Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 210

Finished, yay!

So, LAHN, which I was hoping to get finished before Christmas and then I gave up on that? Finished the actual first draft this morning. I feel like it probably needs a fair bit of work, probably clarification of some points, not sure the relationships all develop believably, various concerns about the plot, but I am to close to it now to tell, so I’m done. I sent it to my brother and to my agent about one minute ago.

My brother is just supposed to go thumbs up or thumbs down for plot clarity, with comments about that, though if he has comments about other aspects of the manuscript, I’ll be interested. Caitlin will undoubtedly have comments about all kinds of things, especially pacing. I won’t be at all impatient to see those comments because I am hereby sick of this manuscript and don’t want to think about it again for a month. By then I’ll probably have acquired enough distance that I can see it better myself.

Largest word count during the creation of this draft: 142,000 words. Word count as of this morning: 118,000 words. Virtually all the cutting came out of the last quarter of the manuscript. I added stuff too, but obviously not nearly as much as I took out.

Glad it’s done! I would now take a serious break from writing, but I can hardly waste the remaining 2 weeks of Christmas Break. So next: I do want to finish this Ysidro novel by Barbara Hambly, but I will definitely be starting work on the 4th Black Dog novel, COPPER MOUNTAIN, tomorrow, if not today.

That will be easier now anyway because I tossed ideas around about the plot with my brother while he was here and now I have a pretty good idea of the stuff that will happen in the book vs the stuff that will wait and happen after the book, in novellas. It was hard for me to sort that out, so this was one of the rare moments when it helped me to talk about a novel before beginning to write it.

Important things that got settled:

a) Does the book open directly after SHADOW TWIN or has some time passed?

You can see how impossible it is to begin working on the manuscript without answering that crucial question. Now I know: it’s going to open immediately after the third book. This will almost certainly require me to work in some of the novellas from Short Stories III during the course of COPPER MOUNTAIN, so I will (almost certainly) have to include a time-has-passed moment or two in order to set those novellas into place. That will be different, since always in the other books, all the action has taken place during an intense few days.

b) How can I remove some characters from the action so I don’t have to include everyone? And, related

c) Who is going to get to play important roles during the main action in the 4th book?

The cast is enormous now and there’s no way to cut it down without imposing an enormous disaster on Dimilioc, which I don’t want to do. They’re supposed to be recovering from the first enormous disaster; I don’t want to destroy the house completely. At least, I don’t think I do.

For SHADOW TWIN, I left Ethan and that crowd in Vermont, as you recall, and set Justin and Keziah and their group over in Roswell with Justin’s grandmother. That let me trim the character list for the main story down to something approaching reasonable size.

For COPPER MOUNTAIN, I’ll have to do something of the same kind. I have an idea for getting Etienne and his people away from the main stage, and there are various other characters and groups of characters I think I might set at a distance as well. If your favorite secondary character(s) do not get to play an important role in the 4th novel, I can just about guarantee that they will get a starring role in the next set of novellas. I like all those secondary characters too, you know, so I will feel compelled to give them a story if they get scant attention in the novel.

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Just stumbled across a zombie story you might like–

Here’s a short story, about zombies (or zombie fiction), I happened to find on Scott Alexander’s blog. Click through and check it out; it’s funny and only takes a minute to read.

It starts like this:

He walked into my office and threw the manuscript on my desk with a thud.

“It’s called Thankful For Zombies. A zombie story where…”

“Nope,” I said.

His face deflated like a balloon. “But I didn’t even…”

“Zombies are overdone,” I said.

“But this is a zombie story with a twist!”

“Zombie stories with twists are super overdone.”

“But this is a story about an extended family who get together for Thanksgiving dinner, only to be interrupted by a zombie apocalypse. It’s a Thanksgiving story about zombies. You have to admit that the combination of zombies and Thanksgiving has never…”

“Done,” I said.

“Wait, really? The family starts out estranged and suspicious of each other, but then when they all have to work together to…”

“Done,” I said.

“How could that have been done?”

“Listen. I know you won’t believe me, but for the past ten years or so, the best literary minds of our generation have been working on creating zombie stories just different enough from every other zombie story around to get published. First the clever and interesting twists got explored. Then the mediocre and boring twists. Then the absurd and idiotic twists. Finally the genre got entirely mined out. There is now a New York Times bestselling book about zombies invading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. If your idea isn’t weirder than that, it’s been done. And that’s the logical ‘if’. If your idea is weirder than that, it has also been done.”

I actually found this story because I was looking for a story about the zombie apocalypse, only the zombies are philosophical zombies. I couldn’t find that one, so if anybody knows title or author or where to find it, please drop that information in a comment.

In the meantime, though, I hope you enjoy Alexander’s story.

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Life skills we’ve learned from reading fiction

Here’s a post from Book Riot: Unnecessary Life Skills We Learned from Reading

My favorite: how to escape from prison and gain revenge: The Count of Monte Christo.

Yeahhh, pretty sure this particular method could not be used to escape from a modern prison; unless, of course, your prison happens to be on an island where bodies are disposed of by being thrown into the sea. For a more useful twist on the same basic method, The Shawshank Redemption would probably do better: sewer crawl instead of burial at sea.

And for revenge, not sure the basic lesson: First find a huge buried treasure is all that practical for most of us.

Let me see, stuff I’ve learned from reading, hmm. Well, how to fix a unicorn’s broken horn. Got that one from The Magic and the Healing, mentioned in yesterday’s post. Plus how to treat gout in birds, same place; also of course gout in the eagle foot of a griffin.

Oh, here’s one: if you’re kidnapped, make a real try at getting away as soon as possible, don’t wait. That’s from that recent-ish Mercy Thompson novel, Silence Fallen, and also any number of mysteries. I expect it’s probably good advice, for a situation that is perhaps not super-likely to occur in my calm, boring life.

The enemy’s gate is down . . . wait, not likely to need that one. Unless you take it as “Think outside the box in combat,” which is still not likely to come in handy, but no doubt substantially more likely than zero-gravity combat.

Never go anywhere alone with a guy you don’t know that well if you’ve discovered a body in the prior week or so. That’s always a bad idea, especially if you’re a female business owner who bakes, and most especially if you are developing a romantic relationship with a cop. Every cozy mystery in the world makes this plain.

If your nearest-and-dearest is bitten by a zombie, you really need to just shoot them right then. Waiting won’t help anybody.

Never put an alien artifact on your head unless you’re perfectly certain you’ll be able to take it off again.

Always be nice to SecUnits and other such entities. Be nice in general when a SecUnit is present. You never know when you might need that SecUnit to jigger its governor module and save your life. …. I guess that if you generalize this one sufficiently broadly, it’s actually pretty good advice.

If an AI / alien / who knows what invites you to join the Synergis, make sure you concentrate on developing your lan as fast as possible. That one’s probably not as generalizable.

What’s a real-life or not-real-life tidbit of important advice you’ve picked up from reading fiction?

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I’m mostly dreaming of working my way through some of my TBR pile. Thanks, though.

From James Davis Nicoll at tor.com, 100 SFF books you should consider reading in 2019.

100 is a lot for a list. Any list. But I’m mildly interested, even though I really don’t get the impression my tastes overlap all that well with JDN’s tastes. Let’s just take a look and see what he’s got here . . .

Okay, I take that back. First book on his list:

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison/Sarah Monette.

Well, he is going in alphabetical order, that’s why it’s first. Still, I am 100% behind this choice. Now I’m more interested in seeing what else is on this list …

Joan Aiken, good. Handmaid’s Tale, uuuugggghhhh, no. My goodness, I hated that one in when someone pressed it on my as an undergrad. Self-conscious dystopias, not my thing.

LMB, “Mountains of Mourning.” Okay, good. War for the Oaks, yay! Octavia E Butler’s Wild Seed, another yay! Now I”m starting to get more inclined to try other books JDN recommends and we’re only just through the B’s.

Oh, Naamah’s Curse by Carey. Not my favorite series by this author. I liked the Kushiel’s Dart series much better. Oh, here’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Good choice. Red Moon Black Mountain. Two thumbs up on that one. Oh, here’s the Morgaine series by CJC. You know, I should re-read that.

Wow, this is an eclectic list. It’s just all over the place for older vs newer works, well-known vs more obscure books. So far, of the ones I’ve read, that’s one I hated and seven I liked a lot or loved, plus a couple where I like the author quite a bit, though not necessarily the work chosen. Pretty impressive proportion.

Click through if you like; I bet those of you around my age will recognize a lot of titles. I mean, look! There’s Enchantress from the Stars! I hadn’t thought of that one for decades. I liked it a lot, way back when. I wonder if I’d feel it’s held up?

Here’s Those Who Hunt the Night, Hambly’s first vampire novel. As it happens, I’m reading her most recent title in this series at this very moment. The first book is really still my favorite, but I do like the whole series.

Good heavens: Janet Kagan’s Hellspark. Did not expect that. Great story. I mean, the mystery was not so very mysterious, but the characters were wonderful and the setting pretty snazzy.

Ah, there’s Patricia McKillip. I was waiting for her to appear. Riddlemaster Trilogy, sure, fine choice, but it’s hard to go wrong with McKillip.

Okay, I’m going to skip down to the end of the alphabet now . . .

Ah, not at the very end, but here’s one I really do want to try: Banner of Souls by Liz Williams. I have one more Inspector Chen mystery to read first, but then yes, I would like to try something else by Williams.

Well, I am hardly going to try to generate a list of a hundred titles myself, especially since I would end up repeating some titles and authors from JDN’s list. But I will add just one author he missed. Let me try to pick something a little older, a little more obscure . . . say at least 20 years old, by an author who might not leap immediately to mind . . . okay, got one:

There you go: The Magic and the Healing by Nick O’Donohoe.

I learned a lot about writing perceptive characters from this book. O’Donohoe doesn’t have to say: BJ IS PERCEPTIVE, LOOK, DID YOU SEE HER NOTICE THAT? She just is perceptive, and if the reader is as well, then the reader will realize it.

Also, veterinary medicine! Fantasy setting! Griffins! I liked it a lot and if JDN’s list of a hundred doesn’t give you enough ideas about older (and newer) titles to seek out, well, here’s another.

Got one of your own? Drop it in the comments, because there’s no such thing as a TBR pile that is too high or too unwieldy, right?

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Christmas music I never get bored with

Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas album is (nearly) the only one I can stand to listen to for the whole duration of the Christmas season, which for me starts today and goes through New Years. I mean, today, Christmas Eve Eve, is the first day I ever deliberately put a cd of Christmas music in the player. This is that cd.

On the off chance you’re not familiar with Mannheim Steamroller, give it a listen.

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Surprising deals if you need last-minute Christmas gifts

The Keeper of the Mist is currently just $4.99 as an ebook, I notice. The paperback version is $9.99, so the ebook price is pretty good.

Oddly, my other reasonably current Random House title, The White Road of the Moon, is currently showing the reverse pricing pattern: the ebook is $9.99, but the hardcover is only $4.99. Don’t ask me, but this is certainly a good time to snap up the hardcover, even though I expect you might not quiiiite get it in time for Christmas.

The Floating Islands is also $4.99 in ebook form.

And of course Black Dog is just $3.99, which is where I generally leave that one. Inviting price, I hope!

Those are the best prices for any of my books on Amazon right now. Just FYI.

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Ho ho ho!

At tor.com, Mari Ness gets us into the Christmas spirit — or not — by offering brief comments on a fairy tale I’m glad I’ve never encountered in the wild: Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Fir Tree.”

As you might guess from the title, “The Fir Tree” is the story of a little fir tree who lives among several other fir trees, and desperately wants to be a big, grown up tree. We’ve all been there. His short size—not to mention the fact that rabbits can jump right over him—makes him desperately unhappy, and rather than enjoying life as a little tree, he spends his time envying the bigger trees.

This doesn’t decrease in the slightest when he sees these bigger trees cut down—off, he learns, for exciting adventures as ship masts (or so a bird explains) or as decorated Christmas trees. Suddenly the Fir Tree has something a bit unusual for a fir tree: ambition. Not to travel on a ship (though that does tempt him for a moment) but to be a beautifully decorated Christmas tree. He can think of nothing else, despite the advice from sunbeams and the wind to focus on youth and fresh air.

This does not end entirely well. If you’re in a Grinch kind of mood, click through and read the whole post. If you’re REALLY in a Grinch-y mood, here’s a link where you can read the actual fairy tale.

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Argh, not finished

It’s the 21st of December and Christmas is in four days and I really, really want to get this revision of LAHN done by Christmas, but you know, I’m starting to think it isn’t going to happen. By New Years, probably, but Christmas? Maybe not.

This is so provoking. Here is the path to full revision for this particular WIP:

Started reading from the top. Read nine chapters the first day, thought, Well, this isn’t bad!

The next day, read through five or six more chapters. Going along swimmingly, making just tiny little tweaks here and there. Decide, Yay, I can probably finish this whole revision by tonight. (This was the 14th.)

Hit chapter 17 and the whole story just . . . dissolves into chaos. I’m all like, WAIT, WHAT? Apparently that’s as far as I got when I started the revision before, sometime earlier this fall.

Skim through the remaining chapters in a state of appalled fascination. Who wrote Chapter 18? Was that me? What was I thinking? Gosh, Chapter 19 is no better. Chapter 20 isn’t so bad, the momentum picks up again (finally), but this one major plot twist is stupid. Also unnecessary, that whole plot twist can be cut completely, why is it even here?

Back up and read the end of Chapter 17. Then cut two chapters completely and begin to carefully splice the end of the book back into the late-middle section, with frequent pauses to stare into space and consider just how to get the splice to work.

So, yeah, this has been a ridiculously annoying week. With a complete pause now and then to read other people’s books. Gosh, those final drafts looks so smooth. Can’t wait till this draft looks more like that.

Which it will.

But probably not before Christmas.

Let me add that yes, it is remarkable how different the writing experience can be from one book to the next, even when you have written . . . let me see . . . getting pretty close to twenty novels, counting both published and unpublished. Oh, wait, it’s 22, counting that trilogy I broke up into WINTER and THE WHITE ROAD.

Twenty-two novels and the entire last third of this one is a total mess, in a way that is unusual for me, but not, I think, completely unheard of. Though I don’t think I ever ditched 20,000 words out of the last third of a manuscript before. I do believe this is a record. Hopefully it will stay that way.

As a side note:

I’m glad I did one final copy editing pass through DOOR INTO LIGHT. Many trivial typos — well, not that many, but a good handful — and four excruciatingly embarrassing typos. The very worst was typing “kill” when I meant “kiss” — a tiny bit of a difference there. Can you imagine if that had gotten into the finished book? I sure can. Vividly.

For some reason page numbers vanish on even-numbered pages halfway through the book. That is, I think, the worst flaw remaining, and frankly I’m not sure it is all that noticeable or important given the odd page numbers are right there.

I may add a bit of teaser material. Just gotta think what. The first chapter of BLACK DOG, maybe; that’s the easiest. One of the shorter stories from BEYOND THE DREAMS? Maybe, maybe, I’ll think about it.

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As we approach Christmas

You, like me, may be tired to death of some of the more commonly played Christmas carols.

I recommend you take a break from all those carols and listen to Annie Lennox sing In The Bleak Midwinter:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.Our God, heav’n cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heav’n and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign;
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But his mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshiped the Beloved with a kiss.What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him—give my heart.
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Recent Reading: Starfighter Invitation by AKH

This is going to be a short review:

Read this book.

Well, maybe that’s too short. Let me try again:

a) Stuff to like:  If you happen to like virtual reality, there’s that. If you’re into characters who are believable and easy to identify with, there’s that. If you’re into complex mysteries threaded through a SF setting, there’s that.

Taia is a great protagonist. AKH said on Twitter that she wanted to do something different than the semi-standard “zero to hero” VR plot. She does. Taia is a perfectly nice young woman, and when playing the game, she’s . . . a nice young woman who’s about number 7000 to achieve her most desired goal. Not the first, not special, pretty okay at important tasks, but not the best.

She works hard, but not the hardest. She takes leadership roles, but not in a pushy way. She is loyal to her friends and has a good relationship with her family — well, maybe not her grandmother so much.

She’s suspicious of her “alien overlord supervisor,” Dio, but she doesn’t figure out the truth before the end. (Neither did I.) She’s not sure Dio’s a real person, of course, for quite a while, since the game is supposed to be purely a VR game, it just seems too advanced to be true. (It is. )

I like the secondary characters too. Especially, yes, Dio, but also most of the others. And the worldbuilding, most of it. The VR stuff is reminiscent of the Touchstone technology, but not the same.

b) Stuff not to like: This is a slow-paced story for most of its length. There is tons of worldbuilding given the VR game. Tons. I didn’t mind this, but this is not a story that hurtles out of the starting gate.

Nor is this a particularly intense book, until the end. Remember how Cassandra was really thrown off the deep end and in an intense situation right away? Not here.

c) Stuff not to worry about: Don’t play massive online games yourself? Don’t really play computer games at all? No problem! You will see some reviews that imply it helps to have some awareness of the online gaming world. Maybe so, but I have zero experience with any of that and didn’t feel like anything was hard to follow.

Also, this is a self-contained book, more or less. The big reveal happens, so we have that. We’ve got the set up for the next book. Big things are about to happen, but the fundamental mystery — that is solved.

Overall:

Read the book.

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