September 2009 Archives

I forgot to bring my notebook home from the office, so the words I painstakingly bled out are lying abandoned and forlorn in a building a refuse to step into once I've left for the day, just out of principle. I could try to write the same gist from memory. Actually, I did use a lot of brackets, which is something I do when the word choice isn't quite right but I can't be bothered to stop and figure out a better alternative right then. So having the exact words wouldn't be helpful anyway.

My mind's already skipping ahead to the next story I want to work on, but I'll exercise some discipline and buckle down on this one. Notebooks are good for writerly monogamy. I used to mix up multiple stories on a single page, but when the time came to type it up, I'd be horribly confused. So now I always feel committed to a story for at least an entire page. (Never min that I only use small notebooks.)

I guess I'll poke at a different scene and see if I can tickle it into submission.

So I'm headed for a lovely weekend in wine country. I agreed to go without much thought — I mean, it's a expenses-paid trip with alcohol involved — but as departure time got closer, I started worrying. Should I take my laptop, so that I could write? I would be leaving straight from work, so maybe I could just take my work laptop? But it seemed wrong to use it for non-work purposes. Notebook and pen, then, but would my companions give me time to write? What if they asked what I was writing and I was in the middle of a steamy sex scene?

I also chatted with someone else who had run a half-marathon, and we began contemplating a full marathon together. I had no social life while training for 13.1 miles, so imagine what it's going to be like when working up to 26.2. It's going to be negative free time.

But I imagine saying, "I can't, I have to write," and I just cringe. Writing is something I should be able to fit in no matter what else I'm doing. And denying myself fun would be a great way to start resenting writing.

So I'm off to enjoy myself. And if I'm lying by the pool, seeming to sunbathe, I'll actually be brainstorming for the story, I promise.

There are writers for whom writing everyday is key. I used to have spreadsheets that would use my daily word count to calculate what percentage of the story was finished, or how far I was lagging behind my goals. I gave that up for a much simpler system: I have a Google Calendar where I mark the total words for any stories I worked on that day. It's easy to glance at the last week and see how diligent I've been in carving out some writing time. Or I can flip ahead and gauge how much time I've got left before an anthology deadline. It's just the right amount of visual cue I need, without getting obsessed.

If I'm feeling particularly sadistic, I flip back and see how quickly I wrote the last quarter of Summer-set. The best person to pace yourself against is yourself, since you know that rate is feasible if you've already done it once.

I'm contemplating NaNoWriMo this year, and instead of slaving away on 1,667 words a day, I think I'll try focusing on writing on each of those 30 days. Then I'll see how the final accounting goes.

I feel like a runner in training, working on both endurance and speed. When I trained for my half-marathon, I remember it being mostly a mental battle, one of convincing myself that I could do it, and of discipline.

I ended up crossing the finish line so much earlier than my predicted time that my friend who was picking me up after arrived after the fact, even when she came early.

I took a break from the computer while my wrists recovered from the mad typing up of performance reviews. Then I made the wondrous discovery that while writing during football games is near-impossible, editing works quite well.

Anyway, here's the beginning of "Shadow Hunt." If you've read "Mayfly Night" or "Beneath Their Masks", this is another tale of the Miirazenu that I plan to put up as a free read once done.

Rialis heard the horns of the hunt calling as she rode through Eyrim Forest. She checked her mare, then dismounted and began disrobing. The only thing she left was a red cord tied around her wrist. The rest she tried to shove into her saddlebags, but the horse snorted and danced aside.

"Stay still," she said, seizing the reins and forcing it to heed her words. "I need to get there before they find real game."

The horns again, closer this time. She stretched, skimming her awareness along every inch of her body, to the very fingertips, then shifted.

The mare whinnied this time, alarmed. Rialis streaked away before it could draw someone's attention. Hadn't she warned Lord Mazan that she needed a calm steed?

No matter, now. Her paws carried her swiftly toward the hunt. The forest was rich with aromas and texture, but she didn't allow those to distract her. She had her own prey to pursue.

She broke through the brush to sudden cries.

"A fox!"

"After it!"

And the baying of hounds.

I'm spending my Friday night writing performance reviews for work. Joy!

On the other hand, this is surprisingly useful practice. Our reviews are transparent, which means that the recipients can read them and know who wrote them. It's incentive for tactful wording, particularly in the "areas for development" section.

Sound familiar? Yup, it's rather like giving critiques to a writer.

Also, while no character of mine is going to be lauded as attentive to end users' needs (I work at a dot-com), it's still a familiar place to be, thinking about what people's strengths and weaknesses are, and how they play off each other. And how every person has some of each.

We're also supposed to provide specific examples for every trait we point out. The company calls this a data-driven approach. I rather think of it as showing instead of telling.

The parallels probably end there, except that I've often stayed up late, bleary-eyed and desperately paging through old pages/emails for inspiration, for both. Back to writing...performance reviews.

I won this in a contest — along with some other goodies that I completely forgot about, because all I really cared about was this book.

I'm a fan of Howson's writing, as she subscribes to the lyrical school of style. The worldbuilding in this one caught at me as well. Forget the wolves and cats who abound in paranormals. This is a fantasy romance where you have a gargoyle-shifter and a woman who can change into lava.

The story begins with Aera (the latter) making her way into the labyrinth where she kills criminals in the name of the god — a holy executioner, if you will. And if you doubt that she'd do this, consider that her family had sunk into the lowest of castes because they hadn't produced anyone with a fire-gift for a century. When Aera discovered her gift by burning down their house, this was the reaction:

Her walk also takes her down the path of memory, and she thinks of Coram, the boy who had accepted her in the days of her family's disgrace, and whom she never saw again after she was taken away to the temple for training. And at the end of the walk, of course, is Coram, now a man. He meets her demand to rise and face his death because she's come in the name of the god with, "To kill me. Yes, of course. Then I think I'll not stand, if it's all the same to you."

Howson describes past events with a deft hand, and I never questioned Aera's affection for Coram, or the hardship her family suffered. And I liked Aera. She's not the wishy-washy sort, but someone who honestly examines her beliefs. She also doesn't wait around, languishing for rescue when she's in trouble, but works to get herself out.

My only disappointment was the scope. There aren't any secondary characters, and the bad guys were fanatical and jealous of their power to the point of being generically evil. There were some beautiful details, like stone pillars where priestesses leave the imprint of their hands, but the world outside the labyrinth was left hazy, despite teasing mentions of maenads who hunt runaways in the desert and rumors of northern lands where all gifts are accepted. There was so much more that could have been done with this setting! Instead, everything centers around the lovers: their anger and despair and tenderness. Which, you might argue, is the way it's supposed to be in a shorter romance.

It's a warming tale rather than a passionate one, but that's what I like about it — it takes the time to go through the characters' emotions beyond some blazing, relentless love/lust/angst, and leaves you quietly content.

I got some great comments on the first chapter of "Gutter-wing," and now I'm caught between going back and rewriting that, or chugging on and actually finishing it all before I start doing the heavy lifting.

If there were structural or foundational issues — say I didn't want the heroine to be an angel anymore (that won't happen) — I would definitely do the revisions now. It doesn't make sense to keep writing along lines that I've decided to discard. But I just might be able to squeeze by with additions and very minor edits, and keep any ripples farther down the story to a minimum. So I'm dithering.

Sometimes there's such a thing as momentum, and you have to keep moving forward. (I think this is what NaNoWriMo depends on. Or, say, stories almost due for an anthology deadline.) But sometimes you tinker with one bit, and it clicks into place, and then everything else in the story makes glorious sense. That little click is worth worlds.

I think I'll be optimistic and wait to go back over Chapter One during the weekend, in case it does spur a creative spurt, and I'll want the free time to take advantage of it.

I think I've figured out that for me, fantasy is all about description, and romance is all about dialogue. I had to discard my usual style of going quietly into the character's thoughts and surroundings and work at developing convincing chemistry between the hero and heroine — which I can't justify with just visuals.

My favorite romantic movies are Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, where the couple essentially wanders around a city, just talking. I love how realistic their conversations are: the topics are random, weave in their pasts, escalate into tears... everything you do when you talk with your lover.

So when I write dialogue, it's not about the passionate declarations or snarky remarks (although they both have their place). It's about letting the characters become comfortable around each other, and yet be excited at the same time by finding out till-then unknowns. Learning to deal with each other. Squabbling. Stuff it'd be hard to do with just description, unless they were two mimes.

I'm going to try posting a little bit from my work-in-progress on Mondays, just snippets of a few hundred words.

It's up on Samhain's "Coming soon" pages as to be released on November 10, 2009!

I'm excited, but this is a (self-imposed) deadline as much as a day to count down to — I am determined to have another novella done and submitted before the first one's published. If I can write just a little faster, I might be able to manage two releases a year, and it does seem like speed matters in an e-published writer's career.

So I went and read a humorous holiday-themed sf m/m short story, Angela Benedetti's "The Joy of Exchanging Gifts." This is not an intersection of categories that I normally look for, and yet I thoroughly enjoyed it. It involved anthropology and sex in quite possibly the most awkward position I can imagine, and somehow that was a winning combination for me. It was rather like the time I read my first mystery novel after years of reading only fantasy, sf, and English class assignments: I got all excited not just by the story itself, but by the door opening, the realization that there's this entire world out there that I never looked at before, and now I get to go romp in it.

I think I need to stop hitting the fantasy category first thing at various publishers' sites, and be more open-minded. Even if a certain genre makes me feel wearier than that guy who went trooping 500 miles and then 500 more, there's always the chance that some wonderful author has gone and made it fresh again. After all, genres are only single-dimensional labels that can't capture some of the aspects that appeal most to me about a book — a type of character, a plot button, or, most importantly, the quality of writing.

The bread of a writer is the actual writing itself. But I think almost all writers crave feedback to go along with it.

I've been turning to the Internet with increasing frequency to find out about the authors whose books I love — to hunt down their other works, find out what they're working on, and just be curious in general. But it never really occurred to me that this meant I could probably email them while I was at it, instead of the previous cumbersome process of finding the mailing address of their publisher and writing an actual letter, which adds gravity to the process. You wouldn't write an actual letter just to say, "Hey, that was a pretty cool book," right?

Anyway, recently I actually took the time to send notes to a couple of authors who are electronically published, and thus eminently reachable by email. I was in correspondence with one anyway (more on her story another day), and the other wrote a great article on the passive voice that I passed on to someone else in lieu of my own impatient explanation. The latter also has one of those lyrical writing styles that I am obsessed with (I found the article by looking for more of her stories), and I decided that good nonfiction and fiction deserved acknowledgment.

(The funny thing is that I'm up to my armpits in critiques to do, so I nearly started making critterly remarks on their works. I settled for more generalized glowing comments.)

I'm only pleased when someone likes one of my stories, so I'm hoping other authors feel the same way. I think from now own I'll make the effort to reach out and tell them about their works that I've enjoyed.

I just sent some revisions to my editor. As I suspect most electronic publishers do, mine asked me to use Microsoft Word's Track Changes feature. I've got an old version of Word, so this means that any changes I make appear in bright red. (Newer versions let you switch views so that your changes look like normal text.)

I turned out to be incapable of writing anything new in red. Either I keep expecting my grade school teacher to have written a scathing comment, or I can't mentally integrate the red and the black text, or maybe I'm just distracted by bright colors. I ended up opening up my trusty text editor, writing there sans any formatting whatsoever, and then transferring the changes over into the Word document.

It's also harder than I expected to tweak a part of the narrative. It ripples through the entire story, but I didn't want to overemphasize the change (why not just put up a neon sign?). I went for less rather than more this round, and will await my editor's verdict.

It was actually near-impossible for me to work on "Gutter-wing" while editing "Summer-set" (I know, I've got to do something about these hyphenated titles). Perhaps my brain needs a handy edit/write switch. Hopefully I'll catch up on my word count this weekend, but as I've got someone's novel to critique, I wouldn't place any bets...

I went back to the online critique group I'd left before, because despite the frustration I'd experienced last time, there was a single comment on the first chapter of Summer-set that helped me rewrite it into something that could sell. (I would thank the critiquer, except I had the impression that she disliked the story. See how negative criticism can be more helpful?) I'm hoping for something similar for "Gutter-wing" — all it might need is just one person's throwaway remark to trigger some blinding authorly insight.

I think my earlier mistake was in expecting something similar to an in-person or static membership critique group, where you can depend on getting the same level and quality of feedback each round. It seems this site might be better suited for what I think are called beta reads: gathering first impressions instead of in-depth lookovers.

I've got the first chapter up now — in fact, this spurred me to fill in a few holes that my non-linear writing method had left — and we'll see what comes.

Ever since I've been trying to get the hang of this romance stuff, I think I've been studying it more closely in all the books I read, even the non-romances. Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar trilogy, usually a comfort read, annoyed me because there's a lifebond that conveniently keeps a couple from having to actually learn about and court each other. (Although of course they still suffer plenty of angst, somewhow.) Then Shannon Hale's River Secrets carried on with a romance from the previous book that had seemed resolved, even though those characters were now secondary, and I wondered if this was breaking romance rules — but of course it wasn't a romance.

And Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn, while it drew me in with the main character's voice and the postapocalyptic worldbuilding, had a decent guy who started out a bit antagonistic. Ah ha, I thought right off. He's going to be her love interest.

I'm now engaged in a mad search for the rest of the books in the Obernewtyn Chronicles — not to find out if I'm right, but because it's good stuff. But I'll probably raise my arms Steve Holt-style and shout, "I knew it!" if I am right, even if I'm in public. Perhaps this should be strictly indoors reading.

I somehow managed to be lucky enough to have the wondrously talented Kanaxa create Summer-set's cover:

I'm not a visual person, so it was a struggle to come up with ideas for the cover. What Kanaxa came up with is gorgeous and fits the feel of the story perfectly. I'm thrilled, and I keep peeking looks at it when I should be doing other things.

I usually don't care overmuch about the environment I write in — I insist on ergonomic workspaces, but mentally I can do fine with music or silence, people around or not, beverage at the ready or snackless.

But in the corner above my desk there is a spider, and that is seriously throwing me off. Do not be surprised if a monster arachnid appears in my current story. Even though there's no place for spiders in an angel/demon novella.

It's been interesting, pulling from the Bible for the mythological basis. I wonder if religious folks will be offended, or if anyone will point out "inaccuracies" where I deliberately took liberties in the worldbuilding.

And what was supposed to be an intimate little love story has suddenly turned into a tale of the apocalypse. Maybe this is my way of working toward writing a post-apocalyptic work, a genre I'm absurdly fond of.