New Science in My Fiction article today: Orbital Mechanics for Werewolves.
Enjoy!
Writing
Whew
Okay, I have a novel draft. So now what? (And thank you all for the congratulations – much appreciated!)
Revisions, obviously, but it needs to sit for a while first. I envision it like bread dough: all the ingredients have been kneaded together, and it needs to rise for a while before I rework it, add the cinnamon, form it into its final shape.
I’ve been neglecting Stringpage and my blogs and websites, so I need to put some time into those. Actually, I’ve been neglecting pretty much everything that isn’t novel-writing or procrastination from novel-writing (except work). I definitely need to put some time into the business and the rest of my life. It’s tax time, which means inventory and all that. This is a necessary time to put some time into that.
And making tangible things: I also haven’t been weaving or knitting or anything.
And nonfiction. I have a review and an essay due soon, and some other projects to work on, including one really big one that should have been done by now.
But what I really want to do, besides spend a day or two in bed with a novel that somebody else wrote, is work on short fiction. My fiction-writing time has gone into novel, novel, novel, and I want to do something else for a bit before I dive into rewriting.
Revise and submit:
Crossing the Water
The Regiomontanus Problem
Finish:
Oyster
Stars Like Clockwork Overhead
The Gray of Her Eyes
Untitled Christmas cookie story
Ponder:
Untitled urban fantasy short story
Book of Signs and Shadows (novel outline)
Untitled urban fantasy (novel outline)
I want to get the two finished stories polished and out in the next month, and have at least two of those in progress well underway.
It’s good to have a plan, right?
I? Just finished a novel.
It’s a very rough first draft, and the middle kind of sucks, and it’s 10,000 words too short.
But I have a complete draft, with a beginning, middle, and end, and it tells a proper story.
Writing a novel is one of those things that you don’t know if you can do until you’ve done it. I knew I could write short stories, but wasn’t entirely sure whether I could write an entire book-length work of fiction. My next major writerly hurdle was to do so. My most successful previous attempt made it to about 70,000 words before getting entirely bogged down, so I honestly wasn’t sure I could finish a novel draft. I can.
I’m going to put it away for a month or so and write the short stories that have been piling up in my head, then come back and do a nearly-complete rewrite with fresher eyes. Now that I know what happens, I can fix up the middle and make it work.
Right now though, there is good scotch, and a lapcat, and a celebratory reading of Gorey’s “The Unstrung Harp”.
I’ve gotten a lot of encouragement from people online, including some I’d never expected to have a word or two for a new writer. Thanks, everyone. It really did help. Novels are hard. Writing is hard. I have no idea why anyone would voluntarily do this kind of thing, except that sometimes it’s awesome, and making stuff up is great fun, and finishing is fabulous.
Zzzzzz
It was a long week, and I was tired by the time I got home last night, but I was determined to make my wordcount.
Determined.
So I pushed on, despite the snuggly cat rumbling in my lap, the warm soporific puppy draped across my ankles, despite the eyelids drifting closed.
I made my wordcount, but it looks like this:
“Finally the gatekeeper gave in, and rang a bell asking for the four sea creatures.”
Sea creatures? There are no sea creatures anywhere in this story. Not one, and certainly not four.
The gatekeeper? Needs to ask for the privy secretary. I have some words to rewrite.
But maybe the sea creatures need a story of their own?
Red sky at morning
This is how the New Year began.
I hope it isn’t an omen
And here’s how the old year went, or at least the SFF-related bits:
According to my Goodreads list, I read 108 books in 2010 (not counting things read purely for work). Not bad.
One of my goals for the year was to read more fiction, and to make an effort to keep up with current SFF, especially that not written by old white men. I did okay with that latter bit, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. Recommendations gladly accepted.
I sold my first two stories (Crossed Genres and the Rigor Amortis antho), and a nonfiction piece to Clarkesworld.
I wrote regularly for Science in My Fiction. My December article on hydrothermal vents was picked up by io9.
I signed up to review for The Portal, though no reviews have appeared yet. (I need to rewrite my first one; I’m not very good at this yet.)
I attended the Viable Paradise workshop, an experience I’m still digesting several months later. And by the way, applications for this year are now open. You should all apply. Really.
And I attended my first-ever con: World Fantasy in Columbus. I had a very good and educational time, and came away with a whole pile of story ideas. (See above, behind on short fiction.) I signed zombie books and did a reading, and felt just like a real author.
I did not finish the novel-in-progress, but I’m very close. I wrote 12,500 words over my brief Christmas vacation. I learned that I can write 4,000 words a day and still have time for cookies as long as I’ve done a good job planning. And no internet. If it’s a workday, I’m lucky to get 500 words written.
I thought I might get it finished over New Year’s, but I didn’t write at all. I cleaned the gutters (on New Year’s Eve!), cooked a lot of very tasty food, spent time with friends, read a lot. I think it was a necessary break after the chaos that my life has been, even if I feel a bit guilty about not finishing PM by my self-imposed December deadline.
My new plan is to finish it up within the next few weeks. Then I want to spend a month or so writing short fiction; I have a lot of things in progress that have been sitting idle while I tried to finish the novel. I only have one short story out in the world right now. That needs to change.
Then: rewrites. Badly, badly needed rewrites. I learned so much while writing this over the past year, about writing and the characters and how to put a novel together, that the whole thing needs to be done over.
But first goal: a completed draft.
On the one hand, I got a lot done. This list doesn’t include day job, fiber arts, and all of the real-life stuff that occurred this year. On the other hand, I didn’t write nearly as much as I’d hoped, or accomplish several other things I wanted to work on. I spent the entire year in a perpetual state of not-caught-up.
Travel and family crises contributed to the stress and lack of time. This year should be better on both fronts. Day job is going to be more intense, though, due to changes in both scientific personnel and management. I hope the latter doesn’t cancel out the former.
And a completely unrelated bit: this “Facts of Life” essay has been making the rounds. It is very much worth your time and thought.
Here is where I should put in good wishes for all my blog readers for 2011. But wouldn’t you know? I’m running late…
Novel research
I mentioned last night on Twitter that I was researching Renaissance Italian streetnames, and Chia Lynn asked if I’d share some research resources.
I’m working on a fantasy novel with an Italoid setting – patterned on fifteenth century Tuscany, though without the omnipresent religion. This is a really easy time and place to research, especially since I’m looking for things that give the feel of a particular place and culture, and not at all aiming for historical accuracy. The most useful books have been on art and architecture and landscape photography. Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes was also helpful for cultural context.
I also a lot of inspiration from websites like this calendar of Tuscan festivals. When do things happen? What are the local celebrations like? The book doesn’t span an entire year, but I can throw in passing references to these festivals, or just use them to build my own knowledge of the culture so I can portray it more convincingly. Tourist websites have all kinds of useful information, like weather at different times of the year.
One of the best resources out there for historic names is the Medieval Names Archive. Intended for re-enactors, it offers historically-referenced names for a wide range of times and places, and gives more focus than the average baby name list for developing a particular cultural feel.
Wikipedia is wildly useful for the basics of history and culture, and for more esoteric things like Italian profanity. More in-depth information comes from elsewhere, but this is a great place to get started.
Google image search is remarkably helpful. I knew I needed a city with a wall around it, but what might that look like? How about a search for Tuscan city wall?
I’ve also relied heavily on Google maps. How might a walled Italian city be laid out? What are typical street names? I can take a look.
You can see the outline of where the city wall is, and the layout of the old part of the city inside that delimiter. Zooming in gets street names, including the Viale della Mura Urbane, just what I needed. No guarantee that the names actually date back to the Renaissance, but I wanted descriptive street names. Doing this gave me some insight into how street names work, and what kinds of things might be appropriate. Again, cultural background not historical accuracy, though something extremely out of place could be very jarring to the reader.
I’m a research geek and love doing this kind of work, so I need to be careful to not get carried away and spend all my time worldbuilding and looking up interesting facts. I prefer fantasy novels with rich and well-realized backgrounds, and time spent on worldbuilding and cultural research is crucial.
November wrap-up
I’m winding up National Novel Writing Month with 16427 words. I realize that isn’t anywhere near 50k, but I’m pleased. I met my goal for the month, which was to write every day (except for the two days I was running a weaving symposium and knew in advance I wouldn’t have time), and to get myself back into a sustainable writing schedule. I have trouble with “binge writing” where I write a zillion words in a short time then none for a while. This doesn’t work long-term simply because it’s so hard to get back into the project if it’s been sitting for a while. My objective was to write a bit every day, even if only a hundred words after work (and I’ve frequently been so tired that even that was a challenge), and write more on weekends when I had larger blocks of time and energy.
I did that too: I wrote 7000 words over the Thanksgiving weekend. Some of the best parts of this book have been written at the kitchen table at the farmhouse. No internet, most of my responsibilities left at home.
That 7000 words put me well past the half-way mark on Paper Magic. I’ve written half a novel!
I’ve written many more words on a single project before, but they’ve never been half a novel, just a bunch of words. This time I have an outline, and a plan, and the words are organized into chapters and have a purpose for existing. Very exciting, really, even if you have to take my word for it.
I was looking back at some of the medium early bits tonight. My writing skills have definitely improved, because I can see how badly they suck! Well, I knew this needed a complete rewrite.
I’m hoping to have a complete draft by early January, with more good bits and a lot of words written at the farmhouse kitchen table over Christmas. I have an outline, and know how everything is likely to come together. At this point, it’s all a matter of butt in chair.
Congrats to everyone who made 50k words in November. Don’t stop – finish and revise your masterpiece!
Writing competence
There’s a theory of competence that goes something like this:
- Unconscious incompetence: you not only don’t know how to do something, you don’t even know enough to realize how little skill you have. I think this relates to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where the less you know, the more likely you are to believe that you are knowledgeable and competent. In the writing realm, these are people who’ve never written any fiction (and possibly never read any) but tell you how easy it is to just sit at the computer all day and make stuff up. I’m not so interested in them.
- Conscious incompetence: Once you really start to learn something, any new skill, you become painfully aware of how little you know, and how much there is to learn. No longer does that skill look easy, it looks impossible. As a writer, you start looking carefully at everything you read and despairing.
- Conscious competence: You have learned the necessary skills, but have to work very hard to apply them. Every word requires attention and effort.
- Unconscious competence: Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton, if you’ll excuse me for mixing skills. The skills are so finely honed that it no longer (looks like) you have to even pay attention to them.
These aren’t absolutes. Attaining unconscious competence really just unlocks the next level so you can see all the new things you are bad at that you didn’t even realize existed.
I can write. I know how letters go together into words, words go together into sentences, where the bits of punctuation go, how to organize ideas into a coherent form. (Except for quotation marks: the American system of putting the comma inside the quotation marks offends my programmer brain and I have to think about it.) But by and large, I’ve achieved unconscious competence at the basic mechanics of the English language.
Fiction, though. I’ve been flailing around for quite some time in the conscious incompetence stage of writing fiction. I can see all the stuff I can’t do, but I can’t do it, and I know there’s more lurking that I can’t even see yet.
Viable Paradise, awesome as it was, only made this worse. Now I can see even more things I can’t do. More flailing, greater conviction that I suck as a writer of fiction and will never get any better at it. As a disciple of the Red Queen, I can simultaneously recognize that as (probably) false and firmly believe it.
This conviction persisted despite getting to do all kinds of authorial things at WFC like signing books, doing a reading, and being horribly embarrassed to have people tell me how much they liked my zombie story. Did it once, apparently, but never again. Impostor syndrome anyone?
So. Flailing. And not getting any writing done. But some of it was fizzing away back there somewhere in the nooks and crannies of my brain, and this weekend I figured something out: this thing about how sentences have to work in fiction, and I’m running full-tilt toward conscious competence with it.
Not quite there yet, and it’s a hell of a lot of work, but so much better than flailing. I have a focus now, and can see how this is/will be going. And it’s fun again.
Huh. Maybe I can do this after all.
Some writings about writing from other people for your edification:
- Terry Pratchett on writing.
- Stephen King
on writing. - James Frey: how not to pursue the business of writing.
- Elizabeth Bear on the importance of grim determination for novelists.
That last link was especially helpful. I’ve never finished a novel-length work of fiction and I need to demonstrate to myself that I can. My plan is to complete the WIP, a YA fantasy novel, by the end of the year. It’s YA so it can be a bit shorter than an adult novel; I’m aiming for about 85k. I’m at 35k right now, but some of that will have to be thrown away.
I have a plan, and a new tool. Time to make more tea and get back to work.
Settling in
A very full October has concluded. I still haven’t written much about Viable Paradise, but I will. I’ve been gone every weekend in October, and weekends are when I usually get blogging done. Also fiction writing and many other useful things. October was very good in many ways, but I’m glad it’s over. November won’t be quite as crazy, and December appears to be fairly tame.
I need some down time. It’s been a roller coaster of a year.
This past weekend was my first ever World Fantasy Convention (and first ever con of any time). It’s a writer-oriented con, with readings and literary panels, and no costumes, movies, or gaming.
This year it was in Columbus. I had an awesome time. It felt wonderful to be moving into that world, if only as the newest of writers. I signed many copies of Rigor Amortis and participated in the publisher’s group reading on Saturday. Many nice compliments on my story and reading.
I went to many panels and readings, including ones by Saladin Ahmed and Cat Valente. Both of those links are for short fiction, while the authors read from new or forthcoming novels. Saladin has a novel coming out soon, while Cat’s latest novel, The Habitation of the Blessed, was released today. I’m looking forward to reading them both.
After this weekend, I have no shortage of things to entertain myself with while I wait.
That’s not the complete collection!
Many of the people who live in my computer sprung to life at WFC. I’m not going to list them, because I would inevitably forget some (but there’s a list; you can imagine me meeting your favorites). I also met many new folks who will be living in my computer until next year.
A couple of other things:
I have a new Science in My Fiction article today, complete with baby dragons. It would be great if you read it and left a comment.
Tomorrow is election day in the US. If you live here, I expect you to vote, dammit. Google will helpfully tell you where.
National Novel Writing Month starts today. 50000 words in 30 days! I’m using the peer pressure to finish something already in progress. VP and WFC have got me all revved up; I hope that inspiration lasts for a while. I have piles of ideas, and a lot of writing to do.
Just in time, the new edition of the wonderful writing software Scrivener was released today. They’re doing a special NaNoWriMo 30-day trial edition for both Mac and the new Windows edition, a discount for WriMo participants, and a larger discount for winners. I highly recommend it, especially for writers who don’t work in strict order.
And now, time to settle in with my laptop, cat, novel-in-progress. I’ll keep you posted.
Serendipity shows the way
I was stuck on writing fiction this weekend, so I went to the library to look at some books. I found the architectural and city photographs I was looking for. They sparked the desired ideas and motivation. But I also found something else, and it resolved for me a much trickier plot point that I hadn’t been able to get a handle on.
(via this blog; unable to track down actual photo credit)
Isn’t that a lovely photograph?
But look closely: that’s marble. It’s a closeup of a statue of Pluto abducting Proserpine, carved by Bernini in the early 17th century.
The lighting in the photo makes it look like flesh at first, but the original is entirely white.
(via this blog; unable to track down actual photo credit)
Look at the hands. Look at the way the Proserpine’s soft flesh dents where the god has grabbed it. Think of the skill in the sculptor’s hands as he formed and shaped and polished, of the skill in his brain that let him see the result before ever touching chisel to stone.
That’s what I needed.
