Wen Spencer's Blog, page 5

Eight MIllion Gods

I've sent Eight Million Gods in to Baen. Will keep people posted as it goes through the publishing process.

Result of tweaking thin character

EIGHT MILLION GODS

3: In the Kitchen, With a Blender

Nikki liked pens. She took some comfort knowing that most writers did. Only her obsession for ink-based writing instruments was on the same level as a wino's fixation on wine. The only things she had ever stolen in her life were pens, usually cheap ones off people's desks. The only new pen was a six hundred dollar Cartier Diabolo fountain pen with an 18K gold nib. (One couldn't really blame her; her mother had dragged her down Rodeo Drive in some vain attempt to make Nikki presentable during an election campaign and triggered a writing fit in Neiman Marcus. She had locked herself in a bathroom stall and wrote out a vivisection on a fist-full of paper towels.)


What "worked" best for her hypergraphia were cheap retractable ballpoint pens supplied by pharmaceutical companies to hospital staffs to promote their products. It was her special brew in a brown paperbag. She could hold the compulsion off sometimes by just gripping one tight and clicking it repeatedly.

Since arriving in Osaka, she fallen in love with Zebra Surari emulsion ink pens with 0.05 points in five colors. She bought them like some people bought cigarettes. She had a dozen in her backpack, mostly black, her favorite weapon, but at least one of the other four colors. She paired them with a plain notebook sold at FamilyMart, stunningly cheap yet superior in paper quality. God, the Japanese understood writing by hand.

Handcuffed in the back of tiny police squad car, she really wished she could think of anything except pens. And how much she needed one in her hand. With paper. And both were within her backpack beside her.

Maybe if she used her teeth…

Then again, perhaps thinking about pens was better than thinking about the mess she was in. This wasn't the United States. The police could and would hold suspects as long as they wanted. There was one case where they arrested a man and held him for questioning for three days. He was suspected of nothing more than groping women on the train. When his parents reported him missing to the very police station that was holding him, they weren’t told that he was just down the hall. In the end, the police realized that they had the wrong man and released him without apology despite media outcry.

And they suspected her of murder!

She bit down on a whimper as the need to write grew a little more desperate. She closed her eyes, took deep cleansing breaths, and tried to focus only on her happy place. Pristine white sand. Water so blue that it defied description.

The car pulled to a stop and they were at the Osaka Prefectural Police Headquarters next to the sprawling gardens of the Osaka Castle.

God, she would kill for a pen.

#

The police department looked much like its American counterpart – desks crowded with computers, office supplies, and paper files threatening to overrun everything. Luckily they paused her by a desk with pens in a coffee mug. She eased around so the cup was behind her and in reach of her handcuffed hands.

"Watashi no nihongo wa heta desu," she said while running her fingers blindly over the pens. It meant -- hopefully – that her Japanese was bad. "Wakarimasen." Which meant "I don't understand." She found a retractable pen. She gripped it tightly, and carefully, silently, clicked it. She took a deep breath and relaxed as she breathed it out. "Please. Does anyone speak English?"

The policemen were talking to each other, ignoring her. She silently clicked the pen a few more times, trying to decide what to do. If this was the American police, she would ask for a lawyer and refuse to talk to the police until someone showed up, probably from the public defender office. All the antidotal evidence, though, seemed to suggest that Japanese citizen didn't automatically have the right to an attorney. If she asked for someone from the American consultant, would they call the embassy for her? Did she want someone?

No. And definitely not. She clicked the pen again.

Fighting Character being thin

I've been flailing about as to what made Maass call Lucy "a real person" and Nikki "thin." He hinted that he felt as if the character only existed to drive the plot, and not real. How do I make Nikki real as Lucy?

So I failed about for about a week now. Today something kind of jarred me into a new mental state.

Voodoo snipped in chat and asked for help on a small action scene. It was two paragraph snippet but it suffered from having two characters on horses. Something I've discovered in the past that when you have two people operating/controlling something that you're going to reference a lot in an action scene, its best to find nicknames to put on the object than referring to it by a general name. Her scene had James and Elsie on horses. A bird frightens the horses. Elsie's horse does x. Elsie does y. James' horse does a. James does b.

As you can see, you have four items, two of which share the same name as other two plus you're repeating the word "horse" again and again. A similar situation is two people fighting with two pistols, or two people in two cars racing…or something. But using general terms, you end up having to use the character names to refer to the objects and you're stuck with repeating the same word – be it horse, gun, or car – over and over again.

Any time you can, you should get specific as possible with an item within knowledge of the character. A horse person would refer to their horse by name – Betsy, Branco, Bugger – and an unknown horse by some general term – black stallion, white mare, roan gelding. Thus you have James and Elsie on a black stallion Killer, and a white mare Betsy. A bird startles the horses. The mare dances sideways. Elsie watches in horror as Killer rears. James falls and breaks his leg.

Or this could be two people scrambling for guns. Elsie kicks the 45 out of James' hand. As the pistol stakes across the floor, the fight moves to who can get to the shotgun first.

What does this all have to do with character thinness? Nothing – but it was an interesting writing lesson….

So I digress. Thinness of character.

Well, after I gave this whole lesson to help Voodoo, Chatter X says "I think her original is fine." Headdesk

So I sigh, reduce the window, and ignore chat for a little while. Later I rant to my husband about it and that's when the AH HA hits. Basically because I start off the conversation with "introduction of character" so he knows who the hell I'm ranting about.

This is how I start it: Chatter X is a young brit – she's like 20 or something thereabouts. She's quirky usually in a good way. She has an obsession with expensive quill pens and moleskin journals. She has labored long to learn how to write elegantly with the quill pens in the journals so she can justify the cost of both. She handwrites everything and then retypes it later into the computer. And its not just any moleskin journals, they have to be beautiful, a certain thickness and density of paper and an a certain size. She's fascinated for some odd reason with volcano and tracks their activity and has like a doctorate level of geology in them. She has a rabid love of pasta too, and can talk at length about different types, how to cook them and what they taste like. Her chat handle is because of her interest in Japanese manga and anime. She's also compulsively private in regards of her real name – she's one of the few people I chat with where I don't know her real name….

And the little light goes on in my head and I forget all about the writing lesson sabotage. In Chatter X, I suddenly see "REAL" very clearly. Here was a mass of information, all vaguely related because they're generated by the same person, all non-plot important and yet creates a feel of a very specific person. It's like there's this solid bones of "this is the person" and then flesh that's shaped by those bones. It's easy to say but it's hard to do.

I've avoided character sheets in the past because to me the seem like you randomly throw stuff onto the sheet really without knowing the character in the first place. What's their favorite color? What's their favorite song? Who's their favorite actor? It seemed too easy to put down stuff that doesn't matter. What did all this stuff have to do with anything. Clutter! Clutter!

But it does matter, but not in a haphazard picked random way. Chatter X is a logical collection of likes and dislikes. You can guess from her likes and dislikes that she is a very strong-willed, very opinionated, and yet very …hmmm… what's the word I'm looking for… lush in terms of what she likes. You can guess that she would happy working in a library or a bookstore or a stationary store. You can pick up a moleskin journal and go "Chatter X would love this" or "This one is so tiny it drive her nuts." You can guess she has a pantry full of pasta and probably has a pasta pot that she uses often. In a scene, if she pulled out something to write with, she'll probably have a fist full of pens to chose from and would deliberate which one to use unless under pressure, and even then it would be "no, not the expensive pen!"

Of course, as long as you kept to that correct level of detail, she feel real. But if you just skim the surface – never drift into a discussion of pens and what makes them good or never have her drooling over a new pen or never having her protect an expensive one – but just say 'she likes quill pens' then its thin.

SO…

What I need to do for Nikki is come with logical likes and dislikes and show them.

Sigh.

Of course, that said, it seems like a very DOH statement.
Because of Chatter X, the first one that springs to mind is pen and paper. There's a good possibility that Nikki has similar love of quill – I rarely meet a writer that doesn't. However, it's more likely that she has an OCD driven level of comfort. The pens she could easily get hold of in hospitals were the cheap ballpoint click pens given out in bulk by drug companies. There's a chance she would have to keep the pen hidden – there might be rules against patients having pens. While she might love moleskin journals, there's probably some kind of stock pad of paper – like yellow letter tablet – that she writes best on. I have to figure out what kind of pad and then work it into the already written scenes. It will divert the flow slight to talk about what kind of pad she uses and why, but it would add depth to her.

Similarly there are her clothes. I start the first scene in Japan with her wearing a Goth Lolita black lace babydoll shirt and I mention slouch boots. Nothing else gets mentioned in the way of clothes until her Hello Kitty rant at the nearly halfway mark of the book. In the rant I mention that she thought she was ugly until she realized it was because her mother was buying ugly clothes for her. Having kind of faced that myself, I know that you end up trying to find stylish affordable clothes even if you're not a clotheshorse kind of a person. I'm not sure at this moment how to indicate the weird "clothes matter but I'm not a clotheshorse" mentality but it should show up earlier than mid-point of book. I state that she was doing laundry the time of the first murder, so certainly there's probably an opportunity to talk about clothes early on.

I have her carrying a yaoi manga book but never indicate why she reads it. Would she actually like yaoi? I stated at one point that she likes the slice of life manga that dwells on the normal day-to-day life that she never got to live. If she does read yaoi, it could because she's not comfortable in romances between male and female because she perceives an imbalance of power between girl and boy that's often not there in boy love stories. Boy's love, since both characters are male, there's often not the physical risk that a girl would face of being over powered, raped, and impregnated. (Yes, boys can be raped and often are in yaoi, but she might not read those kind…) That might be too much aside to handle, though, in the pace that I keep at the start of the book. I could say it’s a romance book, and indicate that she would like to have a boyfriend but guys always find her too creepy, thus setting the stage for her relationship with Leo better…

I have a sister that likes to wear floppy hats because from a very early age she thought it would keep bees from crawling into her ears. (Don't ask, I don't understand it, just after years of hearing this reasoning, I now dream of bugs in my ears…ICK) Japanese have a huge fetish at keeping their skin white, so they wear LOTS of sun protection in terms of long sleeves and umbrellas on sunny days. Does she go with that because she finds their umbrellas charming?

Is she addicted to coke cola and NEEDS to have a soda all the time? I hinted that she occasionally binge eats under stress in an effort not to fall into OCD writing. What does she like to binge on? Ice cream? Candy bars? Salty chips? WHY? Certainly if I say ice cream I could then say its because she could never get it at the hospital, or maybe her grandfather who died when she was young took her out for ice cream, or maybe the best times in her life was sneaking out of the dorms with Miriam to go to the ice cream store waaaay down the road from school (and across from the graveyard.) Does she like graveyards?

Oh, yeah, cool one I thought of and forgot to this moment. Maybe she was taught mediation to deal with the OCD, which deep breathing and "imaging her safe place." I first experience this in childbirth classes. My safe place is front porch of a log cabin by a lake with pine trees and loons at dusk. This reflects an early fasciation with log cabins, lakes, dusk, and loons. I have to admit that if I were learning mediation today, my safe place would be FAR from snow! It might be cool if Nikki's safe place is Hawaii – which Leo holds out later as a refuge. Certainly it could be "beach with palm trees and not much else" in terms of "as far from a hospital as you can get."

Obviously I need to spend some time considering all the possible likes/dislikes that Nikki might have that would give her depth and make sense MENTIONING in the story.

What's next?

What's next is currently running late. Deadline was end of the month, now its end of next month. Sigh. Tentatively titled EIGHT MILLION GODS, its a standalone fantasy set in current day Japan. I'll have more later.

After that? Well, lots of things. A little of this. A little of that. Some other thing over here. That over that. Scatter shoot everywhere. (Translation, in the middle of talks with publisher as to what the next projects will be with nothing set in stone yet, so I rather not say.)

Once I get this puppy out the door and contracts written and signed, I'll post more on next book and upcoming projects.

wen_spencer @ 2012-03-03T20:42:00

eARC of ELFHOME, Tinker 3, is available via baen.com.

http://www.baenebooks.com/p-1583-elfhome-arc.aspx

ELFHOME is on Amazon for pre-order for a shipment date on July 3, 2012.

wen_spencer @ 2011-07-24T10:52:00

As a writer, you end up with odd story dreams. Last night I dreamed that Young Justice was trying to shift from an universe where everything is bad in their lives to a better universe. Kid Flash would vibrate a football and Superboy would kick it.

And it works! They report their successful to Batman.

"So far all eight footballs have gone to other universes," Robin reports.

Batman looks around sees no footballs in evidence. "But you don't know how to get them back."

Robin looks uncomfortable. "We haven't figured out how to do that yet."

Batman sighs, knowing he paid for all the footballs. "Why don't you take it as a sign. God is telling you not to do this by taking all your footballs away."

Later in the dream they get someone to volunteer to be first human test subject. They've added a big electrical field to the experiment.

"I'll be fine," says the test subject with confidence. "It's not like the electricity might be turned off mid-test because you're behind on your payments."

Kid Flash starts to cry at high speed and sputters out this machine gun sob story of living like a hobo under train tracks with the other speedsters because they can't afford electricity. Robin and Superboy looks in disgust at the test subject for mentioning the possibility of electricity shutting off.

(posted here because facebook sucks)

wen_spencer @ 2011-05-28T02:37:00

Trying to expand my media presence so I've sent up a facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/wen.spencer

And its DONE!

I've emailed Tinker 3: ELFHOME off to Baen today. YEAH! Will keep you update on when it will be ready for arc and websubscription.

Okay, now to unpack and supervise the remodel on the kitchen (yes, I have no kitchen at the moment...) and track down a lawnmower as the grass is about a foot deep....

That was NOT how I imagined my first night in the new house...

So I'm still in the apartment just on the shore of Hilo, Hawaii. I'd gone to bed early because I'd been working since 4 am on the book (yes, I'm still on EST time, why do you ask?) At 9:30 I levitate out of the bed as the tsunami siren next to the apartment building (and the 3 dozen scattered all over town) goes off.

Half-asleep, no idea what's going on, I throw kid in the car and drive to new house. Just for occasions like this, we had bought a place way up the hill overlooking the bay. It would have to be a wave of dinosaur-killing size to reach our new house. It's safe from tsunamis. It does not have, however, furniture, clothes, food, or my computer.

I reached the new house to be greeted by my husband who is living there, sleeping on a futon on the floor. He shows me pictures of Japan and maps of the incoming wave and explains we have until 3 am until it hits.

I get back in the car -- leaving child with husband -- and run back to the apartment. It takes a while, I keep getting stuck at intersections near gas stations as everyone who knows the drill is getting bottled water and filling gas tanks. I grab my computers -- ELFHOME is due in 20 days -- all the food I can carry and some clothes and back to the house I go.

I try to sleep but I can't get comfortable on the twin futon with husband, its freezing cold, didn't bring WARM clothes or my blankets. So I got back up and chatting online with friends, letting them know I was in a safe place. First waves hit Hawaii at 3:07 and it quickly became apparent that we're not in for the pounding that Japan got. Still I can't get to sleep. At 7:00, Pacific Tsunami alert is lifted, and I try to head back the apartment. Unfortunately Kona on the other side of the island is getting 12 foots waves, so they're keeping people out of downtown Hilo too. Back to the house I go.

Finally at 8:00 am, exhaustion hits me hard enough that I do sleep, freezing cold, on the floor.

I'm back at the apartment, slightly brain dead, trying to figure out the last action scene of the book. Deadline looms. Must write.

wen_spencer @ 2011-03-06T11:56:00

"This shouldn't hurt." Tinker assured everyone as she used a handcrafted wax and iron-filing crayon to mark out a spell on the white stone.

Merry meeped nervously at the center of the spell.

Tinker was slightly mystified by the lack of trust she'd been encountering all day. She had heard rumors that the University of Pittsburgh had set up a magic research lab near the enclaves, complete with a large-scale spell casting area. It took her several hours to track down the small building, tucked just across the Rim, down hill and out of sight of the fairground. All the university people she talked to acted like she was going to blow it up or something. They'd been reluctant to admit that the building existed at first, and then to give her permission to use it.

Really – the only thing personally she'd blown up was parts of Ginger Wine's – and she didn't think that should be held against her.

"It took three years and ten million dollars to build!" The university officials kept repeating, although when she finally reached the building, she had no idea why. While well built with cunning use of glass, stone, ironwood, and poly-resin, it was basically just one massive slab of polished white marble resting on bedrock with a glass roof overhead to keep off the rain and snow.

Yet, even Oilcan was voicing concern. "Tink, I don't really think this is a good idea."

"I've done this spell before." Tinker paused to dredge up memories of the last time she experimented with it. "On you even."

"Yes, I know," Oilcan said. "I let you talk me into lots of crazy things."

"Did it hurt?"

"No. That's not the point. You've never known what this spell does."

"Not entirely." She had to bow to the truth of that statement. "But I think I understand it now; it's been a very informative summer. It didn't hurt you and it won't hurt her." At least she was fairly sure it wouldn't. "I've cast it on Blue Sky and it didn't hurt him."

"It made me dizzy for the rest of the day." Blue Sky said unhelpfully. "John told me never to let you cast frivolous spells on me again."

"It was the two hours in the Tilt-n-Whirl that made you dizzy." Tinker said. "And I warned you about that."

No one looked confident about her except for Pony and Stormsong, which was why she loved them best.