Vicissitude and Season

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!

Wrote a post for International Women's Day about my female characters and how much I love them. Yay ladies! *hugs them all*

Aside from that, still having a hard time getting my brain into writing mode for long periods of time, so here's a meme (borrowed from avanti_90). Questions are mostly about fic, so I'll answer them that way unless it makes sense to delve into book-writing. Pick a number; pick two or three and I might answer them all if I have time.

1. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.
2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?
3. Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?
4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?
5. Share one of your strengths.
6. Share one of your weaknesses.
7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you're proud of it.
9. Which fic has been the hardest to write?
10. Which fic has been the easiest to write?
11. Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?
12. Is there an episode above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?
13. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?
14. What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?
15. If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?
16. If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?
17. Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?
18. Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines?
19. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?
20. Describe your perfect writing conditions.
21. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?
22. Choose a passage from one of your earlier fics and edit it into your current writing style.
23. If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why?
24. Have you ever deleted one of your published fics?
25. What do you look for in a beta?
26. Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you?
27. How do you feel about collaborations?
28. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.
29. If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?
30. Do you accept prompts?
31. Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your fic being canon compliant?
32. How do you feel about smut?
33. How do you feel about crack?
34. What are your thoughts on non-con and dub-con?
35. Would you ever kill off a canon character?
36. Which is your favorite site to post fic?
37. Talk about your current wips.
38. Talk about a review that made your day.
39. Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?
40. Write an alternative ending to [insert fic title] (or just the summary of one).

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!

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.

Miscellany: writing, cats, TV, etc.

1) I wrote the first sentence in Book Five last night:

The muffled oars whispered secrets to the river as the boat slipped downstream, returning Major John André to the safety of the Vulture.

Which should alert those familiar with the incident that something weird is going on, but never fear, I will explain what and why and how very quickly. I haven't written any more yet, but perhaps I'll get time to do that today; I do know how it goes on. For a little while, at least. And am very glad to get started, and impressed that I've written something considering my mental state a couple of weeks ago.

Also got a laugh when I reviewed the history and saw what the name of the sloop was. Birds, I tell you: following me around.

(The next line in the "How to Suppress Women's Writing" litany goes: She wrote it, and then she wouldn't shut up about it. Sorry not sorry.)

2) Cats! I said I'd write about cats, and I haven't done an update in ages. We still have Lancelot and Hotspurr, and they are well. Hotspurr is now an indoor-outdoor cat - I swore this wasn't going to happen, after losing the last cat (plus others, previously) to outdoor threats, but he had other ideas, and as soon as spring arrived he began scratching and whining constantly (I mean, for hours at a time) and shooting out the door whenever we opened it, and we eventually gave in. (Tried the leash thing first - nope, not going for it.) He's five years old, so he had fully-developed habits before we adopted him, and clearly no one ever denied him anything, including access to the outdoors. He's also refused to wear a collar (he lost six of them outdoors before we stopped putting them on) but he does have a chip at least. And he's smart about what's out there, though I'm reconciled to the possibility that some of it will eventually kill him. He'd just be miserable inside all the time; some cats just are The Cat Who Walks By Himself, and that's how it is. He's done two all-nighters out so far, and been caught out in several thunderstorms, though he tends to curl up on a chair and sleep the whole next day.

Lancelot is still an indoor kitty, because I don't trust him to avoid danger outside, and because the only reason he seems to want to go out is because Hotspurr's there. They bonded nicely in the winter, but while Hotspurr is fond of Lancelot, Lancelot loves Hotspurr, and now he spends days waiting by doors and windows for his friend to come back. We are seriously thinking of getting a third cat, if we can find one guaranteed to prefer the indoors.

3) I'm kind of liking the break from TV in the summer (though the POI preview clip from ComicCon looked awesome), which we are filling desultorily with episodes of "Borgen" - it's a Danish political drama about a female prime minister in a coalition government, and it's intriguing and fun and poignant in a way that's more "West Wing" than "House of Cards" (or "Yes, Minister"), and blends the political and the personal in a balanced way. We're about halfway through the second season. In Danish with subtitles - which means I can't watch it if I'm sleepy, because my eyes will close and I'll have no idea what's going on, but it's been interesting. Neither of us speaks Danish, but I know a little German and J. used to be fluent, so some of the roots are familiar and occasionally we'll pick up a word here and there. We concluded pretty quickly that a lot of sounds get seriously elided, because when there's something you know they should be saying (because it's in the subtitle and not likely to be a mistranslation) you still don't hear it. And then occasionally there will be phrases in English - there are whole scenes in English, I mean, when they're talking to people from other countries, but also just little bits of jargon or idiom that apparently have been adopted into Danish parlance, which is kind of weirdly endearing and startling. Only available here on DVD - which, wow, when was the last time we watched one of those?

4) Subject line is one of my favorite bits of Vienna Teng, from "In Another Life":

In another life
I was married at thirteen
You were killed at twenty-one
On a minor battlefield

which I just think is genius in the "adding insult to injury" way. Minor battlefield, ha. It's the sort of thing Rinaldo would like, and since that's his POV up there in the first line of Book Five (which still has no title) I am particularly inclined to attach to it. (Last book used all female POVs; this one will be all male, which makes it the first book without Olivia's interior perspective, though possibly I'll give her the epilogue.)

5) I've been having shoulder panics. When you've had two frozen shoulders, any lasting pain or stiffness in those joints leads to worry (which probably doesn't help in terms of loosening up) about the possibility of losing most of your range of motion, plus any ability to exercise (because of extreme pain on jarring), for a year or so. I am just back in the swing of things where exercise is concerned, after the frustration of the knee problem, and having that go away again would be devastating. But I'm hoping it's just the temporary result of doing too-speedy hand-weight lifts in Jazzercise. Lots of stretching is in order.

Time and Fevers is now available for purchase in ebook and print versions! Details are at my website (which really needs a redesign, but who has time). Here's the blurb:

Olivia Lake’s search for her missing husband continues, as she and time-jumping partner George Merrill venture into the world of tulip traders, spice merchants and theatre lovers in 17th-century Amsterdam. Meanwhile, new players on the time travel stage make surprise entrances, and the employees of Constantine and Associates face the dangers posed by mysterious conspirators, unanticipated market forces, and their own hearts.

This would be the time to talk up the series, people. :)

Waiting to see if the attempt to link my blog to Tumblr is working any better than the currently-claimed links to Facebook and Twitter - they did work, for a while, and now I have to manually repost everything. I have other strategies in reserve, but still hoping maybe Wordpress will fix itself?

In other news, I'm rereading Christopher Fowler's The Water Room with crossover possibilities in mind - the Rivers of London connection is so obvious it hurts. Need to look at my Trope Bingo card again...

Made a post today on where characters come from, at the author blog, and reproduced here under the cut for convenience. (I don't think I want to crosspost everything from there here, even if I could figure out how to make it happen automatically, but I'll try to link or copy where it's relevant. If you're interested in more you can follow me over there or sign up for email notices.)

And I am editing away on TAF chapter one, pruning still more words and making what's left a tiny bit better.

( you're a figment )

pendrecarc asked: How do you approach writing short and long fiction differently, if at all?

Well, that is an interesting question that I am not at all sure I'm qualified to answer. Because, when I consider it, I realize that I have written very little short original fiction, and no novel-length fanfic. So I'm comparing grapes and bananas, to reach for a more appropriate fruity image, since right up front there's a discrepancy between a story where you start out knowing the setting and characters and a story where you have to make all that up yourself.

However, to some extent writing is writing, so: yes, I suppose I think about them differently. I am not an outliner in general, but when writing a novel I have to have some idea of shape and storyline before starting, and I usually know how it ends if not every major plot point along the way. And there's a lot more research, and many more characters and settings that have to be thought about. It's just all bigger and more complicated. To choose as a metaphor something I'm pretty much ignorant about: it's not just that a marathon is longer than a sprint race, but that it requires strategy and pacing rather than simply raw talent. Or: a full-length ballet needs a story and a structure, whereas a ten-minute dance piece… also needs a story, but it can be a story wrapped around one lovely image that strikes quickly to the hearts of the audience, whereas if you did that over and over for an hour they'd get bored.

And of course both the marathon and the ballet require strength and endurance, of the type I don't have physically but apparently do, in sufficiency, for novel-writing. That's probably the biggest difference, frankly: for long fiction you have to keep slogging away, and there's always a point where desire and inspiration slows, and somehow you just have to get through it. (I've had that happen in short fiction, too, but at least then it's not too far to the end.) It's a commitment; short stories can be more like a fling. Which doesn't make them less a form of art, or essentially easier to produce. The oratorio or the opera, versus the madrigal or the aria.

I'd like to explore this further, but I think comparisons do start to break down when I think about character or plot development, because of the aforementioned original/fanfic difference. There are also lots of things that are the same no matter the type or the length - pendrecarc mentioned in her question the easy and difficult parts I talked about before, and no, those don't change depending on what I'm writing. Longer just means more of whatever it is.

I don't have an assigned topic for today, but I thought of two things to talk about anyway. :)

So we were watching "Breaking Bad" last night (up through 4x11 - !!!!) and it occurred to me that there must have been someone on the production staff whose assigned task it was to keep track of exactly how much money Walt possesses at any one point. This was extremely plot-relevant at that particular moment, but really all the time (I mean, "having enough" is his motivation from the beginning, and he never does). The show's good at continuity in general, so I'm sure they thought that part out very well.

I don't necessarily notice continuity errors while I'm watching a show for fun, but I think I could pick them out when more emotionally detached (being a continuity supervisor would be a great job). The Person of Interest Wikia lists errors of various types for each episode, and I happened to be looking at the "God Mode" entry the other day and saw a note about ( spoiler )

I think it would be fun to have a fandom fest in which people write wild and wacky rationalizations for continuity errors and other oddities. For the above one, I offer: ( and again, spoilers )

On another topic, I had an interesting conversation with an acquaintance at the MG meeting I mentioned where I was being showered with book praise. She took one of my cards, saying that her husband might be interested in reading my book, but that she wouldn't, because she has great trouble with suspension of disbelief and can't read anything that's "unlikely" - including, I guess, all fantasy, science fiction, other speculative fiction, spy novels, and works with too many coincidences in them. She says she enjoys Jonathan Franzen. I am all for people being upfront about what they like and don't like, and it's usually hard to change minds about that kind of thing, especially among older readers, though I always hold out a smidgen of hope.

Anyway, I personally have no trouble with suspension of disbelief within reason, meaning that as both a reader and a writer I allow for at least one major coincidence and/or seemingly impossible technology per book, as long as everything else falls into place logically. But it's interesting to think that some people just lack that ability, in the same way that they can't curl their tongues or deal with brussels sprouts. I've been thinking this as I watch my two cats, one of which adores chasing the little red light of the laser pointer, and clearly has a vendetta against it ("curse you, little red light! curse you forever!") while not suffering any apparent emotional distress over never ever being able to catch and eat it. While the other one watches the light for a moment, and then looks at your hand. If they were bookstore cats, you know which would end up in the mystery novels and which in the nonfiction section.