My Final ArmadilloCon Schedule

 ArmadilloCon is this weekend, which means I'm in crunch mode.  I've actually tackled quite a bit of my to-do list for this month, but I still have a few big things to do before the conference.  Here's my schedule, and some more cohesive thoughts about each one.  This is all, of course, in addition to the Writers' Workshop, which is all day on Friday.

Protecting the Indigenous Tribes 
Fri 8:00 PM-9:00 PM Room E 
Maresca*, Compton, Wright 
Indigenous peoples confront a diverse range of concerns. What should be done to ensure their existence? 

I have to admit, this one gives me a lot of pause, if for no other reason than the very title is fraught with landmines.  This is an easy conversation to go south with, and I'll confess I do not have any sort of first-hand experience on topic.  I know one point I'd like to hit is how to apply this to SF/F fiction, since, you know, it's an SF/F Lit conference, not an anthropological one.

40 Years of D&D 
Fri 9:00 PM-10:00 PM Room F 
Benjamin*, Finn, Maresca, Marmell, Sarath, Wright 
How did D&D inspire authors? 

I haven't been playing D&D for 40 years, but I started within its first decade (and my own).  I know that my own experience with fantasy as a genre has a lot of roots in D&D.  This should be a fun one. 

Quetzaxuahuitzalochtlicueotl 
Sat 1:00 PM-2:00 PM Room E 
Richerson*, Maresca, Oliver
Discussion of Aztec mythology and why it isn't used in more genre stories. 

This is the other one that gives me some pause, though I'm a little more comfortable with the subject matter.  Nothing which would qualify me as an "expert" in any sense, but certainly bringing Mesoamerican and, in a more modern context, Mexican sensibilities to genre fiction is a topic I'm interested in.

Alcoholic Drinks in Fiction 
Sat 5:00 PM-6:00 PM Room F 
Maresca*, Acks, Allen, Downum, Renwick
Discussing the drinks mentioned in stories, movies and tv. 

I've long been a big proponent of using food in fiction as a means of showing worldbuilding and character, and alcoholic drinks are a key subset of that.  An entertaining subset at that.  So I'll do my best not to be dry and academic about the history of beer or something.

Reading 
Sat 8:00 PM-9:00 PM Southpark A 
Marshall Ryan Maresca

An hour all about ME.  So come to Southpark A and hear me read, probably from both Thorn of Dentonhill and A Murder of Mages.  And, depending, there will be some Q&A.  By which I mean, if someone asks me questions, I will do my best to answer them.

Best Cons from Genre Books 
Sun 10:00 AM-11:00 AM Room D 
Webb*, Blaschke, Maresca 
Not many people are good at writing capers. Which books do it right? 

 I love a good caper.  To an extent, Holver Alley Crew is a caper.  This should be fun.

Overhauling a Character 
Sun 11:00 AM-Noon Room F 
Maresca*, Bracken, Carl, Chang, McKay, Rogers 
Now that you have written a book, go back and rewrite your main character.

I have specific stuff to say here, about the revision process of A Murder of Mages from rough draft to sold draft.  I'm sure everyone else will as well. 


So that's it.  I hope to see some of you there.  If you come, say hello.  I know I'd greatly appreciate it.

Path to Publication, Part VIII: The Art of Patience

This process involves a lot of waiting.  And doing more while waiting.  The waiting is not a bug, it's a feature.  The slowness of the industry gives you time to work and get better.

When I rail against self-publishing, it's not because self-publishing is, by definition, bad.  It's because most people do it out of impatience, and thus do it badly.  This series has been loaded with stories of doing work that wasn't good enough and striving to do better.

A friend from my theatre days would say, "Any problem can be solved with money or time."  Time is your friend in this business.  Use it. 

This is all my way of saying that my re-write of Thorn didn't immediately lead to my agent signing me on.  It took him a while to get back to it, and he waived his claim to exclusivity in the process.  I explored other agents, had a few other full-requests, and walked pretty far down the road with one before she passed.

I even went to a conference to pitch to agents.  This was a great experience, which I recommend if you can swing it, and here's why: just about everyone attending is in the same place as you.  At a lot of genre conventions, you've got fans who are there to be fans, and pros who are there to promote... and there's not a lot for the aspiring writer.  Pitch conferences are for the aspiring writer, so you find a lot of camaraderie. 

In fact-- at this point I was querying both Thorn and Holver Alley, and had finished a draft of Murder of Mages.  Like I said, use the time, keep working.  My scheduled pitch was for Sunday morning, and after some vacillating I had decided to pitch Thorn.  Saturday at around 5pm, I checked my email and saw I had received a form-letter rejection to my query for Holver Alley.

From the very agent I was pitching to the next morning.

Needless to say, I was a mess.  And this is where the camaraderie comes into play.  One of the volunteers, who was also pitching her own project, spotted me and immediately realized Something Is Very Wrong.  She more or less dragged me over to her table, pried the problem out of me, and then proceeded to shove me in a secluded corner with another agent.

Now, neither said corner shoving nor the following morning's perfectly fine scheduled pitch resulted in me getting signed-- that happened a couple months later with Mike, so it all worked out well in the end-- but in that moment, it was exactly what I needed.

And, hey, two months later I had an agent.  So that meant I had made it, right?

Yeah... still a ways to go.

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT: Both Thorn and Holver Alley would have been decent, even moderately successful books on the growing Amazon-Kindle market, I bet.  But would that have really given me what I wanted?  Especially since I would have had to have paid for an artist to make a good cover or something.  At this point it wouldn't have been bad, but it wouldn't have been right.

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: To ride it out, because good things did come with patience. 

Path to Publication, Part VII: Buckling Down and Working

So, as I approached the end of 2009, I had a "polished" 70K draft of Thorn of Dentonhill that I was querying.  I had a rough draft of Holver Alley Crew.  I still had a delusion that any given project I was working on, I would be able to finish "next month".  I had now gone to the ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop two more times, using the opening chapters of those two projects. 

In 2008, the opening chapter of Thorn prompted the pro writer I worked with to tell me, "You're really close with this."

In 2009, the opening chapter of Holver Alley prompted an editor from Tor to tell me, "You have a lot of real talent."  Yeah, I floated on that for a while.

Queries for Thorn were getting some hits, but nothing sticking.

And I sold a short story.  A REALLY short story.  Specifically, to the Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction, and my story was only 21 words long.  But it was a sale, in a real book that was going to be in bookstores.

And then I got an email from the man who would, eventually, become my agent.  He had read Thorn, and loved it, BUT at 70K, it was too short to sell. I needed to beef it up to the 90-100K zone.  You know, novel length.  Something I had missed in my process.

I wonder how many agents quickly dismissed my query letter because of the word count.

So, I dove back into Thorn.

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT: It would have been a welter-weight version of Thorn, which might have gotten some attention on the Amazon self-pubbed Kindle market.  But it wouldn't be the stronger, better book that sold now.  And it certainly wouldn't have benefited from the editorial insight that it's getting before being released.  That is a priceless benefit.

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: You mean, besides the "novels really should be closer to 100K?"  But that was crucial to learn, because I had gotten the idea in my head that 70K was good enough.  Also, it taught me something crucial about editing, that it's possible to add depth without sacrificing pacing.   Adding more story, muscle and bone, rather than just padding. 

A New Year and a New Horizon

At this point I usually like to talk about What's To Come in my intended year.  But first, let's look at what my goals were last year at this time:

1. Book deals for Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew, and Maradaine Constabulary. Well, I did not get book deals for all three.  So the highest goal I set did not come to pass.  But who knows what tomorrow will bring?

2. Finish Rough Draft of Way of the Shield.  Done.

3. Finish Rough Draft of Banshee.  About 2/3 to 3/4 done.  Not too shabby.

4. Attend my first Worldcon.   Which I did, and in being part of the presentation for Rayguns, I had a good reason to be there.  So: Done.

5. Have a good reason to start second books of Thorn, Holver Alley or Constabulary.  See point 1, as before. I do have them well planned, should that good reason arise in the near future.

6. Hash out some of these random ideas into usable outlines.   I actually have done this.  I've parsed out characters, worldbuilding, and structure for a piece-- as well as knocking out a few thousand words to start it out-- of a potential future project. 

7. Never give up.  Yup. 

So for 2014?  Everything about that isn't done, keep doing.

Also: I'll be running the Writer's Workshop for ArmadilloCon this year.  Expect me to be talking more about that in the coming days.

Happy New Year!  Good luck in the word mines!

State of the Writer: Summer 2013

A writer is at a party where he meets a neurosurgeon.  "So you write books," the surgeon said.  "I've always thought about taking a summer off to write a book."  "That's funny," said the writer.  "I've thought about taking a summer off to do some brain surgery."

So, we're knee-deep in summer now, and for me it's always more of a challenge to maintain my writing discipline, but I've been pretty good so far.  The main thing I've been working on is editing, and that's a bit harder to put a metric on.  When you're writing, you can use daily word count to track your progress.  That doesn't quite work with editing.

Given that, here's where things stand, and where I plan things to go for the rest of 2013.

Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew and Maradaine Constabulary are, of course, out in the world shopping.  I try not to dwell too much on the details of this process.  That's what agents are for. 

Way of the Shield is finally finished as a rough draft.   Editing it to a fine, clean draft that is worth sending to my agent is my current "main" project.  Part of that is also outlining summaries for the planned Books Two and Three of Way of the Shield.  Knock on wood, that stuff should all be send to the Agent by the end of July.  Should. 

Secondary project is fine-tuning the outline for Banshee, which has gone through a lot of permutations over the years.  However, I've found a new angle that really excites me, and I look forward to tackling that once I send out Shield. 

Beyond that, I've got a handful of loose ideas that haven't quite coalesced into a plan.  Of course, with any luck, someone will be wanting the Book Two for Thorn, Holver Alley, Maradaine Constabulary or Way of the Shield.  I might even write a first chapter for each as a warm up.  I'm thinking of also trying my hand at novelette/novella length works.  We'll see.  I've had some Secret Projects that I've intentionally kept back-burnered until I finished the quartet.  So something may beat its way into the forefront of my brain.

Also: Rayguns Over Texas will be an actual, printed book that you can hold in your hands in two months.  Isn't that exciting?  I mostly consider it a small reward, a reminder that this hard work will be worth it.  And it will.  And as another reminder of that, here's Macklemore to play you out.

Finishing a Rough Draft

So, as of today, I have finished the rough draft of Way of the Shield. 

Just being able to say this is a huge weight off my shoulders.  This particular novel has been harder to midwife into existence than any other.  But with it done-- at least in rough draft-- I actually feel like its easier to breathe.

So you understand: I conceived, in broad brushstrokes, all four Heroes of Maradaine series at essentially the same time.  That shortly led to me drafting out the outlines of what would become Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew, Maradaine Consabulary and Way of the Shield.  If you had asked me at the time what my writing order was going to be, I would have told you: Thorn, Shield, Holver Alley, Constabulary. 

Thorn was first, of course, but when I finished with that, and turned to Shield, I found myself gravitating to Holver Alley Crew instead.  And then, when that was done, Shield was not coming to me, and Constabulary came about instead. 

What was so hard about this one?  Well, for one, there were key elements of the main character that hadn't gelled for me originally.  In the original outline, Dayne really had no stake or personal goals.  He didn't even really have a mandate to be involved in the events of the story.  He essentially just involved himself because he felt like it.  Also, the events of the story were, in the original outline, somewhat weak.  Without going into a lot of details, the plan was more of a mystery-thriller, where people were being killed, and there was someone mysterious in the shadows doing it. Dayne was working hard to figure out who was doing it and why.   And here's where the process of writing changes an outline, because that wasn't working at all. The project evolved, and Dayne became someone who had stakes, and who I understood where he was coming from better.  And I grew to understand where the antagonists were coming from as well, which is critical. 

So, now what?  Well, I'll take a couple weeks to cleanse the palate-- re-read Thorn, Holver Alley and Constabulary-- as well as take care of some non-writing things I've been neglecting.  Then I'll make a cleaning pass through Shield, and send it over to the agent for his opinion.

And then... well, we'll see what's next.  Probably writing Banshee.  But that could change, depending on what's asked of me.

Writing is Very Funny Business

I have to confess something: I'm not big into April Fools' Day.  Mostly because the "jokes" and "pranks" tend to be rather obvious.  I do have a certain fondness to ones where a certain degree of craft gets put into it, though.  For example, John Scalzi's "Shadow War of the Night Dragons" is a pretty brilliant bit of satire.  I mean, yes, it's a joke, but it's well written and the cover art is nigh-perfect.

But it seems most April Fool's Jokes boil down to, "I'm telling you something that's blatantly untrue.  Ha ha got you."  Bleh.

So, anyway, I'm not a "funny" writer.  That doesn't mean what I write isn't funny.  It often can be.  But I don't write it to be funny.  Because if I actually tried to write comedy, I'd probably fail spectacularly. 

Actually, I know I'd fail spectacularly, since I did try and do that in college, writing sketches for the talent show that were not particularly funny.  Except perhaps to me.  Or to the people who knew that I was blatantly attempting to rip off Monty Python.  Actually, it probably was not funny to those people.  But that's what you do in high school writing, right?  Take whatever your influences are, barely file off the serial numbers, and do a blatant copy of the style.  Also back in high school, I attempted to write a comedy/sci-fi romp, and it was exactly what you'd expect it to be: a poor copy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

That said, several short plays I have written have turned out pretty funny.  Which is strange, given that funny wasn't the goal at all.  Sometimes they became funny in the process of production. 

In my novels, I'm not going for comedy at all.  However, there will always be moments of comic relief.  Holver Alley Crew, for example, has a jokey banter between Asti and Verci throughout.  But, again, I'm not writing jokes.  Something about that seems destined to fail.

As an example, I've always been a big fan of Babylon 5.  However, the comic relief bits never really worked for me.  Always felt off, like it was trying to hard.  However, I have a strange fondness for the appearance of Rebo & Zooty in the season five episode "Day of the Dead".  Not because they're funny-- because they aren't-- but because their humor is presented as utterly subjective and of-its-moment.  It's not funny, but most people on Babylon 5 are laughing at it... except Capt. Lochley, who, like us, just doesn't get it.  And there's something interesting in that.

All right, enough of this.  Off to the word mines.  I have self-imposed deadlines to meet.

The Long Journey of the Writer

My thirties are coming to a close, officially this Sunday.  So, needless to say, I'm getting a little introspective.  But when I think about what my thirties were to me, in the big picture, it was about the process of becoming a novelist.

I mean, I had been writing before that, of course.  In my twenties I had written a few plays, and made several false starts on novels, done a lot of worldbuilding work... but it was all still just dabbling.

So, we come to 2003.  Oddly enough, what flipped the switch in 2003 was NaNoWriMo.  Now, as I've said before, NaNoWriMo is a great way to learn how to write a novel, but it's not a good way to get a novel written.  NaNoWriMo, is, in essence, your Trunk Novel Workshop.  And for me, in 2003, it was Fifty Year War.  Of course, I didn't realize that at the time.  One never realizes they're writing a trunk novel when they're writing it. 

I "finished" Fifty Year War by the end of 2003, if you can call a 57,000 word plotless meander with no protagonist a finished novel.  I kept working on drafts of it, trying to send it out, somewhat clueless to its pointlessness.  Then in 2004 I tried another novel- a non-genre one called Long Night of the Pieman.  This didn't really come together at all. 

In 2005 I tried my first (failed) attempt at USS Banshee, which was a mess.  Mostly because this attempt to write it was semi-public, in that I was posting 3-5K chunks online every week, like it was a serial.  While that worked nicely on a motivational level, it again was a failure in terms of actually writing something good.  Over the years, I've kept coming back to that space-opera verse, trying to find the story... and I think I finally have.  But, along the way, everything except the main character and, tangentially, the name of the ship has been scuttled.  It's a completely different story than the first one I was doing.  And that's good, because again: plotless meander.

Also in 2005 I took my first shot at Crown of Druthal, which was, I was convinced at the time, going to be the Real Deal.    I even took the fist chapter of Crown to the ArmadilloCon Writers Workshop, my first time attending it.  It was shredded.  At the time, I was all, "What do these people know?", thinking they were fools.  In retrospect, they were right on the money, but I wasn't in a place to hear that at the time.

2006 didn't see much progress in any of these projects-- all of them, as well as a few other vague ideas, didn't ever coalesce into anything.  Frankly, it was a terrible year for me as a writer.  Nothing was coming together.  Not coincidentally, my day job at the time utterly depressed me, and my health and weight were probably at the worst in my life.

In 2007, I turned that around: I left that job, dropped 35 pounds, and put my nose to the grindstone, finishing the draft of Crown.  I also came up with the initial ideas that would evolve into Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew, Maradaine Constabulary and Way of the Shield. 

In 2008, I worked on a new draft of Crown, and started attending SlugTribe meetings, bringing chapters of Crown with me.  I also wrote the first draft of Thorn, the first chapter of which I brought to ArmadilloCon.  This was the year when things started coming together.

In '09, I rewrote Thorn and wrote the first draft of Holver Alley.  I also started shopping Thorn to agents.  Now, one thing to note: this draft of Thorn was 70,000 words long.  I didn't think this was a problem, though most of my queries were getting form rejected or ignored.

But then there was one, at the end of the year-- an agent who said, in essence: I love this, but I can't sell it at this length.  Rewrite it to 90K and get back to me.

So 2010 was, in no small part, about adding 20,000 words to a novel that was already pretty tight, as well as cleaning up Holver Alley to a respectable draft.  I also wrote My Name Is Avenger Girl, which I sold to Paige Ewing's The Protectors, as well as selling my piece to the Hint Fiction anthology.  I also started the rough draft of Maradaine Constabulary.

In 2011, that same agent who advised me on Thorn loved the re-write, and agreed to represent me.  I then sent him Holver Alley as well, while getting the rough draft of Constabulary finished. I also started being on the Teacher's side of the ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop.

Bringing us to last year.  Finished Constabulary and send it to the agent.  Started the rough draft of Way of the Shield.  Did another round of re-writes on Thorn, Holver Alley and Constabulary by my agent's request, which also helped me strengthen the worldbuilding ties between them all.  Wrote and sold Jump the Black to Rayguns Over Texas.  OK, technically, the Rayguns sale came in on January 1st.  Making a great start to 2013.

So where will 2013-- and with it my forties-- take me?  With three novels out there shopping, and a fourth one (and fifth, really) in process... I hopeful that this year will be a Big Year for me as a writer. 

Cross your fingers.

Perils of the Writer: Balancing the Gender Imbalance

So, in the past month I finally got around to reading the Hunger Games trilogy.  As I've said before, I don't read as much as I should, or more to the point, I don't get a chance to sit down and read for long stretches as much as I would like.  But once I finished, I went digging around on the internet for commentary that I had been avoiding for the past several years, and stumbled across this gem of a reviewlet:

I would have liked it if I was a girl, but since I'm not a girl, it just made me mad.

I just stared at this for fifteen minutes in shock.  Like, what does that even mean? Because the more I look at it, the more astounded I am.  The most charitable parsing of this that I can think of is, "If Katniss had been a boy, I would have liked it more." 

Especially in sci-fi and fantasy, writing female characters can be a minefield.  I honestly don't know if it's more of one for male writers or female writers. However, I do know when female writers write books with female leads, there are bound to be accusations that what they are really writing is a Romance.  And you get reactions like the one above-- that essentially a book by a woman that is about a woman is only for women.  But a book by a man about a man is for everyone.

For male writers, the minefield is very different.  Here, it's a matter of doing it wrong, if it's done at all.  On one hand-- especially in fantasy-- there's the danger of having one's female characters be little more than wives or prostitutes.  I'll confess, when I first wrote out the outline for Holver Alley Crew, I didn't have any female characters, save Verci's wife.  This was problematic, to say the least.  So when I was actually writing it, I made several of the main characters female.  Hopefully, I did a good job in making them dynamic and interesting.

The other minefield is, of course, overcorrecting. By which I mean writing fantasy, set in some sort of pseudo-Renaissance or such, but with enlightened, modern attitudes regarding women's roles in society, or sexuality, or equality.  Enlightened attitudes that are hardly universal or mastered today.  So then you have an idealized fantasy world where such issues just plain don't exist.  I'm not one for writing fantasy all grim-and-gritty, but I think a degree of reality along those lines makes for more interesting reading.

What I attempted to do with Maradaine Constabulary was find that balance.  Here I had my heroine, Satrine, joining the constabulary force as an inspector.  She's not the only woman on the force, she's not even the first one to make inspector.  But these changes in Druth society are still in their nascent stages.  So Satrine faces several challenges. 

Did I get it right?  Again, I hope so.  We'll have to see what the critics say.

Worldbuilding: Art and Culture in the Fantasy World

The most fundamental way to define a culture is through its art.  Geography, food, religion, technology and government are critical as well, of course, but none of those quite get to the soul of a people in the same way.  With fantasy fiction, we're mostly dealing with forms of art of limited technology: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, literature and theater.

Music tends to be the way many fantasy writers go, to the point of cliché.  Especially with songs.  This is probably one of the quirks of genre that we inherited from Tolkien.  Let's face it, Tolkien loved his songs.  Personally, when I was reading him, whenever I saw indented, italicized text, I knew it was time to skip ahead a bit.  The same thing with poetry.  Now, part of the reason why these parts of a book seem so disposable is because the writers are not the poets/songsmiths of the ages that the work purports them to be.  It's one thing to say that a poem is a soulcrushing work of rhyme and meter that drives men to tears; it's another to actually write it.  I could do without it, personally.  I could also do without mention of lutes or mandolins.*

Painting, sculpture and architecture, I'll admit, are a little out of my ken.  Especially architecture.  For painting and sculpture, I tend to go in the direction of what they depict, rather than how they're depicted.  That's a nice way to drop a little worldbuilding history into the mix without it being as much of an infodump.  At the very least, having your characters seeing a painting or statue of a former king gives a slightly more organic way to drop in some background. 

Literature and theater are my favorite, though I tend to again go for what such pieces are about (and what that says about the culture) over trying to come up with excerpts.  In Thorn of Dentonhill, I have a snippet of dialogue from Three Men and Two Wives, which is going on in the background while Veranix is searching for someone in the public square.  Three Men and Two Wives is one of the ribald comedies of Darren Whit, a playwright from the previous century that I occasionally mention that is the Druth equivalent of Shakespeare**.  At a different point, I have Kaiana quoting from one of Whit's history plays, Queen Mara.  But, again, only snippets.  And in Holver Alley Crew, there's mention of the banned play The Marriage of the Jester, which is being performed in an especially shabby part of town.  While Three Men and Two Wives is a lusty, romantic farce (filled with crossdressing and confused identity), The Marriage of the Jester is little more than smut, presented to give the audience a cheap thrill, or for a little more coin, the opportunity to join in. 

I have to admit, I have fun just brainstorming potential play titles.

I intend to include a little bit of loftier theatre in Way of the Shield-- perhaps even an opera, if I can make it work.  Amanda Downum's The Bone Palace has a nice bit where her main characters go to the opera, and it's the blood-soaked tragedy kind. 

The other element I'm interested in adding to the mix is the use of magic in creating art.  I've hinted around that in Way of the Shield as well.  Still pondering that.  It's something I'd like to do, but at the same time, I don't want to stop the story dead in its tracks just to include it. 

---
*- Yes, historical, but they also come off as Fantasy Clichés.
**- I also have some equivalents to Jonson, Marlowe and Webster.  Definitely Webster.  The Druth do so love a blood-soaked tragedy.  Especially since Whit was rarely a tragedist. 

Goals for the Coming Year

So, from my clock, 2012 has a mere 13 hours and change left to it.  2013 is coming, so its high time to set some unrealistic goals for the year:

1. Book deals for Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew, and Maradaine Constabulary.  If we're really aiming pie-in-the-sky, this deal will involve the same publisher and all three at once.  That would be very nice, indeed, Universe.  But in the case of all three, I think I've really done what I can do, and it's past time to be focused on the Next Project.

2. Finish Rough Draft of Way of the Shield.  I should have finished this last year, but between various rewrites of the other three, a hectic summer and a few other things on my plate, it didn't come together.  Part of that was due to a flawed outline, which I think I've got a handle on now.  I understand why it wasn't working, which is a big hurdle to clear.  Time to drive it forward.

3. Finish Rough Draft of Banshee.  This is a project that's gone through significant conceptual changes over the years (you may notice that it's no longer USS Banshee, which is one major shift), but I've finally found an angle that combines character, plot and worldbuilding in a way that works pretty well, at least so far. 

4. Attend my first Worldcon.   It's in San Antonio, it's literally taking the place of ArmadilloCon this year, so it's what I'm doing.  Hopefully I'll have something good to do there.  (See point 1)

5. Have a good reason to start second books of Thorn, Holver Alley or Constabulary.  See point 1.

6. Hash out some of these random ideas into usable outlines.  Because if I accomplish 2 & 3 before I accomplish 1, I'll have no good reason to do 5.  So I'll need a new "new project", as it were. 

7. Never give up.  But this one's a given.

2012 In Review

So, a year ago I put out my goals for 2012, for which I can say: some came to pass, some not so much.  I still don't have a book deal, for Thorn, Holver Alley or Maradaine Constabulary.  However, I can honestly say I feel like I'm a lot closer on those.  All three of those were re-drafted or fine-tuned, so this year I have finished-until-a-paying-editor-tells-me-otherwise levels of drafts for all three. I got a really excellent rejection letter for Thorn. So for the first three goals, I'm still a bit short of the line. 

Number 4: Finish Rough Draft of Way of the Shield, did not come together.  I see now that my initial outline for it was woefully flawed.  In outline, it was a politically-themed murder mystery, but that was far too thin.  It needed scope, grandeur, and more antagonists who had a clue.  I need to get back in there and work out the details. I've had recent epiphanies that made things gel in my head.  Now I need to get them onto the page.

I did do more outlining and worldbuilding-- and some scene writing-- for what Banshee has morphed into.  I feel good about how this is coming together.  The bits that I have written, I really like.  But I need to solidify the outline before it really starts to live and breathe as a novel.  The finale is still something of a mystery to me.

Also, had Out of Ink produce one short play, wrote another for this year's.  I wrote an actual short story that I feel pretty good about.  ArmadilloCon and the Writers' Workshop went very well.

All in all, 2012 went strongly.  Not as well as I would have liked, but still: progression on the writers' path.  That's good, though.  It serves as a humbling reminder that I can always do better.

Riding the Muse Where it Takes You

Sometimes it just doesn't come together.  And that's okay.

I'm in a strange position, writing-wise.  Three novels are out there, shopping at various publishing houses.  Any or all could hit tomorrow, or in a month or six months or never.*  If and when that happens, I need to be ready to shift focus to the Needs of Publication-- including and not limited to starting the Book II of whatever series hits. 

But until that happens, it behooves me to continue to produce more first-of-a-series novels, which is where Way of the Shield comes in.  It ties to the other three novels, in that they are all set in the same city at around the same time**, but it is not necessary to the other novels (as they aren't necessary to each other).  While it would be ideal for me to have Way of the Shield done, and get a deal in which all four books are published in rapid succession, that's not necessary either.*** 

This is all a rather long-winded way of me saying that no one, with the possible exception of my agent, is really asking for Way of the Shield to be written right now.  And I'd be willing to bet if I sent him something else, say something space-opera, my agent wouldn't complain. 

Which is good, because The Muse, as it were, has been muttering Space Opera and aliens and interstellar politics and how Lt. Samantha Kengle of the Terran Stellar Fleet wants people to know that the hairless monkeys from Sol III are not to be trifled with.****

And that's what you have to do sometimes: listen to the Muse, and figure out where it's taking you.  Ignoring it, frankly, just makes everything work slower.  And that doesn't mean one project is dead because focus is shifted onto another.  Quite the opposite.  It's getting a chance to breathe. 



---
*- Personally, I'm hoping more in the tomorrow-to-a-month range, myself.
**- Strictly speaking, Way of the Shield takes place about a week after the end of Holver Alley Crew, which itself starts about a week after Maradaine Constabulary, which starts three days after the events of Thorn of Dentonhill.  Yes, I have a whole calendar.  Yes, I am that obsessively detail oriented about these things.
***- In fact, that's pretty damn pie-in-the-sky.
****- Her language is a bit coarser on the subject.  Sailor's mouth on that one.

Perils of the Writer: The Uphill Slog

Earlier this week, John Scalzi wrote about finishing his latest project, The Human Division. The part that interested me the most in this post was this bit on the process of writing it:

 For process fans, the first words of The Human Division (which eventually found themselves incorporated into Episode Three) were written on January 11, 2012, at 2:37pm. The final words were written on October 23, 2012, at 12:02am. Most of the words were written in September and October; there were a fair number of words written before then but a lot of that got chucked.

This makes me feel better, personally.

Part of it is the fact that it took him ten months to write it.  It makes me feel like my timetables aren't so terrible.  But the more comforting aspect is how back-end heavy the writing is, because I've found my experience is the same way. 

OK, for the way I write, a typical Novel Rough Draft clocks in around 80,000 words*, and that takes about eight-to-ten months to write.  I would like it to go faster, but, you know, LIFE. 

But this is how it goes:
First 10,000 words (or so): Sprint of awesome excitement.  Cranks out like gangbusters.  Yeah, I totally can DO THIS.  Writing sessions of 1000-1500 words.
10,000-20,000: Whoa.  OK.  This is actually a bit of work now.  Losing that pace.  Need to figure out some stuff that I thought was perfectly clear.  Writing sessions of 500-1000 words.
20,000-50,000: The Long Uphill Marathon of Pure Pain.  Nothing is working.  I can't do this.  WHY DID I THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?  My outline for this part is woefully inadequate.  I HAVE NO CLUE HOW TO GET FROM POINTS A TO B TO C HERE.  I'm a moron.  I hate this book and my characters are stupid.  A 500-word writing session would be a PARTY.  This part takes MONTHS to get through. 
50,000-60,000: The uphill evens out.  Pieces click together.  The path is becoming clear.  500-1000 word writing sessions.
60,000-end: Downhill sprint.  The end is in sight, it's just a matter of getting it all out through my fingers.  2,000-3,000 word sessions. 

Right now, Way of the Shield?  Still in the uphill.  I'm getting through it by reminding myself that when I was writing Thorn, Holver Alley and Maradaine Constabulary it went exactly the same way. 


----
*- For me, the Rough Draft tends to be underwritten, and the final draft comes in somewhere between 90-100K.  I find it suits me better to step back and figure out what needs more depth, rather than overwrite and figure out what fat needs to be cut. 

Next Big Thing

Rebecca Schwartz tagged me in her Next Big Thing entry.  So here are my answers:

1. What is the title of your Work in Progress?
    It's called The Way of the Shield, though the title itself is a work in progress.  I've also got a short story brewing that, right now, I'm calling "Hard Vacuum Coyote", but that's still in its nascent stages.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?


   That's actually a complex question.  The main drive of it was to explore a place where traditional fantasy-- kings and knights in armor and such-- and modern, complex social structure overlap and clash.  There is an old order of traditional warriors, and young men who still want to be a part of it-- but in a setting that has more in common with 19th Century London or Boston.  What role can that old order have-- as well as the traditional nobility-- in a society with a standing army, city constabulary and elected officials?

3. What genre does your book fall under?
  It's fantasy, though I'm not sure of the subgenre.  Political/action fantasy?


4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
  You know, I never like thinking in terms of actors-- certainly not famous ones.  Because more often than not, the best choice is someone who doesn't bring too much baggage to the table.  I mean, if you asked Suzanne Collins when she was writing Hunger Games, I doubt she would have even been aware of Jennifer Lawrence.
  (That said, at 6'3" with a puppy-dog honest face, Liam Hemsworth from Hunger Games wouldn't be a terrible match for Dayne.)

5. What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book?
   Disgraced warrior returns home to find himself neck-deep in political scandal, assassination plots and revolution.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
  Agency. 

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
   Again, a complicated question.  I first conceived of the book back in 2008-- when I also came up with Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew and Maradaine Constabulary.  All four are in the same setting, but as separate "book one of a series" concepts.  I wrote Thorn first, with the idea that I would do Shield second.  But then Holver Alley felt right as the second, and the Constabulary as the third, with Shield getting pushed back each time.  I didn't get properly started on it until March 2012, and even then, it's been in fits and starts, as other things (such as minor rewrites of the other three) took some of my attention.  But it's still being drafted, hopefully finishing the rough draft by the end of the year.

8. What other books would you compare this story to in your genre?
  I'm not sure.  In genre, the closest thing I can think of would be David Eddings's The Elenium-- for the knightly orders and the politics.  But there are a lot of out-of-genre influences, so it ends up being the small junction in a Venn diagram of The Elenium, Les Miserables and The Pelican Brief.  That's a strange combination.  I'm sure there's a spot-on in-genre comparison that I'm ignorant of.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
  Daniel J. Fawcett has been my long-term brainstorming partner, and so a great deal of my inspiration comes from hashing out core ideas of the fantasy genre and worldbuilding with him.  Pure and simple, the city of Maradaine (and the rest of the world around it), as well as the characters that inhabit it in all four books, would not be what they are without his input and influence.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
  I'm challenging myself on this one with my first attempt at a solid romantic subplot.  So if that's the sort of thing you need in your fantasy books, it'll be there.  But if you need guys with swords hitting each other, there's that as well. 

August and Everything After

And now summer feels like it's coming to a close, even though that's really not the case.  August always feels like "almost over".  Having finished with the con probably adds to that. 

So what now?  In the "unreasonable goals" department, I had hoped to finish Way of the Shield by the con, but that wasn't going to happen.  Honestly, given what I need to do, finishing by the end of the year might be the most honest goal I can give myself.  And I think I can do that. 

Beyond that?  What else do I work on?  In theory, I have plans for Book Two for Thorn, Holver Alley Crew and Maradaine Constabulary, but until one (or all!) of those are sold, that feels like putting the cart before the horse.  I mean, why work on Thorn 2 if Constabulary is the one that gets picked up? 

I've been thinking more and more about Space Opera.  I have a setting for that, and the story to tell has been slowly forming in my subconscious.  I've had several false-starts at what I called USS Banshee, but the more I tried, the less it worked, and the more it felt like Trek with the serial numbers filed off.  I've come up with some new angles to explore my Space Opera verse, though... and we'll see which one clicks.

So those are the goals for the rest of the year: sell books and write more books.  Sounds simple enough, no?

Excerpts and Workshops

It's been a busy week on this end, so this post will mostly be links.

First, I've updated the Works page on my homepage.  I updated the samples of Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew and Maradaine Constabulary, as well as adding an in-draft sample of Way of the Shield.  The Bat City Novelcrats will be tearing up Shield in the near future, so if you want an early stab on that, feel free to check it out and tell me how many mistakes I made. 

After all, I can always use more critiquing.  And so could you! The deadline for the ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop is fast approaching.  (How's that for subtlety?)

Seriously, the deadline is on Monday.  You may look at it and say, "Hmm, that's $75.  That's a lot."  But you get membership to ArmadilloCon with it, and THAT is worth $40.  Plus you get lunch.  That's, like, another $10.  So, if you think about it, it only costs $25.  You get hands-on critiquing and interaction with TONS of writing and publishing pros for $25.  You can't beat that value.  Again, here's the line-up of teachers:

Elizabeth Bear, Julie Kenner, Scott Lynch, Robert Bennett, Liz Gorinsky, Mark Finn, Martin Thomas Wagner, Martha Wells, Matthew Bey, Nicole Duson, Scott Johnson, Jessica Reisman, Cat Rambo, Joe McKinney, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Anne Bishop, Stina Leicht, Jeremy Lassen, and Amanda Downum.

See?  Awesome.  Well, awesome and that Maresca guy.  But he probably won't make it lame.  

Action, Agency, Passivity, Pacifism

There is a tactic some writers (and screenwriters) use to put their characters in the "hero" column.  It's a tactic that is most recently used in "The Hunger Games" (with a single exception that is glossed over so much it's barely an exception), but I first noticed it in about 20 years ago in a little B-movie thriller called "Surviving the Game".  The tactic is pretty simple:  You put your character in a life-or-death fight, but you let them slip through it without actively killing anyone.  Your hero might do something that lets their enemies get killed, but they don't take active agency.  They win, but their hands are clean.

And it's something of a cheat.

I mean, yes, it allows them to be hero by being exceptional, but at the same time, it's the author giving them a free pass. 

However, that doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as being actively a source of violence.  There's a difference between being a passive character to whom victory is handed by author fiat, and a pacifist character, who truly tries to get throw a violent situation by making the active choice of non-violence. 

See, that's the key difference.  A character who chooses not kill instead of a character who manages to get away with not killing despite being in a kill-or-be-killed situation.

This is the challenge that's been hitting me with Way of the Shield, as Dayne is a pacifist warrior.  That's not an oxymoron-- his "weapon" of choice is a shield, and when it comes down to it, he will actively take that role: put himself between another person and harm. 

But it's hard to mold that pacifism into action, at least in the way I'm used to.

In Thorn, in Holver Alley and in Maradaine Constabulary, my main characters were active, even impetuous.  They would jump into a situation and crack skulls.  In some cases, they would even actively seek out skulls that need cracking.  Dayne isn't going to do that. Nor is he, unlike the characters in Maradaine Constabulary, granted the same kind of official authority to go and take action.  So the challenge is finding that same internal drive that Veranix or Asti and Verci have, but have it being superego driven instead of id.

It's a very different way of thinking.  Dayne is, in many ways, the opposite of Veranix, but they are both heroes.  It's an exciting challenge. 

But the question is, to the readers, does using that cheat make a character a more "moral" hero, or does it come off as a cheat?

Third Act and Second Book Problems

Of late, in addition to hammering at the rough draft of Way of the Shield (yes, that's just a working title), I've been cranking out summaries for intended second and third books for Holver Alley Crew and Maradaine Constabulary.  Frankly, this part of the process is fun, but it is definitely something of a battle.  And right now the biggest battle is turning the rough notes of the third act of Maradaine Constabulary 3 (working title: This Most August Body) into something coherent enough for other people to make sense of.  Included with this is doing it in a way that A. makes for a nice resolution to the story of the book proper and B. turns the screws on arcplots. 

Going back to my six-book arc structure, roughly speaking, book three is where the first shoe drops.  Without giving away spoilers (for a book that, in a wildly-successful supremely best-case scenario, probably wouldn't come out until 2016), I know what that shoe drop is, and I know why it's going to happen... but key points of the how are still eluding me.  I think I'm on the verge of figuring it out.

Of course, there's only so much you can pack into a thousand-odd word summary.  One of my crit partners commented on my summary for Maradaine Constabulary 2 (working title: The Little East):

I'm guessing you went for a who-dunnit with a colorful cast of suspects, but it's not quite coming across in the outline, to me.  What makes the suspects interesting?  

A fair question, but it goes right to that point: the summary only gives the bones of the story.  I have reasonable confidence in my ability to do character and dialogue work (playwriting background, after all) to make the suspect pool dynamic and interesting.  But the summary won't make that clear.  Heck, the summary only names about half of the suspects.  (My outline notes are more complete along those lines.) 

So that's what's on my plate this week: cracking the third act of MCI03, and continuing to dig my way through the word mines for Way of the Shield.  What are you all working on?

 

Sorting out the subgenre- Street Level Fantasy

I'm still dissatisfied with subgenre definitions in the Fantasy genre.  Specifically, where work like Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew and Maradaine Constabulary fit in the grand scheme.

Take, for example, the Genre Map they use over at Book Country.  The Fantasy section has nine subgenres, though three of them (Horror, Weird Fiction and Slipstream/Interstices) are really separate from Fantasy, and are jammed in there for convenience.  This leaves six: Traditional, High/Epic, Urban, Contemporary, Historical and Comic. Though the distinctions are vague, if you ask me. I'm not entirely sure where the lines between "Traditional" and "High/Epic" are, for example, or between "Urban" and "Contemporary".  ("Comic" and "Historical", though, are somewhat easier to suss out.) 

Now, I think my books, in terms of subgenre, fit in to the same sort of niches as Douglas Hulick's Among Thieves*, Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora or Amanda Downum's The Bone Palace.  Of these, only one is used as a "landmark" on the map, that being Lies, which falls under "Traditional".  So that's where I placed my three books when I was using Book Country for critique.  (They are still there, if you hunt for them, though now only the first three chapters.  And said chapters for Maradaine Constabulary are out of date.)  I wasn't crazy about it, but that was the best fit.

I think "traditional" is a misnomer, for myself and for books like Hulick's, Lynch's and Downum's.  But what would be right?

In my gut, "urban" is more correct, since all those books deal with the confines of an urban environment.  But "urban fantasy" is not about fantasy in a city setting-- it's about fantasy tropes set in the "real" world, even if your setting isn't remotely urban. (I'm looking at you, Sookie Stackhouse.) And if that's "urban", what's "contemporary"?

I've heard "low fantasy", as an opposite of "high fantasy", but I don't like it.  It sounds vaguely insulting. 

So here's my suggestions, and I'd love it if people out there helped brand it: Street Level Fantasy.  Fantastic, secondary-world fiction, where the stakes are defined as personal and local. 

Who's with me?

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*- As far as Hulick goes, I'm making some assumptions of how the whole book goes, as I didn't finish the book.  Yes, I suck.  I had other things I needed to read. But for all I know it ends with gods walking the earth and huge armies clashing across continents.  So I could be wrong placing it in with the other books.