Marie Brennan's Blog, page 60

Rook and Rose, Book 2: Chapter 18

For years now I’ve had an essay on my site about writer’s block and why I don’t like that term. The short form is, calling something “writer’s block” does not help you figure out what the cause is, nor how to fix it.

This is relevant right now because Alyc and I had some trouble with a scene in this chapter. We knew we needed to do more with a particular character, and we knew it had to function as setup for something else in the near future. So we’d come up with an idea that, structurally speaking, was exactly what we needed it to be.

We couldn’t get traction on it.

I wrote a beginning. Alyc wrote a bit more. I stared at the screen and had no clue where to go from there. Alyc felt the same. We agreed that, since the next two scenes in the chapter weren’t directly affected by this one, we could work on those and hope that when we came back the next day, we’d have more inspiration. The next day we came back and . . . nope.

When we got on the phone to hash it out (as opposed to in chat, which is how we handle smaller bits of coordination), the first thing I said was “I think we should consider whether we ought to scrap this and replace it with something else.” And that’s what we wound up doing. Because while the idea we originally had was, structurally speaking, exactly what it needed to be . . . nothing in it seemed fun. Not just in the superficial sense of “yay this is a fun scene where entertaining things happen!,” but in the deeper sense of “there is nothing here that we’re excited to write.” In fact, our idea called for some things that, while all too appropriate, we really didn’t want to write.

That’s one of the many possible flavors of writers’ block, and the solution for it was to back up and take another look: at our reasons for needing a scene with this character, at what it had to lay the groundwork for, at what it could be doing to enrich other parts of the story, and — perhaps most usefully — what had happened up to this point, which the new scene could build off. That last wound up providing us with a good hook . . . and we could tell it was a good hook because as we started working through that notion (“okay, how would this happen? Who would be involved? What tactics would they use?”), we started making those noises that happen when one idea cascades into another. The end result is a set-up and spike of two shorter scenes that land on a lot of personal and emotional buttons for the character. Buttons we would have missed entirely if we’d gone with our first idea.

Collaboration may pose extra challenges, but it also provides extra tools. In this case, when both authors are looking at a planned scene and saying “meh” . . . it helps us be sure that it isn’t just laziness talking. We’re barking up the wrong tree, and need to go find another one.

Word count: ~141,000 (and with that, I have officially fulfilled this part of my Clarion West Write-a-Thon goals!)

Authorial sadism: That character might have preferred us to stick with our original idea.

Authorial amusement: The discussion of moon eyes.

BLR quotient: Starts with love, stays there longer than any of the characters expected, then takes a hard swerve to blood.

The post Rook and Rose, Book 2: Chapter 18 appeared first on Swan Tower.

New Worlds: Types of God

The New Worlds Patreon tour of religion continues! Real-world polytheisms feature a dizzying array of gods, but many of them fall into certain recognizable categories. Comment over there!

The post New Worlds: Types of God appeared first on Swan Tower.

Rook and Rose Book 2, Chapter 17

Back to something like linear progress! . . . ish, given that after we finished this chapter, we backtracked and added a scene to Chapter 9. And there’s still one in Chapter 7 that we need to redo, because it wasn’t quite pulling its weight once we changed things around it, and now it needs to be repurposed to develop a plot strand we thought up about halfway through the book.

Okay, maybe not so linear. One of the columns in our outlining spreadsheet shows what week we wrote each scene; that’s mostly there just for our entertainment (watching ourselves zoom through at an absurd pace during the drafting of the first book), but in this case it will serve as a testament to how much more we’ve ricocheted around. Because we’ve been doing a lot more of that this time through.

It does make work a little more difficult. Writing the Chapter 9 scene, we had to remind ourselves not only why we were adding it — to give some attention to a neglected plot strand, develop a necessary political element, and smooth out the big tonal shift between the preceding and subsequent scenes — but also of where it fits in the flow of things, what moods our characters are in and what thoughts they have and haven’t had already. I can already tell we’ll be doing a lot of polishing in that regard when we revise this. We have a lot of places where the right blocks have been put into position, but their edges need trimming and sanding for them to fit nicely together.

As for Chapter 17, i.e. the clear forward progress — oof. One scene in here may very well stand as the trickiest corner we have to navigate in the entire trilogy. (I hope it does. Otherwise there’s something even trickier in our future.) We had to take three runs at it to get it right, with a couple thousand words of material thrown out along the way. But we could tell each time that we were replacing it with something better, so we kept plugging away. And that effort paid off on the last complicated bit, where I kept saying “eh, that dialogue isn’t quite hitting hard enough to trigger the thing it needs to trigger” . . . and then Alyc said “how about this?” and I made a O_O face at it, which is how we knew we’d gotten it right.

Word count: ~133,000

Authorial sadism: The dialogue that made me go O_O.

Authorial amusement: The two-hundred word scenelet that is basically our giddy reward for having made it through the big scene before it.

BLR quotient: Despite the best efforts of certain characters to draw blood, in the end, it’s love.

The post Rook and Rose Book 2, Chapter 17 appeared first on Swan Tower.

Rook and Rose Book 2, Chapter Twelveteen

It’s been a little quiet around here because we have, uh, thrown linearity out the window for a while. >_>

Remember what I said before, about how we decided our Chapters 14 and 15 were both so short they should be a single chapter? That took what had been 13 and pulled it up to 14, leaving us with a gap after 12 — or more precisely, some scenes in 12 that might (and in fact did) get redistributed between that and 13. Hence dubbing the new material Chapter Twelveteen. We’ve spent the last week and a half sort of ricocheting between that and Chapter 17, and it was almost a race to see which one would get done first; Twelveteen won (by a nose).

I’m really glad we made this change (even if it led to one scene ping-ponging from 12 to 17 to 13, which is really inconvenient when a) you number your scenes in the document and b) you have formulas in your outlining spreadsheet that calculate both the wordcount for the chapter and the running wordcount for the novel, which get borked when you drag things around like that). Twelveteen has some stuff we really needed: a big, creepy encounter with one of the threats, a bit of character bonding in a place where it had been profoundly lacking, the reappearance of a character we haven’t seen for a while, and the reintroduction of a character who, we realized, hadn’t actually been seen since the last book. All of which do multiple duties: the reappearance also lets us move an investigation forward and set up a later scene, the reintroduction lets us elaborate on a certain political intrigue and foreshadow something else, the creepy encounter facilitated a whole bunch of exposition and also set up the aforementioned intrigue, etc. Like I said, very much needed.

Aiming for a set length, in the sense of both wordcount and number of chapters, is simultaneously a blessing and a choke-leash. It keeps us from getting too tangled in our own complexities, adding new subplots and twists until we utterly lose sight of where we’re going — but it also means we don’t have the kind of flexibility I’ve had with other novels, where eh, if I need to add in another chapter in order to deal with something, I can. I’m very, very glad that we were able to do the big avalanche stuff more efficiently, in two chapters instead of three . . . because otherwise we might have had no choice but to look back at what we have and decide what thread to yank out entirely, to make room for everything else.

Wordcount: ~123,000 (not counting the nearly-complete Chapter 17)

Authorial sadism: Look, we put Chekhov’s Magic on the mantel. We had to pull the trigger eventually.

Authorial amusement: DOOMCLAW THE YOWLER

BLR quotient: In part because these scenes are spread across two chapters, uhhhh, all three. It depends entirely on which scene you’re looking at.

Oh, and in case you missed it:

Real book!!!! (Advance copies thereof, at least.)

The post Rook and Rose Book 2, Chapter Twelveteen appeared first on Swan Tower.

New Worlds: Polytheism

Polytheism! It’s all over the place in fantasy, and frequently feels all too much like D&D. This week on the New Worlds Patreon, we talk about how polytheism actually works.

The post New Worlds: Polytheism appeared first on Swan Tower.

Advance reader copies!!!! *_*

so yesterday evening my husband says to me “two boxes just arrived that say ‘Mask of Mirrors’ on the side”

and I zoom downstairs to snap a photo to send to Alyc

and they say “I may need to come over there this evening”

and I say “I may have been thinking of asking you to do that”

(because this is my first time co-authoring a book like this, but I knew without asking that I wouldn’t be allowed to open them without Alyc present)

(don’t worry; we’re in a social bubble together anyway)

and behold, my first “unboxing” video ever:

*_*

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Who left this thing on?

Going into 2020, I set myself a lower goal for short stories than before, because I suspected the election might cut into my creative energy. (Hah, what an innocent lamb I was.) But when I decided to participate in the Clarion West write-a-thon — you can still sponsor me, by the way! — I included among my goals “finish two short stories,” because I didn’t want to lose momentum on those entirely. I chose my phrasing on purpose: finish two short stories. I had one partially written, and another which in theory is done, but the first draft is so meh that it needs a white-page rewrite anyway.

Right now I’ve got three finished stories, none of which are those two. Also a semi-outline for a fourth, and a nascent concept for a fifth.

It feels like the valve labeled “Short Fiction” has somehow gotten jammed in the “open” position. It started in early June, when I went to add an idea to my file of short story concepts, and my eye happened to fall on one I’d completely forgotten about. A quick dash of research later, I had a story.

Then I turned my attention to an idea that’s been in my head for over a decade, ever since I ran the Changeling game that gave rise to the Onyx Court novels. The big stumbling block on it — as with many of my short story ideas these days, honestly — was the research; I needed to find a suitable book or two to read before I could write it. But I figured, hey, I might as well look for such a book, right? Well, I found something . . . and then I read it . . .

. . . and I was halfway through a draft when a different short story idea mugged me out of nowhere, in response to an anthology call. And let me be clear: that isn’t how this usually works. I’ve written to themes when actively solicited for an anthology, but my brain is not very good at coughing up themed ideas the rest of the time; it would rather work on the two dozen ideas already in existence. In this case, though, the theme touches on a different bit from that Changeling game — something I never brought up in the Onyx Court books, but which I’d always figured was true somewhere off in the background.

Roughly twenty-four hours after reading that anthology call, I had a draft. A couple of days after that, I went back and finished the other story I’d been working on.

Oh, and that “semi-outline” for a fourth story is entirely the product of me being in the shower and then suddenly BOOM, a three-word elevator pitch grew into scenes and a conflict and I could pretty much write this one as soon as I nail down the specifics.

So yeah. I now have “999 Swords,” “Oak Apple Night,” and “This Living Hand.” (Internet cookies to anybody who can identify what those titles refer to!) I have written my first new Onyx Court fiction since “To Rise No More” in 2013, and I’ve ordered a book that might help me nudge another one toward the finish line. Not to mention that I still have those two things that are what I expected to be working on during the write-a-thon, which I can probably finish this month.

I’m not sure what’s happened, but I like it.

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Books read, June 2020

(And also one I missed in my writeup from May.)

Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword, Henry Lien. Middle-grade fantasy novel about a girl whose life dream is to become a champion of wulin, i.e. martial arts figure skating. This has great details about skating; because it’s done on a surface called “pearl” (whose creation is a closely guarded secret) rather than on ice, and the entire city that houses the wulin academy is built of pearl, basically everything Peasprout does is about skating. There was a fair bit of me wanting to smack her for being obtuse and arrogant — she sees practically everybody else around her as either irrelevant or The Competition — but she’s generally obtuse and arrogant in a way that’s believable for her age, even if I was a little annoyed at how she latched onto a certain explanation for something and basically paid no attention to the utter lack of evidence to support that explanation. And this dug surprisingly deep into the international politics of Peasprout’s country versus the one she’s in, as well as some gender identity stuff. Highly recommended, want the next book now.

An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, Curtis Craddock. Look, it’s got masks (well, masques) and mirrors in the title, plus it takes place in a sky world. As one of the authors of both The Mask of Mirrors and Born to the Blade, this naturally caught my eye.

This Fourth of July

I am not proud of my country.

Not right now. Not when we have, as a nation, failed so profoundly to deal with this pandemic the way we needed to. Not when over a hundred thousand Americans have died, and the number is climbing frighteningly fast. Not when there are so many people whose personal liberties are precious to the point of sociopathy, such that they won’t even put on a fucking mask to protect other people. Not when police officers brutalize American citizens in the name of their own power. Not when the injustice against people of color continues every goddamned day, in every stratum of our society. Not when we worship the almighty dollar to the exclusion of human decency and the future of this planet.

There is a cancer in American society, and it’s killing us.

I know there are good people as well as heartless ones. I know that there are movements for change. I hope to hell they succeed — because the alternative is that we continue this downward slide.

This Fourth of July, I dream of a day where I can actually be proud of my country again.

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New Worlds: What Makes a God?

For the month of July, the New Worlds Patreon turns its attention back to religion — this time for a look at some of its underlying concepts. We begin with what makes a god . . . which is something that differs quite a bit depending on what religion you ask! Comment over there.

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