’t want to be lazy. What I can’t do on my own is tell which ones are worth my time. So — not to thumb my nose at recommendations in general, because I do appreciate them, but what I’m really looking for are books you’ve read, or know someone who’s read, or otherwise have heard good things about. Some way to cull the list of all possible sources down to a smaller list of pre-vetted works. (And — the flip side — please do tell me if you know of any utter crap I should stay far, far away from.)

With that in mind: alchemy.

I really want to be able to use alchemy in fiction. I do not yet understand it well enough to do so. I need, not just old-school sources deliberately written to be as obscure as possible so that they won’t share your secrets with the uninitiated, but more modern secondary works that can help me unlock those old-school things, since otherwise I tend to skip off the top of them. But there’s a lot of vaporous New Age crap about alchemy out there, so if you know of any worthwhile books in a more scholarly/historical vein, please pass along titles. I’m already planning on giving Eliade a shot, and I’ve gamed Amazon into making a lot of recommendations, but it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Nomenclative confusion

My poor copy-editor, dealing with London place-names. Fully half the queries on this book go something like this. “St. Laurence Jewry” — do you mean St. Laurence Pountney? “St. Giles Cripplegate” — do you mean St. Giles-in-the-Fields? “Aldgate” — do you mean Aldersgate? No, no, and no. Last book, it was people names instead; she kept double-checking to make sure this Edward whoever was not supposed to be that Edward whoever.

I’m glad she does it, of course. One of these days I will name two St. Laurence parishes when I only mean to name one. And to be fair, it took me a remarkably long time to sort the two St. Gileses from one another, and to figure out where each one was. But the queries amuse me. If this were a secondary-world fantasy, I wouldn’t repeat names half so often as the real world does, precisely because of this confusion.

Writer, Trust Thyself

Here’s the other thing about doing this copy-edit:

I have to trust I got things right.

Where by “things,” I mean the historical details. At the time I wrote these scenes, I had my research fresh in my mind, with notes and books open on the desk in front of me. That? Was last year. Do I still remember everything? No. And it’s worse with this book than it was with Midnight Never Come, because in this one, the plot engages much more directly with historical events — giving me oodles of chances to screw up. I could try to look it up again, double-check everything, but the library books have been returned and that would make the copy-edit take two months anyway. I have to trust that I got the details right in the drafting and revision stages.

Having said that . . . I’ve caught a few errors. But only because something stood out: a lack of a preposition in a historical quote, which made me check to see if that was a transcription error on my part, or the actual phrasing of the original. (Answer? Both: I have two books that give the line, and they don’t match up. I chose the clearer of the two.) Or me calling a character “Lady Elizabeth,” and then wondering if that’s the proper address for someone of her rank, which made me double-check whether I was right about her not being a countess yet. (Answer? She was a countess, and I had the address wrong. Also, I erroneously referenced her father, who was dead by then. Apparently I was asleep at the research wheel when I wrote that scene.)

I can’t check everything, though. I’ll have errors that crept in during revision, during drafting, during research when I failed to look something up in the first place. And some reader, somewhere, will spot them.

But you know, I’m okay with that. (Mostly.) Because the only way to avoid it is to have my characters float through a non-specific world, where events don’t have dates and buildings don’t have floor plans and the only people with names are the ones important to the plot. But that isn’t how real people live: the world you inhabit is concrete, specific, full of detail. You know the names of the people you work with, and sometimes they have walk-on parts in the story of your life.

What will be interesting to see is what this does to my secondary-world novels, next time I try to write one. Historical fiction has forced me to pay attention to the specificity of real life; can I maintain that specificity when I’m making it all up? I hope so.

At least nobody will be able to tell me I’ve gotten it wrong. 🙂

Thoughts from the Copy-Editing Mines

I managed a while ago to teach myself the distinction between “that” and “which” — I couldn’t tell you when each one should be used, but my copy editor has corrected me on it only twice so far in this novel.

On the other hand, I still haven’t mastered the “farther” and “further” thing. On the other other hand, the Fowler quote given in this Slacktivist post validates my tendency to use “further” for everything. I’m happy to let me CE correct me on it, but hey, at least I’m not totally off-base.

Speaking of off-base-ness, one of these days I’ll figure out where I got my notions of hyphenation from. My CE disagrees with me quite frequently on that stuff.

It still saddens me to watch these books being corrected to American spelling. (“Corrected” because random bits of my spelling are British. I blame a childhood of reading Diana Wynne Jones?) It just seems wrong. Especially since the US and UK editions are printed from the same edit.

Of all the epigraphs I chose for this book, I think my favorite is the one taken from transcripts of Charles’ trial. It’s a brief exchange between him and Bradshaw, the Lord President of the High Court of Justice, arguing about the House of Commons and the jurisdiction of the trial, and while it was almost certainly not what Bradshaw meant to say, it kind of sums up the entire damn period for me:

The King. Shew me that Jurisdiction where Reason is not to be heard.

Lord President. Sir, we shew it you here, the Commons of England.

Back to the mines.

Progress of the Report

Am off to a roaring start. This is deliberate; I habitually work out how much I need to do each day in order to meet my deadline, readjust it to create a margin of safety, then push myself to overshoot the readjustment. It’s how we make deadlines work, here in my brain.

I should note, btw, that I misspoke slightly when I said the late arrival of the CEM was due to a mixup on my publisher’s end; I have a tendency to use that phrase to signify anything that isn’t my end, which is inexact. The mixup was on the part of the copy-editor. But it’s the same copy-editor I had for Midnight Never Come, which pleases me; I like continuity, and I like getting a little note from her saying she’s enjoyed reading these books. 🙂

Anyway. I’ve done all the mechanical work scheduled for today, and then some; I’ve about hit the limit of my usefulness on that front. (Brainpower, not time, is the real constraint on copy-editing speed. It doesn’t do me much good to read over the ms if I’m zoning out while I do it.) I have a small list of revision-y things to do in these pages, but I’ll leave them until later tonight, when I’ve regrown a little of my attention span. And then maybe go over some more pages, because we like being ahead of schedule, yes, we do.

You know who likes it even better? My publisher.

State of the Swan

CEM is here.

Deathmarch has commenced.

I will either be silent for the next week as I try to plow through this at top speed, or posty like a posty thing as I find myself in desperate need of breaks from the work.

for the psych folks

yhlee got me thinking about this one by linking to Harry Harlow — if I needed to read up on the social and emotional development of children, what names should I be looking for?

Specifically, the story situation I’m working with involves children raised from birth in what amounts to an orphanage: professional caretakers (well-meaning ones, not Dickensian sadists), but no parents as such, and the children have to depend on each other for affection. I’d like to know what effects that would generally have on their behavior, and also what kinds of practices the Powers That Be might institute to keep the kids from growing up too warped. (Would it help if they slept in dormitory arrangements, at least until a certain age? Etc.)

I’ll be asking my psych-major husband, too, but until he gets home from work, you guys are it. 🙂

Edited to add: I’ve read enough to come across Bowlby and Ainsworth, but I’m a) looking for more recent models and b) trying to work out the behavior of an adult character raised in such a situation; the specific behavior of toddlers is of less interest to me.

rereading myself

My copy-edited manuscript is expected to arrive tomorrow, and so I spent much of today re-reading In Ashes Lie.

I’m pleased to report that I like it, after all.

You’d think that would go without saying. But I spent so long head-down in this book, and so much of that time under a series of unpleasant stressors, that I truly lost my perspective on it. It’s the longest book I’ve ever written by a margin of nearly twenty thousand words, and approximately 87% more plotty than its closest competitors, which meant I had a difficult time holding the entire thing in my head at once; by the time I finished revisions, I was making changes half-blind, trusting to well-trained instinct that what I was doing would actually work. For all I knew, I was creating a Frankenstein monster of a book. But now, with the respite of having not looked at the thing for over two months, I find that — while there are some rough edges around those last-minute changes — on the whole, the thing works.

(Even the sentences, mostly. I can pay close attention to those in short stories, but in novels they tend to happen on autopilot, while my brain wrestles with plot and character and so on. Especially in a book like this. My autopilot, however, has gotten much better these last few years.)

Don’t get me wrong: I still don’t ever want to wrestle again with the fire-breathing hydra that is seventeenth-century English politics, and I still think this book deserves its moniker of “the Beast.” But that’s the voice of the months spent writing it, not the voice of the result. I don’t love it in the same way I love Midnight Never Come — no two books are ever the same — but I honestly believe Ashes has both Giant Spectacle and character moments that far surpass the best I was able to pull out for its predecessor. (The whole “burning down London” thing helped with the former.) It is a book I can be proud of.

And that two-month respite means I (hopefully) have the will to slog through the CEM, which is my last chance to catch any errors, polish those rough edges, and fix the sentences the autopilot did a less-than-spectacular job on. The production department appears to allot the same amount of time for copy-editing regardless of book length, so I’ll have to stick to a pretty rigorous schedule to get it done. But I’m actually looking forward to starting, at least.

(Ask me again in a week how much fun I’m having.)

Dept. of Hypotheticals I Don’t Have the Time to Write

Last night, in a discussion of Pluto’s demotion to dwarf planet, I brought up the fact that many astrologers have decided to disregard science’s classification and go on treating Pluto as a regular planet(1). And then I said it would be interesting if some pioneering astrologer retooled the system to account for all of the dwarf planets in a new and interesting way, and as a result astrology suddenly started being so laboratory-accurate that even the most defiant of skeptics had to admit that it only didn’t work before because the math wasn’t quite right yet.

IANAAstrologer, and I don’t feel like putting in the research necessary to write the story. But the idea amuses me.

(1) I am told the State of New Mexico has done the same, owing to how the guy who discovered Pluto was New Mexican — though he was in Arizona at the time of the discovery.

a view from another world

I confess to having said a negative thing or three about MFAs in my time, so in the interests of fairness, I link to this defense.

What do I think? I think that Ms. Harding sounds believably correct . . . as far as it goes. I also think she’s writing from a foreign country, the one frequently called Literary Fiction. In the last few paras, where she talks about how writers are supposed to go about getting better, I think of the fairly vibrant network that exists over here in SF/F. It isn’t a perfect network by any stretch of the imagination; for everyone who can afford the time and money to go to Clarion (which we might as well label a short-term genre MFA program), there are a bunch of writers who can’t or have never even heard of it. But Clarion isn’t the only workshop. There are online critique networks. There are mentoring programs. There are conventions and other social gatherings, in person and online, in which you might find yourself becoming friends with a writer further along the path than you, who may very well pause on the trail to give you a helping hand upward. It’s usually not Ursula K. Le Guin descending from on high to help out a young woman who just finished her first novel, but the SF/F writing world is full of communal bootstrapping, a continuum stretching from established pros all the way down to newbies, and bit by bit we all haul each other and ourselves upwards.

I also think that the criticisms she’s responding to are not, for the most part, the ones I’ve leveled in the past. These days you can find a small number of MFA programs that are willing to let you write genre fiction, an even smaller number who employ professional SF/F writers who know something about your genre. Those programs? May well be great, for all the reasons Ms. Harding describes. But to quote two of the motifs she brings up — “Creative Writing Programs Foster Mediocrity” and “Real Writers Don’t Need No Skool” — I do think creative writing programs as a whole foster a particular kind of writing that is not what most SF/F folk are engaged in or would even benefit from, and while I wouldn’t say real writers don’t need no skool, I would say you don’t necessarily need school to become a real writer. Exhibits A through We Need A Bigger Alphabet: very nearly every professional SF/F writer I know. In fact, I stand by my conviction that if you can get your craft lessons by some other route — which in many cases you can — then you’re better off majoring in something that will feed your brain material, like biology or history or whatever suits the kinds of stories you’re telling.

Mind you, were a certain kind of literary type to wander by and read this (unlikely), they’d probably hit the second half of that paragraph and conclude that’s what’s wrong with genre fiction anyway.

But let me state for the record: I don’t think MFA programs are encouraging hordes of mediocre writers, for the reasons Ms. Harding describes. And it sounds like they serve a very necessary purpose in the corner of publishing she’s talking about. I do, however, stand by my belief that while they may do good for the occasional SF/F writer (especially the ones who make it into, say, James Patrick Kelly’s program), they’re not necessary — sometimes not even beneficial — for those of us over here in genre.

Yes, they really did all of these.

“The 10 Most Insane Medical Practices in History.”

Reading that reminded me of one of the unexpectedly difficult things about writing Ashes: dealing with Jack as a doctor. The character is an intelligent, inquisitive man absolutely dedicated to practicing the best medicine he possibly can — but let’s face it, the guy lives in the second half of the seventeenth century. His idea of cutting-edge medical science is using Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood to improve bloodletting techniques.

Jack is probably my favorite character in the whole book, but I wouldn’t let him within a hundred feet of me if I were sick. And yet I had to write lines describing how he’s trying to save somebody’s life by way of techniques that probably made things worse.

Note to time-travellers: if you ever get thrown back into European history prior to, say, the twentieth century, you’re better off refusing a physician entirely than letting one of them treat you. The body has this lovely thing called the immune system, and it stands a better chance of saving your life than any of them do.