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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

but when the story stops doing . . . .

“The Gospel of Nachash”

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meterZokutou word meter
4,387 / 7,000
(61.0%)

Yes, the goalpost moved back 1,000 words.

Obviously I wrote more. I actually entertained a brief, delusional hope that I would finish tonight. But I’ve already done more than 3500 words this evening, and I might have an equal amount left to do — probably less, but I can’t be sure — so I think I’ll stop here. Especially since I haven’t put any thought into how exactly this next bit ought to happen.

Time to work on the theology some more.

ya gotta do what the story’s gotta do

“The Gospel of Nachash”

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meterZokutou word meter
2,709 / 6,000
(45.0%)

That 6,000 is, as usual, a guess.

I have embraced the fact that this story will not read like normal fiction, and that attempting to make it do so would be like sticking a bird on a bicycle and telling it to migrate south for the winter. It will get there faster and more effectively by just being itself. Which will, yes, limit the places I can submit the thing. But let’s face it: I’m writing an apocryphal gospel here, and if it reads like a piece of ordinary fiction instead of the King James Bible, I am, as the lolcats say, doin it rong.

I suspect I will write more before the night is over. I drank caffeine at the Boxing Day party tonight, so I ain’t going to sleep any time soon, and the KJV headspace is hard enough to get into that I should do as much as possible while I’m here.

a question for the SFWA types

As you know, Bob, the Nebula rules are a hair on the arcane side. So if somebody familiar with the process could pipe up in the comments and let me know if I’ve got this right, it would be much appreciated.

According to this Nebula report, Midnight Never Come is on the list of “recommended works.” My understanding is that this doesn’t just mean it’s eligible; it means at least one SFWA member has nominated it for the ballot. Am I correct so far?

And then it takes ten nominations to get on the Preliminary Ballot, yes? So here’s where I get confused. The whole “rolling eligibility” thing means, if I understand it, that MNC could be on the ballot for either 2008 or 2009. Does it have to get those ten recommendations before June of 2009 (one year after first U.S. publication), or before December of 2009 (end of calendar year after end of first year of publication)? The former makes more sense, but also seems like a lot more bookkeeping work for the awards folks. Then again, that would be in line with the kind of complaints I’ve heard about Nebula rules, so I’m guessing that’s the right answer.

It’s likely to be an academic curiosity, since I don’t expect to end up on the Preliminary Ballot. But this is the first time I’ve had cause to look at the Nebula rules, and I want to make sure I understand them right.

solstice writing

My usual tradition is to sit and read by candlelight on the night of the winter solstice.

Tonight, in lieu of that, I have parked myself in front of the fire and written 2666 words on a very sekrit project indeed. If you are one of the half-dozen people who recognize what this means, keep it under your hats, but: it is a revision of a very old piece indeed, one for which a solstice-night start is apropos.

May it fare well in the new year.

I also need to write “The Gospel of Nachash” before the end of the year, but that’s still waiting on the ironing out of some theological wrinkles. That story will be 99% prep time, 1% writing time, I swear.

monthly linkage

Even the Death Bug cannot keep me from posting to SF Novelists!

(Mostly because I wrote the post a couple of weeks in advance. Very glad I did.)

This month, riffing off a recent series at Deep Genre, I tackle the question of monarchy, and why it’s so common in fantasy. Comments disabled here; go talk about it over there. You don’t need an account to post.

recipe for banishing ick

I don’t do stomach bugs. No, really. The last time I had one like this, I was five or so. Ergo, being laid out flat today by such a thing is both deeply unpleasant and highly annoying, since it means no karate for me.

But! Nothing like some good news to perk me up a bit.

Mike Allen, the excellent gentleman behind Clockwork Phoenix and my story therein, “A Mask of Flesh,” has just purchased another story for Clockwork Phoenix 2!

This is “Once a Goddess,” which long-time readers of this journal have heard me mention before. It is the current (and hopefully future) champion of the “longest stretch from idea to draft” contest, as I came up with the seed for it in the summer of 2001, and only shoved it through to completion because I was bound and determined to submit it to the anthology this fall. But now it also holds the title for “shortest stretch from draft to sale” — in fact, it is the first story I have ever sold right out of the gate. So it took its own sweet time coming out of my head, but the result was worth the wait.

The opening line, as cited before in that “first line of unfinished stories” meme:

For eleven years Hathirekhmet was a goddess, and then they sent her home.

This story goes out to all the real-world girls who have been Kumari, and then had to find their way in life as ordinary women.

my brain = sieve!

I meant to post this on Thursday. That tells you something of the state of my brain. (Hey, at least it didn’t fall by the wayside straight into 2009 . . . which some other things in my inbox are in danger of doing.)

If you have not much time for reading, but you do have time for podcasts, check out Beneath Ceaseless Skies‘ audio department. You can download individual stories — including, oh, say, “Kingspeaker,” which went up on (you guessed it) Thursday — or subscribe to the RSS feed, or get updates via iTunes. Instructions for those methods are behind that first link.

Now I’m going to go put on some music. Because while it amuses me that my mental stereo put on the Hallelujah Chorus when my editor told me she liked the revisions I did on Ashes, I’d like something different now.

research query, especially for the Brits here

I know that properly doing this would require reading more than one book, but I’m trying not to fall down the research well, here.

If I were to read only one book to get a sense of the life a pretty and popular young woman (age circa 18-21) would have lived in late 1940s post-war London, what book should that be?

For my purposes, fiction would likely suffice as well as nonfiction. I’m looking for a sense of culture and society here, rather than specific facts.

another open letter

Dear Brain,

When I said I was going to work on short stories, I meant I was going to try and reduce the backlog of half-started ideas. That was not an open invitation to half-start something new.

Especially something that of all things in the world kind of resembles “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh.”

Especially when that means I’ll go to bed with that song stuck in my head.

Cut it out, and go back to developing the sacrilicious idea. Even better, stop being so finicky about working on “Chrysalis.” STOP ADDING TO THE LIST.

Love and kisses,
Swan

I should have saved the egotism link for a little while longer, so I could pair it with this news: Rick Horton, editor of a Year’s Best antho series, is doing his year-end roundup of magazines, and in the post for IGMS he singles out “A Heretic by Degrees” as one of two stand-out short stories they published this year. Woot! Go, Driftwood, go!

pronoun update

Tied for first in the poll are “they” and “yehuatl,” which I find interesting. “Sie” is in second place. But I think the winner will be a candidate not in the original poll: aliettedb‘s fabulous suggestion of “ome,” which is the Nahuatl word for “two.” This is both short and easily pronounceable; also, it carries a benefit for my hindbrain, which is that it evokes Ometeotl, the (mostly abstract) Aztec deity of duality. Since I already had it in mind to port Ometeotl into the setting as the patron deity of the xera — particularly those xera in this character’s condition — that looks like a win all around.

And I think I even have a name. Cenquiztli may not be the world’s most user-friendly set of phonemes, but phonetic friendliness has never been a real priority in this setting. (One of the reasons I doubt I will ever write a novel there. I rarely even bother telling anybody the setting is called Xochitlicacan.)

So my thanks to Aliette, and to all of you who pitched in on the problem. Now I go back to renaming Matzoloa, and trying to figure out where I got vay zodtz from in the first place.

pronoun problems

Finishing “Once a Goddess” reminds me of the great appeal of short story writing: instant gratification. Instant from the point of view of novel-writing, anyway; I cranked out the bulk of that story in a single evening, and it’s a rare story that requires more than three days of me sitting down and adding words to it. So I’m going to see if I can’t finish two more before the end of the year.

One is the sacrilicious story, provisionally titled “The Gospel of Nachash.” I figure I’ll save that for closer to Christmas. ^_~ I need to figure out a name for one of the characters, and then I need to figure out what happens to him; everything around that is more or less in place.

With that one on the second burner, the immediate project is “Chrysalis.” And here, gentle readers, I need your help.

See, to make the structure work, I’m pretty sure I need an additional character at the midpoint of the story. I know who that character is; what I don’t know is what to call him/her/it/them. Said entity is a character perfectly balanced between male and female — which might mean perfectly androgynous or perfectly hermaphroditic, I’m not sure which. Anyway, this being English, where we’ve jettisoned grammatical gender pretty much everywhere except our pronouns, I’m not sure which one to use.

My preferred gender-neutral default in speech is singular “they,” which has been in use for centuries and has the advantage of being a solution people actually use. But in a story situation like this, it can leave the reader thinking I mean more than one person, and generally undermines the sense of unity I want the character to have. “It” would work if I decide on androgyny, but I’m not sure I like the way that renders an individual into an object. (There’s a reason I had the witches call a doppelganger “it” instead of “she.”) Beyond that, I’m looking at a bunch of neologisms like “sie,” all of which I fear would kick the reader out of the fantasy-Mesoamerican setting and into the twenty-first century. My final option — thanks to Wikipedia — is to go the other direction and dig in the dusty corners of English past, which gives me three possibilities: “heo,” which was replaced by “she” because it started to sound too much like “he;” and “ou” and “a,” both of which were used in Middle English. (Is the latter what we see when Ophelia sings “And will ‘a not come again?”)

Or I could use the Nahuatl third-person pronoun yehwatl. Or the K’iche Mayan are. (Sorry, had to repost the poll to add those.)

Anyway. I have options; I just don’t know which one I like. So we have a poll. Check all that you like, and feel free to present your case in the comments.

(Edited again to add: okay, it looks like “yehuatl” might be shortenable to “ye” or “yehua.” If I go with that option, I will very much need to consult with someone who knows Classical Nahuatl, since the way it handles pronouns is very alien to English, and I don’t trust myself to make up the appropriate substitutions without help. But if the length of that word is keeping you from voting for it, there may be shorter alternatives.)

memery for a Sunday morning

I expected jet lag to wake me up at about 9 a.m., since I’d been sleeping until noon in Boston. Instead, I woke up at about noon. Now there is Christmas music on the stereo (since the day after Thanksgiving is when the Christmas season begins for me), and in a little while I will clean this place up so I can think about decorating it, and in the meantime I will do a meme that practically every writer on my friends list is doing. I think it originated somewhere in the vicinity of autopope, but I could be wrong.

* Age when I decided I wanted to be a writer: Certainly by 9 or so. Maybe sooner; I have a crap memory for my childhood. I remember a turning point at that age, though.
* Age when I got my hands on a typewriter and taught myself to use it: Typewriter? I was using a computer by the age of 9, and never looked back.
* Age when I wrote my first short story: This is tough because I have to decide what to count as a short story. I know I wrote something for school when I was in second grade, and other things after that which I completed at a word count that would probably qualify them. I was 18 when I first wrote something I recognized as a short story.
* Age when I wrote my first novel: mostly 18; it was completed shortly after my 19th birthday.
* Novels written between age 30 and age 39: 0. This is where I grin and say “ask me again in twelve years,” and other writers of my acquaintance throw things at me. ^_^
* Age when I first submitted a short story to a magazine: 20.
* Number of rejections prior to first story sale: Eg. Counting this up is slightly inconvenient. Call it 150 or so.
* Lifetime number of rejections: Over 700.
* Age when I sold my first short story: 23.
* Age when I wrote a saleable novel: 19. I believe that first one was saleable, even before I rewrote it; I’ve said before that completing things was the last basic skill I acquired. But if that one doesn’t count, I also finished Doppelganger that year.
* Age when I sold that novel: 24. Submissions are sloooooooow.
* Novels written since age 40: Ask me again in — <ducks>
* Total novels written: 10.
* Age now: 28.
* Age when the money coming in exceeded my statuory employment: 27. This was one of a number of factors contributing to the decision to leave graduate school. They say don’t quit your day job until [insert equation here], but when your day job is providing you with an annual income in the four-digit range, the equation changes.
* Number of books sold: 4.
* Number of short stories sold: 24.
* Number of titles in print: 3.
* Number of titles in production or pre-production: 1. Though I’m working to get myself on a schedule of more than one book a year.

along with that

Can anyone tell me how to make the Biblical Hebrew noun rwkb — transliterated in my source as “b@kowr” — into a plural? (Alternatively, tell me if Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have plurals.)

Edited to add: Okay, I suspect this word is more often transliterated as bekhor, which makes the plural either bekhorot (the form generally used when talking about the Passover slaughter) or bekhorim (if we’re talking classical Hebrew, which apparently flings around masculine and feminine plurals without much concern for the gender of the original noun). Interesting. This is what happens when it’s two a.m. the night before Thanksgiving: I wander off on impromptu lessons in Hebrew grammar.

Now I need a way to turn the feminine noun chereb into something that could pass for a man’s name.

yay redundancy!

The “Chrysalis” notes I know are scribbled on two or three small yellow sheets of notepad paper somewhere on my desk have never made it into electronic format (and therefore are not on my laptop), but it turns out enough of their content ended up in the notebook I have with me for me to at least get by. Which is to say, I know the character names.

This has led to me holing up in the guest bedroom with a handful of pocket change, trying to diagram the story’s weird structural tricks, and wishing I were in Britain because those tuppence coins sure would come in handy right now.

But I’m going to put that aside for a while and see what I think of “Once a Goddess,” now that I’ve slept on the ending and hopefully have some perspective.

first lines meme

With “Once a Goddess” finally moved from the “unfinished” folder to the “finished” one, it’s time for another roundup of story fragments.

[untitled fairy tale story]

“Two crowns says he doesn’t make it past the blackberries.”

[untitled quasi-superhero story]

They didn’t call John in until the bullets had finished flying, until everyone who was going to surrender had surrendered and everyone who was going to die had died.

“Chrysalis” [same setting as “A Mask of Flesh”]

The new ground of the milpa showed like a scar in the forest it had been torn from.

[untitled story, same setting as “Such as Dreams Are Made Of”]

By day their scales glitter in the sun, winding sinuously through the cities of the world.

“The Unquiet Grave” [ballad-based]

Fever took my love from me.

“How They Fall”

He runs as fast as he can, until his lungs feel like lava and the impact of each step jolts him to his skull, until he is blind with exhaustion and terrified hope, but still he is too late.

[untitled Driftwood story, same setting as “A Heretic by Degrees”]

Only idiots bother trying to make maps of Driftwood.

“Mad Maudlin” [ballad-based]

Peter found her slippers just inside the room.

“Ink, Like Blood” [same setting as “A Mask of Flesh”]

I’ve seen the look on your face, when your granny starts telling the old stories.

“Xie Meng Lu Goes on Pilgrimage”

Treasured wife — By now you will have heard the sorry tale of my disgrace at court.

[untitled Xochitlicacan story, same setting as “A Mask of Flesh”]

The tap of the workmen’s chisels was a distant, dreamlike thing to Tlacuilo’s ears, as if it came from another world.

[untitled Nine Lands story]

Having ink on your skin was an offense punishable by death.

[untitled Tam Lin story]

Faerie trouble never really goes away.

[untitled Driftwood story, same setting as “A Heretic by Degrees”]

Time’s one of the most untrustworthy and useless concepts in all of Driftwood.

“Even in Decline”

The boar charged along the forest floor, feet pounding out a furious beat, tusks slicing at the air.

[untitled JB story, ballad-based]

Let me tell a tale of my father’s kin, for his blood runs in me, and so to me falls this duty: to keep the knowledge, the past-thought, the shape of how it began, as my father gave it to me.

Aaaand I don’t appear to have any copies of “Prince of the Stone” here with me, so no snippet from that one.

That’s everything that has at least a bit written. Most of my titles, oddly enough, belong to stories I haven’t started; most of my started stories have no titles. Of them all, I think I’m the most motivated to play with “Chrysalis” — but the notes I have with me don’t include the character names, so that may be problematic. We’ll see. I know Konil, and I might be able to remember a few more. Or get by with placeholders.

Any preferences from the peanut gallery?

Brain!

That’s an excited cry of “brain!” — not a zombie mumble of “braaaaaains.”

The distinction is important. Those of you reading this who have written novels know whereof I speak; others may know it from similarly intensive mental endeavours. When you finish, it feels like a steamroller has come through and pasted every single potential thought into a pancake. It’s possible, sometimes, to get something done soon after, but mostly you turn into the next stage of Mr Earbrass.

Which is why it’s exciting that last night I finished a short story! And not just any short story: this is “Once a Goddess,” which probably holds the record for longest time spent sitting around refusing to turn from an idea into a proper story. There are four abortive drafts on my hard drive, not counting the one that got finished, and the earliest of them dates back to the summer of 2001 — which I know because the idea came from an article I read while indexing for Anthropological Literature.

Last night, I regrew enough brain to finish it. Yay me!

It’s nice for other reasons, too. I haven’t finished a short story since — Jesus. Just went to look at my notes, and that would be “Kingspeaker,” in March of last year. How’s that for pathetic? Sure, I’ve written three novels in the interim, and that’s not bad, but the other nice thing here is that “Once a Goddess” is secondary-world fantasy, which has been lacking in my life of late. I love writing the Onyx Court books and all, but it’s been a while since I scratched the worldbuilding itch.

Brain! It’s working again!

Maybe I’ll try finishing something else, too.