Desert Dispatches

janni @ 2009-12-20T21:35:00

2009-12-21T04:35:39Z

Saw in year's long night by roasting marshmallows in the backyard firepit of a friend's new house. The air here is chill, but not cold, no sign of that just-might-freeze edge it sometimes takes on this time of year. Haze dimmed the moon, gentled its edges, made the night a little darker than it might otherwise be.

The smell of woodsmoke still lingers on my clothes. Tomorrow, the days will start getting longer again. We have mixed feelings about that around here, but in this season of cool nights and warm days, it's hard to truly believe in 110 degree summers anyway--and the extra light will be welcome, even if the cold is not something we seek to escape.

And so the year continues turning round. A good and joyous solstice to all.

Crossover vids for the win

2009-12-20T22:18:38Z

Via lucy_anne, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Daleks.

Thoughts on fictional guilt and responsibility

2009-12-20T04:59:49Z

I've been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender (also known these days as "The Other Avatar"), and enjoying it, for all that it's messages lie rather close to the surface -- there's enough done well with this series that I can mostly forgive the things that aren't (as always, in writing, it's what you do right, not what you manage not to do wrong). But today, I came to a bit that got me thinking about a very common trope in fiction that doesn't always work for me.

About halfway through season 1, the title Avatar (known to his friends as Aang) is feeling guilty about something he did back before the story began. (Being vague here to avoid spoilers.) At the end of the episode where this comes up, he comes to the Important Realization that it wasn't his fault, he needs to stop feeling guilty for it and move on, etc., etc., etc. It's a common sort of story, one I know I've read--and watched--many times before.

Except in the episode I was watching tonight, the thing Aang was feeling guilty about was his fault. It was totally his fault. His mistakes were understandable, and I had sympathy for them--but it still really and truly is his fault.

I actually enjoy the sort of story where a character realizes they've been holding onto guilt that isn't theirs and somehow gets past that. But that only works for me when the character in question actually is innocent--maybe because they lacked information, maybe because, like so many of us, they felt like they ought to be able to control something they couldn't. When the Horrible Thing is a character's fault, imho, they shouldn't be moving on. They should be fumbling toward a path not just of heartfelt apologies, but of solid actions meant to make amends--or if amends cannot be made, actions meant to make the world better in some other way.

The episode I was watching tonight redeemed itself for me because even though Aang says what happened wasn't his fault, he's been acting and continues acting in ways consistent with taking responsibility and trying to fix things, whether he realizes it or not.

A story about a character who admits the Horrible Thing is their responsibility and struggles to do something about it is more interesting to me than one about a character who tries to handwave that responsibility away (often with the loving encouragement of those around them). Repentance doesn't end with saying "I'm sorry," but with making things right, or as close to right as they can be made. There's lots and lots of room for story in that, too.

Sometimes, you just have to stay up late to get a draft done

2009-12-17T16:43:58Z

Which is by way of saying, I now have a third draft of the book in progress.

What I have as of said third draft is mostly the right story, except for the part where it turns into mostly the wrong ending. Judging by previous books, this means I'm mostly on track for my third drafts. If this book works like the last couple books have (keeping in mind that books can be tricksy things), as I go back in to work on the language and emotional arcing and imagery and layering of the early chapters (because I still have mostly the wrong words), the later chapters should come into clearer focus.

But that's for next week. This week ... I'm going to take a few days off, step back, get some perspective, and do a little bit of thinking work before I go back to move pieces around on the page once more.

And also, I'm going to catch up on sleep. Last night's sleep especially. :-)

I always hate to step away from the book at this point, but the book is always better for it, when I do.

janni @ 2009-12-17T09:36:00

2009-12-17T16:36:13Z

You know what a good writing friend is? A good writing friend is someone who not only offers to look at a very rough draft of your manuscript because she knows you'll be on a pretty tight deadline by the time you have a polished one. It's someone who not only offers to take the manuscript with her while she's traveling.

It's someone who, when you tell her finishing that draft is taking longer than you expected, lets you drop this manuscript off at her house in the early morning, less than an hour before she's departing for an international flight. That's a very good writing friend indeed.

Faerie naming contest update 2

2009-12-16T14:42:43Z

So as I work my way through my current draft it's looking like one of the faerie names I've chosen from the faerie naming contest is pretty firm, but I'm still not entirely satisfied with the other. That means there's still time to enter.

It's looking right now like I'll only need female names after all, but that's subject to change, so both male and female names are welcome.

Thanks for all your entries so far! I've really been enjoying reading them, and it's fascinating getting a sense of what does and doesn't feel like a fey name to everyone, too.

To enter--and for contest details--go here.

Tuesday linky

2009-12-15T19:47:22Z

Tu Publishing has been funded (by about $300, which means every donation really did count) and will open for submissions January 1. Yay! I'm thrilled, and I think children's publishing will be the richer for this.

tamnonlinear on potatoes, petunias, and other possibly carnivorous real-plants. As Liza would say, no plant can fully be trusted.

coraa on how negative reviews can help sell books.

metteharrison on 10 advanced writing mistakes that throw her (but may or may not throw you) out of the story.

In real life, there are thousands of people to fall in love with. In a book, two. The bad boy and the good guy. Usually, the bad guy wins. Sometimes the good guy. Depends on the author. But why not any other choices? Is that the way we see our romantic partners in real life?

Bookavore gets frustrated and pleads with authors:

Please, for the love of Pete, STOP only mentioning the race of a character if that race is not white. I know you are trying to embrace diversity and create a more realistic world, but the fact of the matter is this. If I meet five characters (say, your main character, her mom, her sister, her best friend, and her other best friend) and you describe them but DON’T mention their race, and that is followed in the next few chapters by a black teacher, or a cute boy who’s Hispanic, that doesn’t prove to me that you embrace diversity. It proves to me that you assume all characters are white unless otherwise announced; that white is, in other words, the default race in your fictional world and by extension, the world in general.

Bookavore also has some things to say about magical best friends.

(ETA: So google maps apparently cannot find "Will-I-finish-the-draft-today-land." I think I'm in trouble. Because those guys can find everything, right down to the mesquite tree in my front yard.)

"... the flash of bronze, fighters killing, fighters killed ..."

2009-12-12T20:51:15Z

Just picked up the Iliad today after long absence--it's a good book to turn to when I find myself growing impatient with all the other options at hand, and especially when I find myself growing impatient with the prose of all the other options at hand. Because Homer crafts words like no one's business, at least if Fagles' translation is reasonably true to them.

Before I set the Iliad aside, I'd just finished Book 11, which Fagles titles "Agamemnon's Day of Glory." In Book 11, the Greeks, having just finished a successful bout of spying and raiding horses, wake up ready for battle. Or maybe that's justZeus (aka, The Only God Allowed to Interfere With this War, Except When He Isn't Looking) riling them up:

But Zeus flung Strife on Achaea's fast ships,
the brutal goddess flaring his storm-shield,
his monstrous sign of war in both her fists.
She stood on Odysseus' huge black-bellied hull ...
There Strife took her stand, raising her high-pitched cry,
great and terrible, lashing the fighting fury
in each Achaean's heart--no stopping them now,
mad for war and struggle.

Agamemnon armors up (in great detail) and, his men--all thoughts of returning home gone--follow him. Athena and Hera cheer the Greeks on with some thunder, but otherwise manage to not interfere.

Hector leads Trojans out, too, in less detail but with arguably more powerful prose:

Hector bore his round shield in the forefront, blazing out
like the Dog Star through the clouds, all withering fire,
then plunging back in the cloud-rack massed and dark--
so Hector ranged on, now flaring along the front,
now shouting his order back toward the rear,
all of him armed in bronze aflash like lightning

The armies fight. A lot.

... the pressure of combat locked them head to head,
lunging liker wolves, and Strife with wild groans
exulted to see them, glaring down at the melee,
Strife alone of immortals hovering over the fighters.

Strife's getting into this, no surprise. Zeus is having fun watching, too. The other gods are, one assumes, silently glaring at Zeus.

So Agamemnon kills many people. In great detail. This being his day of glory and all.

Think how a lion, mauling the soft weak young
of a running deer, clamped in his massive jaws,
cracks their backbones with a snap--he's stormed in,
invading the lair to tear their tender hearts out
and the mother doe, even if she's close by,
what can she do to save her fawns?

I can't honestly tell if we're supposed to admire Agamemnon here or not.

Even as the Trojans fall, Zeus keeps Hector safe. Eventually he also sends Hector an IM (Iris Message, thank you Rick Riordan) telling Hector to stay out of Agamemnon's way until the latter gets wounded.

Finally Agamemnon goes up against a guy named Iphidamas, and kills him in great detail. Iphidamas has an older brother, Coon, who goes after Agamemnon in turn, and Coon gets Agamemnon with his spear, just below the elbow and all down the forearm. Coon then tries to drag his little brother's body away, but Agamemnon lops Coon's head off, and it tumbles down onto Iphidamas' corpse.

Okay, so much for the admiration for Agamemnon.

But Agamemnon soon discovers that being injured hurts, and he races off the field. Hector, who was paying attention with Iris delivered that message, sees his opportunity and jumps into the battle. Agamemnon is long gone, but Hector goes on to kill many men in a reasonable amount of detail himself, leaving the reader wondering why this can't be Hector's Day of Glory, too. Hector even charges Diomedes, and Diomedes sends a well-aimed spear straight for Hector's head. It's a can't-possibly-miss shot, but Hector's wearing a can't-possibly-be-hit helmet from Apollo, and apparently an immovable object is more powerful than an irresistible force after all. The blow glances off; Diomedes cusses a bit and stalks off looking for other people to kill. Diomedes is also having a Day of Glory, as it turns out, but this being Diomedes and all, that's hardly worth commenting on.

Paris shoots and gets Diomedes with an arrow in the foot, crows about how much he rocks for it, and is soundly mocked for shooting like a girl. Anyone could get someone in the foot, after all, right? (Achilles, are you listening? Achilles? But Achilles is still nursing his anger back in his tent, and I still can't entirely blame him for it.)

Paris shows them later, though, when he manages a shoulder shot and injures Machaon, a Greek healer. While Nestor gets Machaon away in Nestor's chariot, the reader is left wondering why the Greeks would put their healers right out on the battlefield, not as field medics, but as fighters themselves, rather than doing their best to protect them so that they can, well, heal. It sounds like the Greeks might have been having some second thoughts about this strategy themselves, as one of them admits, "a good healer is worth a troop of other men." Oops.

Achilles, who as far as I can tell actually does care about his fellow Greeks even if he's unwilling to fight alongside them, sees Nestor heading into camp, and sends Patroclus over to see who's been hurt.

Nestor, being Nestor, urges Patroclus in great detail and at great length and with much reminiscing about the past to urge Achilles to get his butt back out on the battlefield.

Nestor: "Or if that fails, Patroclus, you could just wear Achilles armor and lead his Myrmidons into battle."
Patroclus: "..."
Reader: "Wait, that was Nestor's idea?"

Yet even as I stared open-jawed at Nestor, the narrative made me understand, for the first time, just what a hard place Patroclus was in, and why Nestor's suggestion was so tempting. Because as Patroclus heads back to Achilles' tent, bearing Nestor's pleas, he meets an injured fighter, Euryplus, limping away from the battle with an arrow in his thigh, blood yet flowing around it.

And moved at the sight, the good soldier Patroclus
burst out in grief with a flight of winging words,
"Poor men! Lords of the Argives, O my captains!
How doomed you are, look--far from your loved ones
and native land--to glut with your shining fat
the wild dogs of battle here in Troy ...
But come, tell me, Eurypylus, royal fighter,
can the Achaeans, somehow, still hold monstrous Hector?--
or must they all die now, beaten down by his spear?"
Struggling with his wound, Euryplus answered,
"No hope, Patroclus, Prince. No bulward left,
They'll all be hurled back to the black ships ...

"Impossible, Eurypylus, hero, what shall we do?
I am on my way with a message for Achilles,
our great man of war--the plan that Nestor,
Achaea's watch and ward, urged me to report.
But I won't neglect you, even so, with such a wound."

And bracing the captain, arm around his waist,
he helped him toward his shelter. An aide saw them
and put some oxhides down. Patroclus stretched him out,
knelt with a knife and cut the sharp, stabbing arrow
out of Euryplus' thigh and washed the wound clean
of the dark running blood with clear warm water.
Pounding it in his palms, he crushed a bitter root
and covered over the gash to kill his comrade's pain,
a cure that fought of every kind of pain ...
and the wound dried and the flowing blood stopped.

And even if we didn't know it before, we know, in this moment, that Patroclus is doomed.

Because of course he's going to wear Achilles' armor. What else could he possibly do?

Faerie Winter playlist

2009-12-10T17:24:16Z

What I'm listening to as I move into the home stretch of the current draft.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Faerie Winter playlist:

"This is Mine," Lucy Kaplansky
"I am here/And this is mine."

"This One's Gonna Bruise," Beth Orton
"What a thing to choose/This one's gonna bruise."

"Four Walls," Charlotte Martin
"... you're gonna get down on your knees/And grow accustomed to the darkness/And see what you're supposed to see."

"February," Dar Williams
"... and you said, that's a crocus/And I said, what's a crocus?/And you said, it's a flower/I tried to remember, but I said, what's a flower?"

"Cold As It Gets," Patty Griffin
"... the one who laid all of our beauty to waste/Threw our hope into hell and our children to the fire ..."

"The Hard Way," Mary Chapin Carpenter
"You know we got this far, darling, not by luck, but by never turning back ... Everything we got, we got the hard way."

"The Consequences of Falling," K.D. Lang
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?/Does your pulse quicken like mine? ... If I'm alone in this I don't think I can face/The consequences of falling."

"Fast As I Can," Cheryl Bliss
" And these shadows are knives/They push me back home ..."

"Little Wings," Kris Delmhorst
"I'll never be one more little songbird you can try to keep inside your cage/You're never gonna tell me where to fly/You're never gonna tell me what to sing."

"Icicles," Patty Griffin
"Shadows will pass/Smoke, it will clear/If something survives of us around here."

"Hunter," Dido
"I want to be a hunter again ..."

"Shine," Vienna Teng
"Shine with all the untold/Hold the light given unto you/Find the love to unfold/In this broken world we choose."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=

I won't be done when I finish this pass. But I'm hopeful that I will, at last, be telling the right story. (1st draft=wrong story. 2nd draft=sorta-right story. 3rd draft=right story. 4th draft=readable story. 5th draft=polished story.)

Unruly endings

2009-12-09T17:43:32Z

So this was going to be a post about the unruliness of story endings, about how you have all these threads you're trying to bring together and tie off and how in the first few drafts they fight you and keep pulling out of your grasp, leaving frayed ends everywhere. And then I thought about how in Bones, there was a whole extra scene in a whole other place that just didn't fit there and made the threads splay out in too many directions, and how I once thought that scene would be at the end of this book too, but it wound up not belonging here either, and wanted to be in some other someday book.

And then I realized that, wait--unlike in the first book, that deleted scene actually does belong in this one--or rather, a climactic scene from the end of this book needs to move to the setting of that deleted scene and take on elements of it--and that if I do that, all those unruly story-ending threads will suddenly start clicking together rather than splaying apart.

And then I thought: but I liked the last 13,000 words I wrote. And: but I was so close to the end.

No matter. If this new thing is the thing the story wants, then those 13,000 words were part of the path to get there, rather than a thing in themselves.

Of course I have to try the new ending, and see if it really does bring things together the way I right-this-moment feel so certain it will. Whatever I find, following that new path is part of the process, too. And I've learned that when that sudden realization makes pieces begin to go click, click, clickety click, I ignore it at my peril.

A random thing that made me smile this morning

2009-12-09T15:05:17Z

A nephew!

2009-12-08T21:42:05Z

Welcome to the world, Zachary Elia, who was born with his eyes open, looking at the world around him.

Bordertown/Finder

2009-12-08T18:14:22Z

I've been reading/rereading the Bordertown books, and along the way realizing that it's hard for me to tell which ones I've read before and which ones I'm reading for the first time, because they've been so influential, a part of a larger urban fantasy landscape that also includes War for the Oaks and Moonheart and The Wizard of Pigeons. I've read the first two anthologies for sure, and Elsewhere as well. But I know I'd never read Emma Bull's Finder before, because it's been on my to-read list forever. Now that I have read it, I wonder why on earth it took me so long, because I enjoyed it lots and lots.

Finder is in many ways the quintessential Bordertown book, and so got me thinking about how Bordertown is, of course, all about finding one's people -- about that business so many of us who felt like outsiders as kids and teens began -- in college or after it -- of in one way or another casting off the world we'd grown up in, and finding or choosing or making a community in which to begin our adult lives, one in which we could be known and seen and accepted as our true selves.

That's powerful magic. Had I read this book in my teens or 20s, when that magic was the thing I sought most dearly in all the world, it would have seemed an end in itself.

But because I'm reading it some years past that, I find myself thinking something I didn't know then: that finding your people and your community is only the first step in a larger journey. A necessary step, a magical step -- but not a stopping place after all.

*** Major spoilers follow ***

And this is what made Tick-Tick's death deeply tragic to me. Her final words to Orient are:

"This is my home. These are my people. You are more to me than any brother of my blood. I have no regrets. It's well. I am satisfied."

I found myself thinking about how for Tick-Tick -- and maybe for Orient, too, and certainly for me and many of those I know at various points in our lives -- this really did seem like it must be the culmination of a life well-lived: finding your people and your place and your home.

But there's so much that happens after that: one finds one place, and one embraces it -- but then one gets comfortable enough to take it a little for granted, to believe one deserves it, and to use it as a base from which to take new journeys, chance new risks, reach for new things.

And maybe that first true community isn't even a lifelong place after all ... or maybe it is ... or maybe it's a touchstone one returns to every so often ... or maybe one wanders in and out of various communities through the years. Along the way, one thinks and rethinks one's community of birth, too, and makes peace with it or fails to make peace with it, and that somehow becomes part of the larger fabric of a life, too.

Finding a community and friends and acceptance there isn't the final goal after all, though for years I'd have told you it was. Living in that community once you find it -- being there, doing things from there, building things there -- are all also part of the larger picture.

I forget which character points out, at one point during Finder, that in Bordertown a lifelong friendship is one that's four or five years old. It's as if the whole city is, for its inhabitants, that starting-out place, turned, through a twist of magic and worldbuilding, to a destination-place. I find this fascinating to ponder.

Yet, thinking more ... if we don't find that community, that starting place of acceptance from which to build a life -- deeper tragedy follows. Because of course in Finder the kids who were taking the drug that promised to turn them into elves and let them cross into Elfland -- but that instead just killed them -- were kids who'd failed to find their place and their people in Bordertown after all, and who were trying to follow the Yellow Brick Road further, to somewhere that would give them the things they sought.

And then there's Tick-Tick's brother showing up, at the very end of the story (this is the part of the book, oddly, that made me cry when nothing else did), reminding us that our connections to the places we leave behind remain, too, no matter how badly we want or need to deny that. Even in the places that ultimately don't work for us, there are often bits that do work scattered about, stray scraps of connection that linger on, never mind that we forget them for years at a time, maybe even need to forget them in order to leave.

Finding one's true self and one's true place is ultimately a very tricky business indeed.

Tu Publishing auction -- one more day

2009-12-08T05:09:41Z

There's one more day (give or take, as auction end times vary) to bid on some cool items and help kickstart_tu, a new multicultural small press being started up by slwhitman.

Items up for grabs include copies of my first three novels, now out of print. (Until Tuesday December 8, midnight eastern standard time.)

You can also help support Tu Publishing directly.

janni @ 2009-12-07T13:14:00

2009-12-07T20:14:33Z

Dear Story,

Wow. You had that set up all along.

I am in awe of you.

That is all,

Me

P.S. Next time, can we skip the stage where it looks like there's no way out of the corner you've boxed me into? Kthxbye.

Winter

2009-12-07T18:45:10Z

Woke up to a "blizzard warning for Arizona" this morning. Took a few sleep-muddled moments to realize the radio was delivering a blizzard warning for northern Arizona.

Even so, it looks awfully gray and cold out there this morning. This is winter here: a chill morning, a gray sky, the promise of rain. Also, cold feet in spite of wool socks.

And I'm off to work on the part of the Bones sequel that deals most strongly with the matter of spring. :-)

- What is one image (or smell, taste sound, or feeling) that says "winter" to you?

- What's one that says "spring"?

Fire, by Kristin Cashore (spoilers behind cut and in comments)

2009-12-07T16:47:28Z

So I finished FIRE a few days ago, and keep wanting to post a review, only my thoughts don't seem to be very coherent. Well, except for this one:

This isn't a perfect book, but it's exactly my kind of imperfect book, and I adored it.

I think I will continue to read pretty much anything Cashore writes. Sometimes, a writer is just telling your sort of stories, you know?

Other scattered thoughts:

- FIRE is a better written book than GRACELING, both its prose and its structure, but I didn't love it more for that. I didn't love it less, either, though.

- I did love Katsa more than Fire, at least at first. It took more time for Fire to gain a hold on me, for me to care about her. But I very much did care about Fire, by the end.

- I love the way Cashore's female characters, both physically and emotionally, are in control of their relationships--how they have wants and needs and consider those front and center without apology. It makes me realize that fewer relationship stories allow for this than one might think.

- It goes without saying that I love reading about strong female characters with true agency in general. Fascinating that this is done in a book about the issues around magic that can take one's agency away.

Spoilery thoughts:

- Including Leck in the story was the weakest part of it for me. He got in the way for me, and he was ultimately easy for Fire to defeat, anyway. I would have preferred simply making Jod or someone else the villain, letting him be either some sort of monster or some other manner of thing that was genuinely challenging to deal with.

- I would have preferred separating this story from the Graceling world entirely, actually. I have trouble believing in a world with both Monsters and Gracelings in it anyway. If it were a separate world, FIRE would have been an interesting exploration, from a different direction, of issues of free will and volition and how one deals with power and powerful magic.

- While Fire took a while to grow on me, I loved Fire and Brigan together from the start.

- And I especially loved how, at the end, Fire--who is perfect in so many ways--needs to be assured that Brigan loves her rough edges, her awfulness. Because so few people in her world even see them. This sort of broke my heart open, in the best way.

- In many ways, as lnhammer says, this is a book about the problems of being surrounded by a Mary Sue field. Which is what lets Fire ultimately be a character we care about, rather than one who is not only literally almost too perfect to live, but also too perfect to read about. The more I think about this, the more fascinating that is, too.

Anyone else here read it yet? Want to talk about it?

Speaking of the Norton Award

2009-12-05T23:21:50Z

For a much longer list of Norton eligible books (at least, those published from October '08 to October '09), check out the SF/Fantasy Cybil nominations. (With thanks to Charlotte's Library for the reminder!)

YA fantasy conversations

2009-12-05T21:23:25Z

swan_tower has a fascinating post about how the genre of a book may be as much a matter of what conversations that book is engaged in as anything else.

I began thinking, over there, about whether one could define YA by working out what conversations it's part of, too. Because I do think YA is a genre of its own, and I do think there are things I look for there that I don't look for elsewhere. And so I began ... going on at length, and realized it would perhaps be appropriate to bring my thoughts over here.

Because the thing about YA fantasy is, I've been realizing as I think about this, in addition to being its own thing, it looks in two different directions when for the conversations it holds: towards adult fantasy, and towards YA not-fantasy. YA fantasy, to my reading, is as much descended from Judy Blume as from J.R.R. Tolkien*; and when new YA fantasy books are written, they're engaging with the concerns of writers such as Laurie Halse Anderson and Ellen Wittlinger as much as those of Mercedes Lackey or Ursula K. Le Guin.

This may explain a sort of dissonance I sometimes feel as a YA and middle grade fantasy reader, too. Whether I'm having a conversation about the books I love, either in the children's/YA community or the adult SF/fantasy community, I sometimes have the feeling that something is missing from the conversation, in a different way in each community. And maybe it is, because maybe the full conversation draws on the concerns of both communities and both communities' books, even though outside of YA SF/fantasy, they're not communities that have cause to talk with each other very often.

*For an example of a book that directly engages with both Tolkien and Blume, I keep finding myself thinking of Aprilynne Pike's Wings. In that book, the fairy folk are struggling to protect their sacred land -- and the protagonist learns she's a fairy and part of that struggle when she literally "blossoms" into adolescence, sprouting a flower from her back as fairy folk are wont to do ...

What I learned from the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary today

2009-12-04T03:34:40Z

The use of "vanilla," in the sense of "ordinary" or "mediocre" dates only to 1972.

(Looked up over bowls of ice cream, during a discussion of how artificial vanillas have led to the malignment of what is actually a quite lovely flavor.)

The stories not written

2009-12-03T19:55:20Z

One of the things about my revision-based writing process is that it feels like I chip things away from the story as much as -- sometimes more than -- adding them to the story. Which means as I keep writing, I become more and more aware of the stories I've chosen not to tell. They haunt the story, ghostlike, and sometimes I catch them out of the corner of my eye and feel a twinge of almost-regret, wondering what might have happened had I followed my story down another path.

It's easy, too, during the harder parts of the writing process not to wonder whether those other paths would have been easier, better, more powerful after all. Because they're unwritten, they can be idealized in the way the unruly story one is actually writing cannot. The stories we choose to tell, for me at least, are messier, more imperfect things than the ones we imagine telling and set aside.

But one of the sometimes-hard things about revising is that even so you have to commit, and let those other stories go--free them up to haunt the story in subtle ways, rather than to be told in more direct ones.

Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

2009-12-03T14:18:25Z

What arrived in the mail today.

Shiny! (Also, found for less than half price, so we, well, pounced.)

Have already learned many things. Like that from 1526-1754, "marmoset" was a term of endearment.

And that there's (sort of) one synonym for "quaquaversal," but none for "petrichor."

And that if you want to use the expression "throbbing manhood" in your historical romance novel, it had better be set between 1640 and 1809, or else after 1967.

Transformative variants

2009-12-01T20:19:47Z

Been reading variations on Tam Lin again, thanks to tamnonlinear's most excellent Tam Lin website. Tam Lin was an early influence on my conceptions of Faerie and fey folk, dating back to when my college roommate loaned me a recording from a Renn Faire she'd been to.

"And pleasant is the fairy land
But, an eerie tale to tell"
--Child #39A

This time my eye caught on all the various things the queen of Faerie transforms Tam Lin into, when Janet (aka Margaret) attempts to rescue him. If one goes through all the Child Ballad variants, there are more types of transformations here than I'd remembered: bear, lion, adder, snake, greyhound, toad, eel, dove, swan, black dog, eagle, ass, wolf, deer, silken string, and, of course, the almost-obligatory hot iron and naked knight.

I cannot tell whether she claims she could have turned him into a tree as well, or merely that she could have killed him painfully:

"I wad hae taen out his heart o flesh,
Put in a heart o tree
--Child #39H (among others)

But then there's this:

"They turned him into a flash of fire,
And then into a naked man;
But she wrapped her mantle him about,
And then she had him won.
--Child #39F

She turned him into a "flash of fire"? How does that work?

One can argue--and some of the variants claim--that the queen of Faerie merely gave Tam Lin the appearance of the things he was transformed into--more believable, perhaps, but I might argue that when you're turning someone into hot iron and silken thread, you've already left most pretense of believability behind. :-)

One does wonder, regardless, about the exact nature of the queen's power. One could imagine a story in which poor Tam Lin was subject to so many transformations that afterwards, each storyteller remembered only a (different) small handful of them.

But really, the _next_ next book will be different

2009-11-30T20:15:51Z

(Cut and pasted this directly from one of my third-draft Thief Eyes letters. Funny how I didn't have to change a word to apply it to the third draft of Faerie Winter as well. Apparently my process really is my process. :-))

Dear Book,

My next book won't be like this, you know.

My next book there won't be any letters to my characters (let alone to you), because the words will all leap from my fingers to the page, and everything will fall into place like magic, and there won't be any time left over for writing letters, to myself or the story or anyone else.

You do realize this, don't you?

Me

P.S. Also, no one will get hurt in my next book. Not like in that one scene we had to write. Or in the three scenes that came after it, either. My next book will be a gentle book. A nice book. I like nice books.

P.P.S. Why are you laughing?

The day after a winter storm

2009-11-30T16:35:09Z

The world is chill this morning, the blue sky streaked with leftover cloud. Snow is just dusting the tops of the mountains, and the air has a clean-washed smell that makes being awake seem like the very best thing in the world.