K.V. Johansen's Blog, page 11

2012 Sunburst Awards Shortlist

Here’s some exciting news — Blackdog has made the shortlist for the 2012 Sunburst Awards in the adult category. The jury said, “Blackdog is everything high fantasy should be … This is a strongly imagined fantasy world, its peoples rendered with both wit and insight.”

Arboretum Notes

This year I limited my grafting to Baldwin and Russet. There’s an excellent Russet at the in-laws’ cottage, much nicer than the Golden Russet of the grocery stores. It’s very old and down to one bough now; I really want to preserve it. My grafts didn’t take, but one Baldwin did. Weakly. It has one leaf and is not a happy-looking graft, but it’s not a dead graft either, so I am being optimistic and trying not to go look at it every day, awaiting its shrivelling demise. I’ll try Jones budding in August again. That’s how I was successful with the Bishop’s Pippin.

A friend brought me a bagful of black walnuts from her tree in Hull. I packed them in layers of leaves in a pot and buried that under a bag of leaves for the winter. In the spring I removed some of the leaves and covered them in compost. The pot is in full sun now, but goes into the shade whenever I’m away for a few days so that it won’t dry out if overlooked by my plant-waterer. Over the last two days, three little, fernlike walnut shoots have emerged. I’ll wait a bit to see how many more appear, than transfer them into deeper individual pots for the summer.

The problem with trying to garden with trees is that unless you start when you’re a teen, you’re never going to see your landscape at its most magnificent. However, if you do don’t do it, nobody will ever see that landscape you have in your head, so you have to plant, and trust to a succeeding generation to value what you’ve made. At present, of course, being a renter, my arboretum is merely a nursery, an arboretum-in-waiting. (However, the orchard part of it has reached the point of bearing fruit.)

Must indoctrinate the nephews in the appreciation of Humphry Repton and Capability Brown.

Pyr E-Zine and Blackdog Special Offer

I’m sure you’ve all got your well-read copies of Blackdog in a place of honour on your shelves … but if you don’t, or if you’re wanting a copy to give to that friend-or-relation who never gets around to returning borrowed books, this month (that would be June 2012) subscribers to the Pyr E-Zine newsletter can buy Blackdog directly from the publisher for half price, a great special offer you should all hurry to take advantage of. As well, in the this month’s E-Zine, you can read an interview with fellow Pyr author Ari Marmell about False Covenant and the Widdershins series. You can sign up for the Pyr Newsletter (free!) through a form on Pyr’s website.

Dispatches from the Desk #16: Dangerous to write and cook

The thing about writing is that when it is going well, one doesn’t want to do anything else. Supper? I can take it or leave it, I’m certainly not going to make it. Fortunately last week, planning ahead for a stretch in which I had to do nothing but write, I filled the freezer with lasagne and tortiere, so we have food. (The Spouse is currently wrestling with his subplots, so he’s not doing much in that department either, and Mr Wicked doesn’t cook.)

This morning I managed to put butter in the frying pan, put the porridge pot on, and return to the computer. Smell of burning butter begins to permeate house … dash to stove, throw egg (blue — Number One Nephew has a couple of interesting hens) into pan, stir egg frantically. No fire hazard, butter merely tastily browned, egg cooked almost instantly. Eat egg standing up at stove. Realize forgot to turn on heat under porridge. Turn on heat under porridge. Remember that I didn’t finish that sentence. Return to computer … Strange noise. Porridge is carrying on like a New Zealand boiling mud-pit. Stir frantically. Resign self gloomily to much scouring of porridge-pot at a later point in the day. Realize kettle has been boiling for quite a while. Make tea. Barely enough water. Convey porridge and tea to somnolent spouse. Eat porridge. Drink tea. Drink more tea.

Realize blog hasn’t been updated in quite a while. What to write about? Dog’s efforts in the garden? I have some nice photos — too much work at present. (Something for you to look forward to — Mr Wicked carrying around a pail of water.) Possible upcoming literary event abroad? Better wait till the details are certain. House still smells like almost-burnt butter … ah, inspiration.

Just look on it as a progress report on the book. The more distracted the cooking, the greater the progress. Holla-Sayan is back into it, and Ivah. I’m very fond of Ivah. Holla, not unnaturally given what she did, feels she ought to come to a gruesome end and that he could do something about that if I’d just let him. We’ll see. I have plans for Ivah.

Not much weeding happening in the garden, either, except what Mr Wicked has been doing.

That was a lobelia, not a weed.

Chewies do not grow into rawhide trees, and anyway, things don’t grow if you keep digging them up and burying them again. Not rawhide chewies, and certainly not my lobelias.

Dispatches # 15: Oh, for a muse of fire – that would transcend this floundering amid divergent paths

Life would be so much easier if I had the sort of mind that came up with a neat, orderly outline and just wrote the damned thing. “Out of cheese error … redo from start.” Just a thought. This thing wants to be two separate stories, is its problem. This is usual, but usually they grow into one another. These are reluctant to merge. Conjoined twins (conjoined souls?) struggling to pull away from each other, in between throttling one another. Gah. Loud Jethro Tull will help. Perhaps.

New file, so that any radical tinkering does not lose what went before, in case the New Idea about H. and A. turns out not to be the revelation and solution I currently, in my tea-fueled and river-viewing optimism, think it should be. The great unity, the crossing point of the two plots, where they twine together like chromosomes trading genes …

Back to work.

“Go spin, you jade, go spin.”

* Long gone are the days of common literary culture, when one could toss off references and assume a shared familiarity with them on the part of one’s readers or auditors. The two eminent authors quoted herein are, of course, Sir Terry Pratchett and Sir Walter Scott.

Dispatches from the desk #14: the earth moved

Not an earthquake, just a major revision of my map. This isn’t the published map; the current book, which is intended as a sequel to Blackdog, shifts the action eastwards, beyond the Malagru Mountains, which form the eastern edge of the Blackdog map. It’s always difficult to change the reality of the geography in my head, once I’ve drawn my first rough map. I’m two-thirds of the way through this story, and have reached the point where, in my personal writing metaphor-landscape, I am no longer travelling on the dark and overhung forest trails, discovering my path peters out to a dead end, becoming mired in deep bogs, and having to backtrack to find the right path. I’m into the foothills and the way to the summit is pretty clear, plot-wise, character-story-wise. Unfortunately, ever since assorted people set out on their various roads I’ve been having worse than usual trouble getting everyone to dance together, as it were. The eastern map’s been nagging at me for a long time as not-quite-right, and that’s at the root of many of the difficulties.

I think the problem is that I’m Canadian. I live in the second-largest country in the world, exceeded in physical size only by Russia. Things are very far away from other things. It seems perfectly natural for a nation to take up the width of a continent. Without thinking about it, I tend to make my maps rather vast. This was fine for Blackdog, with its setting inspired by the Central Asian stretch of the Silk Road; vast was appropriate. The caravan road continues through this story, but the action takes place in a much smaller area. (Er, that is, it should. One city-state and one neighbouring people, with a brief diversion into a second.) A cluster of sparsely-populated tribal kingdoms do not really need all that space. In fact, it’s utterly ridiculous. But it was on the map … I was trying to fit a story onto a map that was entirely the wrong scale for it, and treating the map, never yet published or redrawn into art as Rhys Davies did with the Blackdog territory, as some set-in-geology reality the story had to adhere to. Nobody in Blackdog or “The Storyteller” goes east of Marakand; there was no established reality beyond a few fixed points that were nothing but names. Gah! Tell me, is it easier to scribble a few lines in PhotoShop, or to rewrite two-thirds of a novel to reschedule everyone’s travels? And why do I do this? I changed the map for the new Torrie book halfway through, as the story went its own way, and that was swift and effortless. Why did this one feel so particularly real and hard to revise?

Once I heaved the great sigh and told myself, This is WRONG — fix it NOW, it was actually fun. I did the map first, rather than the story, so as to have a stable reference once I began moving characters and (very small) armies about. A great gulf swept in from the sea to the south. Cities retreated before the flood (that would be the eraser), planting themselves a good way further north. And most importantly, the small cluster of tribal kingdoms in which half the story takes place scrunched themselves up in the north-east corner where they had always belonged. They’re still a bit on the large side, I think, but not ridiculously so, and, you know, they need lots of grazing land . . . Well, I’m going to leave it alone now. It was a good excuse to go through the story and give the whole thing-up-to-now another polish, anyway, and in the process it became obvious Moth was about to do something unexpected, which is always good. (And that had nothing to do with the geography, really.) Now I just need to write and insert that chapter, before I carry on with the last phase.

Dispatches from the Desk # 13: An Aphorism

“The problem with being a writer is that it’s not enough to be a writer; one must also be seen to be a writer.”

- Paul Marlowe

Dispatch from the Arboretum

I spent the morning digging up a plot to put in a dozen raspberry canes I was given. They’re going squeezed into between some daylilies and a rosebush, crammed, of course, far too closely together. Someday I’ll be able to afford “a bit of earth” of my own and the ark-arboreteum, and the rosebushes and grapes and perennials that are equally cramped and jammed in along edges of this rented town yard, will be free.

Someday ...

They’ll stretch their roots (ruthlessly pruned with a spade now and then, in the case of the oaks, lindens, basswoods, and apples, dwarfed by competition, in the case of everything else, though I fear the Beta grape has reached out under half the yard, judging by its ability to surge up to the eaves every summer), and heave a sigh of relief, and reach for the sky. Then, at last, they’ll be able to get down to the real business of being trees and roses and old-fashioned perennials, which is to establish a landscape that will endure and give grace and rest to those who wander through it. Square foot gardening, meet Humphry Repton.

Meanwhile, this summer, there may be raspberries.

World-Building: Clarkesworld Round-Table

A while ago I took part in an interview for a round-table discussion of world-building in fantasy and science fiction for Clarkesworld Magazine; it's up on the Clarkesworld website now. Gods, devils, magic systems, things readers don't know about the authors' worlds … it makes for interesting reading and has some different perspectives on the art of making another reality.

Mr Wicked and the Whirligigs, or the Future is Now

Near-future science fiction can be the hardest to keep fictional. The future keeps becoming the present, or even the past. (Funny, that.) When I wrote the first book in The Cassandra Virus trilogy (The Cassandra Virus, The Drone War, and The Black Box), the Beowulf cluster "Ozymandias" was built of "old" 486s, which was meant to be futuristic. It was, when I wrote it. By the time it came to be published, everyone (except impoverished novelists) was using Pentium-2s, and I had to make changes to the MS to keep it futuristic. (The moral there is, make up your chip generations instead of using real ones.)

I also put a wind farm on the Tantramar Marshes, which it was possible to see from Helen Chan-Fisher's house at Wood Hill outside of Easter River. At the time, the only thing of the sort around here was the small wind turbine at the RCMP station in Amherst. Now, from Helen's house (which is a real house, if you know where to look), and from the Marsh hereabouts, you can see the big wind turbines of a new windfarm over the border. They're not operational yet. Today, one was turning in a desultory fashion; the rest are still locked down down and pointing every which way.

Here's a picture of Mr Wicked out on the dykes, with the turbines outside Amherst in the far distance, in the upper right. They're much farther away than they look here; in another province, in fact, over two rivers. (Okay, yes, the Tantramar and the Missiguash are small rivers.) The little low building over his head is the museum at Fort Beausejour.