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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

now that “Chrysalis” is out of my way

I’m trying (again) for the one-story-a-month thing, which means I’m gearing up for February. This one is going to be a bigger project, and involves at least one piece of directed research. So:

Can anyone recommend to me a good biography of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham? I’m particularly interested in the last five years or so of his life; I could care less what he got up to in childhood.

(Oddly, this is completely unrelated to me reading The Three Musketeers. THAT book, I picked up because I’m trying to figure out what “The Three Hackbutters” should be about, other than its title.)

With it, not on it.

5063 words of crappy draft. Or rather, 5063 words of some admixture or good and bad; I know there are bits in it that work just fine. Unfortunately, they’re nowhere near a majority.

Doesn’t matter. 5063 words = done. I’ve finished “Chrysalis,” and before the end of the month, too.

Now it’s out of the way, and I can decide later what to do with it.

Much later.

with my draft or on it

Okay.

I have about three hours — a little less — until I need to be somewhere else.

I have a story that still lacks only one scene for completion . . . which is where it’s been for well over a week.

I have contacted my crit group to tell them not to expect this story any time soon, because it is a bad enough draft that there’s no point asking other people to tell me what’s wrong with it until after I’ve fixed the most glaring problems. I’ve also given myself permission to stash the bad draft on my hard drive and not come back to it until months or even years from now, because I’m pretty sure this really is a story that will work better once I’ve written (and published) more things in that setting.

I will finish this bloody story today or die trying. I don’t care if it sucks, I don’t care how long or short it ends up being, I don’t care about anything except finishing the stupid draft.

Because in Not Finishing this, I’ve been Not Working on a whole lot of other things, too. So it’s past time “Chrysalis” got out of my way and went somewhere it won’t bother me anymore.

for something completely different

O internets, I could also use someone who can spot-check me on matters of London vocabulary — specifically, the insults that would be used by a pre-adolescent girl who’s spent a fair bit of time on the streets. (E.g.: does “crackhead” sound too American?) Also derogatory terms for a police officer: what other than “copper” and “pig”?

I ask because “The Last Wendy” is being copyedited right now, and this is my last chance to catch any glaring regionalisms. I’m not looking for full-bore cockney rhyming slang here, but I don’t want the words to sound out of place.

I must become all things to all people . . . .

Many of you are probably tired of reading about the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate, at least for this round; you can only take it for so long before your brain gives up. But this post is less about the debate’s focus than its execution: namely, one possible source for the difficulty of communication that I think we can all agree plagues any attempt to move forward. Based on my peripheral encounters with theories of communication, I think tablesaw is right about the ways in which the conduit metaphor shuts down the possibility of effective progress, and Reddy’s alternate metaphor of the toolmakers with their blueprints and the evil magician coming along to mess with them sounds like a pretty apt description of the situation we find ourselves in. (Not just here, either; just poke your nose into politics and watch it play out.)

But I have one big question for the “Becoming Toolmakers” portion of the essay. To quote:

In the toolmakers paradigm, to become a better one-on-one communicator, I must learn more about the person with whom I wish to communicate and communicate to that person in mind. In the toolmakers paradigm, to become a better writer and address a universal audience, I must learn more about everyone by learning about multiple, intersecting cultural contexts different from my own, and I must write with all of them in mind.

On the one hand, this is more or less how I think about communication: that you must always bear your audience in mind, and try to craft your ideas into a shape that will work within that audience’s context. On the other hand — sweet Pentecost on a pita cracker, how am I supposed to speak mindfully to everyone at once? I don’t even know who all my readers ARE! Even if we agree to leave out everybody who isn’t moderately fluent in English, according to this “solution,” in order to communicate effectively, I must learn about inner-city Chicago blacks and Pakistani immigrants in London and American-born Israeli Jews and nisei Japanese college students at Stanford and affluent Hispanic teens in Dallas and everybody else I haven’t named and then write with ALL OF THEM IN MIND.

And that’s before we even get to the possibility that the communication strategy which is effective with one group may be actively detrimental with another, and vice versa.

Dude. There is little in the world I love more than learning about multiple, intersecting cultural contexts different from my own. I spent ten years in school majoring in just that, and I’ll keep doing it on my own from now until you pry my library out of my cold, dead fingers. But the “solution” as framed above is not a solution; it’s a godlike ideal no human will ever be able to live up to. Is it sufficient if I try? Or if I decide, okay, there’s a black character in this story, so I will focus my efforts on trying to speak to the myriad of possible black perspectives (because there is no single “black perspective”) and not worry about what the Hispanics or Asians or whoever think? How do I account for all the perspectives in the world that aren’t mine, and speak to all of them at once?

I don’t have an answer to that. I think tablesaw raised some great points in that post, but I hit that bit at the end and my eyes bugged out of my head. It’s kind of like the rule we kept returning to, during the panel discussions at VeriCon: how do you do [thing X]? Be a genius! It’s the solution to everything. Except that I can’t just wave a magic wand and turn myself into a genius. I can take little baby steps toward this utopia, but will they be enough?

catching up post-con

VeriCon was lovely as always, with a smattering of enjoyable panels and many fine meals with many fine friends. I could, however, have done without the precipitous drop in temperature halfway through; I remember our discussions back in the day about whether to hold the con during intersession or spring break, and I still think the arguments for intersession are good ones . . . but man, late January is a brutal time to hold a con, especially in a building like Sever, where (despite years of our best efforts) people blithely ignore the “airlock” signs on the front doors and pass through them in such a fashion as to release gusts of freezing air upon the reg desk.

But I am, after all, a delicate southern flower.

I got to read “The Last Wendy” at Milk and Cookies, though, which pleased me immensely. I do so love stomping on people’s childhoods . . . .

***

While I was away, the ninja editors of Abyss & Apex put up their new issue, which includes the most melodramatic (and melodramatically-titled) story I have ever written: “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual.” It’s posted in its entirety for free, so enjoy.

Sometimes you have to write a bad draft.

I’ve been working on “Chrysalis,” though forgetting to meter my progress, and I hate the fact that it’s a bad draft.

Other writers have experienced this before. You have to get what’s in your head out on the page, however broken it may be, before you can make it better; you can’t fix it in your head, so that the draft is better on the first try. In the case of this story, the twin challenges of researching setting details and making the covert structure come out right have pretty much crowded all other considerations from my mind. Prose? Is whatever words will pin the narrative down enough for the time being. Actual artistry need not apply, not yet. Same goes for characterization. And description. And all those other nice things that make the story not suck.

The problem is that I’m an idiot for writing this story right now. The sum total of fiction that exists in this setting at present is: “A Mask of Flesh,” four-fifths of a draft of “Chrysalis,” and 1070 words of a so-far-plotless story about Tlacuilo. And it’s a complicated setting, where nobody is human and all the castes are different kinds of creatures and oh yeah Mesoamerica isn’t exactly familiar material for most readers. So what in the name of all that is sensible am I doing writing a story that has to blitz through five different castes in (ideally) less than six thousand words? What am I doing dropping a xera motherfather into the middle of it, when I haven’t ever mentioned the motherfather thing before and it’s extra complicated with the xera because of that thing where they can be either male or female? How am I supposed to make this work when the back half of the story is trying to grow a political context to justify what Matzoloa’s doing and why? Just when do I think I’m going to explain that political context?

All that, and a philosophical lesson, too.

This is the kind of story that works best when you’ve got a dozen other pieces out there that establish all the different bits of the setting, so maybe you can get away with just presenting those bits in passing and hoping your readers remember enough to fill it in. It is not the kind of story you want to write when 95% of the material is new even to readers who read “A Mask of Flesh” five minutes ago, and 3% of the remainder isn’t like they expect because not all xera are crazy like Neniza was.

Yeah, I know, whine whine whine. Tonight I’ll make myself figure out what Matzoloa is doing, and then I’ll write her scene, and then I’ll have my bad draft. Then I can go away to VeriCon and let it compost, and when I come back I’ll decide whether I can polish it enough to inflict on my crit croup, or whether it needs to sit for six months while I do something else with my life.

Blerg. I’m going to go read The Three Musketeers.

where I stand on the appropriation debate, in a nutshell

As I mentioned the other day, there’s been another round on the Internet of the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate, regarding what it means for white writers (or writers of color, for that matter) to to include or not include characters of color in their stories, and all the difficulties thereof. (Depending on your location on the social map, your friends list may have consisted of nothing but this debate for the last several days, or you may have missed it entirely.)

I came to a realization because of all of this. On the one hand, if you write CoC, you may be accused of getting it wrong, of presuming to speak from a subject position you have no right to occupy, and various other sins. On the other hand, if you don’t write CoC, you may be accused of ethnocentrism, of contributing to their erasure from the discourse, and various other sins. Either way you go, you will offend somebody; there’s no “safe” path, much as we wish there were.

This has led many people to conclude, not without justification, that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

In which case, I choose Door Number One: I would rather be damned for doing, than for not.

I would rather try (and get it wrong) than not try (and get it wrong). Because the former has at least some chance of getting it somewhat right, for some readers. It will also, in the manner of a lightning rod, attract more criticism — even folks who are aware of these things are more likely to be aware of, and vocally critical of, that which is executed badly than that which is not executed at all — but that’s no reason to give up.

first sale of the year!

There’s a certain pleasure to breaking into a market that hasn’t bought anything from you before. But there’s also a pleasure, of a different flavor, to selling them a second story.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which previously published (and podcasted) my Nine Lands story “Kingspeaker,” has now purchased a Driftwood story titled (surprise!) “Driftwood.” (Thanks to the vagaries of the creative process, this was the first story I wrote for that setting, but it took longer to beat into publishable shape than “A Heretic by Degrees,” which came out more or less right in the first draft.) ninja_turbo, I think this means you’re officially allowed to be a Driftwood fanboy now.

***

The Ell-Jays are going through another round of the discussion on Representing the Other, sparking some thoughts, but none really concrete enough for me to articulate them here. It does, however, remind me of a realization I had the other week, watching The House of Flying Daggers.

Driftwood being the kind of place it is, not everybody there is human-shaped, and the ones who are, aren’t necessarily human-colored. Because of that, there’s no actor who’s precisely my mental image of Last. But there’s no reason in this world or any other that he has to have European facial structure, and so it occurred to me that if you dyed Takeshi Kaneshiro the right colors, he’d be my casting for the part.

Turns out a lot of my short story sales recently have featured secondary-world characters of a chromatic nature. This is what we call “a start.” But I want to do better in this world, and also in novels.

I know my problem.

I keep throwing out every opening I write for this thing because what the story really wants to do is open with the protagonist waking up from a dream.

But unfortunately for me and the story, that is a cardinal sin I don’t think I’m allowed to commit. It doesn’t matter if I produce the most brilliantly effective waking-up-from-a-dream opening that’s been seen these last ten years; too many editors will roll their eyes and chuck the manuscript without reading onward. And then readers, if I make it past an editor. Starting with a dream or the protagonist waking up is an unforgiveable cliche.

Dammit.

G. R. A. R. G. H.

Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick. I have managed to give myself enough of a mental hernia trying to leap a particular hurdle that I can’t even write this LJ post without stopping, starting, revising, deleting paragraphs, and generally replicating the exact problem I’m having with the aforementioned hurdle.

It’s like when you start paying attention to how you speak — whether you swear a lot or speak in sentence fragments or use “like” six times a second — and next thing you know, you can barely open your mouth for self-consciousness over what’s going to come out.

I am thinking too much about how first-person narration works, which is why I’ve managed to hamstring even my LJ-posting capabilities, let alone fiction. The usual remedy, which is to stop over-thinking it and just do it already, does not work in this case, because while the first-person narration I have is perfectly serviceable, I’m trying to kick it up another notch, and find this character’s distinctive voice. This is rendered difficult by the fact that the story in question is the Sekrit Revision Projekt, which has been around for a very long time. Convincing my brain the sentences need to go differently is like punching fog.

I’ve spent half this afternoon digging out every short story and novel in my library that uses first-person narration, in the hopes that beating my head against them will produce a breakthrough. So far, it’s produced nothing more than bruised brain-meats. It doesn’t help that the voice issue is tied up in how the story begins; I’ve more or less fixed the plot problems, but I still need a better beginning, and part of the bettering needs to be on the level of voice. But this isn’t the kind of first-person story where the narrator is self-consciously addressing the reader (or another character in the story), nor do I want it to be the kind of the tale where the beginning is framed in terms of hindsight — “When so-and-so first showed up, I didn’t know he’d be trouble,” or “The day my life changed forever, I was too busy playing with my cat to notice,” etc. It feels like a cheap and easy way to get the story in motion, and then you drop the hindsight effect after the first page or so. Lots of authors do that. I don’t want to. But I’m floundering around trying to figure out what I do want to do.

I recognize that, once I figure that out, and the voice, I will have dramatically improved this story, and probably my writing as a whole. This does not make flinging myself at the hurdle any more fun.

And we’ve reached a point where my brain is literally trying to stick squirrels into the opening paragraphs, as if they will somehow improve anything. Yes, details like squirrels are something this story needs, but they aren’t the key to the problem, O Subconscious. The squirrels can wait.

<beats head some more>

There’s a box on my desk.

I have a box on my desk now, a box whose lid is sculpted into the shape of a pile of pens, and it has a Hemingway quote on the side that I disagree with, and I have put pens into it. It’s taking the place of the plastic Staples desk organizer my pens used to live in. Only that isn’t true; the organizer holds several other things (like rulers and pads of paper and my mini-stapler) that don’t fit into the Pen Box, not to mention more pens than the Pen Box can actually fit. So the plastic thing isn’t going away; it’s just moving onto the shelves behind me, where I don’t see it when I’m sitting at my computer, and in the meantime my Favored Pens get to live in the Pen Box on the desk, which makes me feel much more elegant and writerly because it’s not made of plastic.

This has no bearing on anything I actually do, but it feeds the ego and the self-image. As if I have upgraded my Writer Equipment, and by doing so, somehow upgraded a tiny piece of myself.

I figure, as long as I don’t forget how irrelevant this actually is — i.e. don’t fall into the consumerism trap — I’ll enjoy the illusion.

What do I have to lose?

I wasn’t going to do this because my odds of ending up on the Hugo list are vanishingly small, but what the heck. If you’re eligible to nominate for the Hugos, here’s what I’ve published in 2008 that you might consider:

Novel
Midnight Never Come

Short stories
“Lost Soul” — Intergalactic Medicine Show #7, January 2008
“Kiss of Life” — Beneath the Surface, ed. Tim Deal, 2008
“The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe” — Paradox #12, April 2008
“Beggar’s Blessing” — Shroud Magazine #2, 2008
“A Mask of Flesh” — Clockwork Phoenix, ed. Mike Allen, July 2008
“Kingspeaker” — Beneath Ceaseless Skies #3, November 2008
“A Heretic by Degrees” — Intergalactic Medicine Show #10, November 2008

Relevant links for all of the above can be found here.

Dude, this thing is HUGE.

I know that by the standards of modern monitor-dom, what’s sitting in front of me is kind of old-fashioned and poky. But there’s a 19-inch LCD on my desk now, and man, it’s going to take a while to get used to it.

Many thanks to kurayami_hime, who couriered it from Dallas, and to my parents, who donated it to the cause of bringing their daughter’s computer setup into the 21st century.

I can see, like, an entire page in Wordperfect now. Seeing as how I write in 12-point Times New Roman instead of standard manuscript format largely because it allows me to see more of the text at once, this is a non-trivial benefit. Also, there’s no longer a monitor stand taking up a chunk of desk — this one sits high enough on its own — and while I’ll miss the middle-shelf space the stand provided, it’s probably a good thing, given my propensity for losing things into the dusty back reaches of that shelf. Hey, now I’ve got space to put a book on the desk in front of me! Such luxury we have here at Castle N, Home Office Edition.

The cleaning of the Augean office got about four-fifths done and then stalled; I do need to finish it. But not tonight, nor tomorrow neither — not with the stupid respiratory bug that has camped out in my sinuses. My energy is reserved for getting some revision done tonight.

Mush!

I am shamelessly stealling Mrissa’s phrasing for this meme.

I have seen this elsewhere, but phrased in terms of force, and you are all, I feel sure, too inherently polite and too cognizant of your own bodily safety to ever want to force me to do anything. So I will ask it more politely:

If you could urge, persuade, or ask me to write any particular thing, what would it be?

Hi, 2009. I’m looking forward to getting to know you.

Things I am eagerly anticipating in 2009:

1) President Barack Hussein Obama.

2) The release of In Ashes Lie.

Other stuff too, but those stick out particularly.

I don’t generally make resolutions, and I’m not going to make any right now, though you could argue that there’s only a semantic difference between that and what I am about to do, which is to talk more generally about a goal.

I’d like to get my discipline back.

Dear Friends Who Think I Am Ridiculously Disciplined Already: Thanks. I appreciate it. But I see all too clearly the ways in which I am not, some of which used to not be true. If there’s something I need to do — particularly something overdue — that I don’t feel like facing, then I avoid it like an avoidant thing, which does not in fact make the problem go away. If I don’t have a contract or deadline holding me on course, I flit from project to project, to the clear detriment of my productivity. And since I go to work at the end of my day instead of the beginning, it’s very easy for me to put off my start time — after all, I can just stay up later, and then sleep in tomorrow morning. The work gets done, but not in a sensible fashion.

I want my discipline back.

There’s no point in trying to set a year-long goal for that; the markers are too subjective. Let me say instead that I’d like to get three things done in January:

1) Revise the Sekrit Revision Projekt
2) Write “Chrysalis”
3) Work on ANHoD.

Leaving that third one vague because ANHoD is an unfinished spec project from two years ago that I’m only playing with while I wait for my marching orders on the novel front. My brain handed me some ideas for it this afternoon, though, so I might as well let it be my play project for now. If I don’t commit to that, I’ll flit around not committing to anything until the marching orders arrive, and the intervening time will be wasted.

So. A short story, a revision, and some fun.

I can do that.

links to close out the year

Brief interview up at Reality Bypass, with me answering some questions and Lune answering a few more, a la Cat and Muse. Midnight Never Come has also ended up on a few people’s lists of their favorite books this year, which warms the cockles of my heart.

Also, since I have a few tabs that have been hanging around forever: another brief bit from me, more like a micro-guest blog than an interview, on the topic of crazy-ass research; and Darrin Turpin’s follow-up to my earlier post on monarchy in fantasy.

Happy New Year, all!

And he said unto me, “It is done.”

“The Gospel of Nachash”

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meterZokutou word meter
5,916 / 5,916
(100.0%)

So it turned out to be more like 6,000 than 7,000 after all. Then again, I suspect it may need fleshing out in the latter bits. But that is not a task for tonight; tonight, I have completed a draft of this story, within the twelve days of Christmas (as I had hoped), and before the end of 2008. That makes this year’s output two novels and two short stories.

Man, my crit group is going to hate me for this thing — though I suspect one of them will expire in a fit of Judaic geekery instead.

Anyway. Draft! Yay! Critique and revision can wait until the new year, and then I get to figure out what magazines might want a piece that’s all about the style and the ideas, and not so much about characterization as we know it.

perspective

It’s all in how you count.

I don’t keep track of the words I produce each year, but I do keep a log of completed pieces, including their word counts. Glancing at that list is depressing right now: in 2006 I logged eight completed pieces, in 2007 five, and so far this year a whopping three. (It’ll be four if I can finish “The Gospel of Nachash.”) This does not look so good.

But out of curiosity, I added up word counts. So far this year? 208,800 words of completed fiction. Last year, 119,000. And 2006, the year that looked like the best of the three? A whopping 27,300.

The difference, of course, lies in what I was finishing. 2006 was eight short stories, one of them only eight hundred words long. I didn’t write a novel that year. In 2007 I wrote one (Midnight Never Come), and this year, I wrote two — Ashes and a YA project that has unfortunately gone bust for the time being. And none of those novels are carryover counts; all of them were started and completed within the calendar year. The short stories had more variation on that front, but as we’ve seen, they’re not where the lion’s share of the wordage is coming from.

Naturally, the upshot of doing this number-crunching is to make me ambitious to improve both metrics. Writing novels is all well and good, but I’m running out of short story inventory to shop, and while they may not pay much, I enjoy them, and I think they do serve a certain purpose in getting my name in front of new readers. On the other hand, years like 2006 are not something I can afford, if I’m to be doing this full-time writer thing. So really, what I’d like is to put out, oh, two novels and twelve short stories a year. That’s six months per novel, which is very much within my reach, and one short story a month.

I can do that, right?

Regardless of what I can or cannot do, I’m feeling better about what I’ve accomplished with this year. It may be only three four items (I will finish “The Gospel of Nachash,” dammit), but those four are pulling their weight.