Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 154

Soundtrack Monday: Working For The Devil

I keep promising to do soundtrack posts for you guys, don’t I?

Music is a pretty integral part of my writing process. Books have soundtracks I listen to over and over again while writing. I usually burn them to CD and keep them in a collection just in case. (Computers have a habit of eating playlists. Om nom nom.)

So I figure on Mondays I’ll post a soundtrack, and I’ll shift the Pliny Train to Wednesdays. That will give me time to read further between posts, since getting that done on weekends doesn’t happen what with all the cleaning and the kids’ social events.

So, without further ado, let’s start with Dante Valentine! Here’s the very first iteration of the Working For The Devil playlist. (There were eventually four versions, but this is the one I listened to during the actual writing.) I’ll link to YouTube where I can, but other weird musical stuff may not be found there. Sorry about that.

WORKING FOR THE DEVIL

1. Jaf Appears Goodnight, Moon Shivaree

2. Remembering Doreen/You Would Call Me Friend? Virtue, Jesse Cook

3. Dante and Death Witness, Sarah Maclachlan

4. You Will Not Leave Me To Wander Alone The Heart Asks Pleasure First, Michael Nyman

5. Santino/Nightmare Boudicea, Enya

6. Eddie Thornton Woo Hoo, The 5.6.7.8s

7. Nuevo Rio Terra Firma, Delerium

8. Slicboard! Galaxy Bounce, The Chemical Brothers

9. Kiss For An Old Boyfriend, Danny? Summertime Killer, Luis Bacalov

10. Dante & Jace Duel Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood/Santa Esmerelda Suite, Santa Esmerelda & Leroy Gomez

11. You Can Be The New Madonna A Silhouette of Doom, Ennio Morricone

12. I Am Your Fallen Take This Life, Mandalay

13. Blood Is What I’m Tracking Tiburon Citrino, L.S.G.

14. Those Are For Santino Battle Without Honor or Humanity, Tomoyasu Hotei

15. Attack On Santino’s Lair, Dead Souls, NIN

16. Cinnamon Ash/Jaf’s Dead Ne Me Quittez Pas, Nina Simone

17. Return to Saint City Temple, Beverly Klass

18. Jace/I’m Staying I’ll Be Your Lover, Too, Van Morrison

Film aficionados will realize that Danny Valentine owes a great debt to the first Kill Bill movie as well as Alex Proyas’s Dark City and The Crow. Tarantino has a genius for soundtracks and dialogue, even if he’s sometimes very messy structurally.

photo by:


hillary the mammal

Thorns

I always wonder what it would be like to fall into this bush. Ouch.

Spring Break

What I actually look like while running.

Today’s workout was 3:3s. In other words, 3min fast, 3min steady, the latter still running, but at about 70% effort instead of 90-95%. It’s a form of interval training, I guess, and I loathe all things interval training. However, I’ve become very good at gauging my effort. My “fast” sessions were at 6-6.1km/hr, and my “steady” sessions were at 7.1-7.2km/hr. Which, given my weight, age, and recent health issues, is pretty goddamn spectacular. At least, I’m choosing to view it as such.

My eventual goal is to work back up to habitual five-mile runs six days a week. We’ll see if I get there. In the meantime, this is good enough.

I spent the weekend getting a proof out the door–all the ImaJinn books (the Watcher series, the Society series, and The Demon’s Librarian) are being re-released with new covers soon. I do get to go in and make minor changes, but I can’t fully re-edit them no matter how much I want to. I keep reminding myself that if one looks at something one wrote a decade ago and doesn’t flinch at the sucky craftsmanship, one isn’t growing as a writer.

It helps, but only a little.

Other than that, there’s some slight revisions on Agent Zero before it goes out to publishers, and I got the first Jeremy Gallow edit letter. I knew there were holes in the latter, and it helps to have my Orbit editor point them out. We’ve been working together for a long, long time (since Working For The Devil, my God) and the level of trust and comfort one gets with an editor that really understands how you work and trusts you in return is a marvelous thing.

I did manage to sleep in until 7am today, because the kids are on Spring Break. Not only that, but they’re of an age where they can get up and get their own breakfasts, and I don’t have to worry about them burning the house down while I’m on a run. This is one of the more awesome parts of parenting, rivaled only by the part where they could get into the car and buckle their own seatbelts AND the part where they could use the loo on their own.

The longer I live, the more I like getting older. I don’t have any gray in my hair yet, which is a shame. With my eyes, I think I could really rock the gray, and I’m impatient for it.

And now, back to the word mines…

photo by:


HVargas

Flight

A helicopter on a pole, part of a display at the local VA complex. Standing there taking a picture, all I could think of was what would happen if the infrastructure went down and those left in the ruins decided to worship this utterly strange thing?

The stories, they never stop…

Pliny and God

It’s telling that Pliny deals with the earth and sun first, and whatever gods there are next. It makes me want to set him down with a deist or two and listen to the conversation, though Pliny is definitely not a deist by any stretch of the imagination.

Instead, he takes aim at his contemporary gods:

To believe even in marriages taking place between gods, without anybody at all through the long ages of time being born as a result of them, and that some are always old and gray, others youths and boys, and gods with dusky complexions, winged, lame, born from eggs, living and dying on alternate days–this almost ranks with the fancies of children…For mortal to aid mortal–this is god; and this is the road to eternal glory. p181

He has some other choice words, which makes me wonder what he’d make of the various stories Christianity is built on. I can just see him tilting his gray Roman head and saying, “Really? A petty tribal god who requires such constant adoration and propitiation, and in whom you must profess love or suffer an eternity of torment? What a revolting notion.”

To Pliny, Nature is the only god, and the failure of a divine being, however imagined by man, to logically be able to commit suicide (the bit about living and dying on alternate days above is rather a large barrier to Pliny ever believing in Christianity, one can imagine) is one of the surest proofs that such a divine being as imagined by man is a folly not worth spending much time on.

The only other divinity Pliny considers worthwhile is Fortune herself, which is very Roman of him. One thinks Boethius and Marcus Aurelius would agree. Being Pliny, though, he’s a little ungracious about it.

Nevertheless mortality has rendered our guesses about God even more obscure by inventing for itself a deity intermediate between these two conceptions. Everywhere in the whole world at every hour by all men’s voices Fortune alone is invoked and named, alone accused, alone impeached, alone pondered, alone applauded, alone rebuked and visited with reproaches; deemed volatile and indeed by most men blind as well…p183

Still, after disposing of the gods thus, Pliny can’t shake a belief in Fortune or eventual justice.

“…punishment for wickedness, though sometimes tardy, as God is occupied in so vast a mass of things, yet is never frustrated.”p185

Which is altogether more optimistic than I expected of him. It reminds me of Stephen King’s IT, where the hero/authorial insertion of Bill Denbrough realizes, during the childhood version of the climactic battle, that things really do work out ridiculously well most of the time, and takes that as proof that he can believe and strike down the thing from Outside.

In short, Pliny is an intelligent man who scoffs at sacrifices, omens, and gods who obsess over anything humans do. Nature is the only thing worthy of the homage paid to divinity, and it is to Nature he returns after he makes one final jab, pointing out that even God can’t make twice ten to be other than twenty–Orwell notwithstanding, and I think dear old George was rather using his classical education in the service of a deeper pessimism than Pliny ever dreamed of.

Anyway, we shall return to Nature anon, starting with how the stars are attached in the firmament. To Pliny, the stars aren’t gods–they are flames he didn’t have the capacity to observe more closely but could make educated guesses about.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…

Curling Up

*peeks out*

*hangs up sign*

RECOVERING FROM ATTACK OF SELF-DOUBT

BACK IN A BIT

*slams door*

photo by:


Moyan_Brenn

Sleep, Superhero

Ten. Ten solid hours of sleep, and I feel more than human this morning. After a run in the pouring rain (seriously, had to wring out my jacket when I got home) and a trip to the grocer’s the superhero feeling isn’t going away, and I wonder if maybe I’ve managed to pay off most of the sleep debt from my previous years.

Of course, I probably lost a massive number of neurons during that time, which explains why I can’t do math. No, seriously. No math for me, not since second grade when the teacher would shake the kids when they didn’t have the right answer. (I hated that.) I only pulled a B in geometry because I beat the teacher at pool. I was still drunk from the night before, but that’s a story for another day. (I can only shoot pool during a certain golden hour of drunkenness.)

Maybe losing neurons explains other things, though.

It’s a rainy day–what? Yes, I know I live in the Pacific Northwest. Most of the time that shit falling from the sky isn’t rain. It’s liquid fucking sunshine, people, and you’d better get used to it, because here the pot grows high, the moss grows between your toes, you slurp tasty-ass coffee, and you like it. *blinks* Ahem. Sorry. Thinking about geometry makes me remember middle school. I think I was a trashmouthed little thing then, too.

So when I say it’s a rainy day that means the bottom of the street is almost flooded because the curtains of monsoon falling on us make even natives and hardened Weterans of the Soggamous blink a couple times and remark, “Woooow, that’s a bit damp.” So much water that my writing partner, looking past me out at the deck, blurted out “Look at the pine tree!”

The tree, an 80-85 year old hulk (according to the master arborist I had out to see if any of the lovely big piles of wood were going to crash on our house during dinner) has massive branches that usually keep the deck dry. Alas, now they were so saturated that water was flowing down the trunk in rivulets. AWESOME, RIGHT? Except for when you have to go driving in it, and for God’s sake, this is Washington, you’d think people would have learned to drive in some water.

Anyway, we’re having a breath between monsoons here, so I should probably check the mail, and then curl up on the couch with the notebook I’m writing Rattlesnake Wind in and get some serious wordcount. After, of course, I put my combat books somewhere safe to dry.

*eyes the preceding paragraphs* Huh. Apparently getting enough sleep makes me random and foulmouthed. I suppose it only expresses more fully what I am at bottom, like so many other things. Stay dry out there, chickadees.

Exeunt, stage whichever, pursued by a bulldog.

photo by:


Frozen Hell.

Lose Myself Again

Every once in a while a book comes along that refuses to be written in the usual way. Of course, there’s very little “usual way” when it comes to finding your path through a thicket of words. Every book requires a different weapon to hunt it down with, a different route. There’s commonalities, but then a book comes along that goes all weird and sideways.

I’m beginning to suspect Rattlesnake Wind is one of them. The protagonist has a very strong voice, and she wants to be scrawled in pen in a Mead 5-star notebook, as if I’m fifteen again and lonely. I hear wind from the high plains when I write, and see the way grass ripples in waves, over and over. Along with it, there’s a dry humming buzz of warning, and curved fangs flickering. I stumble into the book and stumble out later, blinking and surprised to find myself amid dripping trees, the wind vanishing and a chunk of handwritten text to clean up and transcribe into the word processor. There are certain times as a writer that you know you’re not writing the book, the damn book is coming through you, one way or the other.

So today, sleep-deprived and shaky, I lose myself again. God, I love my job.

photo by:


archer10 (Dennis)

Another Layer

The Pliny Train is still chugging along, folks, but we won’t have another landmark until next week. I’d love to say it’s for a good reason, but the plain truth is this past weekend just about kicked my ass. Between playing catch-up from the window installation (more about that in another post) and getting the Little Prince to do his damn homework, I was dead on my feet. I did manage to get Agent Zero revised into a reasonable first draft this morning, and it’s out the door to the agent so I can focus on Rattlesnake Wind and the second Gallow book now.

The Selene ebook rollout had a couple kinks in the hose, but they seem to have been resolved now. I am endlessly grateful to have Skyla as a Most Beloved Minion (aka: Terrifyingly Competent Assistant). Did I mention she does book covers and also has editing services? Go, look, I cannot recommend her enough.

The weather is having a rather violent fit today, veering between bright blue-sky sunshine and dark rumbling clouds, and the changes are giving me the mother of all headaches. It’s not a migraine yet, but I am being vary careful just in case. Running errands this morning when I would rather have been writing also rubbed me down to bare nerves, I’m in the stage of fretting over Rattlesnake Wind. A nap would probably do me a world of good, but it’s not in the cards. The next best thing: diving back into Dez’s painful, beautiful world, hearing the wind and the snakes in the grass, and peeling back another layer of the story.

Over and out.

photo by:


Cia de Foto

ECommerce, You Say?

This is what payment gateways turn you into…

So, the Selene ebook is out now! Hooray and confetti!

Except the surge of demand broke our shopping cart, which had been thoroughly tested and performed just fine, leaving us scrambling for a bit here. We have a more robust cart now, but if your download link for Selene isn’t working, just drop us a line and we will either re-generate your download link or get the book to you another way. Going forward there should be few if any problems (please, dear Universe, don’t take that as a challenge, mmmkay?) and the new cart solution works so well I’ve decided to let it handle my editing waitlist as well.

Thank you all for your patience, and please, if you have any problems at all, just let us know.

The ebook won’t go on sale through other distribution channels until May 1, and after that, we’ll work on getting a paper edition out. I won’t be selling the paper ones through the website–my God, even the thought gives me hives–but there are some very nice capabilities to the current cart/commerce setup that have me thinking “writer’s workshop.” Not sure if anyone’s even interested in that, but we’ll see, down the road. Once I’ve recovered from this particular product rollout. If not for Skyla, I’d be a quivering mess right about now.

Well, even more of a quivering mess…