Marie Brennan's Blog, page 240
January 8, 2011
post-Yuletide thinkiness
Yuletide being my first official foray* into fanfiction, I'd like to spend a little time thinking about it. Out loud, of course, because that's what LJ is for.
(*Technically a lot of the stuff I made up in junior high was fanfiction, either of the "insert my own original character into this novel" or the "huh, I really like this setting, let me run amok in it with only passing references to the canon" varieties. But most of it never got written down, and none of it was really shared with anybody. Hence unofficial.)
I had to offer 4-8 different fandoms, and the ones I chose were: the Gabriel Knight computer games, K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces, Hard Boiled (the John Woo film with Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung), Into the Woods (the Sondheim musical), Shakespeare's Hamlet, Norse mythology, and Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads.
How did I choose them, from a list of about four thousand?
I decided not to offer any novels. Not because I think there's anything wrong with novel-based fanfic (I don't), or because I thought all of those authors disapproved of people ficcing their works (some do, some don't), but because . . . it felt weird. These people are my colleagues; some are friends, and others I might find myself at a dinner table with next World Fantasy. I knew I would feel awkward if I had written fanfic based on their stuff, so I scratched it off the list.
(This may also mean I don't request novel sources in the future, either. Technically there are novelizations of the GK games, and of course Hogfather was a book before it was a miniseries, but Jane Jensen is primarily a game designer and I am unlikely to end up at dinner with Sir Pterry. If it happens, well, I'll deal.)
Then I decided not to offer any historical periods. I had been looking through the 16th century list, thinking how many of the listed people I knew well enough to write, but then I realized it was feeling too much like work -- especially since my brain defaults to processing those people through an Onyx Court lens. At some future point, that knee-jerk reflex will probably have faded, so this isn't a permanent ban; but for this year, it seemed like a good idea to stay away.
I could easily have filled out my entire dance card with folkloric sources: fairy tales, different mythologies, Beowulf, etc. Weirdness crept in there, though, of a different sort; a short story of that kind is also a short story I could theoretically sell. It wouldn't kill me to give one as a gift, of course, but I didn't want that little voice in the back of my head yammering at me that this is my job, you know, and that means I ought to earn money where I can. In the end I compromised by making approximately half my offers folkloric, and half not.
Even after all of that, I still had quite a list. Here, at last, the requirements of Yuletide began to weigh upon me: whatever assignment I received, I would be contractually obligated to provide a minimum of one thousand words involving pre-determined characters, and socially obligated to make it the kind of story my recipient was looking for, if at all possible. My subconscious kept trying to look at the list of sources and think up kinds of stories it would be interested in writing, but I kept having to remind myself that it doesn't work that way. Just because I had an idea for the fandom didn't mean it would be my recipient's idea. And if there seemed a high likelihood I might be asked for something I didn't want to write, I shouldn't offer. (I can't remember if this was my specific reason for excluding Elfquest from my list, but it can serve as an example anyway: the Pinis may be on the record as saying Cutter/Skywise slash is canonical, but my brain doesn't read those characters that way, and I would have a hard time writing such a story if asked for it. But when I saw a specific request I knew I could fulfill, I was happy to write it.)
Finally, I bore in mind the Dark Agenda challenge that runs concurrently with Yuletide, promoting more chromatism in the exchange. This helped tip both K-20 and Hard Boiled onto my list.
The final decisions were a bit random, as I still had something like twenty possibilities to choose from. I just asked myself what seemed like it would be fun, grabbed those, and called it a day.
(BTW, the irony I alluded to a while back was the very real possibility that I would both write and receive Gabriel Knight, as I'm told the matching algorithm often goes first for fandoms with very small numbers. Didn't happen, though.)
Once assignments were received, I trolled through the list of people's "Dear Yuletide Writer" letters to see what I might have been given; that's how I ended up looking at the prompts that resulted in "The Basics of Being a Lady" and "More an Antique Roman." ("Desert Rain" was, as I said before, a pinch-hit; that person's assigned writer had defaulted, so I picked it up from the mailing list.) Those pieces were lower-stress, because I got to do exactly what my subconscious had been trying to do while browsing the original list: I came up with an idea, then committed to writing it. The ballad prompts, by contrast, didn't spark anything especially shiny in my brain, so I shrugged and passed them by.
Ultimately -- not that you could tell by the difficulty I had writing "Coyotaje" -- I think this was very good practice for that hypothetical day when I start being invited to closed anthologies; there, again, I may be asked to write to some kind of theme or prompt, which isn't something I have a lot of experience with doing. It was also boatloads of fun, because of the sheer joy and shared fannishness that Yuletide brings out. Here, the old canard holds very true; it's just as much fun (if not moreso) to give than to receive. It's social, in a way that writing so rarely is. I got more direct commentary on my Yuletide pieces than on most of the short stories I publish -- no joke. The egoboo is non-trivial.
So yes, time permitting, I will do Yuletide again. Will I write more fanfic, outside the exchange? Maybe; I have some ideas bopping around my head, and it's no bad thing to sometimes do writing that's purely for fun. But for now, I've been a slacker long enough; it's time to get back to some paying work.
(*Technically a lot of the stuff I made up in junior high was fanfiction, either of the "insert my own original character into this novel" or the "huh, I really like this setting, let me run amok in it with only passing references to the canon" varieties. But most of it never got written down, and none of it was really shared with anybody. Hence unofficial.)
I had to offer 4-8 different fandoms, and the ones I chose were: the Gabriel Knight computer games, K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces, Hard Boiled (the John Woo film with Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung), Into the Woods (the Sondheim musical), Shakespeare's Hamlet, Norse mythology, and Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads.
How did I choose them, from a list of about four thousand?
I decided not to offer any novels. Not because I think there's anything wrong with novel-based fanfic (I don't), or because I thought all of those authors disapproved of people ficcing their works (some do, some don't), but because . . . it felt weird. These people are my colleagues; some are friends, and others I might find myself at a dinner table with next World Fantasy. I knew I would feel awkward if I had written fanfic based on their stuff, so I scratched it off the list.
(This may also mean I don't request novel sources in the future, either. Technically there are novelizations of the GK games, and of course Hogfather was a book before it was a miniseries, but Jane Jensen is primarily a game designer and I am unlikely to end up at dinner with Sir Pterry. If it happens, well, I'll deal.)
Then I decided not to offer any historical periods. I had been looking through the 16th century list, thinking how many of the listed people I knew well enough to write, but then I realized it was feeling too much like work -- especially since my brain defaults to processing those people through an Onyx Court lens. At some future point, that knee-jerk reflex will probably have faded, so this isn't a permanent ban; but for this year, it seemed like a good idea to stay away.
I could easily have filled out my entire dance card with folkloric sources: fairy tales, different mythologies, Beowulf, etc. Weirdness crept in there, though, of a different sort; a short story of that kind is also a short story I could theoretically sell. It wouldn't kill me to give one as a gift, of course, but I didn't want that little voice in the back of my head yammering at me that this is my job, you know, and that means I ought to earn money where I can. In the end I compromised by making approximately half my offers folkloric, and half not.
Even after all of that, I still had quite a list. Here, at last, the requirements of Yuletide began to weigh upon me: whatever assignment I received, I would be contractually obligated to provide a minimum of one thousand words involving pre-determined characters, and socially obligated to make it the kind of story my recipient was looking for, if at all possible. My subconscious kept trying to look at the list of sources and think up kinds of stories it would be interested in writing, but I kept having to remind myself that it doesn't work that way. Just because I had an idea for the fandom didn't mean it would be my recipient's idea. And if there seemed a high likelihood I might be asked for something I didn't want to write, I shouldn't offer. (I can't remember if this was my specific reason for excluding Elfquest from my list, but it can serve as an example anyway: the Pinis may be on the record as saying Cutter/Skywise slash is canonical, but my brain doesn't read those characters that way, and I would have a hard time writing such a story if asked for it. But when I saw a specific request I knew I could fulfill, I was happy to write it.)
Finally, I bore in mind the Dark Agenda challenge that runs concurrently with Yuletide, promoting more chromatism in the exchange. This helped tip both K-20 and Hard Boiled onto my list.
The final decisions were a bit random, as I still had something like twenty possibilities to choose from. I just asked myself what seemed like it would be fun, grabbed those, and called it a day.
(BTW, the irony I alluded to a while back was the very real possibility that I would both write and receive Gabriel Knight, as I'm told the matching algorithm often goes first for fandoms with very small numbers. Didn't happen, though.)
Once assignments were received, I trolled through the list of people's "Dear Yuletide Writer" letters to see what I might have been given; that's how I ended up looking at the prompts that resulted in "The Basics of Being a Lady" and "More an Antique Roman." ("Desert Rain" was, as I said before, a pinch-hit; that person's assigned writer had defaulted, so I picked it up from the mailing list.) Those pieces were lower-stress, because I got to do exactly what my subconscious had been trying to do while browsing the original list: I came up with an idea, then committed to writing it. The ballad prompts, by contrast, didn't spark anything especially shiny in my brain, so I shrugged and passed them by.
Ultimately -- not that you could tell by the difficulty I had writing "Coyotaje" -- I think this was very good practice for that hypothetical day when I start being invited to closed anthologies; there, again, I may be asked to write to some kind of theme or prompt, which isn't something I have a lot of experience with doing. It was also boatloads of fun, because of the sheer joy and shared fannishness that Yuletide brings out. Here, the old canard holds very true; it's just as much fun (if not moreso) to give than to receive. It's social, in a way that writing so rarely is. I got more direct commentary on my Yuletide pieces than on most of the short stories I publish -- no joke. The egoboo is non-trivial.
So yes, time permitting, I will do Yuletide again. Will I write more fanfic, outside the exchange? Maybe; I have some ideas bopping around my head, and it's no bad thing to sometimes do writing that's purely for fun. But for now, I've been a slacker long enough; it's time to get back to some paying work.
Now it can be told . . . .
The coyotes of Mexicali were bold. They did their business in cantinas, in the middle of the afternoon; the police, well-fed with bribes, looked the other way. Day by day, week by week, people came into Mexicali, carrying backpacks and bundles and small children, and day by day, week by week, they went away again, vanishing while the back of the police was obligingly turned.
The short story I was having so much angst over was "Coyotaje," and it's been sold to Ekaterina Sedia's anthology Bewere the Night. (A sequel anthology of sorts to Running with the Pack , but there's no connection between my two stories.)
It just goes to illustrate what every writer figures out eventually: that the ease with which a story comes out of your head has no particular relationship to its quality. I'm actually quite proud of "Coyotaje," even if writing it was like pulling my teeth out one by one with rusty pliers. Not that the difficulty automatically implies quality, either; I've had stories that just raced from my fingers which I was also extremely proud of. The two things just don't correlate at all.
Release date is April, if Amazon can be believed; I'll keep you updated.
January 6, 2011
obligatory awards pimpage
If you're a Hugo or Nebula voter, here's what I published in 2010:
Novel
A Star Shall Fall
Novelette
"And Blow Them at the Moon," Beneath Ceaseless Skies #50
Short stories
"Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes," Running With the Pack, ed. Ekaterina Sedia
"Remembering Light," Beneath Ceaseless Skies #44
"The Gospel of Nachash," Clockwork Phoenix 3, ed. Mike Allen
"The Last Wendy," On Spec #81
"Footprints," Shroud Magazine #9
. . . I need to get back on the short story wagon, or I'll have very little to list for 2011.
We now return you to a more interesting corner of the Internet.
Novel
A Star Shall Fall
Novelette
"And Blow Them at the Moon," Beneath Ceaseless Skies #50
Short stories
"Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes," Running With the Pack, ed. Ekaterina Sedia
"Remembering Light," Beneath Ceaseless Skies #44
"The Gospel of Nachash," Clockwork Phoenix 3, ed. Mike Allen
"The Last Wendy," On Spec #81
"Footprints," Shroud Magazine #9
. . . I need to get back on the short story wagon, or I'll have very little to list for 2011.
We now return you to a more interesting corner of the Internet.
Writing Fight Scenes: Who?
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
The short story is DEAD AT LAST -- or at least written, revised, and sent off to someone who can check it for howling factual errors -- and so it's time for the triumphant return of How to Write a Fight Scene!
So: who's fighting?
I said last time that the most important question to ask yourself is, what is the purpose of this fight? Only slightly less important is this: who is involved in the fight? This both arises from and feeds back into purpose, of course, so you generally end up asking them both at the same time, but they're both major enough issues that I split them apart for the purpose of discussion.
The answer to this is, in its simplest form, very short: a minimum of two people (or one person and some kind of opponent, anyway). But it isn't enough to have their names. There are a lot of details packed into the question of who, and those details can have a strong effect on how the fight goes. So let's take a moment to unpack them.
Age. I believe the natural physical peak for humans is somewhere around our early to mid-twenties? Speaking just on the point of physical conditioning -- we'll talk about confounding factors later -- younger tends to be better, in terms of speed, strength, and general haleness, at least while talking about adults.
Height. Taller means more reach; I'm ten inches shorter than my husband, and can't get near him sparring in karate. He can hit me when I'm nowhere near hitting him. Also, it depends on where the height is distributed; does the combatant have long legs (covers more ground) or short ones (lower center of gravity, and therefore more stability)?
Build. I find this a more useful term for fight purposes than "weight," because the composition matters more than the raw number. Is the combatant skinny, flabby, built like a brick wall? Tactics will vary.
Strength. How much this matters depends on the type of fight. Gunfight? Not terribly relevant, unless we're talking about the kind of gun Vasquez was carrying in Aliens. Two-handed broadswords? A weak character will barely be able to swing one.
Speed. This can be both reflexes and ability to run, depending on what's going on. For lighter weapons, like rapiers or knives, speed is more useful than strength -- especially since, as a generalization, bigger and stronger people tend to be slower. There are exceptions (my husband being one of them -- totally unfair), but the more mass you're flinging around, the slower it's likely to be.
Balance. Especially if the characters are fighting on an unsteady rope bridge or other exciting terrain.
Endurance. We'll talk later about how real fights tend to be very short, but that doesn't mean they aren't exhausting. And if there's a chase involved, victory may go to the character in better cardiovascular condition.
Flexibility. Much to my regret, this isn't as useful in a fight as I would like; if flexibility ruled the day, I would kick ass at karate. (All that ballet training.) But it can be useful in grappling scenarios, or that last-ditch over-extended lunge to spit the enemy.
Injuries. Either recent or old. Inigo Montoya fighting with three holes in him, or Ye Olde Grizzled Swordmaster with the knee that aches when it rains. Ask a middle-aged former Olympian how they feel: even barring major problems like a torn rotator cuff, that kind of activity takes its toll.
Hair. Oh, how I wish it really were possible to use a long braid as a weapon! All it does is wrap around my throat when I turn quickly in karate, or occasionally thwap somebody in the face. Long hair is generally a liability in a fight; it can get in your eyes or provide the enemy with a convenient handhold. If you want your expert swordswoman to have beautiful long hair, she'd better keep it in a crown braid whenever there's trouble in the offing.
Physical quirks. A catch-all category for those odd little things that mark an individual out. One friend of mine has elbows so double-jointed, they go a good twenty degrees past the horizontal. My ankles can't dorsiflex worth a damn. Six fingers on your right hand will mean most sword hilts are too cramped for you. Etc.
Clothing. Yes, clothing; we might as well group that in with physical characteristics. Ideally, should be loose or stretchy enough not to impair movement; deviations from this can be narratively fun. Footwear will affect stability; contrary to what comic books tell you, high heels are not practical in combat. Also, depending on the weather, clothing will determine whether the character is freezing or about to die of heat exhaustion.
Sex. I left this one until last because its relevance mostly lies in the points above. For example, men tend to have more upper-body strength than women, but not all men have the advantage over all women; you're better off starting with "how buff is my protagonist?" than chromosomal makeup. Having said that: yes, men tend to be stronger in the upper body, women generally have lower centers of gravity than men of equal height, men tend to be taller and have more reach, women (being smaller) may be faster. Etc.
. . . there's probably more, but that's enough for now. Feel free to suggest more in the comments. Onward to mental/social/etc:
Training. Is this an innocent farmgirl dragging down the sword above the fireplace, or a recent graduate of the Ninja Assassination Academy? Is the combatant trained in one specific weapon, or familiar with a wide range? Has their training led them to expect particular conditions and behaviors, that may or may not be what they're facing right now?
Experience. Not the same thing as training.![[info]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1380442897i/1319734.gif)
rachelmanija
has been doing a great series of posts on real-life experience with fighting, which is something I don't really have; I may know how to hold and use a rapier, but that wouldn't do me much good at all if somebody came at me with a sharpened blade and the intent to kill me.
Wits. Okay, yes, I've borrowed this term from White Wolf's RPG character sheets -- but that's because it works. Wits and intelligence aren't the same thing; someone can be illiterate and uneducated and incapable of remembering the most basic facts about history, but quick as a snake when it comes to a fight. The ability to adapt on the fly is very, very useful in a fight, where you rarely have the time or opportunity to plan what your next move should be.
Ruthlessness. That's as good a term as any for the willingness to cause harm to another living creature. Most of the moves taught in a self-defense class are very simple and very brutal: Gouge the eyes. Strike the throat. Kick the knee sideways. Anything to incapacitate your attacker enough for you to get away. Some people have the mentality to do this; others freeze.
Code of honor. Related, but not the same. A knight who will cut down her opponent without hesitation in a duel may refuse to stab an unsuspecting target in the back. Like ruthlessness, and the purpose question from before, this determines what the character will and will not do.
Social expectations. Especially if there's an audience for the fight. A young man not wanting onlookers to think he's craven will behave differently than his natural inclination; so will a young woman not wanting them to think she's unladylike.
I'm probably missing some there, too, but we'll stop there, because by now some of the readers of this post are crouched in the corner making wibbling noises and wondering if they have to fill out full medical information and Myers-Briggs tests for the characters before they can write the scene. The answer, of course, is no: you don't have to sit down and consciously figure out the answers to all of these questions. But by the time you get to the scene -- so long as it isn't the first thing in the book -- you probably know a lot of it already; you have a mental image of your tall, bookish, asthmatic librarian who had some fencing lessons as a kid, or your stocky, street-veteran thief missing three fingers on her left hand. The important thing is to keep those details in mind when you put them into combat, and make use of them as the opportunity arises. Don't let the fight become generic, as if the participants were two armed automata smacking away at each other in textbook fashion. Like any other scene in a book -- you may have noticed this is something of a mantra -- it should reflect who the characters are, in the most interesting way possible.
With the holidays behind us, I hope to maintain a more regular pace. Keep an eye on this space for the next exciting installment, in which we actually give our characters weapons!
The short story is DEAD AT LAST -- or at least written, revised, and sent off to someone who can check it for howling factual errors -- and so it's time for the triumphant return of How to Write a Fight Scene!
So: who's fighting?
I said last time that the most important question to ask yourself is, what is the purpose of this fight? Only slightly less important is this: who is involved in the fight? This both arises from and feeds back into purpose, of course, so you generally end up asking them both at the same time, but they're both major enough issues that I split them apart for the purpose of discussion.
The answer to this is, in its simplest form, very short: a minimum of two people (or one person and some kind of opponent, anyway). But it isn't enough to have their names. There are a lot of details packed into the question of who, and those details can have a strong effect on how the fight goes. So let's take a moment to unpack them.
Age. I believe the natural physical peak for humans is somewhere around our early to mid-twenties? Speaking just on the point of physical conditioning -- we'll talk about confounding factors later -- younger tends to be better, in terms of speed, strength, and general haleness, at least while talking about adults.
Height. Taller means more reach; I'm ten inches shorter than my husband, and can't get near him sparring in karate. He can hit me when I'm nowhere near hitting him. Also, it depends on where the height is distributed; does the combatant have long legs (covers more ground) or short ones (lower center of gravity, and therefore more stability)?
Build. I find this a more useful term for fight purposes than "weight," because the composition matters more than the raw number. Is the combatant skinny, flabby, built like a brick wall? Tactics will vary.
Strength. How much this matters depends on the type of fight. Gunfight? Not terribly relevant, unless we're talking about the kind of gun Vasquez was carrying in Aliens. Two-handed broadswords? A weak character will barely be able to swing one.
Speed. This can be both reflexes and ability to run, depending on what's going on. For lighter weapons, like rapiers or knives, speed is more useful than strength -- especially since, as a generalization, bigger and stronger people tend to be slower. There are exceptions (my husband being one of them -- totally unfair), but the more mass you're flinging around, the slower it's likely to be.
Balance. Especially if the characters are fighting on an unsteady rope bridge or other exciting terrain.
Endurance. We'll talk later about how real fights tend to be very short, but that doesn't mean they aren't exhausting. And if there's a chase involved, victory may go to the character in better cardiovascular condition.
Flexibility. Much to my regret, this isn't as useful in a fight as I would like; if flexibility ruled the day, I would kick ass at karate. (All that ballet training.) But it can be useful in grappling scenarios, or that last-ditch over-extended lunge to spit the enemy.
Injuries. Either recent or old. Inigo Montoya fighting with three holes in him, or Ye Olde Grizzled Swordmaster with the knee that aches when it rains. Ask a middle-aged former Olympian how they feel: even barring major problems like a torn rotator cuff, that kind of activity takes its toll.
Hair. Oh, how I wish it really were possible to use a long braid as a weapon! All it does is wrap around my throat when I turn quickly in karate, or occasionally thwap somebody in the face. Long hair is generally a liability in a fight; it can get in your eyes or provide the enemy with a convenient handhold. If you want your expert swordswoman to have beautiful long hair, she'd better keep it in a crown braid whenever there's trouble in the offing.
Physical quirks. A catch-all category for those odd little things that mark an individual out. One friend of mine has elbows so double-jointed, they go a good twenty degrees past the horizontal. My ankles can't dorsiflex worth a damn. Six fingers on your right hand will mean most sword hilts are too cramped for you. Etc.
Clothing. Yes, clothing; we might as well group that in with physical characteristics. Ideally, should be loose or stretchy enough not to impair movement; deviations from this can be narratively fun. Footwear will affect stability; contrary to what comic books tell you, high heels are not practical in combat. Also, depending on the weather, clothing will determine whether the character is freezing or about to die of heat exhaustion.
Sex. I left this one until last because its relevance mostly lies in the points above. For example, men tend to have more upper-body strength than women, but not all men have the advantage over all women; you're better off starting with "how buff is my protagonist?" than chromosomal makeup. Having said that: yes, men tend to be stronger in the upper body, women generally have lower centers of gravity than men of equal height, men tend to be taller and have more reach, women (being smaller) may be faster. Etc.
. . . there's probably more, but that's enough for now. Feel free to suggest more in the comments. Onward to mental/social/etc:
Training. Is this an innocent farmgirl dragging down the sword above the fireplace, or a recent graduate of the Ninja Assassination Academy? Is the combatant trained in one specific weapon, or familiar with a wide range? Has their training led them to expect particular conditions and behaviors, that may or may not be what they're facing right now?
Experience. Not the same thing as training.
rachelmanija
has been doing a great series of posts on real-life experience with fighting, which is something I don't really have; I may know how to hold and use a rapier, but that wouldn't do me much good at all if somebody came at me with a sharpened blade and the intent to kill me.Wits. Okay, yes, I've borrowed this term from White Wolf's RPG character sheets -- but that's because it works. Wits and intelligence aren't the same thing; someone can be illiterate and uneducated and incapable of remembering the most basic facts about history, but quick as a snake when it comes to a fight. The ability to adapt on the fly is very, very useful in a fight, where you rarely have the time or opportunity to plan what your next move should be.
Ruthlessness. That's as good a term as any for the willingness to cause harm to another living creature. Most of the moves taught in a self-defense class are very simple and very brutal: Gouge the eyes. Strike the throat. Kick the knee sideways. Anything to incapacitate your attacker enough for you to get away. Some people have the mentality to do this; others freeze.
Code of honor. Related, but not the same. A knight who will cut down her opponent without hesitation in a duel may refuse to stab an unsuspecting target in the back. Like ruthlessness, and the purpose question from before, this determines what the character will and will not do.
Social expectations. Especially if there's an audience for the fight. A young man not wanting onlookers to think he's craven will behave differently than his natural inclination; so will a young woman not wanting them to think she's unladylike.
I'm probably missing some there, too, but we'll stop there, because by now some of the readers of this post are crouched in the corner making wibbling noises and wondering if they have to fill out full medical information and Myers-Briggs tests for the characters before they can write the scene. The answer, of course, is no: you don't have to sit down and consciously figure out the answers to all of these questions. But by the time you get to the scene -- so long as it isn't the first thing in the book -- you probably know a lot of it already; you have a mental image of your tall, bookish, asthmatic librarian who had some fencing lessons as a kid, or your stocky, street-veteran thief missing three fingers on her left hand. The important thing is to keep those details in mind when you put them into combat, and make use of them as the opportunity arises. Don't let the fight become generic, as if the participants were two armed automata smacking away at each other in textbook fashion. Like any other scene in a book -- you may have noticed this is something of a mantra -- it should reflect who the characters are, in the most interesting way possible.
With the holidays behind us, I hope to maintain a more regular pace. Keep an eye on this space for the next exciting installment, in which we actually give our characters weapons!
January 5, 2011
Droid app recommendations?
kniedzw
and I finally joined the twenty-first century yesterday, buying ourselves a pair of smartphones to replace the ancient flip-phones we've been using for years. We went with Androids -- mostly because of my husband's overpowering hatred for AT&T -- so now I ask the internets: what apps do you recommend?Free ones are fabulous, but I'm also willing to pay for stuff that's good. In particular, I'd like a recommendation for some kind of calorie tracker, because I know my eating habits are very bad; not in the usual way ("oh, I eat too much ice cream") but in the "I kind of forget to eat in the first place" way. I don't know what, if anything, I want to do to change this, but I figure it can't hurt to spend a couple of weeks actually paying attention to what I'm eating, and when, and what it adds up to. Having a phone app to track it with would help.
Beyond that . . . y'all know me. I do not need the Nascar app that came installed on the phone and is seemingly impossible to get rid of, but geeky things like Google Skymap are totally up my alley. What do you recommend?
better late than never?
It occurs to me I never put up an open book thread for A Star Shall Fall. So, as I beat my head against this bloody short story, feel free to comment here with any questions you wanted to ask or observations you wanted to share. Spoilers for this book are, of course, a given; there may also be spoilers for Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie (or for that matter the short stories), so be warned.
(I may also answer questions about With Fate Conspire, but only if I feel like it. No, I won't tell you how it ends. Or whether your favorite character is going to die.)
(I may also answer questions about With Fate Conspire, but only if I feel like it. No, I won't tell you how it ends. Or whether your favorite character is going to die.)
a missive from the salt mines
Why won't this short story just die?
I'm itching to do things like get back to the fight-scene blogging, but I can't let myself do that until this damn thing is finished. Which will happen tonight, come hell, high water, or the lure of sweet sweet procrastination . . . but god, it's taking forever.
I'm itching to do things like get back to the fight-scene blogging, but I can't let myself do that until this damn thing is finished. Which will happen tonight, come hell, high water, or the lure of sweet sweet procrastination . . . but god, it's taking forever.
January 4, 2011
In Memoriam: my keychain, 1997-2011
O_O
O_O,
. . . okay, this is ridiculous, I know that, but I am in mourning.
In the summer of 1997, I worked on an Earthwatch project in South Shields, England, doing archaeological excavation on the Roman fort of Arbeia. While I was there, I purchased a keychain in a local shop: a little Roman shield, rectangular and curved, with wings and lightning bolts and a round central boss, painted red and gold. The keychain being rather on the cheap side, the paint began flaking off in short order, but that was okay; the decoration was stamped into the steel, so I just stripped off the remainder of the paint and kept it plain.
This has been My Keychain for, effectively, my entire life. I never bothered with a keychain before then, and I've never used another since; I am not the sort of person who keeps twelve tchotchkes strung on the ring. The whole packet right now consists only of house key, mail key, bike key, car key, and the shield.
Or it did, until tonight.
Tonight, when I pulled my keys from my jeans pocket, the ring at the top of the shield broke clean through.
For years, I've been worried that some day I would lose my keys -- worried not because I'd be locked out of the house, but because the shield would be gone. This is better; I still have it. But my husband can vouch for the utterly tragic look on my face when I realized, standing in the front hall, that it had broken beyond repair.
What will I do?
I'll keep the shield, of course. The scoring down the center of the lightning bolts and marking the feathers on the wings has nearly been worn off; the curve of the shield has almost been mashed flat. It was never meant to survive thirteen and a half years of constant use. It's a relic of my first dig, though, and my first solo international trip, and my love of all things Roman; no way is it going in the trash. The real question is what I do about my keys. They're still on a ring, with what's left of the chain; the clasp on that is so fused, I may have to cut it off. But I don't know what I'll do for a keychain. Do I need one? Do I want one? Maybe I need a mourning period for the old one first. I have no idea what could possibly replace it in my affections.
Yes, I'm mourning my freaking keychain. So what. It was a dear old friend, and I'm sorry to see it go.
O_O,
. . . okay, this is ridiculous, I know that, but I am in mourning.
In the summer of 1997, I worked on an Earthwatch project in South Shields, England, doing archaeological excavation on the Roman fort of Arbeia. While I was there, I purchased a keychain in a local shop: a little Roman shield, rectangular and curved, with wings and lightning bolts and a round central boss, painted red and gold. The keychain being rather on the cheap side, the paint began flaking off in short order, but that was okay; the decoration was stamped into the steel, so I just stripped off the remainder of the paint and kept it plain.
This has been My Keychain for, effectively, my entire life. I never bothered with a keychain before then, and I've never used another since; I am not the sort of person who keeps twelve tchotchkes strung on the ring. The whole packet right now consists only of house key, mail key, bike key, car key, and the shield.
Or it did, until tonight.
Tonight, when I pulled my keys from my jeans pocket, the ring at the top of the shield broke clean through.
For years, I've been worried that some day I would lose my keys -- worried not because I'd be locked out of the house, but because the shield would be gone. This is better; I still have it. But my husband can vouch for the utterly tragic look on my face when I realized, standing in the front hall, that it had broken beyond repair.
What will I do?
I'll keep the shield, of course. The scoring down the center of the lightning bolts and marking the feathers on the wings has nearly been worn off; the curve of the shield has almost been mashed flat. It was never meant to survive thirteen and a half years of constant use. It's a relic of my first dig, though, and my first solo international trip, and my love of all things Roman; no way is it going in the trash. The real question is what I do about my keys. They're still on a ring, with what's left of the chain; the clasp on that is so fused, I may have to cut it off. But I don't know what I'll do for a keychain. Do I need one? Do I want one? Maybe I need a mourning period for the old one first. I have no idea what could possibly replace it in my affections.
Yes, I'm mourning my freaking keychain. So what. It was a dear old friend, and I'm sorry to see it go.
January 1, 2011
more fiction!
It's just raining stories of mine around here, ain't it?
Erin Underwood of Underwords has put together a free fiction sampler for 2011, and it includes some stories from Clockwork Phoenix 3, including "The Gospel of Nachash." So if you're interested in me, um, fanficcing the Bible? . . . in full-blown King James Version style . . . with sekrit ingredients thrown in . . . then go check it out. And if you're not, check the sampler out anyway, because I am only one of twenty-seven authors bundled into it, and there's sure to be somebody else you enjoy.
Erin Underwood of Underwords has put together a free fiction sampler for 2011, and it includes some stories from Clockwork Phoenix 3, including "The Gospel of Nachash." So if you're interested in me, um, fanficcing the Bible? . . . in full-blown King James Version style . . . with sekrit ingredients thrown in . . . then go check it out. And if you're not, check the sampler out anyway, because I am only one of twenty-seven authors bundled into it, and there's sure to be somebody else you enjoy.
anonymous Yuletiders are no longer anonymous
The big reveal has happened, and now I can tell you what I wrote for Yuletide.
Before I do that, though -- it's interesting, the ways in which this feels different than linking you to my stories on Beneath Ceaseless Skies or wherever. Those are written for a general audience; as a result, even when they're connected to a pre-existing text (like the Onyx Court novels), I do my best to make sure they stand alone, and can be read by anybody who's interested. In the case of Yuletide, though, they're fanfic, which tends to be heavily in dialogue with the source text, often in ways that bypass the kind of exposition an independent story would need.
Which is a long and overly intellectual way of saying, I have no idea whether any of these stories will mean anything to people who don't know the sources. Since two, possibly three, of them are on the obscure side, this is me throwing up my hands and going, "I dunno, people, read 'em if you want to." <g>
My assignment was for the Gabriel Knight series of computer games -- the only source I both requested and offered. It's the longest and most plotty of the four, which I think is fair (given that it was my assigned work), and the result is here: "What Lies in Books." Spoilers for the second game, The Beast Within -- but since the games all date to the '90s and you need to download special fan-created installers to make them run in modern versions of Windows, I think the expiration date for spoiling is well and truly past. :-)
Then, when that was done, I decided to write a full-length treat for one of the other sources I had offered, the crazy (and fantabulous) Japanese film K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro the Sexiest Man Alive. (So dubbed by
kurayami_hime
.) "The Basics of Being a Lady" is silly bit of fun, and not particularly spoilery, though it may not make a lot of sense without having seen the movie. I need to do a recommendation for that at some point, but it deserves its own entry, so for now I'll just say that if you're fluent in or a native speaker of Japanese, please check out the notes at the end and tell me what you think gyoukei might mean in that context.
Third up was a pinch hit in a fandom I hadn't offered, but knew very, very well: the comic book series Elfquest. The recipient requested something about Woodlock and Rainsong, and I obliged with "Desert Rain." Writing that was a very interesting experience; Rainsong is the sort of character I don't grok very well, but I feel like writing the story helped me understand her better.
And finally, I did a short ficlet for Yuletide Madness, this one again from my offers; two different prompts for Hamlet combined in my head to produce "More an Antique Roman," musing on what things were like for Horatio while Hamlet was exiled during Act IV. Not a fully-baked story, just a few hundred words of character snapshot, but it seems to have been well-received all the same.
I'll have more to say later about the experience of Yuletide, but I want to close out by thanking perryvic, my assigned writer, and meridian_rose, who wrote my treat, for giving me that pair of delightful presents. I'll be back to comment more on AO3 later -- but first, off to my New Year's party!
Before I do that, though -- it's interesting, the ways in which this feels different than linking you to my stories on Beneath Ceaseless Skies or wherever. Those are written for a general audience; as a result, even when they're connected to a pre-existing text (like the Onyx Court novels), I do my best to make sure they stand alone, and can be read by anybody who's interested. In the case of Yuletide, though, they're fanfic, which tends to be heavily in dialogue with the source text, often in ways that bypass the kind of exposition an independent story would need.
Which is a long and overly intellectual way of saying, I have no idea whether any of these stories will mean anything to people who don't know the sources. Since two, possibly three, of them are on the obscure side, this is me throwing up my hands and going, "I dunno, people, read 'em if you want to." <g>
My assignment was for the Gabriel Knight series of computer games -- the only source I both requested and offered. It's the longest and most plotty of the four, which I think is fair (given that it was my assigned work), and the result is here: "What Lies in Books." Spoilers for the second game, The Beast Within -- but since the games all date to the '90s and you need to download special fan-created installers to make them run in modern versions of Windows, I think the expiration date for spoiling is well and truly past. :-)
Then, when that was done, I decided to write a full-length treat for one of the other sources I had offered, the crazy (and fantabulous) Japanese film K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro the Sexiest Man Alive. (So dubbed by
kurayami_hime
.) "The Basics of Being a Lady" is silly bit of fun, and not particularly spoilery, though it may not make a lot of sense without having seen the movie. I need to do a recommendation for that at some point, but it deserves its own entry, so for now I'll just say that if you're fluent in or a native speaker of Japanese, please check out the notes at the end and tell me what you think gyoukei might mean in that context.Third up was a pinch hit in a fandom I hadn't offered, but knew very, very well: the comic book series Elfquest. The recipient requested something about Woodlock and Rainsong, and I obliged with "Desert Rain." Writing that was a very interesting experience; Rainsong is the sort of character I don't grok very well, but I feel like writing the story helped me understand her better.
And finally, I did a short ficlet for Yuletide Madness, this one again from my offers; two different prompts for Hamlet combined in my head to produce "More an Antique Roman," musing on what things were like for Horatio while Hamlet was exiled during Act IV. Not a fully-baked story, just a few hundred words of character snapshot, but it seems to have been well-received all the same.
I'll have more to say later about the experience of Yuletide, but I want to close out by thanking perryvic, my assigned writer, and meridian_rose, who wrote my treat, for giving me that pair of delightful presents. I'll be back to comment more on AO3 later -- but first, off to my New Year's party!
