Thursday Thoughts

Today, I'd like to talk about the Olympics and a story that spoke to me - so if you haven't seen the Ladies' Free Skate for some reason (my cable decided to die Thursday evening, and it was only last night that the program finally showed up in my On Demand listing), close out this window post-haste.  Here be skating spoilers.

Most of the attention and commentary was on defending Olympic gold medalist Yuna Kim, who was clearly a lovely person with a humanitarian bent and a mature skating style; and on the young athletic Russian phenom, Adelina Sotnikova, who came out of nowhere when the spotlight focused on her younger teammate ... both of whom were trying to make history.  Yuna Kim would have been only the second woman to ever win back-to-back gold medals, while Adelina Sotnikova would be Russia's first gold in women's figure-skating.

But there was one more historical landmark at stake that evening:  27 year old Carolina Kostner of Italy, an Olympic veteran with a painful history of faltering at the key moment - she was ninth in 2006, sixteenth in 2010 - stood a chance to give Italy its first medal in solo figure-skating.  But Kostner's opportunity was also deeply personal.  After the Olympics in 2010, she was defeated and weary; she decided to quit skating.

Her mother and coach, once a figure-skater herself, urged her not to.  She said:  skate for the love of skating.

Sounds so simple, so obvious.  It's almost a cliche.  It's the first advice any artist - and make no mistake, figure-skating is as much an art as a sport - receives when contemplating a life in pursuit of passion.

Yet for Carolina Kostner, it was magic.  She was reborn; she was the World Champion in 2012.  And at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, she performed a flawless short program followed by a triumphant free skate.  As she got off the ice, her mother said to her, "Now do you believe in yourself?"

Adelina Sotnikova might have stunned the crowd with her athleticism; Yuna Kim might have moved them with artistry ... but Carolina Kostner, the bronze medalist and Italy's first solo figure skating medal, showed them love of skating.

I suppose this story speaks to me because, as a writer, I often feel like Kostner.  Publication has been a long trudge with a few bright lights, but my main goal keeps eluding me while writers who have been at it a much shorter time keep racking up their successes, and I start to wonder ... what's wrong with me?

That's not to say I should ignore the fact that there are areas in which I need improvement.  I always try to keep an eye on my faults and work to correct them.  But when I go from submitting and selling back to writing, there's only one thing that matters:  do it for the love of writing.

Thank you, Carolina Kostner.

GoodReads Review: Wild Magic by Jo Clayton

Wild Magic by Jo Clayton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The story of spunky, defiant Faan who is forced into a war between god and goddess, Wild Magic is, at its heart, a tale of ordinary people caught up in cosmic circumstances. It's a story with an intensely realized and complex world which is never fully explained to the reader - most of its concepts are learned by osmosis (or perhaps not at all). It's the kind of book that probably wouldn't be published today: full of dense, poetic language, an overabundance of made-up words, and following its heroine from infancy through growing pains to the adolescence in which the real story starts. Yet this life-long course is perfect for the story: it allows us to understand Faan in both her mundane and magical aspects.

It's a pity that this book is under-explained - some major concepts, like the Change, seem to appear suddenly and are left to inference, and there are aspects of the setting that I still don't understand. Faan's time learning sorcery was generally glossed over, which felt like a major omission, though it wasn't necessarily crucial to the story and seems like it will come into play more in the second book. As far as a satisfactory ending, Wild Magic has a great "Yes, but ..." conclusion ... and that's all I'll say on that.

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Thursday Thoughts

I belong to a small writing forum which has been doing bi-weekly free-writes on and off for a while.  Someone hosts and provides a topic / inspiration, and everyone writes for an hour.  I almost never finish, but I've gone back, finished and sold many of these stories.  This week, I plopped down to write up a list of what I had and had some surprises.  The general statistics:

Total free-writes:  58
Finished:  34 (of these, 1 was trunked for being, well, terrible)
Sold / Published:  5 (+1 that was sold and hasn't come out yet)
Currently in Submission:  2

Several patterns appeared.  There was no real science fiction here; a few stories had far future settings, but were closer to science fantasy.  Most of the stories were in secondary worlds, usually with significant worldbuilding basis, but a handful were contemporary.  Most of the protagonists were female.  There were far more stories that involved cooks, bakers or confectioners than I would have expected - keeping in mind these free writes were done long before I decided to attend culinary school.  Four of these stories were in worlds I had used before ... not including the two Ishene and Kemel stories, since the first story started as a free-write, and the story start from the perspective of Ishene's apprentice, decades later.

Some of the free writes were experimental.  One of the finished stories I had forgotten about is completely in dialogue, the arguments of two minds who end up in the same body.  Another is present tense, first person plural.  Then there's one that I have to blame on the prompt:  the entire story is one sentence.  Well, two, but the last sentence is used as sort of a cap to the run-on insanity.  A lot of the finished stories are way too long, and almost all of the unfinished ones need tightening.

So what did I learn here? ... I need to start doing free-writes again, of course.

Thursday Thoughts

As I've mentioned before, I use the backburner of my brain a lot.  I tend to work best when I give stories time to simmer on their own, with just the occasional stir ... and I'll stop there, because otherwise the culinary metaphor is going to become laboured.

But it works even better when I don't just idle in between, instead working on a different project.  I found out the hard way some years ago that two novels wasn't a good idea simply because I ended up in a never-ending editing sequences, but short fiction and poetry is definitely an excellent change of pace.

So a bit late, and I've already missed one month, but I'm resolving to write a short story a month for the rest of the year.  Length is no object - if I have an idea for a piece of microfiction, that's perfectly valid.

So February's story is Stone Unturned, about a historian who specializes in "Soundings" - summoning visions of the past through prayer and song.  It's intended for the Fantasy-Writers.org monthly challenge, which is to write a story including these five elements:  a child, a journey, a betrayal, a bird and a deserted building.  I always tend to take FWO challenges and add an additional, personal level of difficulty - my intention with this one was to have all the elements in both the past and the present, but I believe I'm just short of this ...

As far as this blog is concerned, this project will also give me more opportunity to share the occasional tidbit, as Unnatural Causes has already reached the point where most segments would either require extensive explanation, be "spoilers" for the plot, or both.

GoodReads Review: Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron by Jasper Fforde

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Eddie Russet lives in a world where most people can only see one natural color - and how much of that color they can see determines their place in the world.  He has life figured out ... until he's banished to the Outer Fringes for attempting to improve the process of queueing, where a rebellious Grey named Jane challenges everything he thinks he knows.

It's a fantastic premise for a world, and many authors would have stopped there, but the setting of Shades of Grey is both deeply whimsical and twisted.  It is built on a mysterious past of "the Previous," who the reader assumes (but is never sure) was our own society, then bent thoroughly out of shape by premises that seem absurd, but hinge together with a logic one can almost - but never quite - make out.  It's a balancing act of dizzying skill.

Before the last quarter of Shades of Grey, I'd have to say that I felt Fforde spent too much time just exploring his world, without much clear conflict or advancement of the plot.  Then when I got to the chilling pay-off in the last pages, well ... I still think the story could have done with a little less exploration, but that deep immersion in the setting is crucial for the impact of the climax, and having been hit upside the head with it, I am confident that many of the apparently extraneous details will have relevance in the sequels.

Because this is definitely a book one ... but it's a book one that ends in a satisfying place, with the character resolved and evolved.  The main questions are really deeply personal ones:  will Eddie find his place in the world?  Will he be able to kindle romance with Jane? ... and both these questions get my absolute favorite answer:  "Yes, but ..."

The only other quibble I have with Shades of Grey is that I never felt particularly deep in Eddie's head.  For a first person narrative, it's surprisingly shallow in POV.  But small points aside, I don't say it lightly when I describe this novel as brilliant.  Give it a try.



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Thursday Thoughts

As a writer, while I experiment with different personalities in short fiction, including characters that you would probably want to punch if you met them (the narrator of "A Dose of Aconite," which is currently in submissions and set in the same world as Flow, is a delusional and rather unpleasant Border Watchman), my novels - at least those that spend the majority of their time in one or two perspectives - tend to gravitate to certain character personalities.  Some of this, of course, is just the usual desire to give the reader someone they want to identify with, but for me, I also want to write characters that I want to spend an extended period of time with.

So undertaking Vil in Unnatural Causes - a character who is non-human, from a world whose basic concepts are very different from ours; a character who interprets humanity through a lens that isn't always flattering - was something of a risk for me.  I wanted to be sure I could get deep within the character's skin, without lapsing too much ... but I wanted to enjoy the process of writing her, too.

So far, though, I've been having a blast.  It's true that Vil sometimes comes off blunt to the point of rudeness - but there's no malice in her, just an ingrained inability to understand certain nuances in human culture.  And Iluenn, who shies away from conflict and is much smarter than she gives herself credit for, makes a perfect foil and companion.  They're a formidable team - and both outcasts in their own way.

It makes me want to seek out different types of narrators in my long works.  Who else might be worth spending an extended period of time with, if I just give them a chance?

Thursday Thoughts

Today, let me talk about titles.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't have a knack for titles.  Every now and again, I light upon a good one, but most of mine are utilitarian ... and the few times I've had to re-title a story due to editor's requests, the process has been a struggle.  Sometimes the results are worthwhile (Firstborn = The Dreamweaver's Dispute; The Clockwork Oracle = The Oracle Unlocked), but other times, about all you can say about it is that it's a title (Sailing The Seventeen Seas = Currents and Clockwork).  Post-writing titles tend to be dicey for me, so I try to come up with something before I start.

The kind of titles I enjoy the most - and the style I try to emulate - are those that use some appropriate word or phrase ... which turns out to have multiple interpretations in the story.  Often, this takes a turn to the punny - Terry Pratchett's Making Money; or one of my all-time favorite titles, Laura Resnick's Disappearing Nightly - but it can be absolutely serious, too.  Much of the Dresden Files falls into this - Summer Knight, Death Masks ...

Of my own stories, I'm proud of the titles First Contact - in which "contact" is of new species, but also of physical touch - Diminishing Returns - about a shapeshifter who loses a bit of her substance each time she transforms - and City Limits - wherein the city is a self-contained prison, and the story focuses on the characters' attempts to escape.  Even Scylla and Charybdis arguably falls into this category:  it's a fancy way of saying "between a rock and a hard place," but there are also mythological influences in the novel.

Another type of title that jumps out to me is the one that stops and makes you go, "Huh?"  It's a simple phrase that doesn't go the way you expect, an unusual combination of words, or something that immediately raises a pressing question.  Here you get humor, too - John Moore's The Unhandsome Prince.  When it comes to what intrigues, what creates a burning question, that's more a matter of personal taste, but here are a few of mine:  Mistress of the Art of Death (Ariana Franklin), Channeling Cleopatra (Elizabeth Ann Scarborough), and Thirteen Orphans (Jane Lindskold).

These are the type of titles I don't think I do as frequently or as well, but one I'm proud of is Ten Cities Down ... and, of course, Journal of the Dead possibly falls into this bracket as well.

And just to do both at the same time, Bird Out of Water (From Trespass), which ... nope.  Going to make you go read it.

What are your favorite title conventions?  Any titles that fall into these categories (or any!) that leap out as particularly strong?

Thursday Thoughts

Let me tell you about the first time I ever had an identity crisis.

(This is a writer story, I promise.  Stick with me!)

When I was much younger, I spent a lot of time writing stories - often long, complex multi-"book" series - in my head, sagas which spanned plotlines and generations.  One of these (the beginning dreamed up while listening to Amy Grant's "I'm Gonna Fly") involved a main character named Wylen, a timid homebody who is dragged out of her routine life by daring sorceress Circe ... not to be confused with the mythological Circe, I was just obsessed with the name.  Wylen was intended to be the protagonist, but as I wove the story in my head, I became more and more intrigued with Circe as a character.

This culminated in a moment in the car where I had a complete meltdown because I was afraid I resembled Wylen.

My poor mother dealt with me losing it because I didn't want to be like a fictional character I had created with remarkable poise.  I suppose this is sort of a backwards way of identifying with your characters ...

Goodreads Review: Fantastic Companions

Fantastic Companions by Julie E. Czerneda
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fantastic Companions is a solid, varied anthology of imaginative, emotional, sometimes gently humorous short stories - all featuring non-human characters, most of whom stand side-by-side with a human counterpart. This is an exceptionally strong anthology; none of the stories were really duds, though a few were simply average, and a few others had flaws with virtues could make up for them ... and most of the tales were strong and satisfying, with unusual concepts or worldbuilding. Several moved me, which is quite hard to do. I enjoyed the range and variety of companions and how they came into play. Even the introduction is well-written: a nice teaser of the contents.

An observation more than anything: most of the stories are about and/or by women, and oddly, the weaker stories were often those with male protagonists. It almost makes me feel as if they were chosen to address an imbalance, rather than being the strongest in the submission pool. My least favorite was Jay Lake's "Eggs For Dinner," but I'll allow that it may be my personal taste - his writing isn't something I generally enjoy. (I also thought that "House of Cats," Catherine Dybiec Holm's opener, was weak in comparison to the rest of the anthology, though it's not a bad story by any means.) I could so easily pick out multiple stories as stand-outs, but I've got to go with my gut on this one: "Darkbeast" by Mindy L. Klasty, for an intriguing setting (children have darkbeasts who absorb their pettiness and faults, then have to slay them to be recognized as adults), a great use of a simple, personal plot, and a perfect ending.

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Thursday Thoughts

So for my second post of the year (it's all downhill from here, folks; bail out while you can), I'm taking a look back at 2013.  It crept in, swept me away, carried me along, and then took me on a detour through an obstacle course for the last month or so - but overall, it's been a satisfying ride.

The early part of the year started with a growing awareness of being somehow discontent, and it finally coalesced with my decision to investigate culinary school ... followed rather swiftly with my enrollment, though I didn't begin courses until the fall.  To those observing me, it might seem that I made the decision suddenly or even out of the blue, but it was the product of an extended confluence of thoughts and circumstances.  I've always been a private, internal person, and my decision-making often occurs below the surface.

I spent the summer getting everything in place and wondering nervously how I was going to juggle it all.  When classes started, it was the first time in my life I had been in a classroom full-time.  (As some of you may or may not remember, I was homeschooled from kindergarten on, then did my coursework with Indiana University via distance education.  Scheduled, location-specific learning time is pretty much foreign to my existence.)  And ... it was exciting, it was nerve-racking, it was fun, it was frustrating ... and I should have predicted it, but somehow my efficiency expanded to incorporate everything I needed to do, and when classes ended, I was a bit at a loss for what to do with all this free time.

December, though - December.  I don't want to get into kvetching or too many personal details, but if I went down the list of everything that happened to or around me in December, most sane readers would think I was making things up for kicks.  I've needed some time to recover from it all, but ultimately, I hope it's set me up for a better direction in 2014 ... I just have to do my best and trust it will work out.  And I feel that being open to possibilities, just allowing things to come your way, is an important part of the process.

Though sometimes they need a little nudge.

On the writing front - or at least, the selling of writing front - progress has been slow.  I was particularly pleased with The Hurricane Cavalry's publication in Penumbra; it's one of those intensely structured pieces Dan mentions in his post yesterday.  And while I still don't have an agent, Journal of the Dead got two requests for the full manuscript.  It's been a process of long-term inches for me, which is maddening ... but I have to believe I'll break through eventually.

My next big project is to get Who Wants To Be A Hero? (finally) edited, but I need to run the first few segments by beta readers for a couple of specific issues, and right now, I'm not up to fielding critiques ... but soon.

So many things started in 2013.  I'm hoping for fruition in the year to come.

Guest Post: Daniel Ausema

Kicking off the New Year with a visitor - which means that this is probably the best post you'll see for a while, so enjoy it.  ;-)  With no further ado, I turn it over to Daniel Ausema, author of the serialized Spire City, Season One with Musa Publishing ...

My thanks to Lindsey for allowing me to post this here, and please do take the time to head over to Twigs & Brambles to read her post there, which should be going up soon as well. (Or even check out the post she had there about two years ago, for a little time traveling.)

Lindsey and I share a love of odd story structures and stories that rise from strict forms. She has a great flash fiction piece told in the liner notes of an imaginary CD, and we've both discussed and enjoyed the series of posts from Bruce Holland Rogers on Flash Fiction Online about writing short shorts in all manner of styles and formats.

It's easy to fall into a romantic view of writing that holds any imposed structure as automatically suspect, necessarily limiting the writing in some way. The truth is quite the opposite. Not that an artificial structure is required, but as Italo Calvino and the Oulippo group show in their works (as well as any poet who has made use of any poetic structure), great stories can arise directly from the self-imposed rules a writer creates. This idea fascinates me, and while I don't always write with any sort of predetermined requirements, sometimes I do, and in Spire City there were some specific rules I decided on before I began for how the episodes would go.

The broadest way to look at this is that it is episodic, which places it somewhere in between how I'd usually approach chapters of a novel and how I'd do loosely related short stories. Each episode is neither one nor the other, but aims for a balance between standing alone and advancing the broader story arc.

For planning that structure, I looked at how TV shows handle their episodes and longer arcs. There is a wide variety of season lengths out there at the moment, but I settled on thirteen as a relatively common number of episodes. That number imposes a certain feel to the season-long arcs of the series. Frequently, new shows also are given the first six episodes to establish themselves, and therefore have a definite climax at the end of those first six episodes. So season one follows that, with a major confrontation in episode 6 that forms a complete mini-arc while pointing toward the longer arcs of the season and series as a whole.

The structure of each episode has a large effect on how the story goes. Again I drew inspiration from TV shows. An hour-long show will often have three commercial breaks, dividing the episode into four sections. The Spire City episodes likewise divide up in that way, so that each episode is made up of four 1,000- to 1,500-word sections.

What effect does this have on the story? Each episode is different, so I tried to avoid falling into any repetitive pattern. Even so, it does create a sense of increasing tension as each section complicates the preceding one or expands its implications. It also avoids falling too easily into the three-act structure that writing advice often follows, which is good for making sure it's not taking a mindless way through an event.

The strict word limit also affected the writing. I wouldn't plan out the scenes until I was ready to begin an episode. Then I would take out my note cards and jot down a quick idea for each scene to give the episode direction. Sometimes as I wrote, though, I'd find that the idea I had for a given scene was only enough to sustain half the target word count. Other times, though less frequently, it was cruising toward easily exceeding the target. So I had to work in new wrinkles, or smooth out unnecessary complications to get the scenes to fall right. The stakes went up, the problems increased, the characters were forced to face greater challenges.

Those scenes, difficult to work through at the time, often proved the strongest when I went back to rewrite. The realization that my initial idea needed tweaking (or a complete overhaul) forced me to rethink how I was creating the scene. But without that word count miss, it would have been very easy to just wrap things up and move on to another scene, never realizing (or not until it came time for rewriting) just how much more of an impact a given scene could have within itself and on the story arc as a whole.

At its heart, Spire City is the story of a group of people faced with a terrible infection and fighting back against the scientist who created it. Around that central story is all the structure built from these episodes, which is to say all the crises and adventures of their infected lives. That structure, arbitrary as it was, helped to create the overall feel and focus of the entire story of Spire City.

Episodes 1 and 2 of Spire City, Season One: Infected are available now, and episode 3 is schedule to come out on January 10, 2014. Thanks for reading, and thanks again to Lindsey for hosting me.

Spire City is home to mighty machines of steam power and clockwork, and giant beetles pull picturesque carriages over cobbled streets, but there is a darker secret behind these wonders. A deadly infection, created by a mad scientist, is spreading through the city, targeting the poor and powerless, turning them slowly into animals. A group of those infected by the serum join together to survive, to trick the wealthy out of their money, and to fight back.

 

Thursday Thoughts

Happy Holidays to all, whatever days of celebration you observe and however you do it, religious or secular.  Expect a post of retrospection and introspection soon, but today is not that day.

Today, perhaps appropriately, I'd like to talk a little bit about endings, albeit in the fictional sense.

The past few weeks have been difficult emotionally and physically - a nasty cold which evolved into a sinus infection - so I can perhaps be forgiven for missing my usual warning signs of impending plot hole:  writer's block.  Instead, I ground to a halt with Unnatural Causes and tried to keep plugging away ... but the problem was, I couldn't walk the characters through what amounts to a fantastic autopsy (and believe me, I am having fun with the atmospherics of this scene) without knowing whodunnit.

Seems obvious, perhaps, but years ago, I saw a collection of mystery writers speak at Books and Company in Dayton, and more than one admitted that when they started writing, they didn't know which suspect had committed the murder.  This really stuck with me, and I decided when I broached the idea of a fantasy mystery novel that I was going to go into it with suspects, but no chosen killer.

I finally found this just wasn't working for me, and I needed to decide whodunnit to work through this autopsy (I'm not going to get tired of describing it like that).  What I looked at first was how I wanted to play with various assumptions that had already been made about the crime and the logic behind it.  That gave me some specific parameters to play with and one idea I knew I wanted to incorporate.

Then I started looking at the ultimate motive - was it political?  Personal?  Was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time?  In deciding which way I wanted to go with this, I had a distinct sense of how I wanted the characters (and hopefully, the reader) to react, and this dictated my ultimate choice.

This somewhat less organic than I usually work, but I'm satisfied with the conclusion I came to, and knowing where I'm going helps me shape the tone of the steps along the way.  I've never liked the concept of stories having a message, but I do like to play around with certain themes and tropes.  I suppose it's the difference between a short answer on a test - which would be the "message" - and a stream of consciousness poem.  It's not about the destination, it's about the journey.

GoodReads Review: The Founding Foodies

The Founding Foodies: How Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin Revolutionized American Cuisine by Dave DeWitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An entertaining look at the early history of food in America and the Founding Fathers who were greatly influential in its development, this book was full of delightful information. The period recipes, presented verbatim, are fun to read - and definitely give you an appreciation for modern cookbooks, because I would hate to try to follow one. Be aware that book is perhaps mistitled; the first segment of it (a significant portion of the book) is not so much about founding foodies as it is about the early economy, necessity and evolution of food, from the explosion of the pepper trade in Salem to the duties of the baker-general of George Washington's army.

This is not a general history book - it is an in-depth analysis of American eating, and includes a lot of elements we often take for granted nowadays, such as the requirements imposed by geography and the creation of a national identity. The chapters that focus specifically on Washington and Jefferson are really well-balanced, providing a general sense of their lives and historical high-points, while keeping the focus on the real star on the story: the cuisine.

For me, where this book falls down is the translation of recipes at the end of the book. The author has attempted to modernize the recipes, but the result seems half-hearted at best, both in the product and the methodology used to arrive at these interpretations. To be honest, I would have been perfectly content - might have even enjoyed it better - to have another few chapters, looking at some of the other early culinarians, rather than the recipes. This kind of a project really requires an entire book to itself - perhaps even for each individual region (for instance, New England fare versus Jefferson's Virginia), never mind the whole Revolutionary landscape; it's not really suited to be squashed into 46 pages.

Still, as a reading book rather than a recipe book, highly recommended. If you love the story behind the food, this is for you.

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Thursday Thoughts

It's been a long, draining week.

As some of you who follow me on social media may have noticed, my grandmother passed away this Monday.  To her other numerous grandchildren and grandnieces, she was Juju, but she's always been Grandma Junie to me.

I've always tried to keep this blog "angst-free" with a low personal threshold - I talk about my habits and quirks, but I don't think (as a general rule) people want to read the latest saga of my life.  When it comes to my Grandma Junie, though, I wouldn't feel right without a few words.

The family asked me to write the obituary; it was one of the hardest things I've ever had to write.  I didn't want to gush or use the same trite words seen in every obit.  How to encapsulate what a wonderful, nurturing woman meant to her family with brevity and clarity?  I thought about what I remembered most - both from my own experiences and stories I had heard.  She really gave all of us what we needed, and that's what I wrote.  I'm not an overly demonstrative person; I went for simplicity and truth.

My Papa Tony (her late husband) preceded her in death by several years; you couldn't have imagined a more loving couple.  They both adored the people around them.  Papa Tony started a local tradition at the drive-thru of buying coffee for the person behind you.  Grandma Junie continued to visit the Dunkin Donuts up the street for years simply to keep in touch with the young women who worked there.

And they were wonderful to us grandkids.  For a long time, I was the only grandchild who lived out of town, but they went out of their way to make me feel special and included.  While looking through my grandmother's things, my mother found some very heartfelt thank-you notes I'd written them when they came to visit us in Ohio, along with some very puzzling nonsequitors that definitely refer to events I can no longer remember ...

One of the things I remember about Grandma Junie, both from my personal experience and tales from other relatives, is that she was always willing to stir our imaginations and join in our games.  One of the activities we shared when I was younger was painting rocks.  Can't remember how many hours we spent.  But I probably owe a bit of my creativity to her.

As I grew older, I learned about a few other traits that we share, including a slight tendency to be obsessive-compulsive about the little things.  She's the source of my Welsh heritage.

When she moved out of her house into an assisted living facility, she gave away a lot of her things.  I was asked if I wanted anything, and I had an immediate answer:  the crane plate.  After my mother was born in Bermuda, the family moved to Japan.  There, my grandmother acquired a golden plate covered with a latticework of cranes flying in all directions.  The Thousand Crane Plate is hand-painted, and no one crane flies in the same direction; it's considered good luck.  Some people might call it gaudy, but I had always been fascinated by it; and more importantly, it made me think of her house and of her.  The plate sits in a place of honor on top of my music cabinet.

Alzheimer's is a terrifying illness.  To think of losing those pieces of yourself fills me with dread.  I hate losing my grandmother and I will miss her, but I'm also happy she's whole again.  And maybe looking after and loving people still in her next phase of existence.

Thursday Thoughts

Today is the last day of my first quarter of classes.  I've taken all my exams associated with my coursework; I have one more test, for ServSafe certification, on Saturday ... at 8am.  Who schedules an exam at that date and time, I ask you?

In any case, the academic courses were, generally, no sweat - and my concepts course was fascinating, a goldmine of intriguing information about food and associated topics.  I've always enjoyed exploring the interconnection of information - how the habitat of birds and the necessity of disguise influences the color of their eggs, for instance.

For me, the challenge was the lab course.  First of all, I have a slow physical learning curve; I'm always a bit behind everyone else.  Second of all, I was homeschooled my entire life and then took the majority of my previous college courses online.  I am not accustomed to retaining information solely from lecture format.  So suffice to say ... it was a learning experience.  I've definitely learned to take notes in greater detail.

Overall, the experience was intense, but I enjoyed it.  I love learning; I love keeping busy.  Now it's time to start applying what I've learned ...

Thursday Thoughts

Nostalgia, part two!

A couple more projects I've pondered rewriting.  Like the others, they all have their problems and their plusses.  The allure of new novels is still potent, so it may be a while, but I'm sure these ideas will materialize in some form or another, even if they're cannibalized for another project.

Conspiracy:  This was actually a series of short stories, storyline never finished, that was "published" in my Eye of Unicorn, Tongue of Dragon ezine, which was a private "subscription" (note all the quotation marks!) circulated among a small number of people.  It never quite worked the way I wanted it to - I intended people to "pay" for it (more quotes!) by submitting at least one piece in a certain period of time - but it was a good idea ... and this is off-topic, in any event.  Conspiracy followed a dissolute playboy prince and the leader of the song mages who both had problems that could be solved by each other's resources ... so even though they could barely stand each other, they decided to pretend a romance and get married.  As the story unfolds, we learn a lot more about Calina's dark past ... and two secondary characters on each "side" of the tale develop who I simply adored.

But there's one huge problem with the story:  what's wrong with an arranged marriage?  Why pretend?  I came up with a tentative worldbuild element that might explain this, but I'm still working against the expectations formed by earth's entire history.  This is probably the primary reason why I haven't tackled this already.

Blood From Stone:  This story was a journal written in "real-time" - if there was a three-day lapse between entries, I waited three days to write the next one, and I tried to finish the events of a single day *in* that day, though I think as the storyline heated up and got more complicated, I eventually found this was an impossible quantity of typing.  The basic premise was that everyone was bound to a stone embedded in their body that allows them to be monitored and harmed / disciplined by a class of sorcerers known as Lithomers.  The main character is essentially a gypsy, from a class of people who are still bound to stones, but do not have to keep them on their person ... and she is adopted by a scheming noble to enter the Lithomers.  There's a love ... polygon of some kind (her and three men) and a lot of conspiracy, complication, mythic backdrop ...

Probably the main issue with this story is the slow start and the amount of complication.  To rewrite it, I'd probably have to do a plot / scene outline and identify elements that could be cut ... and I'm sure there are a few. ... a few.  The current draft is about 160,000, which is untenable for a newbie author these days ...

Some of you are probably wondering about my Nano novel, Unnatural Causes.  (Or possibly none of you, but allow me my illusions.)  I'll chatter about that next week, but suffice it to say, I did not "win," but was thoroughly satisfied with what I did get written.

Thursday Thoughts

I've occasionally contemplated rewriting old projects.  They have fascination and appeal for me still.  I'm never sure if it's because I lucked upon - and let's face it, especially with the oldest, it probably was luck; I had no idea what I was doing as a writer - something particularly powerful or compelling, or ... just pure nostalgia.  The new is never quite as good as the old.  I've gained a lot of experience and technique, but I've lost some craziness.  I "know better" and so I've stopped making rash decisions that may turn out to be gems in the end.

Here's a few old projects I've considered rewriting:

The Cats of Mordue:  my first real novel, it was five "books," the first two of which were novella length, and the rest of which were novel length.  It was a run of cliches:  a rebellious tomboy princess, a wise old mentor, and a shadowy dark one.  But then there were the telepathic cats - I always had a soft spot for them - and the plot revolved around the mentor figure (the Mordue of the title) being kidnapped.  Later on, we find out that she and the evil overlord are siblings.  I've actually rethought the magic system and the main character's history a bit (making her an actual gladiator first), and I'm intrigued by the possibilities.

Unnamed:  This was "Nelia.doc" and it was also cliche-ridden - another tomboy, sword-wielding heroine, this one refusing to acknowledge her powers, a wise old mentor and a shadowy dark one, with no explanation of his motives or why people were opposing him.  Where it diverges is an order of warriors bonded to intelligent swords - though I'll confess that I was unduly influenced by Craig Shaw Gardner, and Paquel was something of a coward.  I added a secondary nemesis with goals that, in theory, opposed the dark one.  I did attempt (horribly) to give the dark one some motive by having him use magic surveillance, but I'd definitely ditch that.  And more family dysfunction:  one of Nelia's allies was the son of the dark one.  I really think this is a rich area for exploration, but it does lead me to considering that the resulting story should be more his than hers.  The difficult decisions end up being his.

The Sintellyn Medallion:  Here's the first time I deliberately tried to invert some cliches.  My main character is the "chosen one" ... but it's years after the pivotal events, he's become a young king due to them, and has ended up the figurehead of a political mastermind.  There is a second plotline that weaves in and out of the main plot before they converge.  There also a lot of other elements I like:  unrequited love stories, someone who chooses their life's work over romance, and - of course - political conspiracy.  But the specifics of the plot and the ultimate solution need overhaul, and with two storylines intertwined and timing interdependent, that would take a lot of work.

This post is getting long, so I'll probably post a few more later.  But you can see where I'm dealing with some sticky elements ... and why I've generally chosen to move on into the future.  Still, there's valuable and possibility to be mined from all of these.  And certainly, I've learned what not to do from the final product.

Or at least, *some* of what not to do ...

Let Me Digress ...

In my management and supervision course, it discusses two types of people when it comes to problems on the job:  opportunity thinkers, who focus on finding ways to solve the problem; and obstacle thinkers, who simply accept difficulties as the end of the story and give up.  As I thought about this concept, I decided there was an additional way to look at it.  There are two types of people:  external-problem people and internal-problem people.

When external-problem people are confronted with a problem, they attribute it to the circumstances.  In school, the class is too hard or the teacher is unfair; on the job, the boss is out to get me or the equipment is subpar.  When internal-problem people are confronted with a problem, they attribute it to themselves.  I need to try harder, come up with memory hooks, or treat the equipment more gently.

Internal-problem people are generally more likely to come up with a solution, because they believe the situation is in their hands.  They have taken responsibility for their circumstances and improving them.  It doesn't necessarily matter if their perspective is correct; a sunny disposition might just turn the unfair boss around.

However, being an internal-problem person isn't always positive, and being an external-problem person isn't always negative.  Sometimes, the equipment really does need to be replaced, and all the gentle treatment in the world only delays the inevitable breakage.  An internal-problem person may beat themselves up trying to be something else when the true solution lies elsewhere.

Probably the best compromise is to first consider if the problem is internal:  is it something that you are doing, or something in your outlook?  If an honest assessment tells you that you're doing everything you can for the problem, then it is time to look outward.  And starting with a positive attitude - and opportunity thinking - will improve your odds of solving any problem.

Thursday Thoughts

As I've been working on Unnatural Causes (the working, and probably final, title of my novel in progress), I came to a realization:  almost all of the suspects in the murder are male, whereas the detective, sidekick and victim are female.  I was instantly concerned about generalizing the genders, making the men "villains" and the women "heroes."  I considered changing the gender of one of the suspects to help balance this, and then decided not to.  I had several reasons:

The character I contemplated inverting had a history that specifically connected to his gender.  To give him a sex-change would require a complete rewrite of backstory, which also is integral to his personality and personal motives, which ... certainly, I could come up with an equivalent storyline, but it would require a fair amount of consideration and note revision.

Second, while there is gender inequality, it isn't completely black and white.  There are female suspects, and the queen is the one who ordered the investigation suppressed (forcing our heroes to step in).  I decided to emphasize this a bit by changing the motives of the guard captain, too.  There are other male characters who are allies and sympathetic.

And finally - and ultimately, what I thought was most important - is that the story isn't about "a man who" or "a woman who" - it's about "a person who" ... and I feel that to arbitrarily flip the gender of a character would subvert that.

Or maybe I'm just lazy.  Take your pick.

Thursday Thoughts

So as mentioned in a previous post, I knew from the beginning that I (likely) wouldn't finish the requisite number of words for Nanowrimo, but thought it was a valuable experience for the camaraderie and the "excuse" to focus solely on one project for a month.  With going to school full-time and working (almost) full-time, my writing time is necessarily limited, so I'm not putting must-finish pressure on myself.

Another reason I don't have my eyes fixed on the word count is because I want to do it right.  I am some cross between a plotser and a pantser; I don't plan out my plot in advance (in fact, at this point in the mystery, I don't know who the murderer will turn out to be), but I do plan the characters and world in extensive detail.  So one of my goals as I write is to trickle the information out in a way that orients the reader, sets up the personalities, introduces the victim in a way that will hopefully build sympathy for her, intimates the politics, and develops potential motives for murder, without heavy info-dumping ...

All within the first four thousand words.

Why four thousand words?  I've read in guides for mystery writing that the victim should be dead within twenty pages - which typically assumes 250 words a page.  I decided to use this as my standard, my first goal post to keep the plot on track.

And I'm almost there ...

Yes, I have a long way to go.