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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

two months down

Fortified by a variety of over-the-counter drugs, I have mustered the energy to finish “Kingspeaker,” my required story for the month. (“Schroedinger’s Crone” is officially disbarred, on the grounds that we’re pretty sure it’s supposed to be a poem instead.) I still feel like I kind of had to shoehorn in that one thing, but hey, that’s what revision is for: to make the shoehorning look natural. Right?

4600 words for this draft, more than half of them written today. So it often goes, with short stories.

I think next month’s story will be “Once a Goddess,” after a fruitful discussion earlier this week. The thing’s been cooling its heels for nearly six years; high time it went somewhere.

odds and ends

First of all, Cat Rambo has done an interview with me over at Suite 101. She asks several nifty questions, both about my novels and my writing in general.

Also, Talebones #34 is available, containing “But Who Shall Lead the Dance? I haven’t had a chance yet to read the rest of the issue, but Talebones is good folks.

Regarding my default icon: the people have spoken. A custom icon leads the pack, but the Summer Queen is in second place with as many votes as all the other options got together. I will look into possibilities for something custom, and keep the Summer Queen until I find something I like better.

Finally, do please contribute to my recent post looking for suggested readings. I wish I had the time to assemble the list on my own by reading all the YBFH and YBSF anthologies out there, or the entire ouevre of the Hugo Award, but alas, I don’t. I need specific titles to choose from.

stories needed

I could use some assistance from the internets in putting the finishing touches on a certain project. I’m planning to pitch a course proposal on writing speculative fiction (encompassing sf, fantasy, and supernatural horror), but I need readings! Most particularly I need suggestions of short fiction, but I’d also be interested in how-to texts that might be relevant to these topics.

UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTIONS
Week 1- Introduction to genre
Week 2- Language
Week 3- Outlining, critique, revision
[For these three weeks, I’d like one basic, accessible story from each of the genres I’m covering, just to get them warmed up.]

UNIT TWO: CRAFT
Week 4- Dialogue
Week 5- Point of view
Week 6- Description
Week 7- Exposition
Week 8- Style/Voice
Week 9- Character
Week 10- Setting
Week 11- Plot
[Here, of course, I want stories that particularly shine in the aspect du semaine.]

UNIT THREE: CONCEPTS
Week 12 – Gender
Week 13 – Race
Week 14- Morality
[I’m pretty sure Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” will be the story for week 14, but the others are up in the air. The general idea of this unit is, hey, spec fic can play interesting games with these topics.]

UNIT FOUR: WHERE NOW?
Week 15- How to submit stories
[Might or might not have a reading for this week. It’ll depend on whether I find a story I just really really love and want to end on.]

I would prefer short stories, though in a terrible pinch I might use a novel excerpt. Suggestions?

Schroedinger’s Story

Today in class I wrote something that may or may not be “Schroedinger’s Crone.” (Appropriate, no?) The reason for my uncertainty is that it’s 152 words long, and therefore consists entirely of “hey, look: idea.” I’m not sure if I want to try and come up with an actual plot to demonstrate the idea, or leave it as-is. My mistake may have been last night’s decision to observe the story, thus collapsing the wave form before I had come up with a plot.

Whether or not I count this as February’s story will depend on whether I can smack the second half of “Kingspeaker” into behaving itself.

today’s random question

Imagine there is a novel set in Elizabethan England. What famous figures would you expect and/or want to see show up in it?

Aside from Elizabeth herself, I can think of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Francis Drake, Doctor John Dee, and John Stow.

Who else?

two stories

Glorifying Terrorism, the anthology of political SF/F assembled in protest of a dumb British law, is officially out and about in the world as of today. It’s already netted a mention on Boing Boing, which constitutes some pretty awesome publicity. You can order it from the webpage above, though I’ll admit it’s on the expensive side if you’re an American like me (which would be most of the readers of this journal, I imagine). But my story “Execution Morning” is in it, and you want to read that, right?

It remains to be seen whether any of the UK authors involved in the anthology end up being prosecuted for it. They could be, in theory; that’s the point of the antho.

In much less politically provocative news, “A Thousand Souls” is live at Aberrant Dreams. You can read that one for free.

Man, this selling and publishing of stories is an addictive thing, ne? It’s only been a few days since my last sale, and already I’m jonesing for another. ^_^

Sword & Sorceress 22

Sword & Sorceress returns!

I’m sure others of you remember this anthology series. I won’t go so far as to say it had a huge effect on me, but it certainly had one; among other things, I was vexed when I saw teenagers getting published in it, thereby highlighting my failure to become a Child Prodigy. (Alas, I didn’t write any non-crappy short stories until I was twenty.) Anyway, it’s good to see that it’s back.

But what to send, what to send? (The reading period doesn’t open until March, but I’m looking ahead.) “Stories should be of the type generally referred to as ‘sword and sorcery’ and must have a strong female protagonist whom the reader will care about.” Clear enough, but where do I go with that?

Well, for starters, it turns out I’ve got a dearth of female protagonists on hand at the moment. Of the fifteen stories I’ve got in circulation, four and a half meet that criterion. (The half is “Driftwood,” which splits pretty equally between two characters, the other of which is male.) So the initial list is:

  • “The City’s Bones”
  • “The Drowning Ships”
  • “La Molejera”
  • “A Mask of Flesh”

TCB is urban fantasy, therefore probably out. La M is one of my strongest candidates for the label “interstitial,” which puts it pretty far away from sword & sorcery. That leaves me with TDS, which is not one of my stronger stories, and AMoF, which might count as having “explicit sex,” depending on how explicit they mean.

Which leaves me with stories not yet in circulation. (I’m very glad, now, for that recent short story census.) “Sciatha Reborn” isn’t ready to see the light of day, though I could try to get it there. “On the Feast of the Firewife” isn’t s&s enough. “The Last Wendy” isn’t what they’re after. “Kingspeaker” could go, but it isn’t my best bet. The faerie trouble story, even if I knew what to do with it, also probably fails the s&s test. I could try to go with “Once a Goddess,” if I can figure it out . . . or with the one story I forgot to include in that list, “The Waking of Angantyr.”

Which is based on an Old Norse poem and has a strong female protagonist dragging up the ghost of her father and brothers so she can get revenge for their murders.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner — if I can get the story working, which it isn’t at present. akashiver gave me some good advice on it, but I foolishly didn’t make use of that advice while it was still fresh in my mind, so I’m not sure where I stand. But I’ll give it a shot, I think.

What about you all? Anybody else thinking of submitting?

rambling thoughts on colonialism and feminism

I didn’t freeze, and we appear to have a functioning furnace again, though it’s striving mightily to drag this old heap up from its freezing temperatures to something livable while it’s barely above zero outside. Learned many interesting lessons about survival in the cold without central heating, and also used up a lot of my candles and lamp oil.

But that’s neither here nor there. I want to ramble on about parallels and differences between two different projects of mine. One, Sunlight and Storm, is a fantasy western that was the fourth novel I wrote, back when I was in college. Its first draft sucked rancid goat cheese; its second draft is better, but I still want to rewrite it substantially before it ever goes public, and that will probably not be any time soon. The other is a series I’m contemplating for the future, which would essentially be about scientific expeditions going to study dragons. They share the common characteristics of being in settings that look a lot like our nineteenth century, and they both have female main characters, hence the desire to ramble on about colonialism and feminism.

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short story census

I have made a good start on “Kingspeaker,” which is the story I hope to finish this month. (For those unaware, the goal is to write a minimum of one short story a month. It’s an eminently reasonable goal; let’s see if that helps me meet it. My short story output has been crap of late.) The beginning is going well. Unfortunately, soon I will run out of beginning, whcih means I need to figure out how to put into the story that thing that needs to go into the story.

The goal is also to get one new short story sent out every month. Since I have a small backlog of things I’ve been meaning to revise for a while (in some cases, for years), this means the newly-written stories will have time to get beautified before they go out in public. All in all, it sounds like a good system. Hopefully it will work.

First lines of the stories that need revision:

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Definitions of fantasy I don’t like, #1

I’ve been noodling for a while now with the idea of writing a series of small essays for my website about various genre definitions and how I feel about them — their pros, their cons, their applications, etc. Since Rob Sawyer has started a minor internet dust-up with some recent comments of his on the subject, I thought this seemed a good time to address one of them.

We’ll start with this statement:

Fantasy and SF, on the other hand, are diametrically opposed: one is reasoned, careful extrapolation of things that really could happen; the other, by definition, deals with things that never could happen.

Delany has done a finer-grained version of this in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, which I’ll quote at length because I think any attempt at summary would end up being nearly as long:

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a day of random research

Today has featured two e-mails to random strangers about research questions (for writing, not academic purposes). Climatology and contact information for a Spanish musician — we’ll see if either turns up results.

(Yes, I’m still trying with “Hijo de la luna.” A very helpful person pointed me at the Spanish poem that inspired Cano’s song, but having translated it, turns out it doesn’t contain the elements I’m basing my story on. I did, however, come up with a purportedly official website for Mecano that had some actual contact information [unlike Cano’s own site], so I’m making another attempt to find the man and ask him if I can story-ize his song. The site is even in English! Though I said in my e-mail that I can correspond in Spanish if necessary. As tough as that might be for me, I kind of want to, partly to continue validating my supposed proficiency in the language, and partly to not be a Stupid Monolingual American.)

(Okay, that parenthetical digression ended up longer than the supposed body of the post. Oh well.)

Campbell Award deadline

Please pardon a moment of shameless self-promotion.

One of the awards given at WorldCon during the Hugo ceremony (but not a Hugo) is the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Nominations and voting are based on WorldCon membership, which probably isn’t most of you, but there’s a post on Deep Genre with some timely information, namely, that if you weren’t a member of last year’s WorldCon and aren’t going to this year’s, then you have until the end of the day tomorrow (the 31st) to buy a $50 supporting membership that would allow you to do things like, oh, say, nominating me for the Campbell. ^_^

Given the financial state of a lot of my friends, I don’t expect people to drop $50 on this, nor to be making the pilgrimage to Japan for the upcoming WorldCon. But some of you might have been at last year’s, so I thought I’d toss it out there. And this is information worth spreading regardless, to newsgroups/websites/whatever that might have interested parties.

Normally I don’t shill for awards like this, but the Campbell is kind of a Holy Grail in my mind. Just getting on the list of nominees is a giant boost to a writer’s career, let alone winning, so it’s worth putting my modesty aside for a few minutes. (Fortunately for me, I’m only in my first of two years of eligibility, so I get another chance at this.) Anyway, spread the word, let people who have gone or will be going to WorldCon know.

And if I end up on the list of nominees, I will so totally give you a cookie. ^_^

Marie Brennan’s Patented Three-Step Process for Finishing Stories That Aren’t Working:

  1. Realize that you’ve been doing it entirely wrong.
  2. Start doing it right instead.
  3. Finish the story.

It’s really quite simple, when you look at it that way.

And it means that I am not starting off the new year by immediately failing at my goal to write one short story a month. I may fail next month, but let’s not gallop to meet future difficulties, shall we? I have “The Last Wendy” finished, and this is a Good Thing.

goal anxiety

I’ve come to realize I have a moderately dysfunctional relationship with goals.

(This applies to more than just writing, but writing offers a good, clear-cut illustration of what I mean.)

Let’s say I’m working on a novel and my goal is 1000 words a day. One evening, out of laziness, I write only 800. Or — more likely — I just don’t write at all. (If I put my butt in the chair, I tend not to leave until I have quota.) I treat that as a deficit I need to make up; I write 1200 words or 1500 words until I’m back where I would have been had I not been short one day.

This is moderately okay. Especially since I usually manage to cut myself some slack for occasions when something (like travel) takes me out of commission for several days at a stretch.

The dysfunctionality comes in when I write above quota. Take a recent example: I’m working on something where my weekly goal is 10K. Which means, in general, 1500 a day, with one day where I can cut back a bit and just do 1000. This past week, I wrote 1500 (and change) for a couple of days, and then 2K one day. I built up a surplus.

This does not get treated the way a deficit does — as slippage that should get averaged out.

No, instead my obsessive, goal-driven self tends to ignore all surpluses. Who cares that I’m more than 500 ahead; I should still write 1500 every day. Including that day that was supposed to be an easy 1000. Then I’d be a thousand ahead of where I meant to be! But don’t let that fool you into thinking I could do just 9K the next week. No, it’ll be 10K or bust, and if I can squeeze out more, than full steam ahead!

From the perspective of finishing books (or whatever else I might be working on), this seems pretty good. I’m beginning to notice, though, that it might be a little hard on me — it means I never earn a break. Any such break would have to be earned in advance, and once I’ve done that, I just keep pushing. More words written, more pages read, more cleaning done, whatever the task at hand is, I keep going. Until it’s done.

And then I look for something else to do.

My fiance is probably beating his head into a wall, having read this far; he’s a big advocate of me relaxing and not being so hard on myself. But he (and the rest of you) can take heart: I’ve made a baby step in mending my ways. Having built up a surplus earlier this writing week (which is, for uninteresting reasons having to do with this project, Thursday through Wednesday), I let myself cut back a bit for the last three days. I wrote over 1K each time, to hit my weekly goal, but didn’t make myself do 1500. Right now I’m sitting pretty at 53 words over target — in the middle of a scene, no less, which I decided to leave as a carrot for tomorrow, rather than finishing it tonight.

Mind you, I’ve got other things I need to get done, which is another argument for not driving myself to oblivion on one project only. But nevermind that.

Goals: they’re to be met, but not always exceeded.

“And died stinkingly martyred.”

Don’t ask me why, but the squirrelly part of my writer-brain, the part that finds odd things to ponder (and then usually buries them somewhere and forgets about them thereafter) started thinking about death lines this evening. That is, the things people in books/movies/plays/etc. say when they’re about to die or in the process of dying. Shakespeare, for all I love him, was a melodramatic little wretch where those are concerned. I think one of my favorites comes from Dorothy Dunnett — it’s a bit of a cheat, since the hit doesn’t actually kill Lymond, but he believes it’s going to (and it really would, were it not for some bloody-minded medical intervention) — anyway, having done something good at what amounts to the sacrifice of his life, this is how he exits:

“And died stinkingly martyred,” said Lymond, with painful derision; and losing hold bit by bit, slipped into Erskine’s gentle grasp.

Which is why I love Lymond: he mocks himself even as he’s bleeding out of rather too many holes for anyone’s peace of mind.

What’s your favorite death line?

Order now!

Want to get on an FBI watchlist?

(Those of you who aren’t already, that is. Which might be several of you, for a variety of
reasons.)

There is now a website
for Glorifying Terrorism, Farah Mendlesohn’s anthology of politically provocative
fiction. It’s a British publication, so my USAian friends will have to get it shipped, but
there’s a PayPal button up now, and Farah tells us it’s going to press in the next two
weeks.

And really, it only breaks a British law, not an American one (yet). So you have no reason
not to buy it and support the cause of free speech.

A sort of anti-NaNoWriMo

Many of you know that my reservations about NaNoWriMo include the pace (1500+ wpd is a
pretty brutal rate for people not used to it) and the goal (a 50K novel isn’t saleable, at
least in my genre).

If you’re interested in having a public boot applied to your ass, but you share my
reservations, try this on for size: Novel in 90. Short form is
750 words a day for 90 days, for a goal of 67,500 words (which need not be the end point of
the novel). It’s the brainchild of Elizabeth
Bear, and it’s growing like rather scary kudzu, but over there you’ll find everything from
professionals (including her and me) to people who have never written a novel in their lives.
She’s taken down the bit in the profile that said in large letters “WE WILL MOCK YOU IF YOU
FAIL,” but the idea is to prod yourself into productivity through public accountability.

I know some of my friends are looking for help in motivating themselves, so if you count
yourself among that number, go over there and sign up.

I will mock you if you don’t. ^_^

Even the weird ones can find a home

A while back, I wrote a 2000-word second-person present-tense story about filling out an
application form. Having done so, I stared at it and wondered where the hell I would ever
sell it.

The answer, it turns out, is Electric
Velocipede, a quirky and well-respected magazine edited by John Klima. Glancing at
their fiction, I can see a story by Scott William Carter that’s in the second person and
present tense, so maybe it’s not much of a surprise, eh? I’m very happy to see it placed so
well — oh, let’s admit it; I’m happy to see it placed at all. It’s a weird enough story that
I had very few ideas about where to send it that wouldn’t just be a random shot in the
dark.

I will, as always, give people a heads-up when it actually goes into print.

*click*

When you have a worldbuilding problem for a story you’re not really
working on at present, to which your mind returns periodically to niggle
at it in search of an answer, it is very satisfying to find oneself
niggling at it once again and this time having the answer fall into one’s
lap. And while it may not be satisfying to realize your failure to see
said answer before came about because you let yourself fall into a rather
stereotypical trap of perception, it’s somewhat nice to also realize that
means you’ll have an opportunity to make a quiet demonstration of a point
to which you have always spoken in support.

In other words, most hunter-gatherer caloric intake comes from the
gathering, not the hunting. And I’d forgotten that.

Go about your business. All is well with the world now — or at least
with that world.