unfinished novel meme
We’ll only include novels for which either I have a fragment written, or they’re connected to books that have at least a fragment written. So it’s more an “unfinished and potential novel” meme.
Posts Tagged ‘writing’
any sociologists out there?
Apparently I’m developing this thing for arguing with mind-melds.
In this instance, SF Signal is taking on gender imbalance in spec fic publishing. Lots of food for thought in there, but I’m at the point where my single overwhelming thought is this:
Is there, anywhere out there, a sociologist with both the necessary interest in genre fiction and the necessary methodological rigor to get us some actual data?
Because until somebody does that study, we’re arguing from evidence that is 98% anecdotes and gut feeling. Some magazines (Strange Horizons, Fantasy) openly discuss the gender breakdown of their submissions and publications; Broad Universe has scraped data from issue runs of some more. But where’s the data for novels? First novels, bestseller novels, big contracts, broken down by (admittedly fuzzy) categories of sub-genre, maybe even weighted for type of narrative if our hypothetical sociologist is good enough. Reviews, awards, hardcover versus trade paper versus mmpb publication. In a dream world we’d know the submission stats, too — but good luck getting those. Even without them, it would be a start.
It makes me regret my exit from academia, but truth is, I could never do this study. You really need a sociologist, not an anthropologist; this is not participant-observation work.
Some things we do know: that the people who say “I just buy/read good work, regardless of who wrote it” are naive. It’s well-established, in fields ranging from biology to symphony orchestras, that the perceived gender of individuals affects their reception: the percentage of women in orchestras went up after musicians began auditioning behind a curtain, with a carpet laid down so high-heeled shoes wouldn’t click on the floor. Swap the names on journal articles, and readers will rate higher the one they think is written by a man. Very few editors or readers out there are actively hating on women writers; the real problem is the inactive prejudice.
But we need data before we can get to the deeper questions of “why,” let alone “what do we do about it?” The relative absence of women in science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) no doubt arises from many factors, ranging from fewer women with the educational background to write hard SF, to less free time on their hands for the writing of it, to a reluctance to submit to markets they perceive as unfriendly to them, to editorial bias, to reader bias, and so around the merry-go-round. The relative presence of women in the current paranormal romance/urban fantasy borderland arises from a different set of factors. I don’t think anecdotes and gut feeling are without their use, but we might get farther if we had actual concrete information.
on we go
I forgot to post my landmark last night: 30K down. Not quite halfway through Part II.
We’re moving into a bit of the book where, as I told ninja_turbo this evening, I would never dare make this shit up. Certain details would look too ludicrous, too over-the-top. But sometimes history really does that; truth, on occasion, is stranger than fiction.
Also more melodramatic.
Current count: 31,258.
LBR tally: All three, unexpectedly — though it’s a rhetorical kind of love.
Authorial sadism: Sending people to Hell!
July 1st things
The auction over at is open for bidding now. Look in the tags for “mod note” to find instructions on what to do, and where to post when you’ve won an auction, so they can track totals. Offerings range from more customized fanfic than you can shake a slash at to cookies to personalized clothing advice for those whose bodies don’t look like the fashion industry wants them to. And all the money goes toward charities for defending gay marriage rights.
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I’m a bad writer for putting that one first and this one second, but hey, priorities. Today also marks the official release for Clockwork Phoenix, the anthology in which you can see me attempting to make Mesoamerican fantasy work. Ordering info behind that link. I haven’t read it yet myself — I’m waiting for my contributor’s copy, rather than trying to plow through it in the page-proof .pdf — but the bits I’ve seen look fabulous. Enjoy!
Sporadic Roundup Number Whatever
Remember, you have until midnight Greenwich time (EDT 7 p.m., I believe) to enter the Midnight Never Come competition, with a chance to win £250/$500 in bookstore vouchers. (It’s a pretty sweet deal. D’you think my publisher would notice if I put myself in?)
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If you want to hear me ramble on, instead of seeing it, Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing has a podcast interview up, wherein Shaun Ferrell asks me questions about writing, academia, and (of course) Midnight Never Come.
You can subscribe to the feed via iTunes, or download the file directly. If you want to cut straight to my part of the podcast, it starts around twelve minutes in; if you want to skip right past me, I think I shut up around the forty-minute mark.
Despite my best efforts, I, er, talked like I normally do. Which is to say, fast. Sorry about that.
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Review roundup! Only one of them is accessible online, unfortunately.
Our own ninja_turbo liked it, even accounting for friend bias. Being unfamiliar with the history, he was still able to follow along — yay!
Meredith Schwartz and Jackie Cassada at Library Journal call it a “deft blending” and note that, unlike many staples of the Elizabethan fantasy genre, I don’t use real people as my main characters. (Either approach, of course, can work. But they seem to have liked this one.)
And then two more good ones mailed in from my UK publisher. One appears to come from a magazine called Starburst, and wins my heart for calling Christopher Marlowe “Kit.” The other is from SciFiNow, and it tells me I hit one of the targets I was particularly aiming for: “Eschewing the use of the typical Seelie and Unseelie (or Summer and Winter) courts that appear in so many novels dealing with the subject, Brennan has created a faerie society that is quintessentially English.” Rock on! That goes up there with my UK publisher deciding to pick up a London book by an American author in the first place for evidence I’m doing something right.
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Finally, if you’ve read the book, feel free to poke your head in on the discussions going on in the spoiler thread. I’m enjoying the back-and-forth there quite a bit.
Curse you, English language!
Words I can’t use to describe the Army and their supporters in 1648, because these political terms weren’t invented until much later: radical, extremist, republican, revolutionary.
What the hell am I supposed to call them, except “those guys with the sentiments that freaked the shit out of many seventeenth-century English but look pretty familiar to those of us living in modern democracies”?
(And that’s a whole separate problem — figuring out how to present Antony’s feelings on the Levellers and their ilk, when many of the things the Levellers stood for are the conservative end of ideals we cherish dearly today. The easy solution would be to make him a sympathizer to their cause, but that’s what we call an author cheesing out on historical accuracy. Most people at the time thought the Levellers were trying to destroy the fabric of society. So: find ways to say Antony thinks democracy is a bad idea, without making readers dislike him for it. Somehow.)
open letter
Dear Gods of Overachieving Authors,
If I promise to do suitable penance and grovel a bit, will you promise that I never have to study seventeenth-century English politics again? Pretty please?
‘Cause I’m increasingly convinced this flaming ball of contradictory disaster they called their government is the real reason nobody wants to write fiction about the period.
Pleadingly,
An Author Who Still Loves Her Book, But Wants to Light the Period Politics On Fire
new rule
I think I shall make a resolution never to read or watch or listen to a story that features a weak or stupid character named Kate, so as to preserve the current axiom that all characters named Kate are awesome.
Because Antony’s wife just rocked this scene in so many ways.
Current word count: 24680, but that’s cheating, since 500 is a direct copy of 500 still sitting earlier in the text. (I’ll deal with the first version when I go back and fix all the other problems with Part One.)
LBR tally: Kate loves you, dude, but she also pays attention to politics.
Authorial sadism: Finding out your wife has noticed what you’re up to.
neglected history
Death-marching through The King’s War (five hundred pages down; one hundred to go), I find myself considering a question that’s been in my mind for some time.
Why is seventeenth-century England so neglected in fiction?
Seventeenth and eighteenth both, really, but I haven’t gotten into researching the eighteenth yet. There’s some stuff there, but they get trampled by the Elizabethan period from one end and the Victorian from the other. (Starting early with the Regency.) Tonight I’m probably going to take time off from the death-march to watch one of the only pre-Restoration movies I’ve been able to find (To Kill a King). I know of almost no fantasy novels set during the Stuart era.
Yet the seventeenth century is chock-full of conflict and change. You’d expect to find lots of fiction exploiting that . . . but you don’t. Why?
one fifth down . . . .
Word count: 22843
LBR quota: This is a classic case of rhetoric collapsing into blood.
Authorial sadism: All of it? Antony’s on the losing side: neither Royalist nor Parlimentarian, but the voice of moderation. He’s doomed.
That’s Part One in the can. The good news: I found the books I need to make Part One 600% better. The bad news: I didn’t find them until I had written 99% of Part One.
But, well, Antony’s last scene here doesn’t suck. Yay! And I won’t have to rewrite all the fae-side stuff. Though I may have to adjust its timeline; I fear I may have to figure out a way to cut the Short Parliament out entirely, in order to make space for all the shenanigans of the Long Parliament. (Or rather, those shenanigans taking place between November 1640 and January 1642. All its shenanigans require far more wordage than this; it’s called “Long” for a reason.)
So that’s a fifth or so of book. What comes next sequentially is not what comes next chronologically, since I’m going to be cutting back and forth between periods of Civil War etc. and days of the Great Fire; I have to wait to write the Fire stuff until I’ve done everything leading up to it.
From here we go to 1648. I’m skipping over most of the actual Civil War because it happened almost entirely in places other than London, and in ways that I can’t very easily integrate my characters into. This is lovely, except that I kind of need to read the remaining 554 pages of this book between now and, uh, tomorrow’s work. And get another book and read that one too; who knows how long it is.
Why yes, I am behind on my research.
But onward we go, through the fog of civil war, and into what follows.
Open Book Thread: Midnight Never Come
Quick reminder: the contest running on the official website for Midnight Never Come goes until midnight GMT on June 30th. All six questions have been posted now, and for every one you get right, your name is entered in the drawing for a $500/£250 gift voucher.
Onward to the purpose of the post.
Consider this the official Open Thread for Midnight Never Come. If you have any comments you’d like to make about the book, questions you’d like to ask, feel free to do it here. Want to inquire about some historical detail? Find out why I chose to do something a particular way? Point out to me some anachronistic words or phrases I failed to scrub out before publication? This is the place. I’ll be linking this post on my website, so if you haven’t read the book yet, you can always come back here later.
(People can and do e-mail me, but I figured I’d try doing this publicly, where people can see what, if anything, others have to say.)
I am mighty(er)
I’ve come up with an analogy for what writing this book feels like. (Warning: weird metaphor ahead.)
Say you’ve been going to the gym for some months, maybe a year, and lifting weights faithfully. And the numbers have gone up, sure, but what does that mean? Then one day you find yourself messing around with a friend, and the two of you get into a wrestling match, and you’re gasping and snarling and trying to get a good grip so you can exert some leverage and damn it’s hard — but then halfway through you realize that a year ago, this friend would have had you face-down on the floor crying uncle in about four seconds flat. And maybe all that weightlifting really has done something.
I don’t think what I have so far is brilliant, but I also know what’s what revision is for. I think I’m getting my foundations in more or less the right place, and that means bringing things up to code won’t be too tough. Sure, for the first time in my life I find myself routinely writing three hundred words and then ripping them right back out again, that very night, to start the scene over from scratch — I’ve written fully 15% more than I have of actual book — but that isn’t defeat; that’s victory. That’s noticing my friend about to get me in a pin I won’t be able to escape, and squirming out of it before I can be trapped.
I’m stronger than I used to be.
(Though not physically. My puny self needs to get back to the gym.)
accidental allegory?
The King saw any restrictions they tried to impose as infringements upon his royal authority.
Writing this scene of political debate, it occurs to me that somebody out there will probably decide I wrote this book as commentary on current U.S. politics. With, I don’t know, faerie warfare as a coded metaphor for terrorism.
Or something.
imponderables
The character who was John Highlord when I started writing has been replaced with Thomas Soame, because I realized matters would work better if I used an alderman who was also a member of Parliament later on, and both of them are minor enough figures that they don’t rate entries in the DNB. (Ergo, I can make stuff up and not worry too much about somebody knowing I’m wrong.)
So I ask you: why, pray tell, does my subconscious want to insist that Thomas Soame wouldn’t talk the way I had John Highlord do? Why does it object to him being broad-shouldered? Everything I know about both of these men would fit into a paragraph shorter than this one, and it consists of a handful of dates regarding their public service. I don’t know what they looked like. I don’t know what their personalities were. Yet my subconscious resists the swap.
This, chickadees, is why naming is sometimes a giant problem for me. If I don’t find the right name, I often can’t write the character, and it’s like pulling teeth to change a name once it’s settled in. Some bit of my brain decides nobody named Thomas Soame could possibly be a blunt-spoken, broad-shouldered guy, and god only knows how long it will take to convince it otherwise.
This job would be easier if my brain were rational.
creative whiplash
I’m not sure whether to be amused or distressed that I game with a group of people who, confronted with a horde of zombies headed for Tiananmen Square, decide that the best of all possible responses is to show up with a tank.
Anyway, we just destroyed the center of Beijing — srsly, I’m talking flaming wreckage of the Tiananmen itself crashing down into the sea of gasoline-charred zombie body parts, bullet casings, shattered concrete, and dead PLA soldiers — and now I have to go write subtle, elegant politics.
My head hurts.
But wheeeeee, is over-the-top gaming fun.
another book-release post
First things first: having found my head rolling around on the floor and screwed it back on to my shoulders, I’m ready to announce the winner of the MNC release contest! By the high-tech randomization method of rolling a die — what? I’m a gamer — the copy of Paradox #12 goes to archangl23. Send me your address at marie dot brennanATgmail dot com, and I’ll send you the magazine!
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Second: there’s a new interview with me, this time over at the urban fantasy community “Fangs, Fur, and Fey.” We mostly talk about Midnight Never Come, but also about urban fantasy more broadly.
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Two more reviews in . . .
Karen at SF Signal gives it three stars, calling it “An excellent story full of political machinations and historical accuracy.” I’ll note in passing that I’m pleased by how my prose seems to be coming across; I’m sure there are people who will find it off-puttingly archaic, but for the most part I appear to have hit the target I aimed at — namely, to suggest the period without being impenetrable.
(Now, can I keep doing that?)
Robert Thompson at Fantasy Book Critic also liked it. Pull-quote: “a seductive blend of historical fiction, court intrigue, fantasy, mystery and romance.”
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Also, two interesting news developments about the Elizabethan period. First, it seems that archaeologists have found a fabulously well-preserved shipwreck from the period. (Is that the fault of my characters? You decide!) And Slate has a piece on a controversial decision to excise a poem called “The Lover’s Complaint” from the Shakespearean canon, and to add a new one —
Glimpses inside a writer’s head
Dammit, Strafford, get out of my novel. I don’t have the space to deal with you.
ETA: Also, how distracting would it be, if I actually put in the line, “Let them go, let them go, to do their endeavour”? One suspects it actually was the line used to start duels. At least in Scotland.
ETA #2: Actually, let’s just do this the right way. Does anybody know of a book I could read to find out how duels and judicial combat were conducted in seventeenth-century England?
this month on SF Novelists
I neglected to link to this before because I was out of town on the day it went live, but I have my usual monthly post up at SF Novelists. This time it’s “The Writer at Play,” wherein I lay out why I think role-playing games have made me a better writer. Feel free to head over there and contribute your own experiences in the comments!
special interview
We managed to find a motel offering free internet access, so I’m hopping online long enough to post a link to the unusual interview I mentioned a while back.
Welcome to Cat and Muse, which bills itself as the only Internet talk radio conducted entirely by fictional characters. If you check out that link, you will find not me, but Lady Lune, being interviewed by the ex-succubus Jezebel and Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy. (Who can speak only in cliches.)
This is probably my favorite interview I’ve done thus far.
What are you, twelve?
Where did that come from?
The first scene I wrote yesterday was The Suck. Antony sitting around and being a spectator to history. It didn’t quite get me to quota, so then I started a new scene, where introducing his wife helped liven things up. Two sentences into today’s continuation, she verbally kicks him in the ass and asks just what he intends to do about the problems around him. So I send Antony off to pick a fight with Pym . . .
And he picks a fight.
Well, not quite. It isn’t his fault the scene almost devolved into a riot. But for the love of baby Jesus, man, you’re thirty-two. Aren’t you a little old for fistfights in the street?
LBR quota: Well, it was supposed to be all rhetoric, but some blood got in there.
Authorial sadism: Having your wife call you on your cowardice, I suppose.
