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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

dropped one, but got another

I didn’t finish “Once a Goddess” tonight, so it’s officially late — though I hope to get it done soon.

But I did crank out 2124 words on Midnight Never Come, which doesn’t suck. All of it in an extended flashback scene, mind you, that may or may not ever end up in the novel; I even put it in a separate “flashbacks” file, so I can keep it separate from the main narrative and decide when, if ever, to drop it in. I suspect I’m going to write a number of these things for my own edification, and not all of them will end up being used. But they do matter, because they help me get important background details straight, and the ones I don’t put in will probably end up as freebies on Swan Tower.

So, 2124 words on how Gilbert Gifford got recruited into Walsingham’s service. On the surface, it’s just like history tells you. (One interpretation, anyway. I’m finding a great deal of disagreement over when Gifford started being a double agent. But that’s fine; I’ll just run with the interpretation that serves my purposes.) Beneath . . . well, that’s the whole point of this novel. There’s history, and then there’s the beneath layer I’m adding to it.

It’s fun. But it ain’t easy. In writing those 2124 words, I consulted four different books and two websites (one of them being the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which I discovered the other day and which rocks my world). And I’m having to remind myself that the set of people who would know whether the queen was in residence at Greenwich or somewhere else in December of 1585 and the set of people who will be reading Midnight Never Come are unlikely to overlap to any substantial degree, so I should just put her at Greenwich if I bloody well feel like it and move on with the paragraph rather than worrying that I’m getting Something Wrong.

Historical fantasy. Oy. Why did I think this was a good idea, again?

more thoughts on fanfic

I’m sure many of you have stopped going back to check my earlier post on fanfic for new comments, if you ever did so at all, so I thought I’d a) mention that the discussion is still going on there, and b) start a new post.

The reason for the new post is that my thoughts have had some time to compost, or marinate, or whatever the metaphor I want is, and I think I can articulate some things now that I couldn’t before. Most particularly, a few things I found myself saying to ancientwisdom over there.

Cut again for length . . . .

thorny thoughts

There’s a lengthy entry up by one cupidsbow discussing fanfic in the context of Joanna Russ’ How to Supress Women’s Writing. I spent a good fifteen minutes attempting to write a comment in response to somebody over there, but I’ve decided I’m better off doing so over here; the thought I’m trying to articulate is thorny and awkward, and I’m having trouble figuring out how to phrase it, and if I try to do so over there, odds are I’ll just piss multiple people off and find myself at the bottom of a verbal dogpile I didn’t mean to start. So I’ll chew on my thought over here, and see what I can get out of it. Warning; what follows is rambling and unfocused, and not entirely thought-out.

cut for rambly unfocused length

back to the desert

After a long hiatus, I’m back to work on “Once a Goddess.”

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meterZokutou word meter
2,351 / 4,000
(58.0%)

As usual, the word count is estimated, but I think this one will be on the shorter side. (I’m hoping so, because if I keep it below 4K I can send it to Clarkesworld, which I think might be a good market for it.)

Can I finish it before the end of the month?

Certainly — if I can just figure out how it ends. I know where it’s going in general terms, but not what exactly that will mean on the page. There’s a big difference between saying your ending will be “they defeat Sauron,” and knowing they’re going to throw the Ring in a volcano.

MNC Book Report: Elizabeth I: Profiles in Power by Christopher Haigh

If you ever want to write a novel of noble politics, or run or play in a game of the same, you should read this book. For my own part, I’m tempted to pick up other titles from the Profiles in Power series, to see if they’re as good.

This book isn’t about Elizabeth’s policies during her reign; it’s about how she made those policies happen (or not happen, as was sometimes the case). It’s about the realities of governance in the late sixteenth century, tracking chapter by chapter how Elizabeth related to and dealt with her position as queen, the church, the peerage, the Privy Council, the court, Parliament, the military, and the common people.

It isn’t the most flattering look in the world, either, which makes it a good antidote to the idolatry that often surrounds her; in fact, by the end I was feeling a little bit down, since Haigh covered in detail how Elizabeth’s government was petrifying and falling apart by the time she died. I was glad for the conclusion, where he pointed out that when all’s said and done, she survived on the throne for nearly forty-five years under some of the most adverse conditions imaginable, and that right there is a remarkable feat of politics. It helped restore some of my admiration for her, but it’s tempered now with some knowledge of her failures as well as her successes.

Reading this book, I understand much better how political factions operate: where their power comes from, how one can (and cannot) maneuver around them, what the consequences are of ignoring them, and so on. It makes me realize, too, how much work would go into setting up a political LARP and doing it right. I don’t know that I would ever have the energy to run something like that, or even to play in it, any more than I would have the energy to play politics for real. (I frankly wonder how Cecil didn’t keel over dead of stress decades sooner.)

But this will be useful information, not just for Midnight Never Come, but for Future Novel TIR, whenever it is that I get around to writing that one.

a few more thoughts on technopeasantry

If you are not a writer, but you wish to celebrate International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, then may I suggest this? Post about a writer whose work you originally found unline and then subsequently searched out more, or an online magazine you particularly enjoy, or similarly related topics. You see, one of the big arguments against Dr. Hendrix’s conviction that we’re all stabbing our industry colleagues in the back is that by posting work online, we may well reach readers who would never have picked up an issue of Asimov’s or Realms of Fantasy, who may then go looking for more of our work, which may lead to them buying things that aren’t posted for free — in other words, that we’re trying to increase the size of our readership by doing these things. So if you’ve ever experienced that effect, tell us about it!

Also, since I was in a hurry to post about “Calling into Silence” this morning before going to class, I didn’t get a chance to expound on one of the things I said, namely my reluctance to post stories I haven’t already sold.

I want to talk about that more because on the surface, it seems like I’m saying such postings aren’t a good thing. Not what I mean, though. Partly it’s a matter of my current status: putting a sale to the Intergalactic Medicine Show on my cover letters does me a lot more good than saying I posted a story on my website would, and it’s true that sales breed more sales. So I’m trying to make as many sales as I can, not because I disapprove of offering work for free, but because I’m trying to build a base of credits for myself.

Having said that, I would post unsold stories . . . but all the ones I’d be interested in posting are currently under submission at a variety of markets. Had this been announced with more lead time, and they had come home in the interim, I might have kept them here, and today you would be reading an online version of my ludicrously-titled story “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual.” But according to papersky, “Today is Sant Jodi, when people in Catalonia give each other books and roses. It’s also Shakespeare’s birthday.” So today’s the day, and “Letter Found” is not at home, and I don’t want to irritate any editors by e-mailing them to ask they root through their slush and pull one of my stories out.

The other thing I might have posted was a Doppelganger novella that’s too bloody long to sell anywhere, but the thing needs substantial editing, and I didn’t have time to get it done by today. But I probably will at some point, and that will go up for free, and then we will see that every day is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.

Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

Remember the little ‘splosion I linked to a while back, where the vice president of SFWA called a bunch of people some highly insulting names for having posted their work for free on the Internet, claiming they were somehow stabbing the industry as a whole in the back by doing so? One of those names was “pixel-stained technopeasant wretch.” Because SF/F writers are a snarky bunch, and because a lot of us think Dr. Hendrix is wrong wrong wrongitty wrong about such things, Jo Walton (papersky) has adopted that phrase for the first-ever International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, i.e. today.

So today, you may read good stories all over the Internet, because many writers are answering her call to post works of professional-quality fiction on their websites for free.

My contribution? “Calling into Silence”, my Asimov Award story from a few years back. I chose to post that one for three reasons:

1) I can’t post stories I’m trying to sell if I actually want to sell them, which I admittedly do;
2) I don’t want to inflict on you guys stories I gave up trying to sell, or never tried to sell at all;
3) this story gives me a neat opportunity to mess around with font colors for effect. (I almost messed around with fonts, too, but the color adjustments ate enough of my time yesterday that we’ll leave it as it stands.)

I may post something else later today, too, but for now, that will do.

And if you want to read more pro-quality fiction posted in honor of this day, check out papersky‘s roundup over here.

well, drat.

Made it to the final cut for Sword & Sorceress, but not through it. I had so very much hoped to sell “Kingspeaker” on its first trip out the door — that would have rocked.

<woeful sigh>

I’m rather bummed about this one, I must admit. It’s easier to deal with rejections that aren’t near misses: you send the story, they don’t like it, you move on. Being told that they almost bought your story is spectacularly frustrating.

MNC Book Report: The Elizabethan World Picture, E.M.W. Tillyard

I’ve discovered that I quite like searching for academic books on Amazon; the reviews for them are often surprisingly substantive and useful. One for this book referred to it as “training wheels” for the interpretation of Elizabethan drama and poetry: not exactly wrong, but not something one wants to rely on too heavily in textual interpretation. Since I’m not embarking on an analysis of any Shakespearean plays, that’s fine by me.

But it’s a good thing this book is short, because it took me long enough to get through as is. I generally read a couple of pages and then put it down for a few minutes, coming up for air and to digest what I’d just read. Tillyard presents the metaphors by which the Elizabethans viewed the universe as ordered: the Great Chain of Being (some of you might have heard of that before), a set of corresponding planes, and a dance, and he proceeds to demonstrate, through literary texts of the period, just how those metaphors operated and influenced Elizabethan thought.

The great usefulness of this book to me is a reminder not to think like a modern when I write: regarding class distinctions in particular, it’s important for me to bear in mind the extent to which hierarchy permeated that society. Also, it gave me a lot of fodder for my own metaphorical language, regarding elements and animals, astrology and the humours, and a lot more. So the training wheels, I’d say, have done their job.

I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes

I must issue public thanks to my boy: this morning he delayed me a minute or two in leaving for class, and as a result, I was still at home when the doorbell rang and the FedEx man delivered my Shiny! New! Laptop!

Since one of the first things I’ll be doing with it is carrying it off to London for use in researching my Elizabethan fairy fantasy, I think it only appropriate that the computer be known as Puck.

Let’s just hope that doesn’t encourage it to play tricks on me.

(For the curious, Puck is a Sony VAIO SZ-440. It weighs just a hair over four pounds, and is lovely and sleek, though I’m having to learn to navigate Vista, which is a little annoying.)

for the feminist writers

This is mostly aimed at those reading my journal who participate, professionally or non-professionally, in the sf/f writing community. Over at the SFWA LJ community there’s a post discussing sexism and racism in SFWA, and a little way down into the comments, I’m having a dicussion with a few other people about the problems that exist in the community, if not in SFWA as an organization. It’s the kind of thing where I would very much appreciate input from other writerly-types with a background in feminism, especially because of a thought I just posted there. Having noted that “I’ve been to cons where fellow con-goers discreetly warn young female attendees about which (older male) writers to stay away from,” I said the following to Karina:

If I were more of a confrontational person, I might really like the notion that we stop passing this stuff around sotto voce, and put up a public list somewhere online. The shitstorm that would set off would be unbelievable, but on the other hand, keeping it discreet makes it our (young women’s) problem to deal with, rather than theirs (the old and not-so-old men’s).

I’d never thought of it that way before, but I think it might be true. And it also says a lot about the ways in which women aren’t supposed to be confrontational; I really can’t fathom actually following through on that idea, since I can imagine the damage it would do to my social reputation in the field.

If you’ve got a dog in this fight, please, come on over and offer your views. The SFWA community is open to all and sundry.

MNC Book Report: two works by Katharine Briggs

I’m falling a bit behind on reporting my research, so I’ll cover these two books in one post. They really belong together, anyway.

The one I read first was The Fairies in Tradition and Literature. It’s a good focus on British Isles fairy-lore (as distinct from fairy-tales), and Briggs is pretty good about flagging the region a given detail belongs to, for which I am very grateful; I’m specifically after English fairy-lore here, as opposed to the much more well-known Scottish and Irish and even Welsh materials, so it’s good to know where I should be drawing my mental boundaries.

This book is organized mostly by issues, with chapters like “The Host of the Dead,” “Fairy Plants,” “Changelings and Midwives,” and so on. The big benefit for me is that this gave me the perfect way to think about recurrent tropes in fairy-lore, and how I want to reinterpret them for the purposes of my own work. I have certain ideas now, for example, about why exactly fairies were so fond of certain human foods, and what it is about gifts of clothing that seems to piss off brownies.

The second book is British Folk-Tales and Legends, and it makes a good companion to the first. Redacted from a longer version called The Dictionary of British Folk-Tales and Legends, it’s basically a collection of primary sources (sometimes simplified or summarized, sometimes given in their entirety, dialect and all), organized once again into categories. A bunch of the sections I skipped entirely, like “Fables and Exempla” or “Jocular Tales,” but there are categories for black dogs, bogies, devils, dragons, fairies, ghosts, and giants, all of which are quite handy. And a great many of the stories in here are referenced in the other book, so it’s nice to have it on hand for cross-referencing. Bonus points to Briggs for having the right attitude about her categories: they’re there to help the reader find what they’re looking for, but she acknowledges where appropriate the difficulty of distinguishing one type of story from another, and the ways in which they continually muddle up one’s boundaries.

I’ve got one more Briggs book coming my way, The Anatomy of Puck, which should specifically focus on the fairy-lore of Shakespeare’s time. With that, I should be more or less set with my fairy research, except for one out-of-print book that costs something like eighty dollars for a used copy, which I will probably check out from the IU library at some point.

Which year, which year?

The difficult thing about choosing to set Midnight Never Come late in Elizabeth’s reign is that there’s a six-year span or so where a little fluctuation earlier or later means gaining or losing some really interesting people, and also interesting events. Mary Stuart dies in 1587, Leicester in 1588, Walsingham in 1590. Dee returns from the Continent in 1589, and leaves for Manchester in 1595. Marlowe dies(?) in 1593. Shakespeare’s in London by 1592, but nobody seems to be sure when precisely he got there, and his writing career doesn’t really get going until later. The Armada gets defeated in 1588. Spenser writes the initial version of The Faerie Queene in 1590, and while his vision bears absolutely no resemblance to Invidiana’s court, I can make ironic use of that fact.

Mind you, I think this will be the most time-complex thing I’ve ever written, since I suspect it will contain at least a few flashback scenes; I’ve already put together one from 1554, and there may be others. Certainly I’ll probably end up writing them, just to get matters straight in my own head, and then if they don’t go into the book maybe I’ll toss them up on the website as freebies. But no amount of flashing back will change the importance of when the main events are taking place, and that requires some thought.

1590, I think, will be the answer. It means no Leicester, alas, but I do get to have Essex instead, and that’s a potential source of fun. It also means I can have Walsingham for a while, and then get him out of my way. (Bastard would probably defuse my plot if I gave him half a chance.)

So let’s call it 1590, and go from there.

SFWA lunacy

I liked this icon (courtesy of deedop — it’s available to take, right?) slightly better than timprov‘s “Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch,” though the phrase in that one’s good, too.

Where, you ask, did these phrases come from?

From this little rant. Will Shetterly posted it, but the thoughts aren’t his, so don’t flame on him. And oh, skip the first half to two-thirds of it. The actual content starts around the “In another way, too” paragraph.

So read that. And then reflect that the fellow writing it is the current vice-president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

He’s an SF writer, and he hates the Internet.

And that, in a nutshell, is why younger writers see SFWA as an irrelevant waste of their time and money. Also why we younger writers need to join en masse and drag the thing kicking and screaming into the next century.

(No, I haven’t joined yet. But I’m going to, and soon. And boy howdy is it going to be interesting if Scalzi gets elected president.)

oh dear

You remember when, a little while ago, I referred to John Stow’s A Survey of London, Vols. 1 and 2 as More Than I Ever Wanted to Know About Elizabethan London, Vols. 1 and 2?

Looks like I should amend that to More Than I Ever Wanted to Know About Elizabethan London and Printed With Unmodernized Spelling to Boot, Vols. 1 and 2.

Sample:

Thames the most famous riuer of this Iland, beginneth a little aboue a village called Winchcombe in Oxfordshire, and still increasing passeth first by the university of Oxford, and so with a maruelous quiet course to London, and thence breaketh into the French Ocean by maine tides, which twice in 24. howers space doth eb and flow, more than 60. miles in length, to the great commoditie of Trauellers, by which all kind of Marchandise bee easily conueyed to London, the principall store house, and Staple of all commodities within this Realme, so that omitting to speake of great ships, and other vessels of burden, there pertayneth to the Citties of London, Westminster, and Borrough of Southwarke, aboue the number is supposed of 2000.

It isn’t impenetrable . . . but it will be slow going.

oy, research.

As I just said to the boy, I feel like I’ve e-mailed half the population of London now with research inquiries. So far we’ve contacted Hardwick Hall (okay, not in London), Hampton Court Palace, the Globe, the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers, and the Tower of London, though that last one bounced and I need to figure out why. I’ve also made my hostel reservation. The Museum of London I don’t have any questions for; I probably don’t need a reservation for the Thames River Boat to Hampton Court; Lambeth Palace appears to be almost never open to the public (since the Archbishop of Canterbury still lives there), so I will only be photographing the exterior of the Tudor brick gatehouse.

Oy, research.

If the Londoners who specialize in the Elizabethan period hang out together, I suspect they will make jokes about the crazy American novelist who’s been querying all of them.

I still need to look into Westminster Abbey, Whitehall, and various things in Southwark. And yes, this is well in advance of my trip, but I figure the people I’m hoping to ask questions of will be happier if I contact them early.

I’M GOING TO ENGLAND!!!!!

London, mostly. But also a jaunt up to Derbyshire to see Hardwick House. There’s probably an Elizabethan manor closer to London, but I’m not sure I can pass up the chance to see Bess of Hardwick’s actual house.

I’M GOING TO ENGLAND!!!!!

I realized a moment ago that I haven’t been out of the country since 2002. Which necessitates the world’s smallest violin playing for me — oh, woe is her; she’s twenty-six and she’s only been to the British Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, England, Ireland, Israel, and Japan — but it’s a bit sad to trade approximately once-a-year overseas trips for multiple-times-a-year domestic trips, especially when the domestic trips mostly mean the hotel the conference or convention is in.

So, yeah. May 22nd to May 29th, flying out of Chicago, so buzzermccain, if you’ve got Internet access again, be warned that I’ll be taking you up on that crash space.

I’M GOING TO ENGLAND!!!!!

Edited to add: Okay, so, trying to type a post while on the phone with kurayami_hime doesn’t work so well. I should clarify that I am going to England as research for Midnight Never Come, not that you all probably didn’t guess that anyway. I’m going for a week, and will spend most of the time in Central London, Westminster, and Southwark, with the aforementioned jaunt to Bess of Hardwick’s house, and things like a riverboat trip to Hampton Court Palace, which still has some Tudor-period architecture left, though not much. (On the other hand, it means I get to float down the Thames. Yay!) Anyway, I’ll post more details about my exact plans when I have them more concretely formed. Right now, I’m still giddy. ^_^

I’M GOING TO ENGLAND!!!!!