If you’re going to be in the San Francisco Bay Area on May 19th, come join me at SF in SF! I’ll be reading with Ysabeau Wilce and Erin Hoffman at 7 p.m. (the doors open at 6).
. . . no idea what I’ll be reading; I need to find out how much time I’ll have, and ponder options. But I promise to pick something cool. π
While rooting around in my archives looking for something else, I discovered I never put up an open book thread for With Fate Conspire!
So consider this an invitation to make any comments or ask any questions you might have about that book. (Needless to say, this will result in spoilers. Read the thread at your own risk.) I, er, can’t promise I’ll be able to answer everything with perfect clarity; at this point my head is full of Isabella instead of the Onyx Court, so I may be a tad fuzzy on some of the details. But I’ll do my best!
And if you have a question about a previous novel, the other open book threads are still open. Though I don’t have one for the doppelganger series, now that I think about it. Well, if you have a question about one of those, let me know; I can make a new thread if there’s need.
Note: As an experiment, I have closed this thread until the beginning of 2013, in an attempt to convince spammers to stop spamming it. If you have a question, feel free to ask it elsewhere, or come back in January.
I’ve had friends in town for the past several days, and sightseeing with them almost made me forget what today was. Thankfully, several posts on my friends-list reminded me: it’s International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!
I’ve been celebrating this holiday since it started in 2007. (You can see the relevant posts, including some history, under the tag.) A little earlier this year, a reader informed me that the changes over at Abyss & Apex meant my story “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” was no longer available for free in the archive; I have therefore chosen that as this year’s contribution. And if you want more, you can always browse the free fiction on my site!
And now, I go collapse. Who knew sightseeing was so tiring?
Just laid this out piecemeal on Twitter; here it is in less truncated form.
I’m chewing over potential titles for the second book of Isabella’s memoirs. I want it to sound Victorian and travelogue-ish, and/or to potentially echo something having to do with sub-Saharan Africa (which is the region I’m taking as my model for this installment). My tongue-in-cheek placeholder is “Mrs. Camherst, I Presume,” but that’s not great as a title, hence looking for a replacement.
Right now I’m charmed by a pattern that showed up in Victorian travel-writing, exemplified by “Along the River Limpopo, With Gun and Camera.” The whole thing is unwieldy, but maybe a “With X and Y” phrase? If I can find suitable nouns to plug into it. (And if I can shut up the part of my brain that says I already have one published book whose title begins with With.) Or, y’know, something else.
Anyway, all that rambling is just to give you an idea of the flavor I’m looking for. The actual point of this post is to say that for the next week, I am opening the floor to title suggestions. In between now and noon PST on Monday, e-mail me, leave comments here, or post to Twitter with the hashtag #ANHODgiveaway. I can’t promise I’ll take any of the suggestions as a permanent winner, but I will pick someone as a contest winner, and send them one of these advance copies of A Natural History of Dragons.
If you don’t have any suggestions, don’t worry! I have four ARCs to give away, which means there will be three other opportunities to snag one. In the meanwhile, let the suggesting begin!
Eeeeee! Much earlier than I expected, a packet of advance reader copies for A Natural History of Dragons has shown up on my doorstep.
. . . wow, y’all. This thing looks tiny next to With Fate Conspire. Which it is; that monstrosity was nearly 157,000 words in the end, and this one is a svelte 93,000. But it’s a little startling.
I should think up a contest to give some of these away, but first I need to spend a little while beaming at them and gloating. ^_^ (I promise only to pet the one I’m keeping for myself, though. Otherwise it might get a little weird.)
Bookses!
To my editor, that is, and thence to the copy-editor.
While I wait for the CEM to be dropped on me, I get to poke at short stories, and start noodling around with the second book of the series. I need to get its title nailed down . . . .
I mentioned before that a friend of mine is doing a Kickstarter project to raise the funds needed to complete his Urban Tarot Deck, right?
Well, I got to chatting with him. And after a bit of behind-the-scenes scheming, I have a bit of news for you all.
If the project gets funded, the guidebook for the deck will include a short piece of introductory fiction, written by yours truly.
But wait — there’s more!
There is also a new reward level: the Marie Brennan Package. One first-edition numbered deck, the tarot guidebook signed by both me and Robert Scott (the artist), AND — specific to this package only — a signed hardcover copy of With Fate Conspire. (This is, after all, an urban tarot deck, and that is decidedly the most urban of my novels.)
I’m really stoked to be a part of this project. As I said before, I’ve been hoping for years to see this finished; well, as of me posting this, Rob is halfway to his goal, and there are still three weeks to go. If you already have With Fate Conspire, check out the other reward packages; you can get the guidebook (and therefore the fiction) at practically any level of backing, or splurge and enjoy the talents of one of the deck models. Alas, Chris Hall’s guided tour of the American Museum of Natural History has already been claimed, but I can personally vouch for the awesomeness of Jessica Hammer’s knowledge of game design, and the deliciousness of the food at Tse Wei Lim’s restaurant. (In fact, if you live in the Boston area, you should go to Journeyman at some point regardless.)
Head on over and take a look. And if you’ll be at FOGcon this weekend, I’ll be bringing some flyers with me, to spread the word far and wide.
I keep being totally inconsistent as to whether I use the American spelling of the title (as seen below) or the UK spelling. But anyway! Remember that anthology I sold “False Colours” to?
I’m told the cover for the UK version will be the same, bar spelling. Anyway, this is due out in September, it sounds like. I am very much looking forward to my copy!
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
One thing you may not know, if all your experience of fights comes from reading books and watching movies: they are short.
The SCA fencing practice I used to attend would sometimes stage melees, where everybody would get divided up into groups and set against each other en masse. One time they arranged two tables with a gap in between, and declared the gap to be a doorway, that one group (consisting of about five people) was defending. The goal of the other group (equal in numbers) was to get past them to the back wall.
From start to finish, how long do you think it took?
Less than twenty seconds.
(And that’s counting the time the attackers spent advancing, before they closed with their opponents.)
Fighting is kind of like being a soccer/football goalie guarding against a penalty kick. Do you leap left or right? There are physical clues that will tell you which way to go, but you have only a fraction of a second in which to spot and analyze them, before you have to choose. Left or right? If you’re good, your odds of choosing correctly are better than 50% . . . but sooner or later, they’ll slip one past you.
Sooner or later, a decisive blow will get past somebody’s defense. And it’s probably going to be sooner.
There are times when you want to replicate this in your story. Near the beginning of The Bourne Identity (film, not book), Jason Bourne takes down a pair of cops in less time than it took me to type this sentence. Because the usual convention of fiction is that combat lasts a long time, the effect of a quick takedown is to say, this guy is really badass. Mind you, in prose, the duration of the actual moment and the length of its description aren’t correlated much at all; you could gloss over a knock-down drag-out match in half a sentence, or spend a whole paragraph detailing the three lightning-fast moves that lay the opponent out. But if you want badass points, make it short. (There’s a non-combat-related bit in The Ringed Castle, one of the later books in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, where she spends maybe two or three sentences telling us that what with one thing and another, a handful of characters got themselves from England to Russia. Her not telling us how they managed that — in the sixteenth century, when that journey was not what you’d call easy — makes them seem 300% more awesome than if she’d spent a chapter on it.)
But it’s a convention of fiction that important, set-piece fights can last a really long time. Fair enough; our purpose is to be dramatic, not realistic. So how do you make a fight scene long, without boring the reader?
alecaustin and I had a long conversation today about how fiction sometimes needs to have depiction of horrible things, and the fine line between “necessary horrible” and “voyeuristic horrible,” and the way that readers have sometimes been conditioned toward voyeurism regarding horrible things (see: the problem of depicting rape), and so on. And he got me wondering what I would consider to be the worst violence I’ve inflicted on a character of mine.
Off the top of my head, I decided it was the stuff that happens to Seniade in drafts of what eventually became Dancing the Warrior. It isn’t actually the most damaging violence — she doesn’t die of it — but it’s horrible because it’s being done to her by a sadist, and she knows it, and she accepts it because she think it’s what she needs to do. Plus I dwell on the details of it, the step-by-step process and the pain that follows, which I don’t generally do otherwise. I called it “borderline torture” in that conversation, and only leave it at “borderline” because Sen could walk away at any time.
For all that, though — as I told alecaustin — it bothers me less than, say, the plague stuff I wrote for In Ashes Lie. Partly because Sen volunteers for it, but partly because most of us are desensitized to violence. And then that made me realize that what I find “worst” about the DtW stuff isn’t the physical suffering after all, but the psychological: what’s going on inside Sen’s head. (Which is why it’s the drafts, not the final version, that are the worst. One of them — not so much a draft as an exercise — is a pure, unadulterated inner monologue.)
And then I started thinking, you know, that might be why I tend to prefer torturing my characters psychologically, rather than physically. Because it bothers me a lot more. <g>
I’ve known for a long time that I’m a sucker for suffering and angst. It only works if you get me to really care about the character first; angst in an unlikeable or boring character will just make me roll my eyes. And it has to be the right kind of suffering; my taste tends toward the operatic end of the spectrum, rather than the grinding, day-to-day banality of things like “how will I find the money for rent this month.” But if you hit the right notes, on a character I’m invested in? I will eat it up with a spoon.
I can’t say it’s fun, exactly. “Magnetic” would be more apt. The next-to-last scene of the film The Wind That Shakes the Barley is excruciating to watch; something truly horrible happens, and there’s no resolution afterward to let me feel it’s All Okay Now. But it’s an amazing scene. (One which I didn’t see until after A Star Shall Fall was over and done with — but if you want to know what psychological note I was aiming for near the end of that book, watch the movie. Or, y’know, watch it just because it’s a bloody brilliant piece of work from Cillian Murphy. It’s streaming on Netflix, and worth it for the ending alone.) I can’t look away from such things, and they stay with me long after they’re over.
Really, it’s cathartic. And yet — why do I enjoy the experience? Why am I so often a sucker for drama over comedy? And what determines what kind of suffering I’ll enjoy, versus what will just depress me? I’m still working on the answers to that. So I’m curious to know how others feel about this kind of thing. Do you like angst, and if so, what kinds, under what circumstances? Which kinds of suffering bother you more, and which are you desensitized to? What can you bear to write, versus read, versus watch?
I’m hoping your answers will help me understand what’s going on in my own head. π
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
So, I’ve blathered on at length about how to imagine a fight scene for a story: who’s fighting, and why, and where, and with what, and how they’re doing it, and so on.
How do you get that onto the page?
Point of view seems a useful place to begin this discussion. It’s generally already been decided by the time you get to the scene; if the whole book has been in third person limited from the protagonist’s perspective, you’re unlikely to hop to first just for the fight. (You could do it, as some kind of avant-garde trick — but 99.9% of the time, you won’t.) So, what are you working with: first, second (unlikely), or third? Third limited or omniscient? If limited, then whose third are we in?
For a story with only one pov, again, that’s probably already been decided. But if you have multiple viewpoint characters, and more than one of them is present for the fight, you have a choice to make.
Remember how I mentioned before that I wanted to improve my story production this year? Well, I haven’t really made progress on that; I haven’t written anything new (yet). But I have sent something new out, that’s been sitting around waiting to be revised for a year or more.
When I went to add it to my submissions log, I noticed something . . . poor-ish.
Yes, the point (as I said in my previous post) is to sell things, not to submit them. But while the last three pieces I finished and sent out sold to the first place I submitted them — yay! — that isn’t the whole story. All three of those were basically written to order, under conditions where I more or less knew they were sold before I started working on them. The last time I sent out a story that wasn’t solicited and pre-sold?
Was April of 2010.
And it isn’t because editors have been beating down my door with invitations. Three such situations in nearly two years is nice, but not exactly the sort of thing the leads to some authors of my acquaintance saying “I’m going to have to start turning editors down; I’m already overcommitted.” More like, the only times I’ve been able to prod myself into actual short story productivity is when I know the only thing standing between me and an almost-guaranteed sale is my own lack of effort.
This isn’t a self-esteem thing. Obviously I know I can sell stories, if I bother to write them. And it isn’t a lack of inspiration thing, either; one look at my (growing) list of unwritten story ideas would cure any notion of that. I’m not sure what kind of thing it is, really. It may be part and parcel of the fatigue issue I think I’ve mentioned in passing here; writing novels has been harder, too, for at least as long as I’ve been such a short-story slacker, and while I can’t prove that has anything to do with the way I faceplant for a nap almost every day (which is a more recent development), I’m hoping that fixing the latter will lead to miraculous improvements in the former.
Anyway. Mostly I want to pat myself on the back for finally sending out “Mad Maudlin,” after way too much time spent sitting on it. I have another story in similar circumstances (which probably would have been revised and sent out yonks ago, if I could just come up with a title for the damn thing), and I’m going to push myself to get some new things written. This, at least, is a start.
I didn’t publish a whole lot last year, in comparison with the previous five or so. With Fate Conspire, Dancing the Warrior (the doppelganger novella), and three short stories (“Two Pretenders,” “Love, Cayce,” and “Coyotaje”). The forecast isn’t good for this year, either, because I didn’t write a whole lot, either: A Natural History of Dragons, Dancing the Warrior, “Coyotaje,” and a novelette I can’t tell you about yet, but which has already been sold. In other words, everything I wrote vanished from the pipeline pretty much as soon as I finished it.
I’ve posted about that latter bit before, reminding myself that selling stories is the goal, not submitting them. Still, I have only four things in the submission queue right now, and one or more of those probably ought to be retired. Even if I sold all four of them right now, and all four saw print this year — both of which are unlikely — that’s not a lot of new publications compared to some past years, and it leaves me with nothing for next year.
Okay. So I need to write more short fiction. I’ve vowed this before, and met with moderate success; let’s try that again. Simple to say, not so simple to do, but putting it here where the internets can see it should help.
The one in my book, not the one in the sky.
Just got confirmation today that A Star Shall Fall will be getting a mass-market release in October of this year. So if you prefer your novels in smaller and/or cheaper format, mark the date on your calendar!
(This is actually the first time a book of mine has gotten proper release in a new physical format. There are ebooks of all of them, and the Onyx Court novels got picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club, which does hardcover copies, but this is shiny and new.)
Got a draft of my Yuletide story last night. It’s off to be read by fresher eyes than mine, and then I’ll revise it, and get the whole shebang posted not quite as far in advance of the deadline as I’d initially hoped. π
On the basis of what I wrote last year, I find myself feeling bad that this story is so short, and will certainly be shorter than at least one of the treats I’m thinking of writing. I sort of feel like it, being my assignment, should be the longest thing I produce for Yuletide. Which is silly, of course: any given idea has a natural length (or range thereof), and bigger has no correlation with better. But still.
I’m really happy with my title, though. It came to me about halfway through the process, with no effort at all; the ones that do that are usually my favorites. Titles I have to sweat for rarely end up feeling more than adequate to me. (With Fate Conspire is something of a special case, given the process behind that one. It was more work than any other title I’ve ever put on a piece of writing, but I was very pleased with it in the end.)
I should have procrastinated just a bit longer before posting this. π If you can’t or don’t want to go the Kindle route, you can now buy the Clockwork Phoenix e-book from Weightless Books, in epub or mobi formats, at the same price.
I’ve finally started on my Yuletide fic — started properly, I mean, and not just the fifty words I slapped down a few days ago because I felt like I really ought to have made more progress by now. Found the right tone for the story today, and at least some of the right format; I say “some of” because this is a decidedly odd story, from a decidedly odd source, and it remains to be seen whether the approach I’m taking will sustain the thousand-word minimum for Yuletide. Possibly not, in which case I’ll need to find something else to slide into the break-points that have been appearing along the way. But I’m not yet sure what that should be.
Structure is so often the kicker, ain’t it? I’ve started a treat, too, because I got mugged by an idea for something else, and that one mostly needs me to figure out what beats have to happen, in what order. Now that my subconscious has chewed on my assignment enough to start swallowing some of it (ew — not the best metaphor ever), the treat is going on the back-burner, but I think both of them are going to turn out very well, in very different ways.
Mike Allen (time_shark) has done yeoman work, converting the first volume of the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series to ebook format. This is, you may recall, the home of “A Mask of Flesh,” which I keep wanting to call “one of my Mesoamerican fantasy stories” until I remember that I haven’t actually gotten any of the other ones in shape to submit anywhere, let alone publish.
The rest of the series (CP, not those stories — though maybe them, too) will follow in time, but for now you can get the first volume on the Kindle. If you prefer pixels to dead trees, head on over and take a look!
As many of you have probably heard by now, Anne McCaffrey, one of the grand dames of science fiction, has passed away.
I came to her books through Dragonsinger, I think, and the rest of the Harper Hall trilogy, before moving on to Dragonflight and the other, more “mainstream” Pern books (by which I mean the ones that focused on the riders and Weyrs). From there I went onto some of the Ship books, and the Talents, and the Crystal Singer series, and more. She was never quite one of my DNA writers — not a formative influence on me as a reader or writer — but she was part of the step out of children’s fiction and into adult SF/F. She was, however, a formative influence on a crap-ton of other people, and her oeuvre is one of the big islands in our archipelago.
And, although I never thought of it this way consciously, I think she helped print in my mind not the belief, but the assumption that writing this stuff was a thing done by both men and women. It never really occurred to me that anybody might think otherwise. If you’d asked Teenaged Me to list off important fantasy writers, I would have responded with Anne McCaffrey and Robert Jordan and Mercedes Lackey and David Eddings and Marion Zimmer Bradley and Raymond E. Feist and — well, let’s put it this way. I was a little nonplussed when I found out Terry Brooks was a man, because that was one of those names that could go either way, and women were prominent enough on my bookshelf that I thought nothing of dropping him in that category.
(No, I didn’t pay much attention to the “about the author” bit. Why do you ask?)
(And yes, you can totally see the reading tastes of Teenaged Me in that list. Don’t quibble over me putting McCaffrey in with the fantasy, though. I played the Might and Magic computer games. I was, and in some ways still am, firm in the opinion that slapping a bit of technology on a story otherwise stuffed with fantasy tropes does not make it SF.)
So anyway. I’m thankful for Anne McCaffrey, and for a whole host of other people like her, both for putting amazing and influential books into the world, but also — in the case of the women — for making it possible for me to cruise along in my blithe assumption of gender equality. That mindset has its shortcomings, but I really do believe it’s enabled me to steamroll over any number of small speedbumps that may have appeared in my path.
Thank you, Anne McCaffrey.
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
After (another) hiatus, I’m ready to dive back into the “writing fight scenes” project.
When we last left this discussion, I said I was about to get into the craft issues of how you put a fight scene on the page, but on reflection, there’s one more practical thing I want to cover first, for people without a background in any kind of combat, and that’s the basic principles of fighting. These are things you want to keep in mind when you imagine how your characters are moving, so you don’t end up describing what a more experienced reader will instantly recognize as bad technique.
It’s hard to generalize about every style of fighting out there, but I feel relatively safe in saying they all share one core principle: maximize your ability to hit the other guy, while minimizing his ability to hit you.
