Racheline Maltese's Blog, page 35

NaNoWriMo: Days 14-15

At 20,551, we’ve kind of painfully fallen below NaNo par for now, but since we don’t think the final story is going to be much longer than 30K, we are (I am) quelling my internal Hermione and not getting hung up on the grade word count for now.

Part of the slow is that we’re still battling various sick/busy/recovering from the sick/busy-ness. Part of it is that now we’re back to being able to look at the story something like full-time, we’re starting at the beginning and doing an editing pass. We don’t normally do this until we get to the end of the story and have what we usually call a “Draft 0.5,” but in this case, with the interruptions we’ve dealt with and the multiple discoveries we’ve made about the stories in the last few days, it seems warranted.

To get an idea of what our editing passes look like: It’s all the notes. Everywhere. In-text and in the margins. Behold the horror (And, yes, we’ve managed to find a new title for it: Half Lives):

 

NaNoWriMo: Days 10-13

Falling down slightly on these updates, thanks to a combination of con crash (the fall was busy) and me reacting really poorly to the time change or, more specifically, the light change, but after today we should be on the ball again with the daily posts. 20,015 words, which puts just a bare 15 above par but we’ve never dropped below it yet!

And now, we finally, finally have the last parts of the plot that were giving us despair worked out (there was a lot of despair) are worked out, so we’re gonna start posting snipped and screenshots etc, of what’s still very much a WIP.

The following are the opening paragraphs of what we still haven’t been able to come with a better title for than The Court Quadrille. It’s still kind of a hot mess but hey, this is what first drafts are for:

 

Chapter 1

“I can’t believe you don’t think this is boring,” Myles says before punctuating his general distaste for watching his sister be fit for her wedding dress by biting sharply into an apple. They’ve been here, in the luxurious encampment designed for their transfer to [kingdom/palace/something] for days.  If he weren’t relatively sure [the lands their parents rule -- some shit that doesn’t sound like a bad faerietale] are strategically valuable, he’d be a bit concerned that they are merely being fattened up for slaughter.  As it is, a wedding still isn’t what he had in mind for their coming of age ceremony.  Wil is at least vaguely intrigued by their moving up in the world.  Myles is just annoyed by the whole thing.  

“Regardless of whether it is boring,” Wil says with all the sharpness of an older sibling that has never let Myles forget that she is seven minutes his senior, “These are some of our first official duties as heads of state.”

Myles glances around at the various staff.  Right now, they’re not heads of anything, and Wil is being something of a twit.  He doesn’t want to point out either of those things with an audience, however.  It’s much more pleasant to watch the bee crawling up his wrist to get the juice from his apple.

At least, until one of the attendants shoos it away with a flick of a fan and a disapproving look at Myles. Myles slumps back on the stack of pillows piled on the divan and sighs.

“I can’t believe we’re only marrying one person.”

Guest Post: Cecilia Tan’s Confessions of a Fanfic Hipster

One of the really fun things about hosting other people on this blog is the meeting new people thing.  But this isn’t really one of those guest spots. I’ve know Cecilia Tan faintly for ages through the days of Livejournal and Harry Potter fandom, and now she has a new (old, long story, read the post) book out, The Siren and the Sword, which is book 1 in her Magic University series.

Today she has a guest post for us about fanfiction, today’s publishing tastes, and how she got from there to here and back again.  So often, when we talk about fanfiction I feel like that discussion is defensive, fearful, or defeatist — there are certainly incredibly good reasons in the history of fanfiction culture for this to be the case.  Cecilia’s take is refreshing, because it’s not about that at all.  It’s about different ways to tell stories and what it’s like when the world finally catches up with what you love.

Confessions of a Fanfic Hipster

by Cecilia Tan

Yep, these days fanfic is not just considered “cool,” it’s red-hot mainstream. Not only has a former Twilight fanfic (50 Shades) turned the English-language publishing world on its head, a One Direction fic serialized on Wattpad (After by Anna Todd) recently sold to a New York publisher for a six-figure advance, and the romance bestseller lists are well-populated with P2P works. Which puts writers like me in the odd position of being like those hipsters who were doing something “before it got big.”

Unlike those hipsters, though, I don’t complain about people discovering our “secret.” We weren’t TRYING to create an elitist cabal that others would long to join. Fanfic writers are the intersection of two of the nerdiest groups on Earth: writers and fans. I don’t think most of us thought of ourselves as “the cool kids,” we were just doing something we love! But these days even nerddom is going mainstream: certainly fandom is. In New England, where I live, the recent Rhode Island Comic Con sold out of tickets and turned thousands of people away. So did Arisia, the big multi-fandom science fiction convention in Boston. And don’t get me started on how huge events like San Diego Comicon and Atlanta’s DragonCon are. They’re on a different (huger) scale from Woodstock and they happen every year. It’s cool to be a fan these days.

I’ll tell you why I think fandom and fanfic are such a draw now. It’s not the superhero costumes or the magic spells themselves. It’s because what we’ve been fighting for as a culture–as both writers and as fans–is the right to express ourselves and to wear our hearts on our sleeves. And that right is finally being accepted. A lot of us growing up lived among Muggles, basically, and were told by the Aunt Petunias in our lives to keep our love of “weirdo” things like comic books and “inappropriate” gender expressions and alternative sexuality to ourselves. The pressure to conform acts on anything that isn’t “normal,” including freely expressed sexual desire, fannishness, queerness, and kinkiness. That pressure to conform still exists, but it hasn’t stopped gay marriage from being legalized in more than half the states or 50 Shades of Grey from dominating the bestseller lists (pun intended).

You will see all of those repressed elements–kink, queerness, sex, and fannish love of source material–come bursting out in fanfic. This is why many many fics are not merely continuations of the source material, but seem heavily skewed toward the yearnings in the fannish heart. Unanswered questions in the worldbuilding are answered in fanfic. Slash introduces both eros and homosexuality into texts whose canons may lack them. Even heterosexual fanfic often skews hard toward romance. And romances can skew toward kink (viz: all the many kinky Twi-fics, of which 50 Shades was only one of a horde). And so on.

To put it succinctly: what’s not to love? Fandom is about love, intense intense love, with dashes of deep devotion and maybe even some obsessive need. Fanfic is about expressing that love–which results in some intense intense fiction, incredible emotional rollercoasters–and about satisfying that need. That sounds like exactly the recipe one should follow to cook up a bestselling romance novel, doesn’t it? That’s exactly why fanfic novels and fanfic-inspired works, as well as wholly original works written by writers who “trained” in fanfic, are hitting it big now. Because out there the public is discovering that they like this awesome cuisine that is the food of our people, and there are big companies who are ready to take what we’ve been doing in our hole-in-the-wall speakeasies and deliver it to the masses. Wearing your heart on your sleeve is cool now.

It’s not a coincidence that my career as a writer has taken an upturn since the public tastes have begun to run in my direction. I fell into writing fanfic in the early 2000s when my career was in a slump. In the 1990s I had built up a reputation as a maven of erotic science fiction, combining BDSM and sf/fantasy in my work with explicit, alternative sexuality. I wrote it and I also published it, founding a publishing house to promulgate the genre (Circlet Press). My work was in major magazines like Asimov’s and my collection of short stories was published by HarperCollins, one of the biggest publishers then and now. But by 2002 the tide in both the USA and the publishing industry as a whole was flowing in a conservative direction. Thriving erotica publishers of the nineties were mysteriously closing their doors. Harper turned down my follow-up collection and it took 10 years before I found a publisher for it. Circlet Press (and I) went deep into debt.

I took refuge in fanfic. Although I had dabbled in fanfic before (if you search the Internet very hard you might find a Catwoman/Batgirl BDSM story from 1991 or a Wonder Woman from 1995…) I fell headlong into Harry Potter fanfic in 2006. With my career in a slump it was the best, most addictive way to “keep in shape” imaginable. I found not only a fulfilling way to keep up my writing chops, I found a receptive, supportive community who were not only as into Harry Potter as me, they were also were interested in the same social justice issues I was: erotic and sexual equality, freedom of sexual expression, alternative sexuality, feminism and empowerment of female needs and desires in both fiction and real life. AND writing! The fanfic community was (and is) a community of writers, of word-lovers, and deep nerddom, digging into the minutiae of worldbuilding and character motivation. It was like being a pro athlete whose league folded and despite having nowhere pro to play, finding a gym full of workout partners who loved and supported each other anyway. It’s a world of love.

It was for those my fandom friends that I wrote books like The Prince’s Boy, a gay BDSM high fantasy romance that if you squint hard can be read as a Harry/Draco AU. In the manner of a fanfic WIP, I wrote it as an online serial over the course of two years, to see if I could induce the same level of squee from my original characters and bring the same level of pleasurable addiction to my audience as I did with my fanfic. (Not a spoiler: yes, I did.) The subsequent book edition won Honorable Mention in both the Rainbow Awards and the NLA Writing Awards, so apparently the squee went beyond slash communities to the wider world. I think the love I got from my fanfic readers went right back into the story.

My fanfic friends were also the readers I wrote the Magic University books for. Magic U. grew out of countless fandom conversations about what education after Hogwarts must be like. J.K. Rowling said in an interview she thought there were no wizarding universities: after Hogwarts people were completely ready for wizarding life. That seemed impossible. For one thing, how did Snape become a potions master, then? (By owl correspondence course?) For another, many of the students in the book seem to have poorly grasped the spells they’ve been taught…! But I digress. I not only spent a lot of time thinking about how a magical university might work, I was also thinking about what characters who were 18, 19, and 20 years old might be like. After all, we leave Harry and cohort in the canon just when their love lives and sex lives were about to potentially get interesting. Most of the fanfic I wrote involved them at age 18 or older so as not to be illegal (or squicky) for involving underage characters, so I was writing about that age group a lot. All that thought, along with other criticisms I had about Rowling’s universe (why can’t spells go around corners? why do the Weasleys wear secondhand clothes when there seems to be no limit to what can be conjured?) came together in the magical system at work in Magic University.

The Magic U books first began to appear in 2009, originally published by Ravenous Romance. Because of the book’s strong fanfic ties, I wanted to bring things full circle, and so I convinced them to contract not only the four-book series from me, but an anthology of stories in the Magic U. universe by other writers. Fanfic, in other words. But before I could invite people to participate in the anthology, I began to find Magic U fanfic “in the wild.” So exciting! People were already starting to play in the sandbox without even knowing it might lead to something more. Because they were doing it for the love. I think they felt how much I had poured into the books and they responded. I ended up inviting two of those authors I stumbled across on fanfic archives into the book, and filled most of the rest of the slots with longtime HP fic friends. (And I wrote a few stories myself! Hm. Does that make them canon?)

A lot has changed, though, since five years ago. For one thing, the mainstream interest in BDSM proven by 50 Shades has led me to have a very busy writing schedule for some very big publishers. But I recently got the rights to Magic U back, and so I’m putting the series back in print (and ebook) at last. If you’re thinking you want to jump into the fanfic pool because you’ve heard it’s the hip thing, hey, come on in, the water’s fine. I welcome people playing with my ideas and my characters, even when they diverge from what I would have done. And who knows? Maybe some idea will spark for you that will start off in another direction and become the next bestselling trend. It wouldn’t be the first time, or the last!

~

The Siren and the Sword

Kyle Wadsworth arrives on the Harvard Campus only to discover, much to his surprise, he’s magical. Thus begins his four-year journey to learn where he fits in the world, which ultimately becomes a quest for true love.

Upon arrival at Veritas, Kyle quickly joins a group of peers who become involved in solving the mystery of a seductive siren in the library, while they learn about the magic inside themselves and around them, as well as the secret history of magic and those who practice it.

Kyle’s trials and tribulations range from his need to meet the bisexuality prerequisite before he can study sex magic to the fact that the ancient prophecy he translates for his thesis project seems to be about himself. If Kyle is right, he’ll need to find his true love, or the world as we know it is doomed.

Amazon | All Romance | B&N

Cecilia Tan is the award-winning author of romance and fantasy whom Susie Bright calls “simply one of the most important writers, editors, and innovators in contemporary American erotic literature.” Her BDSM novel Slow Surrender won the RT Reviewers Choice Award and the Maggie Award for Excellence. She lives in the Boston area with her partner corwin and three cats.

Visit her on the web at: http://www.ceciliatan.com/ and on Twitter at @ceciliatan

Do the Thing! Routines

When Racheline and I started writing together, our routine consisted of one thing: writing. Then there was editing on top of that, and then marketing, and then all the little things that go into getting a book ready for production — and with so much in the hopper, we were always adding new things on top of projects still in the process.

It took a while, and a lot of not sleeping enough, but we got comfortable with the routine of juggling writing, editing, and marketing. It’s not a “routine” in the sense that we always spend the same chunk of time doing the same thing every day, but it is in the sense that, we have (and meet) an expectation for ourselves that on any given day, we’ll do something in each of those categories.

Now we’re in the thick of NaNoWriMo, and we’ve stripped away all the other stuff and are just back to writing. It’s jarring, in a way — wait, where did the rest of our to-do list go? — and also freeing (All we have to do is write! With some edits on our Christmas short here and working on some other marketing stuff over there; because we can’t stop completely…). But it’s a change in routine. And at the end of the month, when we go full-throttle back to all the things we usually, that’ll be another thing.

Routines are useful. To my expectation-needing self, they’re pretty much necessary to do life. They take what each day, week, or month needs and makes it predictable, which makes planning easy, or at least easier. And the more I follow a routine, the more efficient I get at ticking off the boxes on the to-do list every day.

Stepping outside the routine, though, can be jarring. What do I do? Where do I go? But it’s also freeing. It lets you re-evaluate what you’re doing, and why. It’s a change of calender scenery. It makes things non-boring.

What changing things up really reminds us, though, is how much is possible. There’s a reason the NaNoWriMo challenge is so popular, after all; people make an exception to their daily routines and crank out tens of thousands of words in a matter of weeks. It lets us come at old problems with fresh eyes.

And at the end of a month, when we’ve cranked out our own tens of thousands of words, it’ll be quite nice and comforting to go back to our old routine, for however long it lasts, before it changes again.

So what’s your routine — that you’re trying to get into, trying to get out of, or happily in the midst of? Whatever it is, we’ll cheer you on.

NaNoWriMo: Day 7-9

So much writing! Too much, apparently, to update the blog. We’re sitting nicely at 17,315 right now, despite a couple of slow days while Racheline continues to battle the cold from hell and we did some revisions of earlier stuff. (We never fell below par, though! Yay team.)

But we’ve come up with some structure stuff we like very much, filled the holes in our Swiss cheese that needed filling, banged the rest more or less into shape, and came up with the idea for a sequel along the way, because we like worldbuilding and societies in cataclysm very very much.

Doves cover reveal

Doves, coming in ebook (January 21, 2015) and paperback (February 14, 2015) from Torquere Press.

The ties that bind…

Two years after the events of Starling, Cinderella story and star of The Fourth Estate J. Alex Cook is living happily ever after with his boyfriend, television writer Paul Marion Keane. But when Paul’s pilot, Winsome, AZ, gets picked up, the competing demands of their high-profile careers make them question their future together.

… c an sometimes tear you apart

As Paul becomes increasingly absent from their relationship, Alex tries to regain control of his private life and establish a career path independent of Fourth‘s enigmatic, and at times malevolent, showrunner Victor. But the delicate web of relationships that connects Alex, Paul, and their friends — including Alex’s excitable ex-lover Liam and his no-nonsense fiancée Carly — threatens to unravel.

With the business of Hollywood making it hard to remember who he is when the whole world isn’t watching, Alex is forced to confront major changes in the fairytale life he never wanted as he discovers that love in Los Angeles often looks nothing like the movies.

Guest Author(s): Emma Jane (& Liz Powell) with Otherworld

Today it’s guest author time again. Emma Jane & Liz Powell have a new release out from Torquere and since they are co-authors too, we couldn’t resist hosting them:

Hi, thanks for joining me on my blog tour. My name’s Emma Jane and I’m one of the authors of Otherworld.

Archetypal English toff William “Liam” Barnes is in big trouble. He’s borrowed money from Irish gangster Davey McGrath with one simple proviso: get the prism from Matthew Luttrell – seducing him if he has to – and bring it back to him. But the prism isn’t with Matthew, and Liam makes a decision he can’t undo, meaning he’s now twenty thousand pounds in debt to a vicious gangster and has no idea where to find the prism.

That is, until he meets stoic Irishman Jim Henvey, the real owner of the prism, who has a cruel demi-goddess of a mother on the warpath for him. Liam and Jim quickly find themselves tied up in each other’s messes, and with more than just the mortal world out to get them, is there any way they can find their way out of a battle between dimensions together and still have time to figure out their feelings for each other? Or will they sink deeper into trouble?

Today, I’m going to talk about Jim. Jim is a nineteen-year-old Irish fisherman who lives and works with his father in Kent, England. He grew up with his mother, but took the prism from her and fled. This prism is something that’s always been in his family and he and his mother used to use it together – in fact, she was training him to use it. It’s a gateway to the Otherworld – it allows people to cross over to the world between life and death.

Jim seems to spend a lot of his time running away. He’s often angry and frustrated – mostly with himself. He’s more than capable of looking after himself though, having spent plenty of time training at a boxing club. He’s quite a serious and world-weary character and needs Liam to lighten him up a little. He’s protective of his family, his older sister Stella and two little sisters, Evelyn and Caitlin. As his family are Catholic, and travellers, he hides his sexuality. The thought of being openly gay terrifies him.

Although Jim is quick-tempered, he has a big heart.

~

The seagulls squealed up above, white flecks on the gray sky. The clouds were dark, swollen with rain, and the sea rocked the little fishing boat violently from side to side, causing James to stagger and almost drop the casket of fish into the sea.

“Careful, boy!” Marcas called from the dock, his lined and leathery faced creased into a smile. “That’s a day’s livelihood right there, and you’re tossing it all back.”

“There,” James said, dropping it onto the slippery wooden slats of the marina walkway. He sniffed, wiped his hand across his face, and grimaced when he caught the stench of freshly gutted fish. “Jesus, can’t you do anything about the smell?”

“Nothing to do about nature,” his dad said shortly as the clouds burst and the rain came down. He wrinkled his nose and stared at the seagulls circling in the sky. “Besides, you soon get used to it.”

“I can’t help but feel you oversold the glamour of the simple life, Da.”

His old man winked at him. “Your mother got you too used to the luxuries, I see.”

Even though he was smiling, James still felt a cold shiver of dread and folded his arms tightly across his chest as he stared intently at the horizon. Hardly ever talks about Mammy, now can’t bloody stop mentioning her, he thought savagely. Mammy — far away in the green rolling fields, where it didn’t stink of fish guts. But he’d left that far behind; he’d chosen to come crawling back to his father, the only one who could truly hide from her, and hope that would be a good enough shield.

“Jim? Give us a hand, will you?”

He tore his gaze from the steely horizon and grabbed the other end of the box of iced fish, wrinkling his nose again at the smell. The rain flecked in his face like spittle. Another glorious Kentish day. He wondered what the girls were doing: the twins would be nice and warm and snug at home — off school sick, and Stella would be stuck teaching in an outdated classroom that stank of Play-Doh. Better than fishing, though. Anything was better than fishing.

You’re being punished, Jimmy, you know that, don’t you?

Yes, yes, he thought sullenly. Oh, yes. He was being punished, and didn’t he know it.

Otherworld is published by Torquere Press.

You can fine Emma Jane on the web at: Twitter | Blogspot | Website

Also by Emma Jane:

The Queen’s Guard – a short story published in Torquere’s Men in Uniform anthology
Compulsion – a short story published in Dreamspinner’s Hot off the Press anthology due for release November 2014
Shuttered – a novel published by Dreamspinner Press, due for release December 2014

Also by Liz Powell:

Hunted – a novel published by Manifold Press

NaNoWriMo Day 6: What’s the period appropriate term for eye-fucking?

(Actual question). Turns out we really like writing period, but are running into some concerns of colloquialism.

But hey, 13,640 words! More than makes up for the words we didn’t make yesterday while we were planning. (Also, value of planning: Now we know more what we’re doing, 2k+ words come pretty easily.)

Tomorrow, once we recover, we’re gonna see about putting together an excerpt of what we have so far. So stay tuned for that.

NaNoWriMo: Day 5

Didn’t write much today (about 200 words, we’re just shy of 11K now) but we spent four or five hours in email today banging out what the story is actually, you know, about. And we did, to our immense relief, have our big “OHH!” moment. So now we can make what we have less swiss-cheesey, and know what the conflict, politics, and resolution actually look like.

Today’s lesson: What we intend to write as a sex romp will inevitably turn into a weird dark story about fame and death. We should really stop being surprised by now.

NaNoWriMo: Day 4

10,777 words, and we have officially hit Swiss Cheese Plotness. We know what happens, and we know the general framework, we just have to figure out how the structure all fits together. Also, we have to figure out exactly how tropetastic we’re going to get.

Tomorrow is gonna be a big day of brainstorming in email while we sort all of that out, and then more words, to keep up the momentum. Also probably multitasking some with LiLA book 4, because, speaking of things we don’t want to lose momentum on.