Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Posts Tagged ‘writing’

silver bullets

Okay, this is just fascinating.

It seems that one of Patricia Briggs’ readers has embarked upon a quest for silver bullets. I came at that series by way of the third chapter, “Lone Ranger, Go Away,” which is a reprint of a 1964 Gun World article detailing previous efforts to produce and test-fire such rounds. That part (which I found via Making Light) is funny enough, but the rest of the series is chock-full of ballistic geekery, of a sort that every werewolf-novel-writing author should read.

And not just them, either. I have no intention of writing about lycanthropes, but I learned from the introduction that three hundred years ago, silver didn’t generally tarnish like it does today. Why? Because the Industrial Revolution hadn’t yet pumped large amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere. If you left a silver object sitting on a shelf for ten years, it would still be shiny when you came back — which made it just about as magical-seeming as gold. And if you’ve come across references to silver cups or knives being used to detect poison, it’s because organic poisons often contain enough sulfur to tarnish the dishware, creating a seemingly supernatural ability to detect their presence.

Of course, if I wrote a story with a silver object that didn’t tarnish over time, readers would think I was doing it wrong. The perils of too much research . . . .

Anyway, if you’ve ever thought about writing a werewolf book, or you like reading them, check the articles out. Turns out the “silver bullet” thing is a lot more difficult than advertised — but out of such obstacles are more interesting stories made.

even more fiction

When it rains, it pours. But this time you get to listen to my fiction instead of reading it!

Yes, folks, it’s my very first story podcast. I’ve got two others on the way — Pseudopod will be doing “Shadows’ Bride,” and Beneath Ceaseless Skies has got “Kingspeaker” — but Podcastle hit the finish line first, with my exceedingly silly flash story “The Princess and the . . .”

I’ve been meaning to post about Escape Artists — the umbrella name for a trio of podcasts, dedicated to science fiction (Escape Pod), horror (Pseudopod), and fantasy (Podcastle). Of the three, I don’t generally listen to Pseudopod (since I’m not a big horror person, my sale to them notwithstanding), and my personal tastes generally mean that about half the Escape Pod stories are up my alley, but I adore Podcastle, and all three of them are very well done indeed. Ever since my trip to London last year, when traveling light meant I packed no leisure reading with me, I’ve become quite fond of being able to carry fiction around on my iPod. Short stories are perfect for sitting around in airports or on planes, since I don’t have to commit ten hours of my life to listening. If you’ve got an mp3 player and need to entertain yourself for half an hour or forty-five minutes, the Escape Artists productions are a good way to go.

This story, though, won’t eat up that much time. When I say it’s flash, I mean it; I don’t remember how many words “The Princess and the . . .” is, but the entire episode, including intro and outro, is about two minutes. You can subscribe to the podcast in the usual way, or download it from a link at the bottom of the story post over on their website. Enjoy!

(Having linked to this, now I’m afraid what kind of answers I’ll get on the comparison post . . . .)

in which I fail to compare

This is going to sound like I’m looking for flattery, but what I’m actually after is assistance.

I have never been able to muster the perspective necessary to say who I write like. It’s one of the things authors are occasionally expected to do; it positions you in the genre, in the textual conversation we’re all having, and coincidentally helps with self-promotion, pitching new projects, and a bunch of other writing-related program activities where you’re not allowed to ramble on for five minutes describing what you write. Sure, we’re all individual snowflakes, but comparisons are still possible, whether they’re straightforward or of the intersection-style “Bridget Jones’ Diary meets H.P. Lovecraft” variety.

But I can’t do it. For individual stories, occasionally — more by comparison to a genre or a specific point of inspiration — but I’ve got no perspective on the general body of my work, not in a useful way. So I turn to you, my internet friends: who do you think I write like? Why? Are you basing your comparison on plots, favorite themes, prose styles? (That last is the true black hole of my inability to reflect; again, I can say an individual story has a nineteenth-century sound to it or whatever, but I can’t begin to describe my prose in general, much less liken it to anybody else’s.)

I can think of two comparisons I’ve gotten in reviews, both of which have induced something of an “I’m not worthy!” reaction. The more comprehensible one, from my perspective, is Ursula K. LeGuin; she’s the daughter of anthropologists, and it shows. (I’ve gotten that comparison twice, for “White Shadow” and more recently “Kingspeaker” — both of which are set in the world that I created to be my anthropological playground.) When I think about my whole cultural fantasy thing, I can see where those reviewers are coming from, even if I’m a long way from having sufficient ego to liken myself to her. Less obvious to me are the Midnight Never Come reviews that compare the book to the work of Neil Gaiman. Aside from the semi-parallel to Neverwhere, I have a harder time seeing where I’m like him.

But, as I said, I have no perspective on this. So please: imagine you’ve got a friend asking for recommendations. What authors might make you say, oh, try Marie Brennan? And when your friend asks why, what would you say to them?

I’d be hard-pressed to answer those questions, myself. I’m hoping you guys can help out with that.

revisions are off

The next day Mr Earbrass is conscious but very little more.

I’ve survived another round with the Beast*.

Time to watch back episodes of House online or something.

*Being The Novel Formally Known As In Ashes Lie But Frequently Referred To As Please God I’ll Be Good Don’t Make Me Deal With Seventeenth-Century English Politics Ever Again.

it worked!

I don’t often link to short story reviews. For one thing, they’re a lot less common than novel reviews, and probably play a much smaller role in convincing people to go find the story in question.

But every so often, one pops up that says, yeah, you know that thing you were trying to do with your story? Bullseye.

At least for this reader. (Warning: spoilers for “Kingspeaker.”)

It’s nice to feel, every once in a while, that you’ve hit your target.

the state of the revision

Warning: graphic metaphor ahead.

***

I currently have the vivisected body of Part IV lying in front of me. (Figuratively speaking; I’m working with an electronic file, not one of my cover-the-floor-with-paper stunts.) I’ve sliced it open and gone to work moving things around: transplants for a few organs, repairs to others, a bit of experimental reconnection that I’m hoping will work. Generally, I feel good about the changes. Having it lying there all bloody is making me nervous, though, because this revision is due on the 17th, and I’d feel a lot better if I could stitch this part up and get it on its feet again, so it can walk around a bit and tell me if anything isn’t functioning the way it needs to.

I can’t, though, because it doesn’t have a liver. There was one before, but it never worked all that well — just well enough to pass — and I’m pretty sure it can’t handle the load the new transplants will place on it. And while a liver isn’t so vital of an organ that you’ll keel over on the spot if yours is kind of gimpy, it isn’t an appendix, either; we really want one that works. So I need a new liver, and I need it in the next week. And I can’t go stitching up the body until I have one, because I’d just have to cut it apart again to put the thing in, and besides, there’s stuff that needs the liver to run right. Which means I’m increasingly fretting about how much work it’ll take to stitch the body up again, and how frantically I’ll have to work to get that done once I have the damn liver.

Fretting, in case you were wondering, is not good for productivity.

There are other things I can work on, and I’m going to do those, so I don’t have to do them post-liver transplant. But it’s harder than usual to trust my usual work pattern — namely, that the idea will show up by the time I need it. Generally it does, and I know from experience that I’ll get better results if I relax and let the hindbrain do what it has to. Unfortunately, that doesn’t silence the little voice whispering but what will you do if it doesn’t . . . .

I’d feel a lot better if I just had the goddamned liver already.

Dear Brain: I’ve had a stressful year. Please don’t add to it any more than you have to. (And consider very carefully what goes on the “have to” list.)

Off to work, while I wait for the liver to arrive.

free fiction

Many of you are no doubt making one of two transitions: either you’re cautiously venturing back onto the Internet, having temporarily exiled yourself to avoid all the political talk, or you’re trying to fill the empty hours now that you no longer need to obsessively check all your favorite political websites. Either way, I have something for you!

The new online magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies has just put up my short story “Kingspeaker.” This is a Nine Lands piece, and the brainchild of something I read about in one of my folklore classes — surprise!

BCS is publishing two pieces every two weeks; my companion this week is the first part of Charles Coleman Finlay and Rae Carson Finlay’s “The Crystal Stair,” which will continue in the next issue. You can also read David Levine’s “Sun Magic, Earth Magic,” Yoon Ha Lee’s “Architectural Constants,” and Chris Willrich’s amusing “The Sword of Loving Kindness,” likewise delivered in two parts. But wait, there’s more! “Architectural Constants” is also being podcasted, and “Kingspeaker” is slated for a later episode. So if you don’t have much time to read, but you do have time to listen, check those out on the website.

hah!

[EDIT: At the advice of my commenters, I’m putting in a notice that this is a post about revision, not politics. I’ve apparently given a few people minor heart attacks already, before they got far enough in to figure out what I was talking about.]

I said it all the way back in July: “When in doubt, throw in an assassination attempt.”

Now, the attempt in question ended up being canceled, but I think putting one in elsewhere may in fact be the solution to one of my problems.

Send in a man with a gun. I don’t think I’ll have an actual gun, but the advice still holds. Funny how this whole “learning your craft” thing involves coming around to the basic lessons over and over and over again.

aneurysm time

And now I have to disengage my brain from thoughts about modern America and participatory democracy and post-racism and the disintegration of the conservative movement and all that stuff, and go back to thinking about the philosophical underpinnings of seventeenth-century monarchy.

Brain. Hurty.

A Modest Suggestion

Discussing a recent Podcastle episode over on their forums, and talking about how I end up not enjoying “realism with just a touch of the fantastic” stories as much if I go into them expecting more overt fantasy, I commented that I might appreciate a heads-up in the story intro, telling me what kind of tale I’m about to listen to. And then, because CYA and all that, I said I wasn’t looking for an actual metric or anything, just, y’know, a hint of what to expect.

But screw that. I want a metric! Should it be dragons? One millidragon for your average “is it fantasy or is this person just crazy?” story, one kilodragon for gonzo over-the-top magic everywhere you look. Or to hell with a metric metric; let’s embrace the irrational organization of imperial units and say there are twelve garcia-marquezes to a tolkien, and eight tolkiens to a gygax. Or whatever. Use the comment thread to suggest what our units of magical measurement should be. Show your work. Extra credit for plausible-looking equations.

conversation with the brain

Conscious Mind: <singing> Revise, revise, revise the book . . . .

Subconscious: Oooh!

Conscious Mind: Yes?

Subsconscious: This is what the book’s about!

CM: Yes, we know that.

SC: Nononono. I mean, yes, but think about this.

CM: I did. Months ago. And that’s about as far as I got.

SC: Get ready to go farther. What if [spoiler]’s motivation was Y, not X?

CM: !!!

SC: Uh-huh.

CM: OMG. That works. So well. And it fits with the —

SC: Uh-huh.

CM: Not sure where to first bring it up, but we can totally work that here, and all through this bit, and —

SC: <preens>

CM: . . .

SC: What?

CM: Except that we resolved that conflict based on the assumption of Motivation X. Just how is this supposed to work out if it’s Y instead?

SC: . . .

CM: C’mon. You got me started down this road; you finish it.

SC: <ninja vanish>

CM: I hate it when she does that.

the full-time writerly life: the big picture

So what do I do with myself all year?

(I figure this is the biggest scale on which I can usefully address the question of how I will be organizing my life. Once we start talking about multiple years at a time, too many of the variables are out of my hands.)

Historically, the answer has been that I write a novel every summer. I missed a couple in there, and sometimes I wrote one during the winter, but on the whole, novels have been summer things, because I’ve been in school.

This has also, to some extent, dictated my pace: it takes me about three to four months to complete a draft. At 1K a day, which is my standard pace, I get about 30K per month, so 3-4 months is enough to produce an average-size fantasy novel. In practice, that’s usually an under-estimate, though I miss days, I treat 1K as a daily minimum rather than an average, so over time I build up a margin of safety. I also tend to speed up as I get closer to the end of the book.

I think it’s fair, then, to divide the year into thirds: three four-month periods. It’ll do as a rough guideline, anyway.

Here’s where it gets fuzzier, because I don’t actually know what I’ll be doing for the next couple of years. In Ashes Lie is the second book of a two-book contract, so other than the revisions (which I’m working on right now) and the rest of its production process, I’m not under contract for anything at the moment. I have some educated guesses as to what I’ll be doing next, but no guarantees yet, and so I’m going to restrict myself to more general terms here.

I can certainly write a novel a year. I was able to do that even while in school full-time; I can do it now. So that’s one third of the year dedicated to writing a novel. What about the other two-thirds?

After years of having nothing much in the way of YA ideas in my head, I’m starting to grow some. So it’s entirely possible I’ll find myself publishing for both adults and teens in the future. Which works out well: a YA novel is maybe half the length of an adult one, depending. Can I write a novel and a half each year? I think so. (My average while in college was slightly better than that, in fact.) I even think I can handle prepping for an adult book — research and so on — while writing a YA. So my ideal yearly schedule would have me writing the YA in the four months preceding the block in which I’m working on the adult novel.

But of course we have to figure in deadlines, which will be dictated by my publisher’s schedule for putting things out. My own order and timing will have to shift to meet reality on the ground.

What about the last third of the year? Odds are high — one might even say certain — that I’ll be revising and copy-editing and page-proofing during that time, since it will follow on the delivery of one book or another. But that isn’t four months of daily work. And while I may be prepping for the next book, it’s hard to imagine that being a full workload, either.

And that’s fine, because I need some time to play. My hope is that the remaining portion of the year, the “vacation” in which I am not drafting a contracted novel, will be spent on playing with new ideas. It’s rare for me to produce a book from a dead halt; usually I’ve got anywhere from a few thousand to forty thousand words already squirreled away in a file by the time I officially sit down to write that book. (Okay, 40K has only happened once. But 10K, sure.) So the last third is for spec projects, things I’m not contracted for but am maybe interested in pitching, or even just stuff I want to do for the hell of it, with no certain expectation of what I’d do with that book if I had it. I’ll be a lot happier if I have a stable of such things, so that when a given contract ends and an editor says, “what would you like to do next?,” I have a bunch of little saplings ready to be turned into full-grown trees.

So the thirds are, in adjustable order: Write YA while prepping adult. Write adult while processing YA for publication. Write whatever I feel like while processing adult and prepping YA.

I think that could work. I like the sound of it, anyway, because it allows me to keep up a book-a-year schedule in both fields while still having some time for work-fun.

We’ll see what happens when I try to put this into practice.

the full-time writerly life: the work week

I’m late posting this one because Project Get A Social Life involved going to my first karate class this evening, at the dojo where kniedzw has recently started attending and my future sister-in-law is a black belt/sensei.

So, my schedule on a larger scale. The next thing to talk about is the week. When I’m noveling, there is no “work week;” I write every single day, unless something prevents me from doing so, because if I don’t a) I lose momentum and b) it’ll take me even longer to finish the damn book. This is a schedule that functions pretty well, but it gets depressing on occasion: after two months of writing every single day, I know I have another month or two of that to look forward to before I can take a break. “No time off for good behavior” is how I usually start characterizing it, around about month #3. And that does suck a bit.

When not noveling, my schedule has heretofore been much more sporadic. Write every day, many advice-givers tell you, but the truth is that I don’t. I write a short story when one is sufficiently developed in my head to go, or play around with new novel ideas, but you need to put this all in the context of the academic year; novels were what I did during the summer, and the other nine months I at least tried to make other things my priority. (You may deduce my incomplete success, which is to say increasing failure, by my departure from graduate school.) But if this is my full-time job, then it makes sense to try and be more productive.

I figure, then, that I should make use of this concept of “work week.” Monday through Friday, with weekends off. If I’m not noveling under deadline, then how’s about some relaxation time? I may write on the weekend, of course; see the first F-TWL post for my refusal to apologize for that. But only if I feel like it. Other jobs give people time off, after all. I deserve some, too.

Monday through Friday, though, my goal is to put down at least some words. The daily novel quota is a thousand; I’d like to shoot for five hundred in the downtime, at least to start with. Five hundred a day for two weeks (with weekends off) would give me a decent-sized short story. Higher productivity would be great, but baby steps; I think I’d rather ease into my workload, rather than leaping headfirst for a big target and finding out the hard way that it’s too much. (That’s how I crashed and burned on the first novel I tried to finish, in high school. Not sure how much I was trying to write per day, but it was a lot more than a thousand. No great loss, mind you; that was an apprentice idea, cobbled together before I leveled up and started having ideas worth my time.)

I figure that goal is flexible. If I spend a day revising a story — real revision; not just rearranging the commas — that’s real work, too. So is world-building, if I get on a kick for that. Maybe I don’t need to put down words those days. But I should still try, because when all is said and done, the production of words is the baseline requirement for this job, without which none of the rest of it matters very much.

parliamentary question

The short story is going better, but by “better” I mean I now have pliers to pull the teeth with, rather than just my bare fingers. So I’ve decided, screw it, I’m going back to polishing the novel while I wait for my edit letter.

To that end: are any of my readers here familiar with parliamentary procedure for the House of Commons? Things like, what phrases do they use to summon the Commons up to meet with the Lords (assuming that still happens), and how do they announce a division?

(The nice thing about the UK Parliament is, I can with reasonable certainty assume these details haven’t really changed in three hundred and fifty years . . . I mean, they still drag the Speaker to his chair, and a Speaker hasn’t been murdered or executed in centuries.)

So, yeah. If you’re enough of a British political geek to answer those kinds of questions, let me know, and I’ll give you the list.

my kind of outline

I know some writers who outline their novels . . . after the first draft is written. They go back and look over what they’ve got, outlining it to help themselves figure out what exactly they’re trying to do, and where it doesn’t yet work. And it came to me just recently that, you know, I do the same thing.

It’s called making a soundtrack.

I talked about this a bit with Midnight Never Come, which is where the practice jumped from RPGs to novels. It started as a mood-music thing, but when you think about it, sitting down to figure out what characters and events deserve songs, and what kinds of songs they require, is basically like creating a musical outline of the novel. Trying to make my choices, I find myself pondering what mood a scene is trying to communicate — is it more ominous or mournful? Is that thing that happens an end-punch to a sequence, or a turning point halfway through it? I’m mostly working from film scores, which are great for this kind of thing; I can be finicky about the shape of the songs I pick, trying to find one whose contours match the events I want it to describe.

Those are my major requirements in picking a song, but there’s a secondary game I sometimes play, hidden beneath the surface. I used a track from Henry V for this particular thing, so if I use something else from the same score over there, will that create an appropriate thematic connection . . . I end up pondering linkages in an unexpected way. And there’s a wealth of ironies hidden in some of the source titles, too; I don’t pick songs based on their original names, but when those line up, it amuses me. (Two non-spoiler examples: Lune’s song this time around is “One Mistress, No Master” from Elizabeth, and the High Court of Justice, which put Charles I on trial, is “The King Is Dead” from Ennio Morricone’s Hamlet score.)

Oh, and then there are the utterly obscure musical in-jokes from Memento. This book bears only a distant relationship to the game — it pretty much consists of the Great Fire being more than just a bunch of flames — but I re-purposed several pieces from that soundtrack to appropriate effect. I mean, if a song is good for the Black Death, why not use it for a later outbreak of the plague? Not that 99.99% of the world will ever know those connections are there.

Some of it, though, is annoyingly difficult. I don’t know why, but I have a devil of a time picking songs for certain characters, protagonists especially. I’m not happy with my current choices for either Antony or Jack, though Lune’s is good. (It’s like trying to pick for the Merrimans in Memento. I never liked about three-quarters of my choices there, but they were the best I could do.) Maybe it’s just that characters are too complex in my head to be reduced to a piece of music — I don’t know.

Anyway, this gives me something to do while I wait for my edit letter. Though I’d be making faster progress if my computer would stop choking on iTunes . . . .

grrrr

Judging by my progress so far tonight, I have not yet found the hole that noveling buried my story mojo in.

That, or having to consult Panlexicon, the OED, or a Latin dictionary — worse case scenario, all three — every sentence or so is killing my forward progress.

Probably both.

I should just write the damn story and worry about the language later, but I hear blood vessels rupturing in all the prose-stylist writers of my acquaintance, at the thought that these two things are separable. Really, I should just write the damn story and give up on the stylistic experiment I’m trying to carry out . . . but where’s the fun in that?

Can anybody recommend a translation of Beowulf that sounds as much like the original as possible? I don’t want accessibility here; I want the linguistic knack I had back when I was translating pages of Old Norse every week, for making my English flow in different patterns. But my Norse is too rusty, and this is supposed to be Anglo-Saxon anyway. Any Anglo-Saxon text would work, I suppose; I just keep turning to Beowulf because it’s the only one I know.

close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and honorable mentions

I have not yet achieved my ambition of getting a story into a year’s best anthology, but “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” received an Honorable Mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. It also got a nod in one of the introductions, during the discussion of On Spec. I had my fingers crossed for this one, I must admit; I love all my children equally, blah blah blah, but “Nine Sketches” is one of my favorites.

(It’s actually my second HM, though. “Shadows’ Bride” got one a couple of years ago — and I can’t remember if I mentioned this, but Pseudopod has picked up audio rights for it, so you’ll get a chance to hear it some day.)

Thanks to jimhines for letting me know I could search the HM list through Amazon, rather than having to get off my duff and go to the bookstore already. Yes, the post-novel ennui+cold continues, and I am a lazy slug.

And congrats to everyone else who got a nod! Share your good news here.