Worldbuilding: How the Arms Make the Character

I write action-filled books, so obviously, my characters are going to be armed.  This is something I put a lot of thought into when first designing the characters and the world.

First off, in Maradaine, I didn't want guns.  They just didn't fit into the mold of the world I wanted Maradaine to be.*  Plus, I don't really know about guns, and when you get that stuff wrong, those who do let you know.  Sometimes quite loudly.  So I avoid that conversation completely.

But which weapons do I give my characters?

For Veranix in Thorn of Dentonhill, I really wanted his weapons to mean something to him.  His bow is to honor his father-- former soldier and leader in the Aventil streets, and then later a trick shot performer in the circus.  His staff is to honor his mother, who a circus acrobat, aerialist and tightrope walker.  Of course, they are also the tools he is skilled with, but that's because those skills were passed on by his parents.

For Minox and Satrine in A Murder of Mages, what I chose for them had to apply to the constabulary force as a whole.  They carry crossbows (usually loaded with blunt-tip quarrels, for an option that is not-necessarily-as-lethal as a pointed ones) and handsticks, The handsticks are, of course, why the constabulary are called "sticks" on the streets.

A lot of the Aventil street gang folk, like Colin, have knives, knucklestuffers (think brass knuckles or this beauty my friend Kat used to carry in college) and cudgels.  Now, I also had to consider what this meant on a cultural level.  Why are people on the streets carrying  this stuff, and what does it mean, legally?  Maradaine is a civilized city, after all, with an established constable force, legal code and court system.  

But Maradaine also has a dark past, where corrupt lords had no checks to arrest anyone they pleased for whatever reason-- or no reason-- as the mood struck them.  So when the founders of the Parliament and other aspects of Druthal's modern government were drafting their Rights of Man, the need to protect oneself from false or unjust arrest was prevalent in their minds.  Thus enshrined in the Rights of Man is the right to be armed, explicitly to protect oneself from unjust arrest.  At one point in Thorn, Colin even mentions it when confronted by a stick. 

These character-based weapon concerns, as well as how old traditions can clash with a "modern" world, come into play in several aspects in Way of the Shield,  a book that I hope to have some news for you about in the near future.  

Also, I decidedly made some unique weapon choices for some of the more flamboyant characters showing up in The Alchemy of Chaos, coming out early next year.  Hope you're looking forward to that as much as I am.  Until then, I have a very full plate of edits, proofs and drafting for the rest of the month (and year).  So I better get to it.

---

*- Not that fantasy can't have guns.  There is, of course, the rising subgenre of Flintlock Fantasy.

Post-NYCC drive-by post

All right, I'm still in the thick of NYCC type stuff.  My signing yesterday was fantastic.  I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't a line of people wanting to get a signed book.  Today at 11am, if you're in Manhattan (or can get there), I'll be at the Penguin Random House offices (1745 Broadway) from 11am to 1pm, giving away signed copies of Thorn of Dentonhill and otherwise trying to seem cool and awesome while around a bunch of other cool writers like Terry Brooks.

If it's like anything else this weekend has been, it's going to be awesome.

Otherwise, this has been a stellar weekend-- including a couple plays and lovely dinners-- and I'm quite incapable of further rational thought.  Especially since after this I'll be heading

Perils of the Writer: Characters Out Of Control

When other writers talk about characters "getting away from them" or "out of their control", I have to confess, I'm at a bit of a loss to understand that.  I'm not saying that in a "I'm right, they're wrong" sort of way-- it's just a difference in process.

For example, I write with a well-established outline, so my major character's goals, intentions and actions are largely worked out in the outline phase.  In the drafting phase, none of them are going to "surprise" me, nor do I have a conflict between What The Plot Needs and What The Character Needs, because I've already taken that into account.   If one is more of a pantser, I can see how the process of pantsing a first draft can create these Plot vs. Character conflicts, where what a character needs to do is at odds with what you, the writer, need them to do for the plot.

However, notice I say "major characters".   This is a crucial distinction, because it's the minor characters where those surprises and discoveries can come into play, mostly because they aren't even taken into account when the outline is written.

Take, for an example from Thorn of Dentonhill, the character of Hetzer.  Hetzer initially existed solely because Colin needed someone to talk to in a scene.  I establish that Colin is a street captain in the Rose Street Princes, so I need someone for Colin to be a captain of.  Hetzer was never in the outline.  Nor were Jutie or Tooser, the other Princes in Colin's crew.  So, when I reached the point in the story where Colin makes a crucial decision and acts upon it... Hetzer is by his side.  Hetzer got elevated to being a crucial part of the story-- even being the POV character for a couple scenes-- because it made perfect sense in the moment.  He stepped up in the story because that was exactly what Hetzer would do.

Now, I'm not going to act like this was some sort of out-of-my-hands divined-from-above thing.  This was a realization I made when writing the scene, and that realization made it clear how the details of the rest of the story played out.  I could have ignored that realization, made a different choice.  I know my first choices aren't always the best.*  Heck, a major thing that became a crucial character element for Minox in A Murder of Mages wasn't even in the rough draft.

My point is this: you know who your characters are.  You know what they need and want, and what choices they'll make because of that.  How that manifests in your skull during the process.... that's not for me to say.

What IS for me to say is that I'll be signing at the Penguin booth at New York ComicCon at 4pm on Sunday.  That is LITERALLY the final hour of the con, so if you're there and you still have strength to shuffle on over to the booth, come say hi.  ALSO, as I said before, there's a multi-author Post-NYCC Event in the Penguin Random House offices on Monday at 11am, and if you can come, you totally should, because they're giving away free books, and there are many authors there who are much cooler than me.

---

*- Back in my theatre days, my usual costume/set/art director had a mantra: "Your first three ideas are wrong."  A bit pessimistic, but it highlights a key point of it being okay to work through bad ideas to get to the good ones.

Worldbuilding: Subcultures and Code-Switching

So, this weekend, I needed to get a lot of writing work done.  Of course, this is true just about every day, but seeing how the previous weekend I was at FenCon, and next weekend I'll be in New York, I needed to make this weekend about getting as much done as I could.  Most of that involved working the edits for the final version of An Import of Intrigue, some business/administrative work for the future books, and a few new scenes in the third Thorn book.

Import is all about subcultures in the city of Maradaine, specifically the foreign enclaves embedded within the Inemar neighborhood.  And, especially on this editing pass, I need to make sure I'm handling that with the care required.  None of the foreign cultures seen in Import map cleanly on to real-world ones, but there are parallels that can be drawn, and with that, there are pitfalls of stereotyping and cliché.  The other important thing to show was how those different cultures clash when they're pushed up against each other, as well as the rest of Druth culture.  The hardest part, for me, though, was in showing how the a lot of the Druth are antagonistic, if not downright hostile, to the foreigners and foreign-descended citizens of Maradaine.  Various epithets are used for different foreigners, but it also matters who uses them, and in what circumstances and situations. Some people use them freely, some only in select company, and some not at all.

The scene I wrote in the third Thorn book this weekend was challenging, and it also involved subcultures, in a less direct way.  If you've read Thorn, you know that Veranix is Racquin-- a semi-nomadic subculture in Druthal of refugees from the neighboring country of Kellirac-- from his mother's side.  In A Murder of Mages, Minox's mother also is Racquin, but Minox was raised in Maradaine by a family that was mostly Druth, while Veranix was raised among the Racquin, save for his father.  Veranix's father's heritage and performance skills allow him to pass himself off as a "regular" Druth on campus and around the city.  

So then, what happens when Veranix is with someone who is also Racquin (and also "passing" in Maradaine culture?)  Code-switching.  They both fall into a pattern of talking like Racquin instead of Druth around each other.  The question on my plate is, how do I make this clear without being heavy-handed?  The main thing I have is very different slang between the two of them, that we haven't seen in the rest of Maradaine.  Does that work, or just become confusing?  I'm still not sure.  That's why it's a rough draft at this point.  

Speaking of, I've still got plenty to do before heading to New York.  So into the word mines I go.

Post NYCC Author Kaffeeklatch at Penguin Random House Offices, Monday October 12th

So, if you're in New York City and you're going to NYCC, or if you're thre and you're NOT going to NYCC, there's a great event with great authors that is free and open to the public on Monday, October 12th, with a whole mess of great authors who will be signing and giving away books.  Check out this list:

Bradley P. Beaulieu, Terry Brooks, Myke Cole, Alis Franklin, Melissa Grey, Susan Griffith, C.A. Higgins, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Sylvain Neuvel, Naomi Novik, Daniel Jose Older, Bill Schweigart, Alan Smale, Shawn Speakman, Erin Tettensor, Judd Winick

Admit it: even if you think I'm nowhere near cool enough to come out for, there's some damn cool writers out there you'll want to see.   And you get to actually see the offices of Penguin Random House.  Isn't that cool?  If I weren't already going, I'd go.

Plus: FREE BOOKS.

Full Details are here: http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2015/09/post-nycc-author-coffee-klatsch-at-penguin-random-house.html

Obligatory Post-Con Post

So, this past weekend was FenCon, which I enjoyed greatly.  I had a number of lovely panels, including one on worldbuilding where I got to talk about how obsessive I get in the process.  Which, if you've been reading this blog for a bit, you know is immensely obsessive.  I did not bring handouts, though.  I thought about it, but I didn't have time to put them together.

I got to hang with some of the other Texas-circuit regulars, including Mark Finn, Tex Thompson, Patrice Sarath, Mark Carroll (who just made his first pro sale-- good on you, sir), Dantzel Cherry, J. Kathleen Cheney, Rhonda Eudaly, Aaron de Orive, Michelle Muenzler, and several more who I am blanking on right now.  Books were signed, books were bought by people who hadn't heard of me before this weekend, so all is well.

Of course, ConWeekend tends to mean Low Productivity Weekend, so I've got to crank it up this week to make up the difference.

Also, I came home to discover this lovely write-up for Thorn of Dentonhill over at Powder and Page.  Plus, and this was a real shock, a review of Jump The Black, my short story in Rayguns Over Texas.

So I feel pretty good, but I still need to get to work.  So off I go.

Perils of the Writer: Writing Synopses

Synopses are a necessary evil.  You need them to query, you need them to submit to publishers.  No writer I've talked to likes doing them.  They're horrible.

Well, maybe not "horrible", but certainly no fun.

Really, there are two kinds of synopses: the ones you write for the book you've written, and the ones you write for the book you intend to write.  Personally, the second kind are far easier for me.

This is partly because of how I outline.  I usually write out about 1000-1500 words as my outline for a 100K novel, so turning that into a synopses is mostly a matter of changing it from a document only I need to make sense out of into one that any one could make sense out of.  More often than not, my outlines are written in a long form already, instead of bullet points, so this essentially just an editing pass.

On the other hand, paring down a finished work down to around 1000 words?  That puts me in a tailspin.  Which parts are the critical things to highlight?  Which can be ignored for the sake of the synopsis.

I mean, it should be easy, right: Just say what happens in the book.  But it never seems that way.

Best advice I can give is to try and bring some emotional distance to it.  Imagine how someone else might write the wikipedia entry for the book.  What would your average reader take away as the key story points?

(This is an interesting exercise in general.  I find it kind of fascinating which elements reviewers focus on-- and moreover the ones they don't-- for both Thorn and Murder.)

Is there a milestone in one's career where one doesn't have to write synopses anymore?   I don't know.  I'm certainly a ways away from it.

---

Reminder: I'm at FenCon this weekend.  If you're in the area, come say hello!