Vicissitude and Season

This is the official announcement that my new book, Not Time's Fool, #4 in the Waters of Time series, is now available - I'll link you to the author blog for the details.

*whew*

For a bunch of reasons I don't want to say much about 2015, and also I have to make a feta-tapenade tarte soleil, so this part of the post is short. (The whole thing will be short; I am not claiming in-depth analysis in the latter part.) Actually, baking something semi-complex that may not turn out is a good symbolic end to the year, and certainly good food has been a lifeline for me, one which I intend to continue hanging on to as 2016 begins. Gardening was perhaps not so satisfying, but I'm hoping to make progress in some new projects, and either the weather will be better (it could hardly have been worse) or I will continue to get used to the new abnormal.

A few things worth mentioning that I really enjoyed this year: I got to see Vienna Teng in concert, I helped my sister get our family's WWII letters up on the internet (if you're interested, it starts here with an introduction my grandfather wrote well after the fact), and I took myself on a road trip through the Midwest and finally got to spend time with penwiper26 in person. And there's also been the federal grand jury service, which has at least been moderately interesting and has another year to run.

My creative energy, at least writing-wise, was really low this year, and I've made very little progress on The Seed Time (book five), but I did manage to do some good-quality editing on Not Time's Fool, and come hell or high water, which is not a trivial phrase these days, I will get it published by the end of January. I have, however, come round to feeling essentially non-fannish (though I am still enjoying watching and reading lots of things), and have no desire to write fic. For the moment I'm still getting those kudos emails every day, which is nice (new people turning up in the fandoms I wrote in), but I expect that to diminish this year unless something happens. Which it may. Who knows.

Which, ha. The one bit of fannish impulse I have at the moment seems, unexpectedly considering that two years ago I was going to drop it altogether, to be toward Doctor Who - at least, I am spending some of my downtime watching old episodes, and I enjoyed most of this season and the Christmas special. Come at me with your nitpicks and continuity slips, but I thought the latter was fun and charming and sweet, which is a pleasant change of pace, and I have done the fannish thing and looked at River's timeline charts and thought about doing a marathon in chronological order (if such a thing is possible and if I had the time - maybe as a prize after getting the book out). I guess people complain that her timeline is too complicated, but I like that kind of thing (and have written one that's as hard to figure out if not quite as romantically bittersweet). But since I did manage to watch the Library episodes again I started thinking about character arcs and what it means to finish them, or at least "finish" as opposed to leaving them hanging out there unexplained and/or uncompleted. I mean, what if we'd never gone back to River after "Silence in the Library"? Would it have been a worse story, if we'd never known who the hell she was? Yes and no? I suppose, considering that the Doctor's story went on, he had to run into her at some point, so perhaps it's not a fair example, and I know that the whole Steven Moffat Loves Puzzle Women thing is mixed up in this, but on the one hand I am satisfied to feel some closure to the circle and in another way I feel it's Just. Too. Much.

I remember when I wrote the Vorkosigan story "Single Combat," which was a prompt fill and meant to be a one-off, and got a lot of comments about when was I going on with the story - which I did end up doing, but for a while was determined not to, because I thought the open-ended ending was a perfectly good one. I think the urge to go on and finish things, to fill in the gaps, is a fannish urge and a genre-related one - and maybe it's that I have been reading a fair amount of "literary fiction" this year (Jane Smiley's trilogy about the Langdon family is really good, by the way), but I'm getting more dissatisfied with the need to Just Go On (reference not unintentional). Not that I'm going to leave the Waters of Time books hanging without tying a few things up neatly, whether Five or Six is the last one, but (and this goes back to the quote from Ancillary Mercy in my last post) I feel the need to acknowledge that things are not neat and tidy either in real life or fiction, and someday I'd like to write a book that just ends, dammit, and doesn't care where.

Happy New Year, all!

I tried to post here earlier and somehow my delete key got stuck while making a correction and erased everything I'd written. Hoping a visit to the Apple store is not in my future.

Anyway, I think I'll stick to two topics for now and then post again about media consumption (maybe tomorrow after the new POI ep). It's raining off and on; usually I'd be at the demo garden now, but the workday is canceled and I'll go later to take care of necessary tasks.

First, the Ebooks Tree thing. They grabbed five works of mine off AO3 (four totally random fics and "The Opposite of an Epitaph") and also the free 15% samples of Time Goes By and (again) "The Opposite of an Epitaph" from Smashwords. I downloaded the TGB out of momentary panic (you can download files without signing up with the site, and yes I did run a virus check afterwards), and it's chapters 1-5 with a link to my Smashwords page and an exhortation to support the author, which if it wasn't unauthorized and the third book in the series I'd just laugh at and consider free advertising. Can't say for sure that everyone who's had original work nabbed is in the same situation, but I'd check before getting hysterical. In any case, I suppose I will get around to sending the DMCA takedown notice, but I'm busy this week and not inclined to add another to-do list item until I see how it all shakes out. Site might be gone in a few days, after all. And it's very much a "principle of the thing" feeling for me, not a sense that it's likely anyone's being made vulnerable (I assume gathering info is the intent) by downloading my stuff among all the thousands of possibilities. *yawn*

Second, just wanted to relate a couple of book sales stories from the last couple of weeks, with a This Is How It Works In The Real World theme, I guess. Did a talk (on edible landscaping) to a garden club last week, and though I don't come out and advertise I ended up handing out lots of business cards; the hostess of the meeting said she'd already bought Time for Tea on the strength of my sig file in the organizational emails; the club president amused me greatly by saying that they'd had [well-known person in local gardening world] for a talk last year, who had written a mystery novel along with her gardening books, and it wasn't very good, badly needing editing, and she hoped mine were better, and was glad that I had those free samples up so she could check. I suspect I made a sale there, though, and probably a few others (I also managed to plug Naomi Novik in the post-talk dessert chat). (Also, for someone who is not sure she ever wants to read more Outlander books, I market well to those fans by being vaguely enthusiastic. I think I should probably watch the TV series at least.)

And yesterday, I ended up giving another Master Gardener (met that day in person for the first time) a ride home, and she (another email recipient) had already been to my website, quizzed me for a while about the possibilities of self-publishing for a relative who writes poetry in Spanish, and sent me a thank-you email afterwards saying she was going to buy my books.

This process continues to compare interestingly to the fandom world parallel, where... I guess there is more sense of investment and fear of commitment, or something? (Or just "not gonna buy it if there's no explicit gay sex," but I can't do anything about that. I mean, we might get a little Rinaldo/Pasha in the new book.) Gardening is a fandom, too, of course, but it doesn't work on the same rules and I'm not writing about gardening, except for the occasional tulip and bouquets of metaphor. And I do see these folks on a regular basis, some of them, though I always let them introduce the subject of whether they liked what they've read.

Anyway, sig files = reasonably successful marketing.

Big honking post on the author blog (as requested by sea_otter3) on how I construct plots, or rather books, as I can't really regard them as separate things. Which for once I will reproduce here under the cut. No spoilers. Also, along the way, I tracked down in my beta group listserv the post where I counted up the characters (named, speaking, or otherwise influential) in Time Goes By. There are 70 of them, ha ha! Not shy with the character-creating, me. Oy vey.

( with analogies involving space debris, clay sculpture, and of course plants; plus an exercise program )

I thought it might be good to do a year-end roundup regarding writing, now that nearly all the holiday fuss is done with (including finally getting Younger Son and his girlfriend home yesterday, a full day later than they were supposed to arrive, how dare there be snow in Frankfurt in December).

So, let's divide this up:

Fanfic. I've enjoyed doing the fanfic end-of-year memes for the last several years, but it would be stupid to do one for this year, since I posted a total of three fics (two Person of Interest, one Lost) all in January. It's not even possible to call this a cyclical writing drought, because really 2011-2013 was a new explosion of fic-writing for me, due to not being caught up in writing books, and this year I wasn't even writing a book, so I don't know what's going on exactly, but I hope 2015 will bring more writing of both sorts (well, I must get the book written, but perhaps there will be leftover energy for fic). I had new fandoms this year, and continued interest in previous ones, but just no inspiration for putting down words about them. It may be that I have a hard time switching between writing mode and editing/publishing mode, and clearly I was in the throes of the latter all year. So we'll see.

Thanks to new people coming into fandoms, though, I still get a kudos email nearly every day, and occasional comments, which is nice. Mostly POI (despite canon-outdatedness), with some Vorkosiverse flurries, and rare but appreciated hits on the others. So at least I have stats to report. ( under the cut because stats )

Yet again I did not participate in Yuletide (even in good fic-writing years the final months are not productive for me) and was smart enough not to take on any other exchanges or challenges; it just would have meant failure. I also failed at fulfilling previous commitments, but someday, philomytha, I really am going to finish that Alys/Simon-at-the-Orb story still lingering on my hard drive. I do think about it occasionally, I promise! - but nothing inspiring jumps out at me.

I'm not reading as much fanfic, either; the two seem to go together.

Waters of Time Series. I just got through my first year as a self-published author, and I have learned a lot. Particularly about formatting, it seems. I just did the painful thing and trashed (well, recycled, since I am environmentally sensitive and all) the various misprinted/typo-filled hard copies that I stupidly paid money to have printed and shipped to me (authors don't pay for content but do have to pay CreateSpace's costs), and I still regularly have little panic attacks over people reading inferior editions. Turns out I am weirdly sensitive to this: hopefully much more so than my readers. But I think I know most of the necessary Word tricks now (in time to forget them before next November when Not Time's Fool comes out) and I have learned a whole new skill in cover creation, moderately well.

I'm also on my way to learning the sort of patience and tolerance that publication of original fiction should teach, particularly as opposed to fanfic, which (not always but often) has the goal of providing speedy gratification to both readers and writers. I had a comment recently on "Children of an Idle Brain" that irked me in a particular way illustrative of my feelings about fannish entitlement; it wasn't all that different from other comments I've received, but the way the commenter said (nagged, perhaps) "I don't like to see Root and Shaw together in any way" just made me want to yell back "Well, did I ask your permission?" (Of course I didn't yell; I was very polite and thanked them for telling me that there were some nuggets to be admired in all the crazy dream-writing and ill-advised proto-shipping.) Aside from the occasional gift story, I don't write fic to other people's specifications but to please myself, though of course I appreciate that others enjoy the results. But the culture seems to assume otherwise; the number of people who have essentially told me that all my stories should be "The Rest Is Silence" is… well, irritating.

Anyway, writing for money is a bit of a different game, but I basically have the same philosophy: I write what pleases me, though with the goal of pleasing others too, and I try to accept that some readers won't like what I write. Though it's nice when the majority do, as appears to be the case so far. Reviews are great, by the way, whether they are positive or negative; those inclined to say positive things are of course particularly urged to get them down in writing, just saying.

So, I have made what's probably a reasonable though not staggering number of sales for the first year and three books; most of the people I've heard from who read the first book have kept going through the second and at least intend to read the third, though I haven't heard back yet from anyone who's finished it (it is, indeed, very long). Aside from the panic attacks, I'm finding that I enjoy knowing my words and characters are out there and making an impact on readers. I've fielded compliments (and a few critiques) and I'm enjoying writing things on the author blog (and know a few people are reading them). Keeping the marketing bandwagon moving is far more tiring than any aspect of actual writing, and I'm not very good at it yet, but I think this is pretty much still the word-of-mouth stage anyway. I don't actually know everyone who's reading my books, which is kind of cool, even if many of those I don't know are friends of my mother.

I'm still disappointed in the apparent lack of response/sales among the fannish community - many of you who are long-term friends have bought and read, thank you! but it's very hard to spread the word through Tumblr or AO3 or even DW/LJ, and I think the aforementioned fanfic entitlement/gratification culture does not bode well for sales even if I can make the hedda62/Erica H. Smith connection in people's minds. Why, after all, should you pay for (long) books about characters you don't know when you can go read stories for free about characters you do know, by the same author or not? I may yet be surprised by procrastinators or a slow spread of awareness, but in the meanwhile there are the Real Life Friends who are unexpectedly kind and enthusiastic and surprisingly don't mind all the trauma I inflict on George and Olivia and cohorts, although the literal cat-bashing was not well received.

My current to-do list is heavy on the GET STARTED WRITING BOOK FIVE DAMMIT elements, so expect some updates in that regard soon. And who knows, maybe some more fanfic someday as well.

Happy New Year!

Oh, Sleepy Hollow, NO. You did NOT do that. Please be the kind of show that doesn't. *writes furious fix-it fic in head*

And, to continue the previous Katrina thoughts - I read somewhere on Tumblr bits of an interview someone did with some showrunner (sorry, cannot cite. "I read it on Tumblr somewhere": death to modern scholarship) where among other things (one of them being that they consider Katrina to be a "strong woman") it was stated that K. is having difficulties getting her magic in line after all that time in purgatory - and, okay, that would be cool. I would go for that. Except that all that's coming across is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and she shows no real reaction in either case. Or rather, she shows a reaction to the result of the success or failure, but not to the success or failure itself, which a craftsperson should do; there should be a little smirk of triumph or anger when what should happen doesn't. It's bad writing as much as bad acting. She could be a reluctant witch - that would be interesting - and a witch of necessity only, or she can be totally getting off on it, but in any case she needs to desire competence. And to regret failure, not just because it kills people but because it makes her look bad.

On another subject entirely, I think I've fixed the epub file problem - still waiting for Smashwords to review the files (apparently they are still on holiday schedule) but I auto-vetted the file and it passed, so I'm pretty confident (and you will hear wailing and gnashing of teeth if it still fails for some reason). mmegaera said it might be in the headers or footers, and it was - phantom page numbers in the footer, which I never put in there, but Word in its infinite wisdom decided should be present. Don't know why in this book and not any of the others, but there you are.

Volume Three of the Waters of Time series, Time Goes By, is now available for purchase! See this post for links, and (since I mentioned it here before) this post for the cover images.

Whew. I would collapse but I have to make dinner. But I'm excited to have this one out there, and interested to find out what you all think of it - though I will have to wait a little while, since it's 621 pages long and might take some time to read. But yay! Done, and hopefully with no horrible formatting accidents this time!

Announcements! (cross-posted from blog)

1) I have cut the price of e-books of Time for Tea and Time and Fevers on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle to $2.99 each for the month of November. So, starting tomorrow and until November 30, get the discounted gift of a good read for your friends or yourself - and get ready to buy Time Goes By when it arrives!

2) Speaking of which, teaser chapters for the new book are up here. If you've been waiting to find out what happens next, this is your chance!

(Also, after much agony and help from penwiper26, I finished the blurb, which as of now goes like this:

Kidnapping, intrigue, technological crises and innovations, personal skirmishes: life has never been so complicated for the employees of Constantine and Associates. George Merrill undertakes a desperate quest through time to find his beloved Olivia Lake, while his colleagues follow their own paths toward the same goal. Andy Bishop explores the pitfalls and pinnacles of the political landscape, Beatrice Rivas makes the longest journey of her life, and as the action shifts from Moscow to Dunkirk, from Washington to Paris to Casablanca, Olivia—stranded amid bombs and bloodshed—fights her own battles. But something—or someone—is drawing the time-traveling comrades together again, through turmoil and danger set against the tumult of the Second World War.

There may be further tweaking, but I guess that says it more or less. Ergh.)

New post up at my author page - Something Alarmingly Plausible, No Doubt: Writing the Past - about how I approach my version of historical fiction. I'm just going to do one more "update" post, tomorrow or the day after, and then leave the blog alone until I get back from Italy.

And OH WOW fantastic episode of POI last night, perfectly grim and poignant and intimate and funny and laying the foundation for who knows what. I loved it all, and all of them in it, but number one was Fusco's glee-face. Friendly acts of revenge: better than falafel.

A few random remarks post-romance rant (okay, it wasn't really a rant, but I wish alliteration), things best said in this forum if only for my own sake, and hopefully somewhat more relaxed, good-natured, and self-deprecating. (Although the last makes me contemplate again the expectations placed on female writers, that we will speak (seldom and in modest tones) of our little scribblings that no one needs to take seriously. I wish that the ability to contradictorily take things seriously and not seriously at the same time was more widespread, but until that miracle occurs I'm gonna self-promote like hell.)

1. One thing that irritates me about the offhand critique of romance, especially when it's expressed (as it often is) in the form "You are free to write whatever satisfies you, but I don't read that stuff," is whatever amount of love story may be present in a work (when written by a woman, at least of the sort not reviewed by major newspapers) is assumed to always be a form of wish-fulfillment, self-indulgence, and pandering to the (female) masses; there's nothing wrong with any of that in moderation, of course, and I certainly find writing romantic storylines fun. (Where it comes to wish-fulfillment, I'd say that the ability to memorize large amounts of poetry and learn languages with chemical assistance is far and away the most-longed-for gift of which I have written.) But even if that's one's intent, doing the job well is hard work, and being dismissed with a pat on the head is condescending to say the least, and makes one's teeth ache with grinding, even when it's well-meant.

2. I did think of claiming in the course of that post that my books are romances in the older sense (the medieval and allegorical, possibly, but at least the more heroic and marvelous and less snuggly), but left it out because I was talking about modern publishing categories and because it would sound pretentious (and insufficiently researched). I really do need to read Sidney's Arcadia all the way through at some point.

3. However, it did make me think again of the somewhat-accidental linking of each of the books (with the possible exception of Time Goes By) to a form of literature, and led to the head-smacking moment of realization that people think of Time for Tea as a romance novel because it's wrapped around 18th-century romance in form and substance - making fun of it, quite often, but also using its modes and its language. I think I am okay with this.

4. Along similar lines, I had a critique of Time and Fevers recently that talked about faults in structure (conflating style and construction, I think, and probably affected by a temperament averse to both the mode of romance and multi-book arcs, but never mind), and after wrestling with that awhile, I've decided that, yes, some of the faults exist, partly because of that much-regretted alternate-chapter-POV choice and partly because the literary-linking as described above wasn't thought out enough. ( cut because spoilers )

5. And, to pursue this further, I had a think about Not Time's Fool (Book Four), and since the literature-link there is fairy tales, I pushed a little harder on the one arc that still doesn't work quite right, and reshaped it from the "happily-ever-after-but-then-what" concept into an echo of the transformation-type tale that I use in another arc, and I believe that editing with that in mind is going to help, both with the story as it stands and with the weirdly-floating section in the (again) long denouement that leads into Book Five's arc. Well, one of the weirdly-floating sections. I have well over a year, and plenty of writing time on Book Five (*knocks on wood*), to pull it into a shape that makes sense.

6. Which leads me to consider what Book Five, with its conspiracy theories and historically-linked politics and tests of loyalty and male POV characters, needs in terms of a literature-link, and it could quite possibly be medieval romance, but I won't know till I get started.

7. I am going to have to write more at some point about how the structure of the more-than-book-length arcs works for me, and why I like the technique of (so to speak) pulling the camera back gradually as the action moves along, but that'll make more sense after Time Goes By.

Oy vey. Next post will be about cats or zucchini recipes or television shows, I promise.