Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 189

Follies Animaux

Three miles on the track with Miss B. this morning. There were a couple other dogs, so of course she went mad. She wants to be friendly sooooo badly, but her manners are atrocious. We're working on it.

Also, my darling 40-pound dog tried to kill me this morning. The track is at the local middle school, and they were testing and repairing the sprinklers for summer. When some of the sprinklers turned on near us, she headed for the safest place around–right between my feet. While I was running. I didn't break anything, but it was damn close. I haven't made an amazing leap like that since…well, ballet, really, or my last barfight. Of course, since the leash is wrapped around my waist, she came with me. it was an interesting fifteen seconds or so.

Also in the Cat and Dog Follies this morning: Tuxedo Kitty is in another bolt-and-bounce phase, which means Miss B. views him as a magical food-producing machine she can't get too close to, but must watch carefully in case the jackpot occurs.The kibble isn't even chewed when he horks it up–just moistened a bit. Miss B. thinks this is a glorious snack. Tuxedo Kitty goes right back to the bowl after every hork. It's a Circle of Life I just don't need to be involved in. Though I have found that catnip spray will disrupt Tuxedo Kitty from staggering back to the bowl.

You read that right. I got my cat high to stop his binge-and-purge. Hey, whatever works.

Also, I found out that Miss B. will never starve. Not as long as the squirrels keep burying peanuts in the backyard. It's like she's a peanut-hunting machine. The squirrels are less amused than I am.

Time to load up on choco donettes and head back into the wilds of the copyedits. Submerging in 3…2…1…

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Squirrel!Matrix
The Glorious Advent Approacheth

Me? Procrastinate? Never.

Things that happened this weekend:

* I found sweet, dumb, silly Tuxedo Kitty trying to spray on my canvas map of Dickensian London. Again. My cry of horror brought everyone in the house running. I don't know what that cat has against the West India Docks, but it's apparently severe. I tossed the offender outside to ruminate on his sins, but he was distracted by a butterfly.

* A friend sent me the link to this…well, I guess "fan art" is what you could call it. Before I give you the link, though, just be warned that it's not safe for work OR sanity. It is hysterically funny–as long as you don't mind your 80s childhood weeping at the same time. Okay, that's all the disclaimers. If you're sure you still want to know…here it is.

* Got a new waffle iron. The old one was just…well, it's tired. I guess we eat a lot of waffles. I can't bring myself to be ashamed of this.

* I found out I have almost a bookcase-worth of World War II (Eastern Front and Dictators) books. My writing partner commented, "Well, you have enough WWII stuff to qualify for a Military History Specialty. Why not organize it?" I just didn't think I had that much. I read that sort of stuff to give my brain a break, since I'm likely never going to write a story set in that era. I am…not sure what this says about me.

* The kitchen reorganized itself. It started out with moving a single crock of cooking utensils to the other side of the stove. Then I had to move another crock so the first one wouldn't feel lonely, then I realized I could get some space if I just switched something else around…and two hours later, nobody could even find the forks. (Okay, I lie. I left the forks where they were. But that's ALL I left.) As procrastinations go, this was a good one. Very useful.

* Panic-stricken, I realized there was a HUGE PLOT HOLE in the book now in copyedits. I dug through pages and pages…until I found out I'd fixed the plot hole two drafts ago, and that's why I couldn't find it in the CEs. *headdesk*

* Got a frantic call from a friend. "mumblemumbleRAN OFF THE ROADmumblemumbleTIRESmumbleOMGHALP." So I bolted out to Hazel Dell (pretty name, right? It's misleading.) and arrived at a tire-repair place ready for blood, screaming, or what-have-you. Turns out I didn't need to kill anyone, just pay for a new wheel and new tires, because she doesn't get paid until later in the week. That was my cardio for the day. I was so discombobulated that when she said, "I am calling the Pope and having you nominated for sainthood," I actually replied, "Nah, I did too many Catholic boys." The man behind the counter about choked on a laugh. He tried really hard to stay professional. Poor guy. I'm sure it didn't help when I looked up at him and blurted, "Oh, hell, I just said that out loud, didn't I."

* Found out that Miss B. can, in fact, leap five feet straight up. If she's motivated enough. (Like, say, by Steerpike!Squirrel. Who almost lost his tail.) It's a good thing the fence has her fooled, for now. *sigh*

* Witnessed a duel between Squirrel!Neo and Steerpike!Squirrel. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE. (Yes, there is more SquirrelTerror. When I'm done with CEs I'll write them up.)

There were other things, but they're either too embarrassing or boring to relate. So, that was my weekend. Now it's time to dive back into those copyedits.

500 pages of them.

*weeps*

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There is too much. Let me sum up.
Sir Pewksalot, And Cluck Luck

Gallop Aloud

Hello, dear Readers. I've been visibly neglecting the blog for a while–I hit a burnout stage with the Friday Writing posts, and after my personal life fell apart in flaming fragments, well, the time and inclination was seriously lacking. I had very little energy, and what I had I had to spend on deadlines. (Speaking of deadlines, you can find an announcement about Bannon & Clare here.)

But things are a little better now. I was out at 7AM with Miss B., ran a respectable three miles in just a few minutes over a half-hour. Running outside is very different than slogging away on the treadmill–harder on the knees and lower back, certainly, and I wouldn't be running outside if I didn't have the dog. The companionship and protection factor is not inconsiderable at all.

While I ran, I was putting together the Ride of the New Guard, which is to say, a particular piece in the book I'm working on now where I want the rhythm of a gallop to come through the words. It's going to require some specific music, and some breathing, and some reading things out loud to get it right.

I am always amazed by people who say they don't read their dialogue aloud to check for rhythm. Often, problems with dialogue or the "scan" of a piece can be fixed by looking for rhythm and breathbreaks–those places where one runs out of air and naturally take a breath. Reading is most often a silent personal activity, but the flow and ebb of speech is still the most natural framework for a story. Emphasis and stress, the upward inflection of a question, the cadence of education or dialect, all these things are a richness just begging to be used, as well as a forensic tool. Often, when you can tell a sentence isn't right, saying it aloud will show you where the catch is. (Diagramming the sentence sometimes works too, but only in a small number of cases. YMMV, of course.)

Reading your work aloud to yourself (I add the "to yourself" because reading aloud to others is a special sort of hell for me personally, one I avoid whenever possible) also helps with immediacy–feeling it in your own corpus, and therefore being able to bring it to a Reader.

So, while running this morning, I was thinking of the cadence of a gallop, and how to bring that through. Which will mean a lot of muttering as I stare at my screen today, fingers tapping, and my body remembering what it was like to ride a horse. Of course I'll look crazy, but that's beside the point. Crazy's pretty relative if it pays the bills.

Or so I keep telling myself.

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Revising That Fight, Part 2
When The Gallop Takes Over

TorChat!

Quick note: Today I'll be participating in the June TorChat. Come talk about paranormal romance, urban fantasy, and other fun stuff!

ETA: Thanks for such a great chat, everyone! Tor is running a giveaway too, to celebrate. Enjoy!

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Nuts Or Amnesiac, You Decide
The Best Fugue

Nuts Or Amnesiac, You Decide

Neat stuff–I'll be participating in tomorrow's TorChat!

Also, Chicks Kick Butt, featuring an Eleni and Tarquin story, Monsters, is now out. I love Monsters–I very much wanted to tell a vampire-hunting story from a vampire's point of view, and Tarquin has been knocking around in several unfinished stories for a very long time. He and Leonidas are great characters, Eleni surprised me as a protagonist, and I very much like Wolf. Maybe I'll get to go back to them someday.

In other news, still going full-bore on the alt-Renaissance-France story I can't really say anything about. Keeping it under-hat is pretty much killing me, but there it is. Anyway, I came to a fresh realization yesterday about how much writing freaks me right the f!ck out.

It was another instance of a secondary character, one I didn't much care for, suddenly becoming incredibly useful and necessary to the story. I've learned to obey that little tingle that tells me just wait, this is important, leave it in. Sometimes I don't even notice, I'm in that creative fugue state and when I look back over the wordage, I flat-out have no memory of writing it or inserting some detail that turns out to be incredibly important later. This is particularly eerie when I've reached an impasse and have backed up to take a look at the bigger structure of the story–and I find, half-buried in the sand, a priceless artifact I had no idea even existed.

I can't figure out which weirds me more: obeying the internal tingle that tells me a minor character or detail will be important later, or having absolutely no memory of writing something that turns out to be critical to the later parts of the story.

Of course, I could just be losing my mind or amnesiac. That's always a possibility.

Oh well. Back to the word mines…

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Sensitivity

The Best Fugue

There's an interview with me and a giveaway over at My Bookish Ways; there's also my Top Five Methods To Determine You're A Zombie plus a giveaway of a one-of-a-kind Jill Kismet-inspired necklace over at CJ Redwine's place. (The necklace, made by Tasha Falene especially for this giveaway, is so awesome, and it's strictly a one-off. I wish I could enter to win it.) I think I'm going to be part of a Tor chat on Twitter sometime in the near future too, stay tuned for details.

In the category of Other Cool Internet Things, there's Flavorwire's How To Drink Like Your Favourite Authors and information about a stunning movie based on Diaghilev and Nijinksky. Which makes me wish I still had a VHS machine AND a copy of it. *sigh*

I spent pretty much all of yesterday in a fugue state, the story pouring out of my head and onto the screen. It's weird to surface from a wholly different universe and find out that an hour has passed since you last shifted your weight of (seemingly) blinked. Of all the varied states of consciousness, that one has to be in my top five. It's so bloody satisfying; it scratches some deep internal itch nothing else does.

Anyway, I am nervous and twitchy this morning. A good hard three-mile outside run with Miss B worked out some of the fidgets, but nothing will cure the rest but sinking into the story again. This is what I live for, really.

So it's an espresso shooter followed by 500-Mile Chai (hell of a boilermaker, right?), my sword loose in its sheath and my eyes on the horizon.

Come on, story. Let's tango.

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Balance, Bulk, and Visible

Nothing much to report. I've got a nobleman on the floor with an assassin and a knife, both of them outside a Queen's door, and I've got to figure out what the assassin wants out of this. So that's going to take some digging through my music library and finding his story. Of course the assassin's got a story, and I've got to find it before I know what he really wants out of all this. Possibly it's just expediency, but still, I need to know.

This is something I don't talk about often. What a reader sees is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a massive bulk underneath that lifts it up into the visible. That bulk is what I know of the characters, their motivations, their world, their needs. The bulk is necessary, the labyrinth must be plumbed. It that huge mountain of ice and rock underneath that gives the visible its shape and depth, its internal consistency. Writing is often striking the balance between looking at that bulk and shaping the contours of the visible. Shaving little bits off here, tweaking what lies underneath so that the visible takes the shape one needs.

There's so much more going into a book than what you see on the page. Sometimes I with the technology was available to invite the reader even further in, to give the full sensory experience I get, the sheer visceral pleasure of living in that alternate universe. Words carry the experience to you, but sometimes the limitations of the medium are so bloody frustrating. That's why there's a craft and an art to it, I guess.

Anyway, that's where I am. Stuck in the heart of an iceberg, chipping away. Shivering and wiping my nose, numb fingers on the chisel…and a huge, stupid grin on my face.

See you in a bit.

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Critical Mass, The Growing Book

The current book has taken a screaming left turn into dark territory. This surprises me every time it happens. I will think I know a book, I will think I have it all planned out, either in my head or on paper (I have recently, under protest, started outlining. But that's another blog post.) or what-have-you, and then all of a sudden…this.

The book starts behaving organically, like it is its own creature. The critical mass point is reached and as it coalesces, suddenly the book is a living thing and I am no longer solely creator but also midwife. It's a funny thing, to have one's brain taken over in such a manner. Even funnier to admit to it in public, despite the risk of the nice men with the white coats being called.

Anyway, the book just decided that the handwavey holes I had in the outline are of course places for thus-and-such to happen, even though I had no idea thus-and-such would fit neatly into the hole. Almost as if made for it. It's faintly creepy, you know–my job is just to show up, and the Muse drops these custom-made pegs into these very specific holes. The fairy dust happens reliably when I do what I'm supposed to–sit down, shut up, and write.

Who'd'a'thunkit?

For extra fun and games today, here's Chuck Wendig's Six Signs It's High Time To Give Up Writing.

Enjoy.

*dives back in*

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Were-Llama, WSJ's Concern-Troll Fail, And See Me Climb

Too much to explain. Let me sum up.

* An interview with me, and a giveaway, over at CJ Redwine's place. I am interviewed by a were-llama. Also, part 2 of the giveaway next week involves JEWELRY. Trust me, you want to be in on this.

* The Wall Street Journal went concern-trolling for pageviews again. Dame Jackie responds a lot more politely than I would have, Diane Duane hits it out of the park, the Guardian weighs in, and #YASaves hits trending. I thought of posting my own response to WSJ's pearl-clutching idiocy, but in the end Jackie and Diane did it better than I ever could, and I don't want to link and feed the troll more pageviews. So there it is.

* Kristen Lamb on training to be a career writer:

Athletes who compete in decathlons use a lot of different skills—speed, endurance, strength. They walk this fine balance of giving an event their all….without really giving it their all. They still must have energy left to effectively compete in the other events and outpace the competition.

We writers must learn to give it our all….without giving it our all. The better we get at balancing our duties, the more successful we will be in the long-run. Writers who fail to appreciate all this job entails won't be around in a year or three. They are like a runner who sprints at the beginning of a marathon. They will fall by the side of the road, injured and broken.

So today when you have to squeeze in that 100 words on your break from work, think I'm training. When your kids hang off you as you write, picture that weighted sled. Play the soundtrack to Rocky if you must. (Kristen Lamb)

* Want to see me climb? We're recording ourselves on routes so we can nitpick our performance. (By "we" I mean "me and ZenEllen, my bouldering partner.") Here's some from today: an inglorious failure at a bouldering route, then a second attempt where I stick the damn thing. I've been working this route for a few weeks now. You can also see some of my tats, and the Official Belt Of Urban Fantasy. (Long story. I had to buy one, after that.)

And now I've got to spend the first half of my writing day in alternate-Renaissance fantasy France, and the second half in contemporary paranormal YA. The braincramps are fun to watch–my face squinches up when I shift gears and go from one to the other. Good times, man. Good times.

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RECKONING Winner! And Other Stuff.

It's Friday! And Ilona Andrews has pictures up from our recent Powells Pwnage. You can see me looking slightly-less-terrified, and Devon is always beautiful. Also, I promised to announce the winner of the RECKONING contest> The winner is…

…Reader Heidi F. from Eichenau, Bavaria, in Germany! Heidi, I will get your prize to you as soon as possible. (She gets to read a chapter of RECKONING before anyone else in the world, aside from my agent and editor. Lucky lady!)

Thank you to everyone who entered by pre-ordering signed books from Powell's. And thanks to all the wonderful Readers who came to the event! We had a great time.

Today is nice and sunny, and I'm due out at the track for a couple miles before long. I even got a watch that's supposed to help me track my times, but in order for it to do so I must:

1. Remember to wear said watch

2. Hope that the battery in it doesn't give out within the week, like every other watch I've tried to wear

3. Remember to check the watch while running

4. Decode what the watch says while running

5. Do basic math to figure out my speed…while running

Needless to say, I am not sanguine about this. Normally, while hauling my silly ass along at anything faster than an amble, my higher-brain functions pretty much shut down in protest. So, there it is. I'll report back next week. If I don't trip over my feet and hurt myself trying to check the watch. Which would be embarrassing, but not exactly surprising.

Catch you later…

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