Mistress of the Art of Death

As some of you know, I read a fair number of mysteries on top of my speculative fare. I just finished this book, by Ariana Franklin, and overall, I very much enjoyed it.

It's set in mid-twelfth century England, a few decades after the Cadfael era and sends Adelia - a female doctor from the medical school at Salerno - as one of a pair of investigators to discern who killed four children in Cambridge ... and absolve the Jewish population, which would otherwise be profitable to the king.

The historical detail and the way it is conveyed is fantastic. It all seems to flow; I never had the sense that I was being lectured. It all feels very sharp and authentic. This extends into Adelia's perception of herself in the male world (it's pleasant to see a confident period female character who doesn't come off strident or too modern), the way disease is handled, and everyone's attempt to understand the idea of a serial killer.

I did have some significant issues with the book. What probably annoys me most as a writer is the headhopping. Franklin can't seem to stay in one character's thoughts for the duration of the scene, and it's confusing to track where she's switched without the scene breaks. It also makes it hard to tell who the main character is supposed to be when the book opens, which is not where I want to be.

More on the issue of the actual plot, a few things: I guessed the killer less than halfway through the book, so I can't think that it was very well-disguised as I stink at guesswork. ;-) I also found the romance sort of "forced" - it springs up out of nowhere. The way it's played out is entertaining, but I was sort of exasperated by the whole, "Oh, instantly when he's absolved of suspicion she's going to realize she's fallen for him," tact.

I was amused by how much it feels like "medieval CSI" without actually breaking that sense of being in-period. Really, the crime is solved by committee, and there are a handful of supporting characters who help Adelia out immensely. I appreciated this aspect - so many mysteries are lone detective, or detective + batty sidekick.

Anyhow, overall it gets my stamp of approval.

Thursday Thoughts

It's Thursday again? Where does the time go?

This past week was much more relaxing for me. Last night, I even had enough spare time to feel restless. My writing bug still seems to bite me late at night, so when I get to the hours I ought to be pondering bed, I keep squeezing myself up longer to get a little more written.

I've been writing flash fiction off quotes, both as part of F-W challenges and with some help from folks on my personal journal. The former have been 100 words + quotes; the latter, I limited myself to 200 words including the quote. Some of the shorter ones, I felt, lacked just a little bit of clarity due to skipped transitions, emotional states missed, etc - so I rounded them out. Thinking of posting them for critique when I've got a baker's dozen.

People are talking about NaNoWriMo again. I really have no idea if I'm going to do it. It will depend heavily on the progress I make with my current novels ... and whether I can complete my worldbuilding before I start. I've discovered that, while I usually write novel plots by the seat of my pants, I can't do the same thing with characters and world. I need to have a clear idea of those before I begin. (Not so much the characters - they seem to do a good job of inserting themselves when the situation calls for it.)

Pretty sure I'm going to increase my transcription rate for Journal of the Dead from two manuscript pages at a time to three. I still can't tell if rewriting from hand helps at all and it's driving me batty. I think the conclusion is going to be it worked well for this project, but in the future, I can discipline myself to edit more strenuously without re-typing everything.

Process

I just posted this on F-W, and I think it describes a part of my writing process pretty well:

Personally, I don't think my characters so much have a mind of their own as I do a lot of my thinking (and this includes plot elements) on a subconscious level. There's threads moving under what I'm doing that my brain doesn't think the lowly pilot in the cognitive area actually needs to KNOW about. So when I realize this isn't fitting or I feel that a character "wants" to do something ... it isn't the character running amok so much as it's that second author surfacing and letting me know that I'm contradicting myself.

Thursday Thoughts

Since returning from Grandfather Mountain, I've written with new vigor, despite possibly / probably having picked up a case of strep throat down there. To some extent, my own darn fault for not packing more warmly, but you expect the temperature to stay somewhat up there in summer in the south - even in the mountains.

I received a challenge on f-w.org to write a story about a light that doesn't give off light and someone who can see in complete darkness. For this I decided to take a loose interpretation of "see" and borrow an old concept of a character who (despite being perfectly able to see) never used his sense of sight, rather relying on scent - sound - touch. And interdimensional lampposts serving as beacons to travelers. It really is just a bit too much for flash fiction, and I'm fairly sure I'll write a normal-length sequel once I finish my monthly challenge (different story).

Yep, F-W does provoke a lot of writing out of me.

With regards to Journal of the Dead, I've reached the second half of Ihseye's backstory. I really wonder if the spirit comes off as dislikeable and unreasonable - and realize that's all right. There are plenty of flaws to go around in this novel.

The current scene I'm in is the scene where the headman where Rhiane is now staying delineates the heart numbers of her spirits. I don't think numerology permeates the storyline in the way I would have liked it to, but this is a fantastic scene, exploring the diaphanous nature of numerology. Note to self: add some further numerical commentary later. (Ironic that I didn't get this into the editing notes.) Rhiane doesn't really believe in it, but it works nicely for flavor.

Scylla and Charybdis, the stage is still set in New Athens. I am trying my best to make this section roughly equivalent in length to the section in Eastwood. There's a sense of mirroring in that there are more or less three incidents here (as there), but it plays out with a different flow and build, so it should be reminiscent but not (hopefully) an obvious example of, "Oh, the author is trying to compare / contrast."

By the By ...

There were no Thursday thoughts last week because I was en route to Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina and had no internet access. Also, I did absolutely no writing (though some brainstorming!) until last night when I got home.

Gasp. Horror. But there's a good reason: I was judging the harp competition at the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, and I was hoppin' the whole time.

Now it's back to the grind.

The Last Unicorn

What a lovely, wonderful, moving book.

Here there is also whimsy and child-like simplicity, and here it works, evolving from fairy tale into truth. There are passages that are simply beautiful - and make sense on a metaphorical, magical level even if they don't make sense on a literal level. It's an intriguing look at love, immortality and humanity. It manages to explore fairy-tale tropes, often with direct references, without feeling meta-fictional (at least, not for long) or losing its sense of reality.

Want my own copy.

(... library book, for those just tuned in. Did NOT steal it. ;-))

Speechless

The title of this post is the title of the story I just finished. Because I want to delve into the fantasy-writers.org monthly challenge (and hopefully another challenge) soon, I resolved to finish it, and did so yesterday ... well after 3am.

I knew the flashbacks would make it longer, but I wasn't aware how long that would be. The completed length of the story currently is about 8,600 words. It turned out that I used several points from my idea exercise, though I dropped a few. For instance, I had given my MC a necklace from an old lover she claimed was her daughter's father; in the story, I never used the necklace and the issue of the other half of her daughter's parentage is only brushed past.

I'm not totally sure of the strength of the story. I used vessels that trapped spirits could be placed into to be reborn - but how satisfying is it to be given a limited, artificial body? A reader has to believe this is worth doing, or the motive of the narrative begins to fall apart in multiple places.

One part I am very pleased with is that you don't discover until a third of the way through the story why, exactly, Nariv needs to reclaim her sword so desperately. The mystery falls into place through the flashbacks. I hope it creates dual lines of tension instead of diffusing it.

I continue to have a horrible time writing the last few paragraphs of a story. I'm never quite sure precisely where to break and how to finish on a sentence that creates a strong conclusion. I don't remember always having this problem; it seems to have developed. Maybe I'm more picky? Hope so, as the alternative is I'm getting worse ...

The Once and Future King

Yes, it took me this long to finish the next book in my classics review. I have been madly busy ... and it is a very thick book.

I remembered enjoying The Once and Future King more the first time I read it, many years ago. I'm not sure whether this is the blurring of time, or whether there is something in the book that spoke to me then that seems different now. There is a youthful (I hesitate to say childish) humor, a simplicity to the book that makes me feel removed from it now; the anachronisms were distracting, was as perhaps before, I simply accepted them. It's a thoughtful exploration, a satisfying take on ancient legend, but it just didn't hit me in the same spots.

(Now I really want to read the portions of the Mabinogion that reference Arthurian legend, having touched upon it in two retellings. Do this soon?)

I have The Last Unicorn left yet, and I hope to finish it before I depart to judge the harp competition. Considering this is NOT a 600+ page book, this might actually be doable.

Thursday Thoughts

It's July! When did that happen?

Scylla and Charybdis is exhibiting the behavior that makes novels so much fun to write - and why I'd never write events out of chronological order. I don't outline when I write a novel, but I do have a general sense of the flow, shape and some of the pieces which ought to come into play. Thus, I am always surprised and delighted when things just seem to flow naturally into the narrative that I didn't picture, fall outside those lines - but fit perfectly. Right now, I've got my main character asking for a lawyer in much the same uncertain fashion as someone squinting at the Sphinx going, "Ah, are you going to tell me a riddle before you eat me?"

I am pretty solidly convinced that I am writing science fiction like a fantasy writer, and it's not a bad thing. My sense of metaphor and description just lends itself to a very fantastic atmosphere. I am trying hard, however, to keep the science in line, as well as the science progress. For instance, I think it's not unreasonable that after centuries of having the successors of cell-phones and electronic money that some people might start having tendencies to retract from these conveniences. We haven't seen a lot of tech backlash in history yet, I think, because higher technology hasn't had sufficient time to endure to that point of exasperation.

Not much to say on Journal except that I think I need a way to speed up the rewrite. I'm not getting very far anyhow fast.

I need to finish my short story ASAP so I can a) edit the last two I completed + my intended next submission and b) start work on the fantasy-writers.org July challenge AND C) possibly be ready to write a shorter story for another on-site challenge. Not necessarily in that order.

It would be amazing if I could think of titles for either of the first two.

The Naming Braid to GUD

I just sold The Naming Braid to GUD, or the Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine (http://www.gudmagazine.com). This marks my first mainstream sale, GUD not being a speculative-fiction specific market. I am highly chuffed.

The Naming Braid, for information, is a braided (... right ...) retelling of three of the Lais of Marie de France. It springs from some of my observations about the course of the stories and how the women in them were viewed.

Thursday Thoughts

What an exhausting week this has been! I've been putting out so many fires at work (and just so busy in general) that I haven't had as much time to write as I would like.

I did manage to start the story mentioned in previous posts, even reached the first flashback. I'm having unusual trouble with names in this story - they're just not gelling. They feel too similar. By contrast, I don't really think I have a set culture feel to them ... just sort of gooing around in the fantasy territory.

Small progress in the novel projects. Within a chapter or so, Scylla and Charybdis will have made landfall on Elysium ... and I get to introduce the other cultural dimension. Of course, I've had opportunity (particularly in those recent section) to make it clear that the generalizations are averages and that different regions, planets, etc all have their own viewpoints and takes ... so it helps to avoid an inadvertent sense of being homogenous.

I'm reaching the point in Journal of the Dead where I stopped and went, "This is a stupid problem to have." To whit: I could not figure out why it would take my character most of the day to read two fairly slim books, but I needed the library to close before she got very far in book three - and she'd entered in the early morning. After doing some reality checks with people, I realized that not everyone reads that quickly and ... it's not as silly as it sounds. It still makes me snerk as a rather ridiculous thing to get hung up on.

Collection Idea

So for a while, I've been tempted to make one of my "novel" projects to write a collection of short stories. (I might even try to sell them as a collection first, though I know the places that pay money upfront for them are slim ... and most of them are looking for novella-length totals, which is way under what I'd end up with.) A large part of why I haven't put this high on my list (and anything but "top of the list" doesn't get written with novels, sadly) is because I am about two years back on story submissions and I have a log of 40+ short stories that haven't seen the light of day yet. So the last thing I need right now are more of them. (Yet I keep writing them. I'm an idiot.)

The idea is ... I have a world concept that involves three types of magic, with four disciplines within that. I also have a timeline (that needs a lot more detail - I just have "kingdom A, kingdom B" right now) that goes from pre-historic up to the equivalent of modern times, with some incorporation of rise-and-fall, growth of religion, major historical figures, etc. So I wanted to write a story following a sorcerer of each flavor of magic, set in a different era (undecided whether it would be chronological or back and forth).

A possible pay-off of this is a potential collection title is "Earth, Wind and Flesh" which is to my mind pretty cool.

But like I said - I need to come out of this with twelve more short stories like I need a hole in my head. Indeed.

New Story - Plotted

So I undertook answering the questions from the last post and came up with some interesting information ... stuff I didn't expect to use, but started to come into play as I worked on a plot outline. (Which I need for short stories, not so much for novels.) What I've ended up with is a very dark S&S story set in a manor ... I'm wavering back and forth about whether flashbacks are appropriate, especially as they're likely to make it long, but a) it seems more interesting than just narrating the information; b) everything in the past comes into play in the present and c) my short stories are always long. Why buck the trend now?

Anyhow, the questions got me thinking about story points in a whole different way, and I enjoyed that. I tried not to come up with too much of the plot until after I'd finished with the questions, to mixed results ... the two (three, if you count setting separately) wove naturally together.

New Story

So I'm working on mining my old boot camp exercises for stories again. I already have a mountain of free-writes backed up, but I'll get back to those.

Two camps ago, I did two descriptions a day (a character and a place) using the word of the day from dictionary.com. I decided to take one of each from different words and then apply to the character a series of questions a fellow writer says she uses to design her characters. I thought they were a really neat way to study a person outside-in.

I chose my character desc easily; there's one I really love. From that, I decided I wanted sort of an S&S/action story, and to avoid what might be obvious, an indoor/urban setting. I ended up with the following two:

She was wiry, sparse, a collection of attenuated muscles strung taut over thin bone. One part warrior, one part scarecrow, daubed in the colors of decay: leaf-mold brown hair, turned-earth skin, pallid grey eyes. Most of the time, she kept her head down and her voice soft – but the grave-chill she could summon when roused would daunt even the fiercest of challengers.

The foyer of the estate swept outwards into the main hall, a hardwood-paneled expanse three floors high. Balconies rimmed the chamber, their bars cages around the many doors. Light stabbed down from a single circular window in the ceiling. The marble staircase pooled, the final steps oozing into the floor - which gleamed, pearl-flesh, like a zealous merchant baring his teeth.

At this point, I decided the setting needed three questions to go along with the character. So my questions are:

What are they wearing?
How do they feel about what they are wearing?
What do they have in their pockets (or about their person, ready say, in case of a werewolf attack?)

Who lives here?
How do they feel about it?
What doesn’t fit?

From this, I should be able to get a good spark for a plot ... whoo.

Thursday Thoughts

My prime concern about Journal of the Dead right now is the story-within-stories. These are interludes explaining how the individual spirits who travel with Rhiane ended up being sentenced to death. They're long for internal tales, but wouldn't be considered lengthy if taken as separate short works. There are five spirits and six stories: Ihseye's is broken into two somewhat shorter chunks.

One concern is they start fairly early into the journal. I waffle back and forth as to whether this is a problem since the reader will have just come out of third person (the chapter section), or whether it works better because it builds on that expectation.

Overall, I've decided that I'm justified having these interludes because:

1. They provide character flavor and color; rather than info-dumping the spirits' backgrounds, you really get to meet them AND (again) half of them turn out to have plot relevance. I hope the first time the reader runs into a reference to something they saw in the sidestories, they'll keep their eyes peeled for more.
2. There's precedent. I point to American Gods, which has long interludes, earlier in the book than my first digression -- not to mention that none of these interjections, while they are flavorful, have any direct bearing on the plot.

On a more cynical note, the interludes are far enough into the manuscript that by the time an editor sees them, they'll be looking at the whole tamale, and I don't think even if they ARE a problem, it's weak / significant enough to bring down the whole work.

In regards to Scylla and Charybdis, I am currently having some mental disconnect because I'm reading the fourth book of the Mabinogion Tetralogy - the one involving the mythological Gwydion - while writing about my Gwydion, and they couldn't be more different. The name was originally chosen as an homage; when I was writing the SaC short story, I wanted a mythological manly-man to contrast to my Amazons. I went for Welsh because ... I like Welsh. My intellectual decision-making for stories only goes so far!

I suppose I could have named him Pwyll.

I'm a trifle concerned about this warlord's assistant who is ... well, pursuing Anaea. His sudden attention feels a bit thin. On the other hand, it's a point I'm trying to illustrate about the society, that those at his level are accustomed to having what they want, and that leads to a fair number of frivolous impulses chased down with unnecessary intensity.

I finished the form story about dancing, btw. It is a universal not-hit - but it did get written.

Mythology

Frustrated at my lack of progress with writing (specifically selling) lately, I made the following comment:

"I feel like Penelope with that stupid tapestry."

The sad thing is, my listener understood what I meant.

Thursday Thoughts

Not much more to report on the two novel projects: they're lumbering along. I've been pretty consumed with a harp workshop that I'll be giving this time next month, getting the music and handouts prepared and trying to excise a rhythmic inaccuracy that I slowly learned in one of the tunes. Speaking of harp ...

Also working on a short story that was based on a "worst day on the job" prompt. I always feel as if I'm too clinical when writing about harpers. I never ramble on, but the flavor and detail, to me, don't seem as if they're interesting - from the inside of my head, I'm more likely to feel I'm showing off. Reader reaction to the last story where I did this was that the bits and pieces worked and flowed well ... I think it's just that I'm inherently self-conscious of something that's, "Been there, done that," to me.

Servant of Winter

Hey, it's up!

I feel rather sheepish for missing it, but my poem is up at Silver Blade:

http://www.silverblade.net/issue3/poetry3.html

This was the first villanelle I wrote, and it wasn't done in poetic form initially. It was part of my 3am Epiphany "boot camp" and the assignment was to write a brief prose piece that used the elements of a villanelle. In fact, this was the first time I'd ever even heard of the form.

I recast it as a poem and started submitting it. I spent some time wrangling with another editor who decided not to accept it, and I did change some of the things he requested back - but the final version was much stronger, I think, and much thanks to his suggestions.

The Mabinogion Tetralogy

Two of my books arrived early this week and I promptly picked them up. I was briefly intimidated by the size of the Mabinogion Tetralogy, a mid-sized hardcover book of over seven hundred pages - but it being four books, this seemed not unreasonable, and I decided that I would feel free to stop if I didn't connect with the first book.

I was intrigued by the archaic style and the formalized, sweeping grandeur of the dialogue - and yet not entirely sure, to what percentage, the tone could be put to the subject matter, the period in which it was written, or the author's individual tastes. Certainly the feel of the original work is much present, though with other legends woven into it such that an entire universe stands behind the book.

One tendency I noticed seems to be a product of the times - I also spotted it in Jirel of Joiry and to some extent in the Harold Shea stories. Fantastic elements (particularly those of the otherworld, in this case) are presented vividly, almost surreally, with little attempt to explain their presence. Not that they seem off-kilter or out of place, but a modern fantasist would have to give some nod to how the monster subsists when there aren't mortals wandering through to eat, etc. There's an attitude of it, "This works. Just have faith in it," and ... to flout all the advice given to worldbuilders nowadays, it does.

An element that disappointed me, though again I can't tell to which of the three aforesaid influences to attribute it, is how "distant" the POV is. I didn't feel very engaged with Pwyll as a character; the (first) novel keeps you a good distance outside of his head.

I don't entirely know what to make of the heavy elements of goddess worship. That they may be suited to the historical period is outside my expertise to argue; they certainly don't feel inauthentic in that regard. I am less sure whether they are valid in view of the Mabinogion, or if they are not, if the stories can / should be interpreted as such. It doesn't seem an unreasonable projection into the storyline, but I'm not sold on it.

All that notwithstanding, however, I think I am going to press on and read the books that follow. I'm intrigued to see what Evangeline Walton does with the rest of the Mabinogion.

Thursday Thoughts

Today is also the goal-setting day for a group I'm part of, and I came to an interesting realization: the only time I've missed or fallen shy of a goal was when I made a conscious decision to switch my focus for something more important. (Or my computer crashed with the latest edit of the story I was trying to post on it. Le sigh.) This week it was a requested revision from a top-tier market. I'm still not totally sure that I managed to work enough in-depth changes to satisfy the request, but I reached the point where I didn't want to do more because it might cause problems in another direction. So - you make a judgement call.

I ran into a small plot issue with Journal of the Dead which I resolved by re-casting some of a scene and putting in another time break. My next chunk involves two fairly involved dialogue insertions / revisions.

I notice that I have some tense jumps in Journal, which I've decided to leave. Because it is a journal, there are patches where the narrator would naturally discuss thoughts / confusions in a more immediate fashion. I've kept these to specific, distinct chunks and not allowed there to be hops when there's story going on. That should minimize the confusion and make the tense shifts feel natural rather than in error.

I ran into an odd issue with Scylla and Charybdis: so far, Anaea and Gwydion have solved all their problems by spinning falsehoods. Now, honestly, this is pretty much the only resource they have available to them, but it still becomes a little repetitive. I've taken conscious effort to re-cast the other two encounters in this part of the story so they are more direct and face-value. (This also fits the theme of the society they're moving through.)

I remain oddly amused that this particular segment of the novel had me googling "Jewish entrance scrolls" because I couldn't remember the word mezuzah for the life of me, and I stupidly didn't write the term down. I hope Anaea's religious cynicism isn't off-putting, but I have to keep in mind as I'm working how foreign all this is to her. She's sort of an untrained anthropologist.

Form and Function

So right now, I wonder if I'm biting off more than I can chew.

Looking at the monthly challenge for fantasy-writers.org, I waffled back and forth about whether to attempt it. Then I thought a flash fiction piece, a nice, succinct description of two quasi-elemental forces dancing - that would be fun to do. To give it more structure, and to imitate the way formal dance constantly comes back to where it started, I thought of using a looped sentence structure.

But then I decided that the dance ought to be between inspiration and tradition ... and with that, you can't just stick to the fixed form. Now I have ideas of starting fixed, then tossing in a few unfixed paragraphs - then having the last sentence in the story contain the initial word, but continue onwards for another part-phrase.

If I do this right, both the story content and form will play out the tension between structure and freeform. If I do it wrong, it'll be a big bloody mess.

We'll see, I suppose!

Reading List

A recent post on fantasy-writers.org brought my attention to some of the more classic fantasy novels ... and in the case of the one I'm reading right now, novellas. I'm currently meandering through The Complete Compleat Enchanter, a compilation of the long-shorts by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt from the 1940s. I'm enjoying the experience and "feeling out" the conventions of the era, so I decided to keep at it.

I could have reserved a good dozen books, but decided to stick with three to start because I don't know what my reading time is going to be like ... and one of these is four books in one. The ones I marked:

The Mabinogion Tetralogy - Evangeline Walton, because I'm in love with the Welsh mythos and would love to see how this retelling plays out.

The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle, because I have no idea why I didn't read this years ago. Honestly? There is no excuse. I should be in chains.

The Once And Future King - T.H. White, which I actually have read, but it was a very long time ago ... but I remember enjoying it, hence its re-addition here. The reason I had to reserve it is because I cannot find my copy. Anywhere. Argh.

This will all start after I finish another book which I found while looking for The Once And Future King and have always meant to read: I just found my copy of Machiavelli's The Prince.

Thursday Thoughts

Since I've just hit paged 17 of 170 in my Journal of the Dead printed manuscript, I'm - actually less than a tenth of the way through, as there are no more partial pages after the journal begins. Still, to think that almost ten percent of the story is in third person before the switch is startling. It's a necessary move; hope I can overcome when I get to querying and submitting.

I'm beginning to worry that Scylla and Charybdis is too heavy on the worldbuilding and description. The issue is simply that everywhere Anaea goes, even the most basic things are brand-new to her. I have to paint the picture along with her reaction, while still propelling the plot forward - and then to make things more glumpy, it would be pretty low of Gwydion not to explain things to her since he's standing right there. However, in many respects, this exploration / discovery IS the plot. I think of this as primarily a setting story (unusual for me) followed closely by character. The more formalized plot structure is a distant third.

It may be simply that I'm unused to a setting that is front and center, so my mental sense of the ratio is off. Time will tell.

Speaking of time, I'm having the curious sense of deja vu. Did I complain about this same issue before?

Instructions For An Initiate

This one was a long ... long ... LONG haul! but my flash fiction story Instructions For An Initiate, an experiment in second person imperative (that is, rather than being told as if "you" were a specific MC, it's told as if an invisible narrator were issuing commands) has SOLD! (sold ... sold ...) to Golden Visions magazine.

Now for the walk of gravity-defying ceiling scuffery.

Thursday Thoughts

If I just relax and stop trying to pace myself, Scylla and Charybdis seems to work much better. I have some rough patches as to how long the journey is supposed to take - it turns out that the way I built hyperspace and the sub-light distances between corridors, the exploratory mission I was picturing as a long-term thing couldn't have taken more than ten days to get to the vicinity of Themiscyra. Wow.

Ironically, the main reason I've made hyperspace travel-time so short is I don't want to leave my two characters in the shuttle for ages because I have less pretext for him not to tell her everything he can think of ... and that makes my novel boring. Help, I'm adjusting my setting in accordance with narrative necessity!

Journal of the Dead - I am pretty much convinced that the new-file rewrite was worth it, though I wonder when in the world this novel will finally be ready to face the world. I thought I would be totally done by May - June. Fall? If I say certainly before the end of the year, I may jinx myself.

Squee!

The website for the World Fantasy Convention 2010 has just gone up and ... the topic is whimsical fantasy. I am so excited! Add to that the fact that it's in Columbus, which means my travel expenses are down to a tank of gas ... still far enough away that I'll need a hotel room, but I don't think lodging in Columbus is that expensive.

I am thinking of buying my membership in October this year, because there's no way I'm NOT going and it's $25 less before Nov '09.

Thursday Thoughts

Scylla and Charybdis spatial progress update - now in hyperspace. I'm not real proud of the mechanism I use for hyperspace as I think it's pretty stock ... but it's not an element that's terribly important to the story, so I mainly just needed something that would work for quick travel without getting in the way of the rest of the setting. I am enjoying the weird little pseudo-mystic quirks I've added to the experience - and the fact that ships use mechanical clocks because there's no way to track galactic positioning from hyperspace.

Journal of the Dead - first edit begun! So far, I would say the process of rewriting into a clean file has paid off. I've felt much more free to change awkward phrases or cut redundant information. I feel more in control of when I need to add things, too. I'm still not totally happy with Parik's accidental death in the first chapter, but it is less forced. I think I've probably taken it about as far as I can until I get a fresh set of eyes on it.

I had briefly pondered cutting the chapter section and skipping ahead to the journal, but I think that seeing the process that leads Rhiane up to her rebirth is really important ... and that has to start with her son.

Short stories - I seem to be incapable of writing a short story right now that isn't long, epic and blathery. Have finished several in succession over 7000 words. One of them I think may become a series, if I ever get through my backlog of unfinished free writes. The idea of fantasy time travel is a great one, I love the two characters I've come up with - and it's an interesting way to explore clashing viewpoints and just ... well, settings. Which is an obsession of mine.

Surfacing ...

This past weekend was insane, and I'm still recuperating.

One of my former harp students, Christina, got married this weekend, and I played harp for her. Also came to the rehearsal (which I don't always) and was invited to the rehearsal dinner and reception. It's so nerve-racking to play for someone you've taught - the urge to be perfect has never been stronger. I'm not, of course, but I think I did as well I could have while still keeping one eye on the aisle.

Christina also had a Korean tea ceremony as part of her wedding - since her husband-to-be's family was Korean. I was really looking forward to this, and I found it an intriguing custom. Watching the ritual was a treat, and I happened to have a front row seat (as I was playing - again). I alternated between a few Eastern pieces which I learned for the occasion and two Celtic pieces that sounded less Western.

And the difference between the musical modes? Very stark. I was very leery of arranging the Korean tune, Ari Rang, because I didn't want to make it sound Celtic with the accompaniment. The other tune, Wen Ti, I played the arrangement out of my book - but it looks as if all the tunes in said book are arranged the same way, with the accompaniment simply being the melody a few beats behind. So I may not be able to get much more arrangement help out of it.

Also played Eleanor Plunkett, which is an Irish tune, but pentatonic and ends on the fifth chord. This makes it sound less conventional. Ridee 6 Temps was a Breton tune and ... I don't know, it just sounds very foreign and exotic.

Anyhow, after this, my Sunday was a double-session at the same location: 11am-1pm, then 5:30pm-7:30pm. Because of my poor little puppy, I had to come back between, so the round-trip mileage ran 127 miles (a little under 45 mins each way). Now, I hate driving this part of town - I wouldn't be surprised if the roads are the worst in the Cincinnati area. It also requires a little driving on I-75, which is a similarly deplorable stretch of highway. On the upside, I love the venue and wish it were closer: the people are very nice, there's always little kids who stop and ogle the harp (which is adorable), I get lots of compliments.

Sunday, I got so many comments in the second session that I felt like it interrupted the flow of the music. Good news, bad news?

Anyhow, combine with the fact that I haven't slept right since last Thursday night? I am waking up feeling dragged out. Haven't recovered yet.

Thursday Thoughts

Editing mark-ups for Journal of the Dead - complete! That means I have only one more step on this first edit, but it's the most time-consuming: the actual rewrite.

Sometimes I think my subconscious looks out for me. I just wish it would tell my conscious mind it was doing so! I spent a lot of time angsting over a particular plot turn - an incriminating document. I got to one of the last scenes and I realized ... I'd already built in a way around it without even realizing it. So I went back and crossed out a few of my frantic scrawls. Not needed, after all.

Scylla and Charybdis: by the end of this chapter, my two main characters will be off the space station! Break out the champagne.

Working on another F-W challenge story and sincerely hoping this one goes better than the last one.

Anatomy of an Idea: In These Shoes

I actually don't recall the thought process behind most of this story: unlike most of mine, it mainly developed in the writing. I got to a certain point, I made a decision, I kept going ... there are two or three twists in the tale that I really enjoyed creating.

However, I can remember how the whole thing got started, and that was with an exercise from The 3AM Epiphany. The exercise was (I think) to reveal information about a person or history through a piece of clothing. I chose a shoe, and the six hundred words I wrote (later pared down) much later became the opening of this story.

This story made its first stop at Sword & Sorceress last year - I wonder that the editor (if she paid attention to these things) doesn't think I'm obsessed with assassins, given my first submission this year. On the other hand, it's more likely I've been labeled as obsessed with arctic environments: three, count them, three to that market alone. There's probably a little truth to that. On the other hand, I write plenty of non-arctic stories, those just happen to be the ones inclined in the sword and sorcery direction.

As anyone who knows me ... well, knows ... I stink at titles. Ergo I sort of slapped "In These Shoes?" on it as I was writing in reference to a Kirsty MacColl song. Unfortunately, it kept sticking because I couldn't think of anything better. I lost the question mark early on, but title is now final.

This has always been one of my favorites. I have a soft spot in my heart for the action combined with a very (I hope) emotional core.

In These Shoes

Me again - In These Shoes is now available over at Staffs and Starships! More about this later ...

Sojourn

I just finished Jana Oliver's Sojourn - and boy, was that a fun read! I very much recommend this book (and in fact, after writing this more detailed review, I'm off to add a shorter one to my website). Jacynda, a Time Rover, travels back to Victorian London in search of a missing tourist - even as Jack the Ripper roams the streets. She encounters two men with very different motives and one thing in common: they are Transitives, or shapeshifters.

Now, first off, I just have to admire the skill it takes to combine these two elements. Here are two very different types of outsiders - visitors from the future versus a secret society of shapechangers - which seem, in tone / feel, to be incompatible. But they blend together, and they work, and maybe it's partly the setting, but ... well done. Second off, here is a great example of how to do multiple points of view well. Watching the characters mutually keep their own secrets and gnaw at the others' is great fun. Way more fun than not knowing.

Book is not without areas where I quibbled - I thought a bit too much time was spent on Cynda's timelag. I also thought there were a few too many loose ends left undone. I did, however, appreciate that one of those loose ends was the romantic subplot. I've got to admit, this is partly because the character who was fairly apparently intended to "win" in the triangle was my lesser favorite of the two. Don't get me wrong, Alastair is a great character; but he annoyed me at times, whereas I pretty consistently just wanted to hug Jonathon to death.

None of this really marred my enjoyment of Sojourn. The emotional pitch was excellent - there were bitter moments were I just kind of lowered the book and went, "Awwwh." No, I actually verbalized an "awwwh," which I honestly can't remember doing before. I also liked how there were so many small events going on in the book, and yet it was unquestionably a cohesive whole.

Anyhow, I definitely will be looking to get my hands on Virtual Evil. I don't suppose Dragon Moon will have released it as a paperback? I really hate having to lug around trades ... even though this is one of the prettiest examples of such I've seen in a while. Yes, folks, even the cover is pretty darn awesome.

Mutual Links

Just added two links from authors who have linked to me: K.E. Spires, who shares the table of contents with me in Staffs and Starships (first publication, huzzah!) and Sarah Ashwood from Fantasy-Writers.org. Sarah has had an exciting while with a poetry chapbook (... am I using the right word?) publication and a novel forthcoming.

Thursday Thoughts

This is late because I intended to post yesterday and ... my desktop crashed. No motion. Not sure whether it's dead or just a minor problem. Got someone working on it.

Anyhow, this makes the progress of the past week somewhat ironic: I spent almost all of it working on a story meant for the fantasy-writers.org monthly challenge. The story ran extremely long; Tuesday evening, I finished it an immediately started editing it with an eye for cuts.

Probably the story strictly didn't need to be as long as it was ... but I had decided when I started that I really wanted to immerse readers in the main character's head and explore her problems, so I wasn't going to skimp on flavor elements. I think this is part of why I'm a novelist at heart: I much prefer to explore a situation, immerse in it, rather than carve a straight path through a plot.

I did finish; I was almost done editing. Unfortunately, I was about an hour and a half away from when I usually do my nightly spot backup ... so the progress from about 1:30am Thursday morning to 6pm Thursday evening is - not gone, but trapped. I know the harddrive can be restored if the machine is truly trashed, so I'm leaving the story on there until then.

Still a demoralizing dropout. Grar.

Squee!

The Best of Abyss and Apex, Vol One is now available - with my story, Hour By Hour! Check it out:

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Abyss-Apex-One/dp/0981924301/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240406650&sr=8-1

Glad to see the anthology out and about. And I still maintain it's one of the most awesome covers ever. Pity you can't see the back cover - it shows a knight with the spaceman reflected in his helm. (So basically a reverse of the front.)

Thank You For The Days

This collection of songs differs from my previous "Day by Day" in that it's less about seasons and time as specific references to days (and nights). The title refers to a line from the final song on here, going thusly: "Thank you for the days: those endless days, those sacred days you gave me ..."

1. A New Day Has Come - Celine Dion
2. Titanic Days - Kirsty MacColl
3. I See Hope - Midge Ure
4. Always Tomorrow - Gloria Estefan
5. This Night - Dian Diaz
6. It's A Beautiful Day - Sarah Brightman
7. Tell Me On A Sunday - Andrew Lloyd Weber soundtrack; Sharon Campbell
8. One Night Only - Dreamgirls soundtrack
9. Everyday - Anne Murray
10. Yesterday - Sarah Brightman
11. Mysterious Days - Sarah Brightman (another case of bad mixing - but again, the songs are wildly different)
12. One Of These Days - Michell Branch
13. Lazy Days - Enya
14. Poor Little Fool - Helen Reddy
15. Ten Days - Celine Dion
16. Last Day Of Summer - Kirsty MacColl
17. 8th World Wonder - Kimberley Locke
18. Save The Day - Thalia
19. Days - Kirsty MacColl

... aaaaand there it is. My token repeated song is "Tell Me On A Sunday." Whoops. Oddly, it always seem to be in the latter half of the CDs, even though I don't MAKE them in alphabetical order. So it's not fatigue ...

Loyal Dice

Loyal Dice - my Pazia prequel story - just sold to Darwin's Evolutions! I'm stoked to see it printed in the same venue. I'm also very glad of the quick response when I've been in a pretty terrible mood.

Witch High - ed. Denise Little

(Another one of Lindsey's insanely long anthology summaries. Run.)

The description - and a very entertaining introduction by Denise Little - makes this sound like a shared world anthology: the setting is described as the same fictional highschool. So of course, I am wondering if there's any crossover between characters … but I suspect that it's merely to provide a loose common framework.

I didn't find "Domestic Magic" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch a promising beginning. This is the tale of a young highschool student, blessed or cursed with domestic-based magic, who dreams that her old nemesis is burning up kids in the cafeteria. While the premise of someone whose magic has domestic capabilities is a clever one, and I enjoyed the use of prophecy and dreams in the story, I thought it suffered from two flaws. First, there seemed no reason to use first person present tense and it was distracting. (This is certainly personal: I don't find it works unless there there is a compelling reason for it - the story is being told in motion, the narration is alien in some way, etc.) Second, the use of severe torture didn't seem to fit the tone- even considering that it dealt with some dark subject matter, that particular turn made it difficult for me to grasp the story as a cohesive whole. Overall, it just didn't work for me.

Okay, I'm biased: I love Laura Resnick's sense of humor, and "Temporal Management" was a delicious and funny adventure for me. This is the story of a (too clever) student who decides to cook up some temporal magic to get through her heavy courseload. Besides the humor of the underlying story, there are lots of small tidbits throughout that are also laugh-out-loud. This is a smart, entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable story. No complaints. (Boy, when was the last time I said THAT in a review?)

Phaedra M. Weldon offers "Boil and Bubble," which, apart from having a tenuous connection to its title - I swear the phrase was inserted into the story to justify said title - was an excellent read, turning from touches of mystery to an intriguing revelation. Kyle is invited to join the illustrious Omega Society, a mysterious organization that brings in one student a year. This story was paced perfectly and had a good sense of fair play without being an easy guess. My only objection is that conclusion had some awkward obscurity, and it raised questions about how a first person narrator would be able to tell a complete story under the circumstances.

I had some trouble with "Chemistry 101" by Pamela Luzier, the story of a young fire-witch, her crush on a boy, and adventures in chemistry class. Now, I was homeschooled and I never went through a boy-crazy phase, so I may have a skewed perspective, but though I felt sympathy for the character, the narration was so heavy with highschool idiom and the character's youth that I had difficulty enjoying it. That said, there is a cute concept here about fire powers, and you really do feel for Kenina's awkwardness.

Christina F. York provides "A Perfect Ten," the first third-person story in this anthology - involving the school's cheerleading squad and one girl's concern that the lead athlete is somehow cheating with magic. The first scene - and bits of the others - were so girl-clique that I had trouble reading them. I think a little goes a long way in that regard. It settles out, however, and I really liked the main character's guy-pal. Unfortunately, the mystery in the story was way too obvious, removing much of the tension because I could see what was coming a mile away.

Jody Lynn Nye's "Another Learning Experience" is another first: a story from the point of view of a teacher … or in this case, guidance counselor who fell into the role after a history of unrepentant prank-playing. I thought the setup was light and entertaining, and I loved the story's underlying message. However, I thought that the way the character's initial conversion (from hating her job to loving it) was described leaned on the pat side - too quick. This may have been to the better, as the story seemed to end abruptly, with a relatively brief mini-conflict (and a name mistake that should have been caught in copy-editing). Because I enjoyed the first half so much, I wanted more from it.

I had great fun with Sarah Zettel's "A Family Thing." The narrator strives to rescue her friend from the clutches of her grandmother, the Black Forest Witch, who would sweep her granddaughter away to Germany to follow in her footsteps. This story has a delightful use of traditions and bloodlines - both magical and technological - and takes some unique turns. The narrator has a strong and sympathetic voice while still being a convincing teenager. My only small quibble is I thought the element that provided the final solution was perhaps just a little underplayed earlier in the story.

Debra Dixon's "Coyote Run" is an entertaining tale of a girl searching for her familiar - and finding a dark and dangerous creature in the process. This story had an intriguing premise and a sympathetic main character … and I particularly liked how a few pieces of jewelry were incorporated into the story. This was a boy-pining character who came off convincing without being irritating. It is told with long first person sections, interspersed with briefer third person sections in another POV - once I got used to this, it flowed nicely, but I'm not sure the second narrator actually added anything. Overall, the story felt too short: there were pieces (particularly the conclusion) that seemed shortened, slighted or not fleshed out.

By now, I'm starting to get the sense that there were some basic groundrules laid down for this school by the editor. I've identified a few minor elements in different stories that could be argued are mutually exclusive, but you could make a decent case for this all occurring in the same setting. Cool!

Esther Friesner is a goddess. "You Got Served" is just more proof of this. This is a frothy concoction about the woman holding the worst job in a school of magic-wielding hooligans: the lunch-lady. The humor is bright, clever and peppered with grin-worthy moments, and the denouement was delightful (if just a little too easy in one respect). I also appreciated the vivid depiction of a character who just wanted to be a chef.

I was riveted by Bill McCay's "Remedial Magic," the second truly serious tale in this anthology. Saranne comes into her own as a magic user when her mother succumbs to cancer and fades into a coma. This story strikes just the right notes for being sorrowful without being a downer, and I became truly invested in the character early on. My quibble is that I didn't see the connection between the narrator's apparent talent of sucking magic away and what her gift is eventually revealed to be.

From Pauline J. Alama comes "Homecoming Crone," an entertaining story about two outsiders who bond together to defeat the clique known only as the Wickeds. So being picked on by the popular girls and deciding to thwart them in turn is really old hat - but the other elements in this story, including the family lineages, power effects, and the significance of Homecoming, were applied in interesting and engaging ways. Maria and Holly were definitely characters to cheer for.

It took me this long to realize that the vast majority of these stories are told from the female POV. (Yeah, I know.) Is this in response / rebuttal to the Harry Potter phenomenon? Either way, I would have liked to see more magical football jocks and boy problems. However, I also noticed that all but one of the authors were female, which would partly explain the spread.

Karen Fox's "Late Bloomer" suffered a little from its placement in the anthology - while the main character's crush is cute, it feels a bit stale after several other variants of the same thing. I think if I read the story out of context, I would have enjoyed this aspect more. Luckily, the story of Abbi, the only student in school who has no apparent magical talent, has other things to recommend it. Her struggles to fit in are engaging, and even though I saw her eventual power coming about halfway through the story, the anticipation just enhanced it. This is a sweet, fun tale.

"The Price of Gold" by Sarah A. Hoyt got off to a rough start, but it drew me in with an intriguing situation, a unique talent and a lovely conclusion. Interesting contrast from the previous story, this one follows the girl who has too much magic and is ostracized because of it. She sets herself to the task of finding a missing student, son of two wealthy and influential sorcerers … who appears to have no magic himself. My issue with the opening of this tale is that the first scene (and to a lesser extent, the second scene) felt less like the narrator's thought process as someone standing above her explaining things. Other than that, nicely done.

The final story, "The House" by Diane Duane is clever with an entertaining conclusion. Unfortunately, the charming details of spellcraft, cookcraft and humor are somewhat lost to the length of the tale. Done wrong by her would-be parascience partner Arthur, Brianna cooks up - literally - an idea to recreate a certain famous fairytale house. I did appreciate the fact that this story didn't have the expected romantic subplot; it was a nice subversion at the end of the anthology.

To sum up, there are four stories I thought really shined: "Temporal Management," "Boil and Bubble," "You Got Served" and "Remedial Magic." I thought that none of the stories were really disappointing - they were all at least readable. You do get a sense that all this could have occurred in the same school, which is nicely done for fourteen authors who don't seem to have a detailed world handbook. I'm still disappointed there weren't more guy-student stories. I also noticed that the first person / third person stories were badly divided - the book was almost straight down the middle. Still, even though the anthology started and ended weak, it delivered a lot of good stories overall. Worth a read, maybe not in the order the editor intended.

A Message On My Machine

This tune collection is probably the one where the songs have the least direct connection to a/the theme. It was originally conceived as a collection of songs invoking telephones and phone calls. However, when I chose to title it from Caroline ("She called me up the other day and left a message on my machine ...") I decided to expand it to letters and other forms of long distance communication. Ergo:

1. Caroline - Kirsty MacColl
2. Take It From My Heart - Anne Murray
3. There Is Nothing Like A Dame - South Pacific soundtrack
4. Misbehavin' - Thalia
5. A New England - Kirsty MacColl
6. Dr. Beat - Gloria Estefan
7. Disappear - Sahlene
8. Telefone - Sheena Easton
9. X-Girlfriend - Mariah Carey
10. Emotion - Helen Reddy
11. Drops of Jupiter - Train
12. Hotel Paper - Michelle Branch
13. I Enjoy Being A Girl - Flower Drum Song soundtrack
14. Still Within The Sound of My Voice - Linda Ronstadt
15. What Do Pretty Girls Do? - Kirsty MacColl
16. Catch My Breath - Helen Reddy
17. Catch You - Sophie Ellis-Bextor
18. Tell Me On A Sunday - Andrew Lloyd Weber sampler; Sharon Campbell
19. You Can't Treat The Wrong Man Right - Linda Ronstadt
20. Sex in the Nineties - Gloria Estefan
21. Guess You Had To Be There - Helen Reddy

Thursday Thoughts

Eeep! I forgot my Thursday thoughts!

I've noticed that I've been making a lot of cross-notes through my Journal of the Dead edits - flipping back and forth and forth and back to remind myself to lay groundwork for this or come back to that. This wouldn't have been possible without the outline. I am hoping it will also come in handy when I go to write a synopsis, allowing me to perhaps cut down to the essence of the storyline.

Almost to the departure juncture in Scylla and Charybdis ... way longer than I expected it to take, but I'm on the downhill slope to it. I'm not sure if the scene in the infirmary that I'm writing right now feels forced. I'm still pleased with the emotional timbre I'm striking - I hope that will hold up when I get to the editing phase.

Longer remarks next week. I'm tired!

I've Had Enough

Fourth CD reached, "I've Had Enough" - a collection of songs about people just too frustrated to put up with their other half any further. I suppose this is similar to "Good Riddance," but seeing as that was part of the very first batch of these I burned ... surely I can be forgiven? (And in a couple cases, these songs really wouldn't have fit the other theme.) The title is a line from This Time: "This nightmare is not fair, and I've had enough."

Some shaping here: the first song starts with the question - how far do I have to go? - and ends on a much softer note - "Deceive me, hurt and mislead me, all that I wish you is love."

1. How Far - Martina McBride
2. No Second Chance - Blackmore's Night
3. I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor
4. Strong Enough - Cher
5. Hit The Road, Jack - Helen Reddy (version)
6. I Do - Lisa Loeb
7. Big Boy On A Saturday Night - Kirsty MacColl
8. Isobel - Dido
9. Can't Go Back - Sissel
10. Bad - Kirsty MacColl
11. Move - Dreamgirls soundtrack
12. This Time - Celine Dion
13. Bye Bye - Alana Davis
14. Who The Hell Are You - Emma Bunton
15. You're So Vain - Carly Simon
16. Nah! - Shania Twain
17. Wrong - Kimberly Locke
18. Loser - Sahlene
19. Refuse To Dance - Celine Dion
20. Not That Kind of Girl - Paulina Rubio
21. Get Over You - Sophie Ellis-Bextor
22. I Wish You - Gloria Estefan

Kudos for Fatecraft

Courtesy of a fellow writer who seems to be much better with the grapevine than I am, here's a post from bookspotcentral.com about my recent story publication:

http://www.bookspotcentral.com/2009/04/maria%E2%80%99s-ephemeral-finds-fantasy-worlds/

Thursday Thoughts

I was feeling rather bleak and hopeless: another failure at the pro level, and this time on something I was pretty sure would go through.

Then I received an acceptance from Silver Blade for one of my poems: Servant of Winter. This was my very first villanelle, an unrhymed piece that was actually done as a boot camp exercise. I'm very pleased with it. I had a back-and-forth with another editor who wanted the imagery more vivid, but ultimately, the numbness was a crucial factor to the poem for me. I'm glad to find a venue that agrees. Also! Another poem publication. I'm a poet. No, really!

The ups and downs of the last few days have left me in a strange state. I can't quite seem to pull myself out of general malaise, and I feel strange for reacting stoically to successes that would normally have me grinning. Perhaps I'm just a pessimist at heart: the failures matter, the successes don't.

It's Not That Far

CD collection #3 - reached!

This one is collection of songs about the state of the world. The title comes from Walking Down Madison and the line repeats several times, one of which is, "From the sharks in the penthouse to the rats in the basement ... it's not that far ..." This whole song has some really fantastic lyrics, however depressing.

1. Love Is All We Need - Celine Dion
2. Straight To The Point - Carrie Newcomer
3. Close My Eyes - Gloria Estefan
4. One After 909 - Helen Reddy
5. A Little Good News - Anne Murray
6. Building A Mystery - Sarah McLachlan
7. Breathe - Midge Ure
8. Always Tomorrow - Gloria Estefan
9. Something To Believe In - Sarah Brightman
10. Walk This World - Heather Nova
11. What's Forever For - Anne Murray
12. Higher - Gloria Estefan
13. There's Got To Be A Way - Mariah Carey
14. Book of Days - Enya
15. Walking Down Madison - Kirsty MacColl
16. Nobody Home - Amy Grant
17. Is Anybody There? - 1776 soundtrack (Brent Spiner)
18. What About The Love? - Amy Grant
19. Weight Of The World - Chantal Kreviazuk

Small shuffling issue, I suppose, with the two Amy Grant songs so close together, but they're sufficiently different that it's not a huge deal.

Anatomy of an Idea: Fatecraft

This is one of my favorite stories as far as how an idea came together for me.

So I had sent Soul Siblings (see below) to Black Gate - and got an encouraging rejection from the editor. The one comment he did have was that he simply saw too many stories about assassins. So, having heard that the best way to catch an editor's eye is to respond to criticisms within a couple weeks with something that addressed them ... I decided to write a story about characters who had unusual professions.

Now, I already had a daserii or dicemaker character who I happened to enjoy a great deal - I'm still trying to sell her original story. After some thought, I decided that someone who did clockwork would be interesting - but what in the world kind of plot would require those two sets of skills?

Fighting to work this out had me come up with the idea of villains who wanted to make a very powerful set of dice out of fatestone. And to keep the fatestone out of their hands (initially), I put it behind a massively complex clockwork gate. I ran into a number of other problems, including how you could create dice with changeable faces, but once I had the initial idea, I was off and running.

One thing I'm particularly pleased with in this story are the villains. I like to think that in some respects, their motivations (or one of their motivations) are sympathetic, and they have redeeming qualities. They're not just cackling black hats.

I've written a second story with Pazia and Vanchen, and somehow managed to get an equal amount of mileage out of their two skill-sets. Can I make it three? We'll see if another idea strikes.

Fatecraft now available!

It's been a long wait, but worth it! My story Fatecraft is now available at Darwin's Evolutions:

http://darwinsevolutions.com/

Check it out!

Shelter of Daylight

Shelter of Daylight - which I think has to be one of the coolest anthology titles ever - is now available from Sam's Dot Publishing. Includes my story "The Seeds of Profit."

I wish I could remember the exact history of this idea. I just remember watching a pirate special and thinking something along the lines of, what if you focused on cargo that no one bothered to protect? That hatched this story ... and of course, I had to name the herbalist character after a specific flower, Minette (a kind of Alba).

It's definitely one of my tongue in cheek stories. I wrote it as the rash of pirate anthologies was going around, but never did submit it to any of those because it was just a little too short for their wordcounts. (Yes, I know. Me, too short for a wordcount?)

Color Everywhere

Advantage to a long drive to a gig: I've moved on the next collection. I've been trying to do a color collection for ages and never had quite enough songs. I finally crossed it - and the title here is the name of the first song. Where the color isn't obvious from the title, I've inserted it.

Disclaimer about any of these sets: a few of them, I had to cut a song to get it on a single CD and I can't recall which / which song. So figure any list is about ninety-five percent accurate. ;-)

1. Color Everywhere - Dian Diaz
2. Big Yellow Taxi - Amy Grant
3. Greensleeves - Blackmore's Night
4. Blue Black - Heather Nova
5. Out of the Blue - Debbie Gibson
6. Pot of Gold - Dian Diaz
7. White Flag - Dido
8. Carribean Blue - Enya
9. Wrapped - Gloria Estefan (blue)
10. A Boat Like Gideon Brown - Great Big Sea
11. A Question of Honor - Sarah Brightman (black and white)
12. Golden Heart - Kirsty MacColl
13. Who Painted The Moon Black - Hayley Westenra
14. Writing on the Wall - Blackmore's Night (black / rainbow and the phrase "when will your true colors show")
15. Orange Express - Gloria Estefan
16. Blue - Helen Reddy
17. Wearing White - Martina McBride
18. Blue Caravan - Vienna Teng
19. Runaway - Sahlene ("which colors to wear to laugh or cry" - red)
20. A Whiter Shade of Pale - Sarah Brightman
21. One Short Day - Wicked soundtrack (green. LOTS of green.)

I'm surprised how many blue songs I seem to have. Hrm.

I've got to comment briefly on Blackmore's Night rendition of Greensleeves. Now, much as I love it personally, Greensleeves has got to be the ultimate Elizabethan cliche. So really, if you play that genre of music, it's reached the point where you might as well just say, "Pretend we played Greensleeves," and get on with it. However, if you absolutely must do Greensleeves, this is an excellent way to record it. There's a lively beat sequence and an ooh chorus that (for me) evokes some very vivid imagery.

Child Full of Promises

Swapped my car-listening music around again and this time decided that for my CD titles, I was going to use a line from one of the songs that related to the theme. So first off - a collection of songs about (directly or tangentially) children and the next generation. "Child Full of Promises" is a reference to Evacuee, and the line is particularly, "All I am: a child full of promises. All I have are miles full of promises of home ..."

As always, I try to open with a song that feels like it kicks things off and close with something that leads elsewhere.

1. Darling, Let's Have Another Baby - Kirsty MacColl
2. Roots and Wings - Anne Murray
3. Wait For The Healing - Amy Grant
4. Coulda Been - Kimberly Locke
5. Children of the Revolution - Kirsty MacColl
6. Sarah's Song - Sissel
7. Crickets Sing for Anamaria - Emma Bunton
8. Eve - Chantal Kreviazuk
9. Immortality - Celine Dion
10. Wild Child - Enya
11. The Woman in Me - Crystal Gayle
12. Curious Thing - Amy Grant
13. Hijo De La Luna - Sarah Brightman
14. She's Not Just A Pretty Face - Shania Twain
15. How Can We See That Far - Amy Grant
16. This One's For The Girls - Martina McBride
17. Evacuee - Enya
18. Angie Baby - Helen Reddy
19. One Name - Gloria Estefan
20. Older Than My Years - Cherie

I Once Met a Man With a Sense of Adventure ...

He was dressed to thrill wherever he went.
He said, "Let's make love on a mountaintop,
Under the stars on a big hard rock."
I said, "In these shoes? I don't think so ..."

My story entitled "In These Shoes" just sold to Staffs and Starships! The story has nothing whatsoever to do with the Kirsty MacColl song that inspired the title - really. It's about an assassin and involves the shoes she traditionally wears for a kill.

In trying to input this into my website, I realized that my links were a visual mess. I played around with all sorts of ways of reformatting - I even had one of my fractals as a BG. The only thing I knew is I had to get rid of the dark-background-white-text, because it was a pain in the neck to update. After about an hour of fiddling, I finally went with the KISS method (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and went with a very subtle blue-flecked white BG and dark text.

Check it out if you like.

Thursday Thoughts

Oh, right. It's Thursday.

Journal of the Dead - ran into an amusing error when editing one of the spirit stories. To whit: ... hey, wait, I have pistols in this world ... making notes on back-edits was fairly simple, but I have a feeling it's going to alter a lot of the remaining pages as well. The changes won't be major, they'll just be frequent and annoying.

I hate guns. Seriously.

In full-out panic mode about the length of Scylla and Charybdis. I am very pleased with everything I've done, just not how long it has taken to do it. It does make me aware why a few editors seemed to think the original short story needed to end when they left the station ... there's an incredible amount of meat there.

I have a very messy and confusing muddle in regards to computers and phones. I have an aural link which I was originally just thinking as an intercom, and now I realize with technology several centuries later, it's likely it would be a combo phone / PDA / system link ... and on Themiscyra, that would mean you could effectively access the entire world from a little widget behind your ear. Anyhow, I haven't explained any of this directly (... and I kind of keep changing my mind about what it's supposed to do) so this may be one of those things that gets a major clean-up in editing.

Shiny Stones

Like a raven, I pluck shiny stones ...

So my villanelle - actually, literally the first I wrote that rhymed - by the title of Shiny Stones is now official in Aoife's Kiss March 2009. I'm stoked to see it in print: the magazine is beautiful, very classy-looking. Haven't had a chance to read anything else in it yet.

A bit about the poem - I wrote the opening three lines (if two lines is a couplet, and four lines is a quatrain, what is three? A triolet? I must look that up) and then realized I had picked a really difficult rhyme scheme: owns / stones versus trove. Finding words that wove into the "storyline" made this a very interesting poem to write. The through-line is about a thief who steals from the nobility and what she / he does with the ill-gotten gains.

Thursday Thoughts

I've now reached the journal section of Journal of the Dead, and I do have a few places marked for major revision, add notes about XYZ ... so far, I feel as if I'm in control and making the changes that I wanted far more extensively than if I had chosen a less in-depth editing method.

Looking at my notes before I started writing the novel, I had a few additional named spirits. Now editing, I am glad I removed them. Trying to keep Davius, Parik, Kazhe, Parashi, Ihseye and Astennu distinct in my main character's head is quite enough ... and I'm fairly sure I don't always succeed with Ihseye. (For those who are curious, all female names have an h in them, usually silent: so the middle three are ladies.) If I were up to a sweeping edit, I might remove her - but she's one of the sorcerers and I need her magic. Ahem.

Another idle note about the naming conventions: I had decided at the beginning that female names usually end with an i or an e, and almost never a ... wow, you wouldn't believe how hard that is for a Western brain. Consonant endings are supposed to be almost exclusively male-only, but I do have one break from that later - Atsihl. Anyhow, it definitely provides a flavor to the names.

As for Scylla and Charybdis ... ow. Major ethical dilemma as to what Anaea tells her best friend, who has pleaded with her not to explore the mysteries of the station, but you can't tell her nothing, it's a serious breach of trust (and hypocritical besides) if she lies, it is emotionally damaging if she tells the truth ... at the suggestions of some folks on my writers' board, I decided to make an expansion to handle this, but ...

Now I worry about the pacing of the whole novel. Over 10,000 words, and I'm still on Themiscyra. After that I have eight (!) sections tentatively planned: a brief stop in the male-civ, a brief stop in the female-civ, an interlude in the Sanctum (from whence Gwydion came) before Anaea decides she isn't going to flee madly from hiding only to return there; an arc in the male-civ where she's just trying to live and let live; an arc in the female-civ ditto; a return to the male-civ with more active intentions; a return to the female-civ ditto ... and then a mad rush back to Themiscyra for close. This last bit may change depending on how the intervening goes - heck, the second half may change depending on how the preceding goes.

Anyhow, if each of these comes out long? I have an unwieldy, unsaleable novel.

I've told myself not to worry about it: I can come back and edit out, even reshape the early plot, if I need to, but trying to artificially truncate would do more harm to the beginning than letting it run long would.

Still ... argh.

Reccs ...

I now have thirteen entries on my "Old Reccs" section of my website. (I keep my three newest at the top.) This is somehow ... ominous.

Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley

I simply loved this book.

It's a riveting account based on the premise of dragons as an endangered species in the modern world - everything feels scientific, accurate and real. The story focuses to a micro-level on the story of Jake, who finds an infant dragon next to its dying mother and risks everything to raise her ... when no one knows anything about how dragons grow up.

One of the best tidbits of dragon origins is that "real" dragons are Australian in origin ... and they have pouches like marsurpials, used for similar function. The astonishing bit is this works.

Dragonhaven proves that you can break the rules of writing and get away with it if you're talented enough. The first thirty pages are, fair warning, pure info-dump ... and yet it's so engrossing and fascinating that you don't notice. Similarly, there is a lot of summary throughout the book: there has to be, given the massive amounts of time and the gradual changes that occur during it. Yet this only begins to wear on the reader (or at least, this reader) close to two hundred pages into the book.

It isn't perfect: there are scenes that are I wished had been more illustrated and less summarized. But the narrator's voice is strong and compelling, and the through-line that it's a written account of "real" events works perfectly. Jake's voice is distinct; it also "sounds" like something an (albiet very intelligent) young man would write, rather than the work of a trained author.

The suspension of disbelief is a remarkable component of the book. By the end, I was buying things that would seem ridiculous if presented at the opening ... and it all seemed like a logical progression.

Anyhow - highly recommended.

Thursday Thoughts

Scylla and Charybdis seems to consist of frenetic leaps from one conversation to another. I am entirely off the course of the short story now, but very pleased with the direction. I am slightly dubious that Anaea hasn't stopped to interrogate Gwydion for more details about his society, but that would slow up the story with a dialogue info-dump - so I focus on forward motion until I've gotten a little further.

Not much more to say ... nearing the end of chapter three. They seem to be breaking fairly naturally around 3600 words.

Editing marks for Journal of the Dead - progressing nicely. My hope is that, by working from the printed copy rather than the original draft, I'll be more free to make changes, even drastic ones, as I input ... so I often have notes that don't directly fit with the current text. I am in Chapter Four of the third person section - one more chapter after this, and the narrative swaps to first person as the journal begins.

One thing I have to be very careful about inserting into the text is how in the world Rhiane is keeping this journal on her person - and there are times where she would have had to be carrying it to make an entry - without it being confiscated, and for that matter, how it isn't read by anyone else. I have a reason for this. It feels labored, but once worked into the storyline, it should work. I'm just nose-crinkly about it since it was an afterthought for me - I reached the final portions and went, "Oh, blast."

Onwards!

Thursday Thoughts

Today would be free-write day, but I can't seem to get onto the forums ... and the lack of any messages to the effect of a reminder would suggest that it is down. Either way - I am a lump of allergies, so probably just as well.

Started to move through the manuscript of Journal of the Dead while trying to juggle the printed copy of my outline. Unwieldy thing! I am really concerned about the opening fight scene: it has to go bad and escalate fast enough for Rhiane to accidently stab someone before the rest of the guards get in from outside. As written, it doesn't work. My manuscript copy has a whole bunch of scrawled notes now on how to fix that. Certainly I can get away with Parik being short-tempered and preremptory, but there are limits.

Scylla and Charybdis is moving comfortably and ... going in a direction that was quite unplanned and didn't occur in the original story, though this is more an issue how I'm getting from point B to point C rather than a change in the positioning of the points. It's a summing of little changes I made that seemed to fit better as I got into more detail about the world and how Anaea got in this position.

I've recently been reading a riveting book called Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley (which, unless the last half utterly disappoints, will be going on my recommended reads). Its micro focus on emotions, reactions and coping with the unthinkable has made me think a lot more about these early parts of SaC, when Anaea is wrestling with her version of the impossible. I can't go into the same amount of detail as Dragonhaven - the scope of the story makes that impossible unless I want enough pages to comprise War and Peace. But it has given me some sense of just how much you can get away with ...

Arcane Whispers - Vol 2

So it looks like Arcane Whispers, Volume Two - the Best of Sorcerous Signals for 2008 ... will include not one, but two of my stories!

Luckily, they're very different in tone: Apartment Tour is an urban fantasy flash fiction, written with a bit of tongue in cheek bite. Soul Siblings is a long sword and sorcery-style epic with some heavy material - though there are some moments of humor if I'm recalling right. I'm nearly incapable of writing without it.

I am particularly excited about the latter because Soul Siblings has always been one of my personal favorite stories.

Even more amusing - last I checked, the illustration for Soul Siblings is frontrunner for cover art. I actually didn't vote for it because I liked some of the others (even by the same artist) better, and because it's a little inaccurate: the Geneb third eyes are supposed to be different colors from their normal eyes. There wasn't time to change it before Sibs went to press, so no big deal - it's still a gorgeous picture. I almost hate to bring it up if it does get the nod for cover art ...

Thursday Thoughts

Discovered today that I had used my last Beast of Albion card yesterday, so my boot camp is finished.

... and so is the macro-read of Journal of the Dead! I'm letting it set for a few before I print out the outline and see how much material, how many changes, what kind of issues I'm working with as I go back through the manuscript.

Things are picking up in Scylla and Charybdis. One dynamic I hadn't really explored in the short story was the interaction between Anaea and Orithia - her current friend and ex-lover. At the time, I just threw in the "ex factor" because it served to illustrate an aspect of the station. Now I'm finding that it has more dimensions. I also am enjoying building the contrast between Orithia, who is outwardly rebellious but inwardly conventional, and Anaea, who is outwardly obedient but inwardly daring.

I also introduced Penelope, Orithia's kearl - which is a companion animal somewhere between a cat and a monkey. Now, Anaea wouldn't think of them like this, so I didn't directly describe it as such, I just used descriptors that keyed into the two animals. Hopefully, when Gwydion meets kearl later and I get the opportunity to explain fully, it will simply fit the pieces into place for anyone reading.

(Albion) Boot Camp Week 5

There seemed a lot of sentence material in This Is My Funniest 2, so I waited a few days before swapping over to Stardust.

For whatever reason, the past few days I've been having trouble incorporating the Albion card into my exercise - the sentence sparks a thought, and all of a sudden I realize that I haven't involved the first element.

I've had a few places where I've taken some effort to stop and consciously re-contextualize the sentence - just to make sure I'm not using the same set-up and surroundings as the original implies.

I am pretty sure that I have less than a week of cards left. Overall, a satisfying exercise. I hope to come back and write one of my excerpts, though which one? So many appeal ...

Thursday Thoughts

My progress on my novels was somewhat derailed (happily) due to a request for a rewrite from a prestigious market. The edits to the story then proceeded to eat my head completely for close to twenty-four hours. I re-sent it yesterday morning and today got a notice it would be 3-4 weeks before he could see it. Augh the anticipation!

In any case, I am now in the last few "phases" of the Journal macro edits - time in the world is measured by the date within a moon-phase. I think my spreadsheet is very long - I won't be surprised if it is more than 30 pages. Being able to see what each scene consists of should allow me to go through and note where would be best to insert discussion of element X, element Y ... then I take a micro pass at the manuscript.

Then I rewrite from the manuscript in a clean document. Oh, this will take forever. I'm not even sure if I am over-editing, but I know that one of my weaknesses is that I don't edit enough, so putting myself through such a laborious process is a worthwhile experiment. It may work for me; it may not.

I'm concerned that Scylla and Charybdis is too "talky," but I've tried to keep the tension going. I guess the issue here is that I've never written a story whose purpose is so entirely to explore the setting, so I may not have a good feel for the balance. The worldbuilding seems to fit pretty naturally into the narration, but there's so much of it. I also realize that I need to be more intensive about Themiscyra, as knowing precisely where Anaea comes from is crucial to have a frame of reference for her later journeys.

I am also starting to feel like a bit of an imposter. I always knew there was some serious material with the gender dynamic - but my intentions had been to play that light, less a sociological treatise as an exploration not unakin to a child crawling through one of those Playspaces. Now I'm seeing other serious psychological questions and even a few religious ones, and I really don't feel as if I have any business commenting on these things. I never set out to have a "message" in my fiction, and I'm concerned that I sound like I'm preaching now. It's fiction, it's a story ... and yet I am so worried about what I might be saying, perhaps inadvertently, that I don't know what to do.

All this and I'm still in Chapter Two.

Stardust

I just finished Neil Gaiman's Stardust - stayed up last night to finish reading the epilogue. On balance, I enjoyed it much more than American Gods. It has a beautiful feeling of archetype and fairy tale, yet delivered with a sly humor. Much of this comes from a matter-of-fact tone. In American Gods, this surrealness sometimes worked to the detriment of the story - things were so detached they seemed unrealistic. With Stardust, the tone blends wonderfully into the mood.

One thing did disappoint me, and I'm not sure if it's partly because I saw the movie and I was expecting a big climactic battle: the ending was very flatline. It didn't really "go" anywhere. Even the romantic revelation at the end just sort of happens. I do agree that the flash-bang in the Stardust movie would have been inappropriate here, but to me, it seemed less like a novel climax and more a simple stopping point.

The epilogue, I should add, was lovely, and it made me sniffle. It was a striking final note. (I am counting this as an "after the ending" summary.)

Having now read the book, I'm rather puzzled by the movie adaptation in general. It seemed to spend a lot of time on elements that went by in passing in the book, while excluding others ... and even adding things that don't seem to fit with the Stardust world. Some I understood for adaptation and presentation, and others just due to Hollywoodisms, but the pacing between book and movie leaves me a bit bewildered. I did think the portrayal of the Stormhold ghosts was delightful, however. Nicely done.

Updates!

Space Sirens is now available, including my story "Precious Cargo." This story was written especially to be submitted to this anthology, which is best described as space opera with (swashbuckling?) female protagonists. I already had Kirin and her aunt bouncing around in my head from some exercises I'd done, and they wanted a story. Some day I may go back and write onwards, but I think it would be more of a novel-to-come than a series of shorts.

Anyhow, check it out at flyingpenpress.com! I really like the description Carol Hightshoe (editor) put together for my story.

On more minor news, my story "Remember" has been bumped back to the October Kaleidotrope. My poem in Aoife's Kiss should be out this month, but I'm waiting to receive my print copy to be sure as it's not in the online edition.

(Albion) Boot Camp Week 4

If I'm adding right, this next week will be the last full week.

I almost forgot to change books yesterday, after having finished This Is My Funniest 2 on Friday. So far - given a random pick of two - the book is working better than its predecessor.

I've got a lot of sparkers I'd love to continue. So many stories, so little time ...

This Is My Funniest 2

I just finished reading this anthology, edited by Mike Resnick. I thought it was about on par with the first as far as overall quality: I thought there were fewer wonderful high points, but there were also fewer complete misses (and those weren't, as in This Is My Funniest, placed in the first few slots). I was very puzzled by one story ("The Acid Test" by Kay Kenyon) that I couldn't see as humor at all. While there were a few amusing turns of phrase, that didn't change the fact that the overall story depressed and saddened me.

I also noticed an unusually high percentage of western spoofs, make of that what you will.

One flaw I noticed that occurred in several stories was pacing. Many of the stories had a detailed, involved set-up with plenty of color and humor ... only to wrap up quickly in a couple pages. I suppose this in part because, in comedic stories, there's an urge to explore the weird goings-on at the fringe of the story - but I did find it interesting how frequently this showed up in the anthology.

Overall, though, I love a good humor story and I enjoyed the anthology very much. There are many delightful concepts and turns of phrase throughout, often in the same story. I continue to get the impression that Mike Resnick really knows how to put together an anthology to create a flow. (The aforementioned issue with This Is My Funniest notwithstanding.)

German

... wow, all right. Someone reviewed Sails & Sorcery (in which my story Currents and Clockwork appears) ... in German.

This is rather cool.

Here's the translation:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.literaturschock.de/literaturforum/index.php%3Ftopic%3D16528.0&ei=i6KmSZiEL-CbtwfF59zvDw&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=4&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3D%2522Danielle%2BAckley-McPhail%2522%26start%3D330%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

Thursday Thoughts

I'm feeling more comfortable with Journal of the Dead as I progress through the edits. My impression when finishing the first draft was that I had a mass of vaguely connected, over-complex tendrils, elements that were added practically deus-ex-machina to solve the problem of the moment. In the rereading, however, it has an unexpected cohesiveness. Some things need a bit more groundwork, but that's pretty easy to retrofit. There is a lot going on, weaving in and out of my narrator's life ... but all of it fits together. Everything has its place.

I am pleased how much the lives and advice of her spirits truly influence Rhiane. Just having the spirits there as passengers and comic relief would miss the point, to me.

Scylla and Charybdis still trundles along - I have just entered Chapter Two. I've done something I don't usually care for, a "fake-out" cliff-hanger at the end of the chapter, in which an apparently critical problem turns out to resolve in the first half-page or so of the next chapter. I may or may not end up removing it. Possibly this doesn't bother others as much as it does me; certainly I've seen it in plenty of published books. (That doesn't mean it's a good technique, just that it's printable. Ahem.)

I am very pleased with the first real conversation between my main characters. I even got to use an element that wasn't on the radar in the short story: Gwydion makes a reference to evening prayers. I am not so pleased with how Anaea gets into a supposedly restricted area, but I can't really make it much more difficult without making it outright impossible.

(Albion) Boot Camp Week Three

Swapped books - to Best Short Novels of 2006 - and discovered that there is an advantage to a fairly workmanlike prose style (as with my previous selection). I had to reroll several times this week when I got lines that were so specific to their story - even when I took out specific person / place names - that I couldn't pull them out of context to work with.

However, I am enjoying the new lines and possibilities. I'm pondering, at the end of this run-through, selecting one to turn into a story right away ... or near enough.

And I have discovered that this boot camp has a neat, finite end. I had thought that the Beasts of Albion was a pretty sizable deck, about the size of a Tarot deck - somewhere between sixty to seventy cards, anyhow. Instead, I just realized it's only thirty-nine, so I'll be through them in early March.

Not a bad thing. I have so many writing projects afoot that while the boot camp is nice, it's beginning to become a little distracting.