Vicissitude and Season

eris asked if there was anything I wished had a larger fandom, and hahahahaME, but the answer is… yes and no. Of course there are so many things that I wish more people had read and seen and were willing to discuss and shout about and write fic for. I will just mention, yet again, Reginald Hill's mystery novels, and also Christopher Fowler's, and I wish Slings and Arrows had a larger fandom than it does, and so forth; I could list things for days.

But then again… I can't be alone in feeling that often when fandoms expand they change, and not always for the better, so I can't actually wish huge fandom status on anything I love. I'm still pretty curmudgeonly where fandom participation is concerned (my reluctant immersion in all things POI is a significant exception), and so I guess really what I mean when I say "such-and-such needs a larger fandom" is "all my friends should read/see this." I just want to talk to people about stuff, not have vast number of fans I don't know posting gifs on tumblr and writing bad slashfic.

And yes. I should really do Yuletide one of these years. I just wish it wasn't at Christmas, you know? Because a) busy, and b) the time of year I am usually least able to write for psychological reasons. (But just maybe I'll crank out that Bryant & May/Rivers of London crossover sometime this year.)

yunitsa wanted to know: If you were in charge of the Vorkosigan books, what would the next one be about?

Piotr.

There, that was easy.

But to expand slightly: I would LOVE a tale of Piotr (and Olivia!) during the Cetagandan War, or any time before the action of the current books starts. Or, if we have to go forward chronologically, something about the coming-of-age of the next generation, after Miles's death. I realize this may sound like I hate Miles, and I don't, but I think we've had plenty of him, and I have next to no interest in filling in the gaps in his life. Though of course if Lois wrote that, I would read it. If she wrote the phone book, I would read it. There would be a lot of the letter V.

In other news, I have spent a fair amount of time in recent days writing more of the Ben-as-Henry-Gale story I started some months ago, and am really hoping to finish it soon so that I can start properly panicking over actual real life commitments.

Also, it has been ridiculously cold here, which is not news to many of you. We've had the water trickling in our bathroom sink for three days without stopping, so the pipe won't freeze, which we only do when temperatures are consistently below 15F (it's the north corner of the house). Mornings have been in the low single digits, with below zero wind chill. Today it might actually reach freezing, though, which will be like a heat wave. As xkcd said so brilliantly, this is the old normal.

Also, the cats are behaving like regular old cats who live in the same house now, not exactly playing together, but observing each other playing, and eating side by side, and all that. Lancelot has been doing Speed Personality Transformation, and now looks to possibly be headed for dominant feline status (Hotspurr is just too easygoing to object, I think). First we thought he'd never come downstairs, then we thought he'd never stop hiding when he saw Hotspurr, then we thought he'd had a deprived kittenhood and never learned to play, but now he is collecting ALL THE MICE and hoarding them in the chair that used to be Hotspurr's, and skittering around chasing them. He still doesn't really understand the point of the laser pointer, but he may yet catch on. It's been a long while since we had two cats at once, and - they actually learn from each other! They also (perhaps inadvertently) team up to make fixing dinner very difficult if they haven't had theirs yet. Twice the underfoot I am used to, half of it blending with the black and white rug.

brewsternorth wanted me to talk about travel, and name a place I'd like to go someday. Well, ha, fancy asking me to pick a place. Lemme just go on about travel in general for a while and we'll see what happens.

Travel and I have a complicated relationship. If it were up to me alone, I'd spend my life never going anywhere and then regretting it, so it's good that I'm married to someone who loves to travel and that I have family and friends all over the place. I do actually enjoy being in new places, once I'm there, but I hate deciding where to go (on the small scale. My husband is worse on the large scale; we have all these conversations where he says "and while we're in Paris we might as well go to Prague" and then I chime in with "and then it's not far to Delhi and we should take in Cape Town while we're at it" just to emphasize the absurdity of the see-everything-in-five-days optimism. It's the only time I get to be the pessimist, really). And there's making finicky arrangements, and worrying about not speaking the language, and then there are the horrors of air travel and the near-inevitable migraine that swallows the first day after arrival (though that's been better of late). And there's the guilt over the idea that foreign travel is Broadening, but then again there's still much of the U.S. I haven't seen (though I've seen a fair amount), and it's certainly easier to go places where English is spoken and the hotels are predictable, but oh I am a terrible person for thinking that. And I really should speak five languages and I don't.

I've also had too many conversations with people who live in the U.K. (or in continental Europe) who don't quite understand how very much farther and more expensive it is for Americans to travel to Europe, so why haven't we insular savages been there or to the other parts of the world adjacent to it, and I had a running discussion with my English neighbor who'd boast over regularly taking his kids abroad while they were growing up, while we were just going places in the States, and I'd think "you're taking them to visit their relatives, and so are we" (except we also went to many places we didn't have relatives, and their kids have had to wait till adulthood to see their own country). (And speaking of kids, when you have a family of four it's a lot more costly to go places than it is just to take yourself. We're lucky to have the money, but we don't have that much money. And there's the tyranny of the school schedule. Ah, what a revelation it is to be an empty-nester and be able to go places in May and September!)

Then there is the weird writer's guilt over not having visited all the places I've written about (though at least there's the loophole of not actually being able to travel to, say, 17th-century Amsterdam). Probably those I've missed should have been first on my list. Though, you know, I didn't get a research budget.

So, as I said, complicated. That said, hey, I'd like to travel everywhere. You could probably not name a place I wouldn't be interested in going to, as long as it's not currently being bombed. I hope I will get to go to a few of those many places before I die. I'm hoping for Italy next fall, if P. gets to do his semester abroad there. (He's going to Ghana in May, but I don't get to piggyback on that.) On the other hand, it seems we're always going somewhere and saying how much we love it and that we'll definitely come back someday, and we never do, so… I'd like to go back to some places I've already been, too. I'd especially like to go back to that little hotel-of-cabins on Caye Caulker in Belize, and hang out by the shore and eat great food while barefoot and go kayaking. I want to go to Yellowstone again, and stay at Chico Hot Springs, and hike in Zion for more than a couple of hours (short version: we didn't care to spend Easter Sunday in Las Vegas. I do not want to go back to Las Vegas). I want to see much more of Peru than I've already seen (do I want to go to Machu Picchu again, or is one transcendent experience enough? This is a question worth debate). I want to go to Charlottesville and Charleston enough times to feel really familiar with their geography, and ditto San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area even though I've started to map that pretty well in my head. And last year's trip up the northern California coast was lovely (and the Oregon coast! also wonderful! and the Olympic Peninsula!). I need to go back to Maine, because it's part of my DNA. I want to climb Snowdon again, and trudge back up to Surprise Lake in the Tetons (and not permanently injure my knee this time). And so forth. I've been so lucky to get to see what I've seen, but sometimes once is not enough to have really been there.

On the other hand, Tahiti…

a.k.a.: January posting meme: bulletproof kinks.

kivrin asked: Do you have a favorite narrative trope or theme? In other words, a narrative "bulletproof kink"? If so, discuss. If not, discuss.

It depends on how you define it, I guess. Lots of people will eagerly raise hands and say yes, yes I have one! or two or three, and for me, though I'm not denying they exist, they don't leap so quickly to mind and I end up with broad categories rather than specific tropes. I mean (okay, and I am rereading The Game of Kings, though it is in fact the only thing about Lymond that counts as bulletproof for me) I am always going to go for characters who will not, just once, speak in prose like other people, or who are otherwise quick-witted and agile-tongued. So there's that; blame large doses of Lord Peter Wimsey at an impressionable age.

But beyond that… well, first, nothing is bulletproof when the bullets are bad writing and poor characterization, but if we're beyond that already… hm. Unlikely partnerships grab me, especially between people who are broken in ways that complement each other, and I am equally happy if this leads to friendship or romance. Alice feeling her way into Wonderland makes me sit up and pay attention; if she has to team up with the Mad Hatter I'm all the more pleased. Competence and cleverness are good things, if only because they make a narrative zip, but I think faults and mistakes are interesting too (just don't whine about them). First times and new discoveries and hurt/comfort and food porn. Unconventional weapons.

I could go on, because there are lots of tropes and themes and other stuff I like, but I guess that's the point: no one particular item stands out strongly, and none is indispensable. Also I think sometimes I don't notice what the tropes are, either as a consumer or a producer, which is a cause for wonderment and made me sign up for trope_bingo so I can get some practice. :) (Waiting for my card now, with impatience and trepidation. I may end up with no time to write anything, but on the other hand maybe it'll spur me to finish some of the fics I've started and/or explore some new fandoms.)

ETA: I should add, now that I'm awake: redemption.

wendylove also wanted to know if writing and gardening had anything in common, and… this is a question I wish to return to on many later occasions, because I think they have a lot in common, but for now (because I have a lot to do today and because it's quite enough to read on its own) I will point you to my reposted essay on Integrated Pest Management Editing.

Someday I will write an entire book on this topic, yes.

1) The honeymoon phase of book release is here. When one's used to the quick turnaround of posting fic and getting feedback (like, minutes, sometimes *is amazed*), or even the slightly longer pause between sending book chapters to beta readers and getting thoughtful replies, the delay between publishing a book and people actually reading it (and telling you so) seems to last forever, but I had enough early adopters in there to keep me happy, and now it's Christmas (some weeks after actual Christmas, which has a lot to do with people not reading instantly right now what are you waiting for?). I was grateful to get a couple of DW/LJ signal boosts this week, but what's really surprising me is the response among my RL acquaintance, and it is so thrilling to go to a Master Gardener speaker's group preview meeting (which was really good on its own, actually) and not only have three separate people tell me how good my book was (one said she was up to 3:30 am finishing it, which - yeah, it's long, budget your time wisely), but watch two of them keep talking about it while I went out of the room. And then they followed me and kept saying nice stuff and wanting the next one now and asking questions and speculating on plot twists (and, huh. That particular misconception never once occurred to me. Wow). And I may have sold a couple more there, too; I'm glad I had business cards printed. Then home to get FB message from son's girlfriend's mother saying how much she was enjoying it. Harder times to come, I know, but for now, whee!

2) Both cats are sometimes now occupying the same room for periods of time, so progress. Boy, do they have different personalities, though. Should have named them Introvert and Extrovert.

3) Caught up on The Good Wife, and oh, do they keep hitting the gold. Perfect balance of comedy and dramatic tension, all the way through. My only complaint is that they don't quite know what to do with Kalinda this season, though I'm glad she and Cary are reigniting their whatever-it-is.

4) On a related note, I got a pedometer for Christmas, and am using Elsbeth Tascioni as a model for how to use it. 10,000 steps, here I come!

5) Watched the premiere of Intelligence (I like Josh Holloway; what can I say. Also Meghan Ory) but I doubt I'll keep watching, because it switches to its new time tonight - and okay, I will be watching Sleepy Hollow before, so who knows, but I doubt I can deal with another 10 pm show. And it was okay but didn't grab me in a big way. Also, that is so not Rock Creek Park.

6) I suspect this week's POI will be both a relief from the recent tension (in the crisis-of-the-week sense) and a gut-wrenching reminder of it (in the John-Reese-front-and-center sense). I still don't entirely trust the show, but maybe it can win me over again? Amy Acker and Sarah Shahi are so fantastic that I want everything to be written as well as Root and Shaw are, and there are lots of intriguing things going on, just… wish I had time to write fic to make Reese make sense, because I think that might do it. But this week, no. I don't think.

7) Rutabaga curling is a thing that exists. This makes me happy.

For the January posting meme, philomytha wanted to know what was the earliest fiction I'd ever written, and ( I'll try to answer to the best of my ability )

So for today philomytha very kindly asked me to explain how I was ambushed by birds in the course of writing the Waters of Time series. I should say first that although I am quite fond of birds, and feed them so I (and the cats) can watch them out the window, and find them fascinating in all their dinosaur-descendant weirdness, I'm not what you'd call a bird enthusiast. But in the back of my head where lurk all the serendipitous oddities that create writing coincidences, there must be a bird name repository. Not that this explains everything that happened bird-wise.

I did make one bird joke on purpose in TFT, and that was Eagle Costuming and its employees Phoebe Black and the unseen Robin (in TAF there's also Ava). I believe I decided at the time that the owner was a Mr. Bob White, though that's never actually stated. I also named a character Brant, although this is not because he's a goose. George's surname, Merrill, was chosen for its watery referent, but as I discovered when looking up the etymology while writing TAF, it can also be derived from French merle (blackbird, Latin merula, Dutch merel). I think at this point I had already named Lena Vogel, but only afterwards decided that this was a pseudonym and her real last name was Raaf (Dutch for raven). In that book I use as a character a real historical personage, Adriaen Pauw, whose surname is Dutch for peacock.

And I think that was it until I got to Time Goes By, which has an entire scene set in an aviary because I needed to work off my feeling of being followed around by birds. There's a sequence of George's dreams in the book that involve maritime figures that all look alike and are associated with time travel devices, and the first one is explicitly a ferry captain in Boston Harbor (the Americans' Tim), so when I had him dream about the Russian equivalent I then decided that their time machine is named Perevozchik, which does mean Ferryman - but when I looked it up I found it also meant sandpiper.

There's also a minor plot point involving passenger pigeons, and I know there are cormorants out of Andrew Marvell, and a fairy tale with giant birds that steal things, and probably some others I'm forgetting (besides the utter bombardment of real and symbolic fowl in the aviary). Anyway, you can imagine how I felt when I started watching Person of Interest and encountered Finch and his many bird aliases. I have a character with many names as well, though his all have to do with peace - and I decided that before I realized that he'd need to own many things emblazoned with doves.

So there you have it. Chirp, flap.

More from the posting meme. philomytha wanted me to talk about composing prose and choosing words and images, which first of all is a topic large enough for a book, and secondly something I find tough to analyze - writing about the process of writing, so difficult! - but I can probably manage some random thoughts.

I suppose insofar as one is choosing which words to use, which images to project, which themes to wrap it all around, there's head-choice and gut-choice, or decision and instinct if you want to put it that way. In my best writing, I use both, not usually simultaneously but in either order: gut doesn't always precede head. So there's conscious searching for the right words, and serendipitous finding, which is less likely to come at the word level and more at the metaphorical level, and one can lead to the other. Quite often I spend time looking for a perfect word, and then that spurs a whole new train of thought (see, if I say "train" I am immediately running over tracks with occasional jolts and sways and constant rhythmic noises, not that I would use "train of thought" if I could think of an alternative, unless it was in dialogue, and then someone would make a railway pun).

Head-choice is easier to talk about. So, first of all, yes, I do use a thesaurus (online exclusively, now), and I am not in agreement with writing advice that suggests otherwise, although I understand why people say that. You need to know what the words you choose mean, not just pick the coolest-sounding one from a list. English is a ridiculous hotpot of a language, but you can't equate all the synonyms for a word even if it's a long list. Anyway, I mainly use a thesaurus because I'm old and my memory is cranky (actually it's been cranky in this way since I was 30 or so, so I can't blame aging), and sometimes I know the word I want perfectly well but can't get it to the front of my head for access (often because something that sounds a bit similar is blocking the way). But also I'm picky about not repeating words too often; it's a judgment call whether it looks absurd to use a series of synonyms in succeeding paragraphs, and sometimes hitting a word over and over contributes to the sound and rhythm of prose, but other times it feels sticky and boring (and yes, that's me talking about gut-choice: much more difficult to explain).

Because I write time travel fiction (otherwise known as not-quite-historical-fiction), and because I have deep pockets of nitpickiness, I try to choose words (for dialogue, at least) that are appropriate to the time and place - so, yeah, I did look up most of the relevant sections of TFT in the OED, or at least particular words I had questions about. I'm sure I left in some anachronisms, but overall I hope the language choices evoke something of the period. (Plenty of surprises along the way: in one place I wanted an 18th-century character to talk about catching someone on the rebound, and was astounded to find that, with a little variation, it was fine to do that. I suppose that might work against a sense of authenticity, but I couldn't resist leaving it in.) I was a little less picky for Time and Fevers, because most of the period language is actually Dutch translated (in that miraculous novelistic fashion) into English, so I used vaguely 17th-century English but wasn't fussy about details (because, you see, the characters weren't really saying those words. If that makes any sense). Time travel lends a nice duality to all that, because I can have Olivia and George speaking period language to the people around them and then have them converse in more modern English when they're alone, and also let them react to period word choices (my favorite example is Halsey remarking to Olivia after a ride that "I wish I had the mounting of you, Miss Lake," meaning he wants to choose her horse, but, knowing Halsey, probably implying exactly what she first thinks he's saying. I stole that from Georgette Heyer, I believe).

The other thing I can touch on in without making this too long is what I talked about a bit yesterday, the carrying through of metaphors and thematic material, which is actually a bit too easy for me, because I have a tendency to release the plug on metaphorical language and let it flow; I mean, whole paragraphs awash in various forms of liquid, and so forth. And I've found myself, in the last two books, crafting chapters that read a bit like short stories, with repeated thematic elements; I guess it's okay, as long as they don't isolate themselves from the rest of the book. It works great if I am writing short stories (in my case, mostly fanfic). But driving a metaphor or image to its logical or illogical conclusion is one of my favorite things in writing, and when used judiciously it can be extremely valuable.

The best way to get into details of word choice and so forth is those DVD commentary things (which I have done a few times before and am always happy to do again). It's hard to select the perfect example from an entire novel or set of novels, so I'm going to let my previous reference to deep pockets choose for me, and make remarks about two characteristic bits of prose from chapter 24 of Time Goes By, under the cut.

( minor spoilers, I suppose )
Anyway, that was fun, even if it describes my writing process insufficiently. I hope I scratched the surface of the question, which was a good one!

There are still plenty of empty slots for this meme, if you want to join in.

Today's request is from enemyofperfect: If you could wish a new fannish custom or genre into being, what would it be?

This is actually really hard to answer, since I've come to assume that fandom has already invented just about anything I could possibly think of. I'm sure there are holidays that have been missed for potential gift exchanges, but at the moment that just seems to add more burden to an already heavy weight of oh god not going to get this thing done on time, and it would be rather self-serving to say "gee, I wish there were more venues to advertise original fiction by fan writers who aren't BNFs."

But you asked me to come up with something, so… I'm not really a huge fan of changed-situation AUs or whatever you call them (coffee shop, high school, etc.), because they often lack the charge and peril of the original and tend toward cliches, but they can be really entertaining, and… sometimes I want my fandoms to cross over more comprehensively, you know?

So… the gardening AU. In some of the fandoms I've written in, this is easy or unnecessary: in the Vorkosigan Saga we already have Ekaterin, and I don't feel the need to wrap everyone else into an AU around her (and I've written a garden design story and an essay to support her profession); and Lewis is going to canonically work his allotment in retirement. I feel fairly certain I could make up some Ben/Juliet/Locke stories set in a university botany department, and I could see Peter Burke as the manager of a large public garden plagued by outbreaks of rare plant theft. And I have written my Neville Longbottom story already, as well as one about devils and heirloom locally-sourced souls.

But what would a Gardener of Interest story look like? Well, they'd have to be guerrilla gardeners, to start with. I'd keep the Man in a Suit, because discussions of what one wears to garden are always interesting. Finch would of course dress way better than P. Allen Smith, though he'd be doing little of the planting himself, instead plotting safe and strategic locations on the computer, and buying everyone ridiculously expensive gewgaws from Williams Sonoma (Reese would order a totally unneeded broadfork just because he thought it was cool; also makes an interesting weapon). Root (who is appropriately named for this AU) would insist on designing the gardens just so, and they would all be part of a larger design. Shaw would say "Shut up and dig" a lot. Both Reese and Fusco would have dark gardening secrets they don't want unearthed (well, Finch would already know all of Reese's). And Finch would have dark secrets of his own, perhaps a background in which he and Nathan had bred lovely and poisonous plants that ended up being used by the government to kill people (including Nathan). Grace, of course, would be a botanical illustrator, and Carter would be park police, slowly coming to realize the beauty of the illegal enterprise.

Well, there you have it. *waves hand* Propagate.