Bad blogger.
Did I mention it’s the 16th again? And I have a post up at SF Novelists? This time it’s “Why I will never write a Mayan apocalypse novel.” Go, read, enjoy.
I think I may know what my next two months of SF Novelists posts will be. That’s a nice feeling.
Dear Brain,
Why?
No, seriously. I know I asked you for ideas. But did you have to come up with this? I don’t know if you remember, but we just did the research thing a few bleeding months ago. Is that really what we need to be doing again? I mean, come on.
Yes, it’s a shiny idea. But still.
Okay, okay. Yes. This might be a good thing. Let me sleep on it, okay? STOP PESTERING ME. I have a game tonight, and need to stop thinking about the Shiny! If it really is shiny, it’ll still be shiny tomorrow. You know how this works by now.
So yeah. Knock it off already.
With slightly murderous affection,
–Your Writer
So, here’s the deal. My publisher wants to include an interview with me at the back of Midnight Never Come, and I’ve been give the go-ahead to let the interviewer in question be you, Gentle Readers.
They’re looking for me to answer 7-10 questions about writing in general and Midnight Never Come in specific. I figure I’ll solicit questions from everyone, pick out the most popular and/or the most interesting, and send those in; the ones I don’t answer for the book, I may well post on my website as a bonus.
So post your questions in comments! Try to keep it writing- and/or this-book-related (no questions about my secret life as a Cambodian mortuary-worker-turned-spy), and try to post it by next Wednesday (the 17th) at the latest. (I need to send my responses to Orbit by the 19th.)
Here we go . . . .
Updated to clarify: Feel free to ask more than one question, and to repeat other people’s questions (since that’s how I’ll judge the popularity of a given topic).
We’re up to 442 words on “How Heroes Fall” (its other possible title). Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but since this will consist of a bunch of vignettes around a theme, it’s a decent amount; it’s two vignettes out of some unknown total — maybe eight or ten.
This is, without a doubt, the most artsy-fartsy piece of crap I’ve ever written. My one hope is to make it good enough to remove “crap” from that equation. (Ain’t nothing gonna redeem it from artsy-fartsy-hood.)
I had all three of my e-mail accounts down to thirty e-mails or less when I went to bed last night; they’ve bounced up a bit since then, but not much. The fact that ninety unanswered e-mails counts as brag-worthy progress tells you what state they were in before.
I’m in a weird state right now. Not enough motivation to get anything done, but enough brain to want to get something done. Can’t figure out what to do with myself. Answer e-mails? Grade? Those would be useful. Write? Read? Watch something? Those would be entertaining. Clean up the house? I really ought to. But I can’t settle down to anything, it seems.
Meh. Stupid temperature dropping like a rock. We skipped right over the first two stages of fall, it looks like, and went straight to grey and dismal.
So, I got married. And then I went to Vegas. (With a pause in there to teach two more days of class; I couldn’t just cancel a whole week.) Now I’m home.
Very, very glad to be home.
I’m trying to recover enough brain to deal with the backlog of e-mail that has built up over the last month or more. Most of the truly crucial stuff has been dealt with as it happened — I hope — but there’s a lot of non-crucial stuff owing. If any of that stuff involves you, Dear Readers, then please bear with me as I try to wade through it. Cerberus (my collection of three e-mail accounts) has grown a fine new set of teeth on all of its heads; dealing with those will take a little while.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying my return from the land of Flashing! Lights! and Brightly! Colored! Things! and did we mention the Obnoxious! Noises! The shows we saw (Penn & Teller, and Cirque du Soleil’s Kà and Mystere) were fabulous, but right about now, I’m taking deep pleasure in reading unmoving black text on a white page. And even writing a bit of my own; one of the flash vignettes that will make up the story “How They Fall” (if that ends up being its title) got scribbled down during my office hours today. I have hope this signals the return of my brain. It’s been missing for several weeks now; I’d love to see it again.
Brief challenge: can anybody make me a better icon out of the book cover? This one doesn’t shrink terribly well, but I lack the skills to do anything fancier with it. (The font used for the title is AquilineTwo, available for free online.)
Anyway, the real point of this post is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. With the revisions done and out the door, I’ve decided it’s time to officially dismantle my research shelf — the bookcase where I’ve been keeping all my MNC-related books since April or so. They’re all dispersed back to their usual sections, now. But I took a photo a month ago, to record for posterity what it looked like:
The notebooks on the bottom are unrelated, but everything else is there for the novel. (Well, not the fountain.) Faerie lore on the left of the middle shelf, assorted library books on the right; on the upper shelf, it’s roughly organized by general Renaissance, London, biographies, espionage, and then a few isolates like a book on the Reformation, and a few pieces of period literature. That giant thing in the stack on top is the dissertation Dr. William Tighe mailed to me, one of the few scholarly works in existence that discusses the Gentlemen Pensioners in any detail.
Not everything I used is there. I think my Agas map book is missing, as are The Book of the Courtier, The Prince, and the complete poetic works of Sir Philip Sidney, which I pillaged in my search for epigraphs. I do not claim to have read everything on that shelf in its entirety. There’s almost nothing there, however, that I didn’t at least try.
It could have been a lot more. That’s the terrifying part.
But it’s dismantled now, and I’m finding out just how massively certain sections of my library (like “London” and “faerie lore”) have grown. Rearranging books is an activity that makes me oddly happy, though, so it was a pleasant task for a sunny Friday afternoon.
Well, that’s it. I’m done with the revisions on Midnight Never Come, and I must say I’m rather pleased with the state of the book. Which sparked me to ponder the difference between “the best book it can be” and “the best book I can write.”
Most of what I do is the former. This is the latter.
Let me put it in metaphorical terms first. You know that height is determined by both genetics and nutrition, right? As in, your genes allow for you to be a range of possible heights, but your nutrition will determine where in that range you fall. (Broadly speaking. I need the metaphor, not the biological specifics.) Well, most of the time what I’m doing is feeding my books all the nutrition (effort) I can give them, so they reach their full potential in terms of growth (or rather, quality.)
I think of it this way because my ideas tend to come out of my subconscious, and are inflexible to a certain degree. They are what they are, and if I care about them enough I will write them, but that doesn’t guarantee that every one is a groundbreaking new leap forward in my skill. There will always be some development — I never want to coast — but I can’t necessarily take an idea that’s capable of being five foot nine and make it six foot just because. I make them the best books they can be, given the ideas they’re built on. If there are flaws, weak points, it’s a problem in the foundation; the only way I can do better is to write a different book.
Midnight Never Come has eaten everything I’ve thrown at it, and asked for more. I can’t feed it enough to make it hit its full potential. It is the fourteen-year-old-boy of novels.
It’s close to being as good as it can be. I can tell. There are very few places in the book where I look at it and think, man, that could punch the reader just a little bit harder — but there are a few. And those places exist, not because I haven’t put in the effort to fix them, not because the foundational ideas aren’t strong enough, but because I simply don’t have it in me to squeeze out those last few drops of awesome. This not quite the best book it is capable of being, but it is the best book I am capable of writing.
When I wrote Warrior and Witch (to pick one example), I deliberately tried to work on a bigger political canvas. That was the major challenge of that book. This book? The political canvas got bigger again. And there are more pieces on my mental chessboard. And the embroidery of its description and style is more intricate. And a whole lot of other metaphors I could toss in there, which boil down to: I’m pushing myself everywhere. I can’t think of a single major aspect of the book that isn’t bigger and better than what I’ve tried before.
You could say, shouldn’t that be true of every book? In theory. But the truth of the matter is, my brain doesn’t cough up ideas that advanced on a regular basis. Most of them push me on one front; some push me on more. Which is fine, really, because working selectively on different aspects of my writing make leaps like this one possible. If I sat around waiting only for the truly record-breaking ideas, I’d never come up with them, or be capable of tackling them if I did.
But it’s odd to look at a book and think, this truly is the best I can do. And not have it be a negative statement (c’mon, is that the best you got? pfff), but a positive one.
<ponders> I’m not sure this post conveys what’s in my head. It feels like this reflects badly on most of the other books I’ve written, and I don’t mean for it to do that. I promise, I don’t slack on any of them.
Maybe what I should say is: most of my books are the best I can do with my ideas, while this book is the best my ideas can do with me.
Final version, or at least final enough that I’m allowed to post it.
A few notes. First of all, this is the kind of cover that will look much better in print than on the screen, because as I found out the hard way, the details depend heavily on your monitor settings. If you can’t see the building in the background, you aren’t really getting it all. (Yes, there’s a building in the background. I promise. I didn’t see it until I tried a different computer.)
Second, there are two details that can’t be conveyed in an image. The title will be printed in silver foil, and the floral pattern winding through will be done in a spot gloss on an otherwise matte cover. Or at least that’s the current plan.
I’m quite pleased with it. Authorial nitpickiness aside (there’s always authorial nitpickiness), it’s a nice, elegant cover, and I like their choice of a pull-quote for the top; that’s a line from a John Dowland song I found just as I was doing revisions back in August. I’ll leave it as a closing note:
“Time stands still with gazing on her face,
stand still and gaze for minutes, houres and yeares, to her giue place:
All other things shall change, but shee remains the same,
till heauens changed haue their course & time hath lost his name.”
I forgot to mention it last month (bad Swan, bad), but I’m one of the contributors to the SF Novelists group blog. The sixteenth of the month is my day to post, so today, it’s a ramble on respecting history — that is, writing historical fiction while being respectful to the real people of the time.
In other news, I’m sick. Better now, thirteen days before the wedding, than some time next week, right? Right?
Wow. Shortest edit letter in the history of publishing. (Or at least my history of publishing. And apparently my editor’s history of sending such things.)
Seriously, this thing is one page long. And the top half of that is letterhead followed by the Standard Introductory Paragraph of “Thank you for sending this to me, it’s great, here’s a few nice things about it.” Three paras of Things To Fix, and we’re done.
Mind you, it isn’t three paras of “here’s a few typos;” the three things she touches on are a little more pervasively problematic. As I put it in my response to her, they’re of the “one sentence to describe, rather more to fix” variety. But really? This is the kind of edit letter that makes one come close to collapsing in weak-kneed relief. Oh thank god, she doesn’t want me to rip out this entire plotline and change the ending and replace that character with a one-legged midget from Morocco. Just a few things that aren’t quite clear or powerful enough.
The downside? With the edits so relatively light, she wants to know if I can get it back to her sooner than the agreed-upon date of Oct. 22nd. Which would be absolutely doable . . . if there weren’t a wedding in the way. As it stands, I’ve sent a very waffly response to the effect of “can I play with it for a week and give you an estimate then?” variety.
We’ll see what I can pull off, here.
I must have been a good little writer-being or something, ’cause the prototype cover I was just sent for Midnight Never Come is PURTY.
If you’re in the camp of people who would have preferred something other than a half-headless chick in leather for the cover of Doppelganger, you’ll be pleased to hear that one of the first adjectives to leap into my head for this one was “elegant.”
I’m waiting to hear if I can post the image I was sent. It isn’t utterly finalized, so the answer may be “no” — they need to do some minor bits of rearranging — but I’ll put it up just as soon as I can.
They didn’t call John in until the bullets had finished flying, until everybody who was going to surrender had surrendered and everybody who was going to die had died. By that point, of course, she was long gone.
Oh, lordy. I do not need my hindbrain offering me story nuggets whose research requirements start with “telephone the FBI.”
Like a proper ego-stroking writer, I just went through the list of nominees (pdf) for the Hugo awards, as they have released not just the short lists of actual candidates, but all the names that were proposed. Turns out I got four nominations for the Campbell. Which isn’t a lot, and nowhere near enough to put me in the running (the lowest person on the short list got 24, the highest [Naomi Novik] got 81) — but still, it’s nice to know. If you’re one of the four, then thank you.
Kudos to everybody who got a nod.
Midnight Never Come is out the door (electronically speaking) and in the editor’s hands. Or at least her computer.
Which means I get to pretend, for just a little while, that I’m done with it.
I’m not, of course. She’ll send me an edit letter, after which my revised draft is due October 22nd. Then copy-edits some time in November or December. Then page proofs. I will be so very sick of this book by then.
But for now, I get to bask in the glow of it being (temporarily) Done.
We interrupt this revision to bring you the following complaint:
God, I hate working with non-decimal currency.
It took an irritating amount of math to figure out what £46 13s. 4d. works out to in Elizabethan marks. (Seventy, in case you were wondering.) Doing calculations where there are twelvepence (d) to the shilling (s) and twenty shillings to the pound, and a mark is worth 13s. 4d., is a good argument for modern currency systems.
Okay, great Internets ubermind. I need a rather specific music recommendation.
I’m soundtracking Midnight Never Come, and I don’t seem to have anything appropriate for a particular scene. Of course, I can’t share the details of the scene, but the relevant thing I’m aiming for is the somewhat ominous ringing of bells. Deep bells, not little hand-bells, and it should seem like a threat rather than a triumphant sound. (What can I say? Faeries don’t like church bells.)
I know some of you listen to a great many movie scores, and that’s probably one of my best bets for finding something suitable. Any suggestions I could go looking for?
Edited to clarify: to borrow Deedop’s phrase, I need something aggressively ominous. I also need something that doesn’t sound too modern; I’m not actually using truly period music for this soundtrack (though I listened to some while writing the book), but I’m trying to avoid synthetic sounds.
This is one of those working habits that probably isn’t a good idea. But it’s how I work; Midnight Never Come is the eighth iteration of this approach. I’m used to it. And it has its benefits.
When I finished writing my first novel, I took a little time off, and then I started editing. Step one, of course, was to read through the novel, at which stage I marked it up with the major changes that needed to be made: continuity errors, bits that needed tightening, awkward sections, things I had to mention earlier or not drop later. This is, in my head, the “chainsaw edit” — the stage at which I take a chainsaw to the story. I mark it up with a red pen, and the goal is to make it look like I bled on the printout. If a page gets by clean, I feel like I’m not trying hard enough.
But what you have to bear in mind is that a page, in this situation, is not a standard manuscript formatted page of novel. It’s a miniscript page.
The miniscript is the part that’s probably a bad idea, but it has historical justification. The Harvard Band was going to some away game — Princeton or Cornell or some place we took a bus to the night before. Since I was always on the Study Bus (as opposed to the Raunch Bus), I decided I would use the trip as a chance to read through the novel. But even in my usual formatting (Times New Roman 12 pt., single-spaced), that was 198 pages of book, which is an awful lot to haul around. I decided to make it smaller.
The result was something my brain immediately dubbed the “miniscript,” the mini-manuscript. Times New Roman, 8 pt., full justification, half-inch margins, delete all page breaks between chapters, print on both sides of the page. Hole-punch the edge and secure it with those little metal rings, and you’ve got yourself a novel on forty pieces of paper — less if it’s a short novel, more if I ever write something that goes substantially past the 120K mark. I have eight of these things now. Maybe more; I can’t remember if I printed a miniscript for the atrocious first draft of Sunlight and Storm, or the revised draft of TNFKASotS*. I go through and mark them up with the red-pen chainsaw edit; then I go through again with a green pen, doing the line-edit. (That’s useless in places where I’ve radically changed scenes, but I just skip over those.)
What you need, to try this at home: forty pieces of paper (give or take), three metal rings, a red pen, a green pen, and microscopic handwriting.
Is it the best way to edit a novel? Probably not. But it’s how I edit a novel. Which is why the miniscript of Midnight Never Come came with me on a plane to Dallas, and acquired a sizeable bloodstain that has nothing to do with the quality of the story; my pen exploded during the flight. For portability, the miniscript can’t be beat.
—
*The Novel Formerly Known As SotS. That’s an acronym at the end, for the original title, which I’m not using so I’ll stop thinking about the book by that name. I’m failing, but I keep trying. My problems would be much reduced if I could just come up with a title I like.
Some of you may have heard that August 6th through the 12th is the second International Blog Against Racism Week.
I’d love to contribute something lengthy and thought-provoking, and maybe while I’m home in Dallas I will. But I can’t promise I’ll have the time, so instead of a substantial post born of my anthropology brain, you get a brief, personal anecdote.
You see, most of my stories are set in other worlds, where the representation of race automatically gets more complicated. (If my black-skinned people have a Chinese-style culture with a religion that looks more Sumerian, who am I “really” commenting on when I write about them?) Then there are works like Midnight Never Come, where historical reality dictates that my characters will be white. But every so often, I write something set in the modern world.
Last night, I was developing a synopsis for one such idea to send along to my agent. It’s a new idea, something I’m still very much fiddling around with, and who knows if I will be writing it any time soon, or ever. So a lot of details are still fluid, and amenable to change.
And out of nowhere, I found myself stepping back and asking, “why is every character in this white?”
It’s that easy, folks. Question your assumptions. Poke at your default settings, rather than just operating on reflex. There’s no reason the main character’s boyfriend can’t be black. There’s no reason the best friend can’t be “mixed race.” There are only two characters in this novel who have to be white, for story purposes. (I wish it weren’t the protagonist and another central character, but that’s how this particular idea is built.) Everybody else is — and should be — potentially up for grabs. I’m not going to deliberately populate the cast of characters with a carefully balanced sample of races, as that way lies tokenism, but I will make myself think twice before imagining everybody as white.
It’s that easy. I have no excuse not to do it.
Okay, I utterly failed to announce this during the day like I was supposed to; I blame the fact that I spent half my day up in Indy. But anyway, today (or rather, Monday, for those of you who have already gone to bed and will see this tomorrow morning) is (was) the launch of the shiny! new! revamped! SF Novelists website.
It started out as a membership-restricted group for professional science fiction and fantasy novelists — a mailing list for people to ask questions, a website for us to share information. There’s plenty of advice out there for getting started in this field, but once you leap those first few hurdles, you’re often dependent on the assistance of more experienced writer-friends. And sometimes the questions you want to ask are of the sort that shouldn’t be asked publicly.
But we’re growing beyond those humble roots. If you follow that link, you will find our brand spanking new group blog. One of the side columns scrapes the RSS feeds of our own personal journals, but what you see on the left there is original content, written specifically for SF Novelists’ public face. I imagine we’ll range all over the place, from craft- or business-specific topics to things of more general interest to the SF/F community. You can also find free samples of members’ work, so if somebody makes a post that really gets your attention, it’s easy to follow up and see if you want to read their journal or fiction more regularly.
It should be fun, in the vein of Deep Genre or similar endeavours. Take a look, see if you find anything you like!
I would like to open each of the five acts of Midnight Never Come with an epigraph.
(What, you thought I would actually be taking a really-and-truly break for any substantial length of time? Hah.)
I have sources picked out for four of the five, though in three of those cases there are several potential quotes I might use — which means they haven’t been firmly assigned to particular acts, except for the last one. In no particular order, therefore, they are: The Faerie Queene, The Book of the Courtier, The Prince, and Dr. Faustus.
I need one more.
So I’m opening the floor to suggestions. My requirements are as follows:
1) The book/poem/play/whatever must be contemporary to the period of the novel. That is, published no later than 1590. (The first three books of TFQ came out then, and since nobody seems to have conclusive proof as to the date of Faustus, I’m going with the argument that puts it some time 1588-1590.) If it’s foreign, it needs to have been translated into English by 1590. If it’s substantially older than that period, my ideal would be for it to have been popular in the Elizabethan era; Beowulf wouldn’t cut it.
2) No Shakespeare. I haven’t bothered looking up what, if anything, of his got written before 1590, but even if there is something, I’m making a point of not shoehorning him into this novel.
3) I’d like to avoid repeating any of the authors I already have. Ergo, no Discorsi, no other plays of Marlowe’s, no Shepherdes Calendar or whatnot.
I know some of you are thorough-going Elizabethan geeks; any suggestions as to sources I could mine for that last epigraph?
