Lymond book-blogging begins soon, probably tomorrow. (If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, see this explanation. If you want to be added and haven’t told me so, drop me a line here. But remember that you do have to have read all the books, unless you want the entire series spoiled from the first post on.)
I’m wondering if I may need to pretend to be mrissa for the duration of this novel.
Now that I’ve got her attention, let me let me explain what I mean. That will take some rambling, so I’ll put it behind a cut.
Not much of a day to speak of, here; I had to leave by about 10 a.m. in order to get to the airport. But I did manage to do two things.
Hee. At lunch today, I wrote a sentence in my notes for Midnight Never Come that still has me giggling. I’d share it, but it would be a terrible spoiler. (Yes, I’m a tease.)
Last day.
While reading this account, remember that it was probably in the 50’s or so and raining all day long.
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. I take the Tube to St. Pancras instead of walking. It’s cold outside, and I can’t be certain how long the walk would take, nor do I have a map that shows the area. So I head for Blackfriars.
Dinner update from last night: OMG I love Wasabi. Not the green stuff; the restaurant. Not only were they open at the dinner hour (which most of the eating establishments in the vicinity aren’t), but they gave me a giant container of yakisoba and a Coke for four pounds forty, which is the cheapest actual meal I’ve had here, barring the complimentary breakfast from the hostel.
Anyway, Friday. An excellent day that ended with an excellent demonstration of my stupidity.
Last night I got the arch of my left foot to pop, which cured the shooting pains. Unfortunately, though today contained about half as much walking as yesterday, that was still about 40% more than my feet wanted to do. If I can survive Westminster tomorrow morning, though, I think I’ll live. After that, there will be more sitting, less walking.
So let’s continue with my perambulations, as taken (mostly) from my journal, whose formerly sleek black exterior is rapidly becoming war-torn indeed.
Woken up at 6:30 this morning by a fire alarm. Good morning, London.
The rest of my shared room decided they might as well get up, so after a failed attempt to go back to sleep (and mind you, I didn’t get to sleep until after 1 a.m.), I get up, too. We might as well get started.
I have many things scheduled for upcoming days, but nothing for today. This is deliberate. Today is just for the City.
For those not familiar with its history, a brief primer: London the city is a sprawling monstrosity, but the City of London is a tiny thing, approximately one square mile, and back in the Elizabethan era, it was all there was. The City; some suburbs beginning to burst out of its walls; Westminster upriver, connected by a thin thread of development; Southwark across the Thames, connected by the one and only London Bridge. I’m staying in a hostel near St. Paul’s because I wanted to be in a place that existed back then, and where I could walk the City.
There’s almost nothing here that dates back to the sixteenth century, though. The Great Fire saw to that in 1666, and what it missed, the Victorians got. I have to scrounge to find Tudor-era buildings; that’s what the next few days are for. But the City is still here, and that’s what today is for. Many of the streets are still right where they used to be, even if now they’re lined with Starbucks and Pret. Sir Christopher Wren had grand ideas after the fire for how to redesign the city into a more harmonious pattern, but while he was busy planning, Londoners were busy rebuilding — right where everything had been before. I walk different road surfaces than my historical characters did, but the roads themselves are often the same.
So today was a wandering day, and what you get is a wandering journal.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have ten thousand words of book.
(Actually, we have 10172. Not counting the 2124 of Gifford flashback, that isn’t really in the book yet.)
This is the point at which I start believing I’m writing a book. Ten thousand is a nice round number; it convinces me I have something of substance on my hands, rather than flimsy shreds. Unfortunately, soon after this we hit the stretch where adding a thousand words doesn’t seem to make much difference in the total, where I run and run and get no closer to the end. We call this the “hamster on a treadmill” stretch.
But let’s not race to meet future miseries.
Authorial sadism: making Lune be wrong, wrong, wrongitty wrong. But it’ll be fun for her later.
LBR tally: love. The Goodemeades are so sweet.
I may or may not write one more scene this weekend; we’ll see. But then it’s off to London, and then I’ll be trip-blogging. It’s all Midnight Never Come, all the time, here at Swan Tower! (I promise I’ll try to have some other content, really I will.)
I think I’ll call it quits for the day, at 2683 words. I kept going because I really really want to write a certain upcoming scene, but this story calls for a richness of detail beyond what I tend to default to, and that means after 2683 words Lune’s only just now gotten to the Angel Inn. (With a lengthy break in there to try and determine just when that thing got built. Best I could find was that it was around by Jacobean times; I’m going to assume it was there a little earlier, and if anybody can dig up the evidence to prove me wrong, more power to them.)
So no encounters yet with our favorite batshit-crazy seer. He’ll have to wait for another day. But some turns of phrase I’m rather proud of.
If I can get in another solid day of work tomorrow, I think I’ll call it quits for a while. I know better than to think I’ll write steadily while in London, but I wanted to get the beginnings of Lune’s and Deven’s plots on the page, and let that compost in my head while I’m gone. Then, come June, we’ll really get to work.
Authorial sadism of the second part of the day: poor little mortal pets.
LBR tally: a bit of metaphorical blood, a bit of rhetoric. We’ll have some love tomorrow.
Eh-heh-heh-heh.
I know what I’m doing with Lune, at least to start with. (Though I don’t actually know how she got herself disgraced, and should probably figure that out.)
Authorial sadism of the day: the country mice don’t realize the city mice are cannibals.
LBR tally: today it’s been blood, though not of the physical sort.
I may write some more. I mean, I don’t have anything to do until the game tonight, except clean up my office or unpack more stuff or get myself together for the trip or finish the book I’m reading or —
I still may write some more, anyway.
Given the amount of attention I attracted with my recent posts on fanfiction, I suspect that a larger-than-previous number of you would be interested in this article by Cory Doctorow, “In Praise of Fanfic”, posted on the Locus Magazine website.
For those of you not aware, Locus is the industry magazine for sf/f professionals, and Cory Doctorow is a leading light among pixel-stained technopeasant wretches, having released his first novel electronically, under a Creative Commons license. So this isn’t just an article saying “hey, stop spitting on fanfic;” it’s an article by a major proponent of liberalizing copyright, printed in a well-respected industry periodical. Which ought to put a smile on a few faces.
I should mention, I suppose, that I have begun tiptoeing my way delicately through the beginnings of Midnight Never Come.
I’m tiptoeing for a lot of reasons. Frex, I know where the plot is going, but not how it’s getting there, which is a weird situation for me. (Normally I know where I’m starting, and I follow the plot to see where it goes.) Also, I’m only just now getting to know the protagonists; Invidiana’s been in my head for a good year and a half, but Deven and Lune are new to me. I had to rewrite the beginning of Chapter One twice, proceeding a little further into the scene each time, before I started hitting the right version of Deven. (And I still don’t think I have his first name right, though he seems okay with that surname.)
Also? Historical fiction is slow. There’s a bit of Received Wisdom that says something like, do your research, and then use twenty percent of it. I disagree. Use a hundred percent of it, and then go do more and use that, too — but only make a point of telling your reader about, oh, maybe three percent. If that. The rest of it should be used in a pervasive, background kind of way, but it should most definitely be used. I should be thinking, as I write, about how old Walsingham is in 1588, and what he looked like, and how he dressed, and what his family background is, and what he would be doing on an average day at Hampton Court, and that he and Burghley both studied at Gray’s Inn, and oh is this in the period when he and Burghley had fallen out with one another? And also about gentleman ushers, and the protocols of the presence chamber, and how one played tennis in the sixteenth century, and the recurrent problem at Court of how the kitchens ended up feeding more people than they were supposed to (because people would bring their families and servants and third cousins’ friends’ roommates, which they weren’t supposed to) and so regularly went over budget as a result.
I shouldn’t make a point of telling you about any of that unless it’s important to the plot. But I should mention in the natural course of things, if it’s relevant, and I should be keeping it in the back of my mind all the time, so that the shape of the story I’m telling flows through and around it.
. . . which is hard.
My hope is that it will get easier as I go.
Anyway, I can’t remember who I ganked this icon from, but lots of people have it. Seems a pretty appropriate work-in-progress icon, especially since I think this novel will have all three, concurrent and consecutive.
Today’s work: rhetoric, I suppose. The love and blood will come later.
If you’ve read the entirety (yes, I mean the entirety) of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, then this post is for you.
I have a project in mind for this summer, or however long it actually takes me: I would like to re-read the Lymond Chronicles.
But, you say, doesn’t that usually sink you into a slough of despond where you think your own writing sucks? And don’t you have a novel to write this summer?
Yes, generally, and yes, I do. But while Dunnett may make me feel bad about my writing, I don’t think she actually makes my writing bad (except, y’know, by comparison), so as long as I sit my ass down in the chair anyway, I should be okay. And — more to the point — that’s kind of why I’m doing this. You see, I don’t just intend to re-read them. I intend to do a close re-reading of a craft-focused sort, looking for the kinds of things I’ve talked to some of you about, like how she manipulates point of view, or describes certain things but not others, or makes that one duel the awesomest duel ever seen on the page. (In other words, I’m trying to get over my inferiority complex by anatomizing it.) And I’ll answer a whole lot of niggling questions I need to re-read for, like which characters call him by his given name and when they start (or stop) doing so, how old he is when certain events happen, and just when we start seeing signs of [spoiler] or first get told [spoiler] but don’t realize what it means.
I could do this without other people, but it wouldn’t be half so fun. So the purpose of this post is to say, I will be blogging my progress through the books, bringing out interesting tidbits or answers to niggling questions, and inviting discussion in the comments. But this will involve spoilers like whoa, so I’ll be doing so behind a specially-constructed filter. If you’ve read all the books, and are interested in joining the party, please comment here and I’ll add you. If you have read some of the books, I’m sorry, but you really don’t want to be a part of this yet; one of the things I intend to track as I read is the growth of a plot from book six that I know starts in book one, and I don’t want to ruin that for you. But I’m more than happy to add people later, if they happen to finish the series and want to see what we’ve been up to.
Or, to put all this in other terms, I want to partially re-create the fun of the interactive “Let’s watch khet_tcheba read the books for the first time” circus of myself and kurayami_hime, via Khet’s locked posts on the subject. It will lack the tasty, tasty irony of seeing her make comments about ongoing plots when we, but not she, knew where they were going, but it should be fun regardless.
Edited to add: special brownie points for anybody who comes up with a good icon for me to use on such posts.
We are entirely moved out (of the old place) and moved (transported to the new place). Now we just need to finish moving in, i.e. unpacking.
As a result, I have some brain with which to think. And I’d like to talk about something that came up on Deep Genre, to whit, the increasing tendency for newspapers and the like to cut out their book review sections.
This seems problematic insofar as it can be read as a barometer of public interest in books — which I’m not convinced it is — but as a phenomenon in its own right, you know what? It doesn’t bother me.
I’m a part of the generation newspapers have failed to attract. I’ve never subscribed to one, though I will read the NYT or some such online when interest strikes. (This is an enormous problem for newspapers as a whole, and one they don’t yet seem to have found a good solution to. Their circulation numbers are dropping steadily as their older readers die off and they fail to replace them with young ones. And they’re cutting their book reviewers partly as an attempt to cut costs and keep their businesses afloat.)
So I’ve never looked to newspapers for book information because I’ve never looked to newspapers for much of anything. One of the few exceptions, when I was growing up, were movie reviews, and therein lies my second reason: I regularly saw the newspaper reviewers pan movies I quite liked, so while I would still read them for entertainment value, their opinions didn’t mean all that much to me. They failed to convince me of their credibility and authority. Why, then, should I care what their book reviewers had to say? I can find book reviews online if I want them.
But, you object, are the two really comparable? Am I really willing to accept the opinion of BookLover612 as just as valid — or moreso — than that of the professional reviewer?
Actually, yes.
If I’m looking for in-depth critique, especially of an academic sort, then I won’t look to BookLover612 or somebody writing for the local newspaper. But if I’m looking for an opinion piece — which, face it, is what most reviews are — then the criterion that matters most to me is, whether the reviewer’s taste is like my own. This is more likely to be true of a person I find online than in the paper, if for no other reason than because I read genre fiction, and mainstream publications often give my books short shrift — condescending reviews when we get reviews in the first place. Honestly, I get most book opinions from friends, not from authority figures of any kind. And if I look to strangers, I’ll look in places where I know they like the books I like. (The danger, of course, is that this becomes insular, that I’ll never be exposed to anything new. But given the range of places from which I get these opinions, and the impossibility of anybody’s taste being identical to my own, I think more that I get exposed to a fluctuating fringe of stuff that’s an easy step or two from what I already like, instead of so far afield that I won’t bother picking it up.)
In the end, what I feel we’re losing here is a level of cultural arbitration: a limited set of authoritative voices telling people what they should and should not like. It’s an uncharitable interpretation of what newspaper book reviews are/were, perhaps, but that’s the major thing I can see newspapers giving us that random blog reviews can’t. And even then, we still have loci of authority, with organized review sites and the like.
So it doesn’t really bother me. But I’m curious to hear what other people think.
kitsune_zen made a comment last night, about different settings/story sets of hers having different colors in her head. Which added another item to my list of Weird Metaphors Through Which I Perceive Stories.
Midnight Never Come is, in my head, strongly influenced by Shekar Kapur’s Elizabeth (the one with Cate Blanchett). It’s shadowy and dark, with dark rich jewel tones. Invidiana’s black and silver and cold glittering gems.
The Waking of Angantyr, to pick an unpublished novel, is a palette of blues (midnight and pale ice blue) and grey-browns that have no real warmth to them. Welcome to the bleak Viking revenge epic, eh?
The Vengeance of Trees has jewel tones again, but they’re brighter than MNC’s, and warmed up with copper and gold.
Sunlight and Storm is the brightest of the lot: sunshine gold, the blue of a midwestern sky, the grey-blue of a thunderstorm, the yellow-green of plains grass. With a cameo appearance by the variegated earth tones of badlands.
Not everything has colors in my head (notice the absence of Doppelganger, for example), but somet things do. How about you all? Stories/novels you’ve written or read, what color palette do they evoke in your mind?
Moving has been eating very nearly my every waking minute for over a week now (packing, transporting, unpacking, organizing), but I thought I’d take a moment to post about my upcoming trip, and how incredibly helpful people are being. Once I’m home again and have a complete list, I’m going to post something on my website naming off every individual who has assisted me in planning the research aspects of my trip: both the ones who will be giving me personal tours of sites I’m visiting, and the ones who have helped coordinate those tours. At this point, I’ve got assistance lined up for when I go to the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Hardwick Hall, and the New Globe Theatre’s archives. These people have very busy work schedules, I know, and so I’m deeply grateful for the time they’re taking on my behalf.
Regular service of novel-related posts will resume in the not-too-distant future. After I get myself entirely out of the old house, and remember that oh yeah, I have a novel to write.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have a job for next spring!
I will be teaching “Writing Speculative Fiction” as a Collins course. And I’m giddy about the prospect.
A million thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions for the reading list a few months back. I’ll post a finalized version of that list when I teach the course; between now and then it might get tweaked a bit.
And now, knowing that I have a year of employment secured, I can relax and start breathing again.
If you’re interested in reading some (or heck, all) of the work posted for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, there’s a permanent list going up here, collating links from the variety of places that people announced their contributions. So you can bookmark that and have it all in one handy place. I don’t think the list is quite complete yet, but it’s got a lot there already.
