Posts Tagged "Writing"

• The Little Black Book

  The Year in Review

  I carry around a little black notebook. Most of us do, in some fashion or another. Mine is a Moleskine daily journal from 2007, when I had the idea of writing a full page every day and filling the notebook in a year. It’s taken me five years, and I’m down to the last few pages. In the front, I set aside a page for a table of contents, marking the start and end date of every project. It starts with The Potemkin Mosaic and ends with Earth Thirst. 2007 was also the year of my first professional short story sale (“How the Mermaid Lost Her Song” at Strange Horizons), which makes this little black book the record of my first five years of writing professionally.

  

  There are eleven projects listed (one is still under wraps); five have been published (Potemkin, two CODEX books, two Foreworld books, and Earth Thirst); two—Instrument and Rabbit’s Foot—are novels in the universe that I have several short stories in; and the rest are isolated projects that are still in the germinative state.

  Notice that the start date for Angel Tongue is a month before I finished Heartland. I’m just pointing that out to keep the nay-sayers at bay.

  Which puts me at just under fifty percent, which I find to be a pretty good percentage. Of course, things don’t get put on the front page of the book until they’re far enough along to warrant keeping notes. And the list doesn’t really reflect that I did a lot of ruminating in the early years (through 2009), and in the last few, I’ve been spending more time writing than wool-gathering. Nor does this list reflect the five novellas that were written in the back half of 2012 (all of which will be out by this coming February). All in all, I wrote nearly 200,000 words last year and did editorial rewriting on another half million.

  I started another writing notebook this week. It has three projects with start dates of January 1st. BLOOD HARVEST, HERE BE MONSTERS, and ANGEL TONGUE. I used to be an intensive planner, but looking back on the full writer’s notebook, I have to admit that very little of that was on my five year plan. My goal in the next year is to write one of those three books listed above. Maybe we should do a pool. Long odds on ANGEL TONGUE, of course.

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• Rules for a Mostly Sane Writing Experience

  The Life

  Like Courtney I’ve never had a light bulb moment, except when I discovered how much I could delete without ruining the story. For example it’s nice to talk about the engraving on an ivory brush, but in the second half of the second book, people already have a sense of the world and the things in it. Or sometimes a friend can help you see that a character twisting his lips for the fortieth time doesn’t really get the point across – it’s just annoying. So as far as deleting, I’ve had these moments when I realize how pointless so many of my lines and paragraphs are. But other than that? Not really. I do however have some rules.

  1. Take a walk. Or a shower. Or a bike ride. I find that continuing to write when I’m just stuck does not work. I end up with pages that don’t go anywhere that I later have to delete (see above). If I remove myself from the situation, a better solution will come to me. (more…)

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• Hm, What’s the Difference?

  Uncategorized

  The given topic is “Lightspeed vs. Landlock – Intergalactic Travel vs Mundane Fantasy.” I’ve been puzzling over that all week, to be honest. I’m not sure what “mundane fantasy” might be.

  My go-to definition for science fiction is about our relationship to technology – how we deal with its advances, and how it in turn changes us. This can lead into class, politics, and government as found in Dune, 1984, and Brave New World; but such studies are not unique to science fiction. Fantasy offers a wide variety of futures and alternate timelines that offer views of human (or elvish, or orcish, etc.) rule, for example Mark Lawrence’s Broken Empire or Bradley Beaulieu’s The Lays of Anuskaya series. (more…)

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• Does Sex Matter?

  Sex and Feelings; It's in every genre. How are the elements of Romance used in Science Fiction and Fantasy?

  Sex. Many feel it simply has no place in fantasy, and when they find it there, it’s just like the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial – hey! You got sex in my story! – but without the happy resolution. It all depends on the story being told. A person can write a rip-roaring tale of heroes caught in romantic adventures without having to find a way to describe bodies bumping. Others may differ.

  Does sex matter? Sex is part of most of our lives, and certainly not an unimportant one. Our government sees fit to legislate where it can and cannot occur, and what percentage of nipple can appear on our television screens. It’s codified, controlled, and explosively popular: sex propelled Fifty Shades of Grey to the bestseller list and earns the pornography industry $14 billion a year. I would say yes. Sex matters.

  There are many ways to talk about sex in books. One is the craft of the actual scenes which I suspect would be boring to read about. Another is the purpose of sex in the book – what it is meant to convey. Yet another is the societal overtones of that sex, from unconscious Puritanism and sexism to post-colonial biases.

  So where does one begin to unravel sex in our literature? Certainly the temptation is to leave it be. Art is not exactly meant to make sense of our lives – only ask questions or find beauty in it. The great mystery of sex – what it means to each of us and to the characters and world of a book – is only one of a great many riddles in any good story. And yet there persists the worry that something harmful could be there, something twisted, that begs to be opened and put into the sunlight. (more…)

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• To Be Finished, Rather than Perfect

  Creativity

  I rarely have a problem coming up with ideas. In fact, my problem is too many ideas. Every news story and history book has me sitting there saying, “what if …” Right now I’ve got beehive mountains, steamboats, a detailed image of a sociopath, and a fifteenth-century Florence -style government in my head. Don’t even ask.

  Even as a Game Master for our table-top roleplaying crew, I come up with dozens of side plots, distracting the players from the Real Villain and doing the opposite of railroading the plot. In a game, all of those can serve as herrings and I don’t have to make them matter; in writing, I have to find a way to bring it all together.

  The result: a sick feeling that makes me not even want to sit in front of the computer. Deleting whole storylines, writing half of a chapter and then realizing it’s not going to contribute anything, eliminating whole characters from the tapestry of the story – that’s all part of writing, and especially for me.  Add to that I’m somewhat of a perfectionist when I know that I cannot make a book perfect.

  So what I will address is: How do I find a way to sit in front of the computer and straighten out my tangled mess? (more…)

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• Pseudonym starts with ‘p’

  Say my name! Talking Pseudonyms.

  Here’s the thing. I did not expect to get published. I had enough to think about in even finishing a book, let alone sending it off to an agent. Still, in my far-off dreams on the subject I had considered that any form of my name(s) would not work well on the cover of a book because, just as Courtney Schafer complained about her own, nobody spells them correctly. Ever. So when people were suddenly using words like “contract” and “payment” and then I also heard “pseudonym,” decades of correcting credit card representatives and RMV workers had me primed to agree.

  There is a strategy to pseudonyms. You want to appear on the right place on the shelf; send a message about your identity (‘Raven’ sends one message, ‘Suzy’ another); show some musicality or rhythm your real name doesn’t have; and leave certain bits of information out of the picture, in many cases  gender. (more…)

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• Hannibal Lecter Is A Friend Of Mine

  Villains

  What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.  What doesn’t kill our characters makes our stories stronger.

  So Hannibal Lecter is a friend of mine.  So is Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  And The Joker, and Professor Moriarty, and especially Darth Vader.  Maybe Bane, too, but we’ll see.

  

  Villains in fantastic fiction are one of my favorite things to write because, as the nemesis of the hero, they get to have a lot of the same qualities, but they get to have them in an evil way.  Call me twisted, but writing about the use of power towards nefarious ends is at least as much fun as writing about heroes and their struggles.  And it makes the story that much more satisfying when the hero wins. 

  With acknowledgements to Iago and every henchman-type bad guy, interesting villains to me are generally powerful individuals.  Part of what makes a villain powerful is success in his/her field. You want to know a writer’s politics? See who he casts as the villain in his story.  Corporate greedheads are usually good, but let’s not forget corrupt cops, military officials gone rogue, or maybe even a President who wants to transform a country from a representative republic into a European socialist state…

  But I digress. 

   ;-) (more…)

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• The life of a writer, now with added Panda Face

  Managing promotion vs. writing vs. your personal life.

  In a utopian world, the writerly life would involve lie-ins and leisurely mornings, perhaps commencing with a perusal of the world news in order to inform yourself, alongside a perfectly brewed double espresso or three before retiring to the Shed (because there would, of course, be a theoretical Writing Shed in the theoretical garden of the theoretical house). This world would contain no day job. Instead each day (wait – each weekday, for there would be weekends, in which fun things were done) would involve Actual Writing, conjuring up sentences and stories and plots and characters and dialogue and ideas and getting them down on the page.

  Alas, sadly this remains, and doubtless shall remain for some if not all time, the trappings of fantasy. Like many other writers, I juggle a day job with the creative side of writing and the business side of writing. And if you’re going to be a professional writer, the two go hand in hand. The creative side hardly needs explaining; but perhaps the greatest consensus on writing advice is to write often, and it’s not easy to carve a piece of time out of every day.

  

  Roald Dahl's writing shed - what every writer needs

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• The question is why

  Comics: Tights vs. existential angst

  I have to put my hands up at the start of this post and declare that my credentials to talk about comics stand at approximately zero (the credentials for existential angst I feel I can claim to be somewhat higher). Of the superhero film franchises, I’ve seen a few but by no means all, but I’ve never got into comics as a visual medium. Of what I have seen, I think it’s fair to say that both tights and angst feature strongly. There’s an aesthetic in these stories which is appealing – the masks, the paraphernalia, the exclusive powers, the generally cool stuff. And then there’s what makes those characters tick, which for me personally is the more interesting bit.

  If there’s one book that should be mentioned in reference to comics, it has to be The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. It’s a few years since I read it and my memory isn’t good enough to talk about it in detail, but quite apart from the (quite epic) journeys of its two brilliantly realized central protagonists, Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier, Kavalier & Clay is a wonderful exercise in both the history of comics and what, at a particular point in history, they strove to achieve. Sammy and Joe, in discussing the hero of their own new comic book superhero (will he be a hawk? A lion? A tiger? They can’t decide), pinpoint the issue of what drives a superhero thus: (more…)

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• Everything is autobiographical and everything is fictional

  Writing on other cultures that are not your own.

  This week’s topic is writing on cultures that are not your own, a subject which, rightly so, generates debate. Certainly writing on cultures not your own, as with writing anything that is not a direct personal experience, needs to be approached with care. Personally, I would love to write a novel set in Japan. Japan is a country I’ve wanted to visit for a long time; I’m intrigued by the culture and I studied the language for several years at school (sadly all I can remember now is a few hiragana, and that’s about it – I keep promising myself one day I will learn again). I’m drawn to books set in Japan – Murakami’s works being the obvious example, but another all time favourite is NUMBER9DREAM by David Mitchell (who lived in Japan for some years), set in Tokyo. But for me to write about life in Japan, or about any other culture which is not my own, I would naturally worry about getting the details right, and writing in a way that didn’t reinforce the stereotypes that are automatically embedded in any one culture viewing another.

  In this theoretical project there are some obvious things I could do to mitigate potential blunders – research being the first point of call. I would want to do my research thoroughly. Ideally I would like to visit the place I was writing about, but for most writers, financial concerns are going to limit the feasibility of travel. Fortunately, we are in a unique position compared to the vast majority of writers who have come before – for now we have the Internet. And with the Internet comes such a wealth of information available in the form of visual media, personal narratives, online magazines and podcasts and interactive maps and blogs – that there is no excuse for not doing your homework. (more…)

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