Karalynn Lee's Blog, page 3

Character descriptions

Like most writers who started young, I went through a phase of giving my characters eyes and hair of dramatic hues. Gems and precious metals were particularly common: "amethyst" or "silver" or the ever-popular color-changing gaze.

Clearly this tendency toward rainbows isn't limited to folks who grow up in homogeneous populations, but as someone raised in Korea, I might have been trying to escape the straight black hair and brown eyes that pretty much everyone had.

Now I hate providing physical descriptions, perhaps after reading a few too many tales where the heroine wakes up in the morning and looks at herself in the mirror, providing a tidy catalogue of all her features. Also, I'm horrible at visualizing from text; as a reader, I never play the casting game (where you pick actors and actresses you think would fit characters' appearances).

These days I reckon that the most important traits actually give a clue as to the person's livelihood or personality: callused hands, prematurely graying hair, that sort of thing. Let's say all your characters do have the same colored hair and same colored eyes. What would you fall back on? Their mannerisms, perhaps. If the first time I encounter a character, all I hear is that she has a wicked smile, I know so much more about her that matters than I would if you gave me her driver's license.

Brought to you by the letter K and curiosity as to whether the tiny scraps of physical description I provide to my cover artists is freeing or frustrating. (That said, they do incredible work! I can't wait to share my next cover.)

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Unedited excerpt from Let Slip Glory: An unexpected journey

This is the tale about a girl who strikes up an unlikely companionship with a half-breed hellhound, set in the same world as Demon's Fall.

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Read the rest of Unedited excerpt from Let Slip Glory: An unexpected journey (783 words)

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Relationships to sink your teeth into

Here are some fantasy novels that contain awesome couples who caught in my mind. Often it's because the odds were stacked against them and yet I was utterly convinced that they did indeed fall in love despite all that.

(Straight romance books didn't make this list because the entire plot is predicated upon the relationship working. There's a delicious tension that gets added when the couple must find each other amidst the craze of a big external plot.)

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Read the rest of Relationships to sink your teeth into (358 words)

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Failed multitasking

I'm perfectly fine writing multiple stories at any given time; inspiration will lead me to flit from file to file, and I'll write whatever comes to me, for whichever is the flavor of the day. (Although there's usually a tipping point where I'll then hunker down and devote myself to a single story for an extended period.)

However, it turns out that I can't really revise one story while writing another.

I don't count minor edits, the little adjustments that copy-editors tend to ask for. Need me to get rid of a semicolon? Sure. (And the heroine of our other tale shall meanwhile rid herself of a foe…) Is the phrasing awkward? I'll smooth it out. (While the hero over there smooth-talks the heroine into some roguery…) Unclear who's talking? Insert handy dialogue tags. (And here's an important conversation that uncovers its own share of secrets.) I can juggle like a pro.

But deep revisions, where I have to keep in mind the entire shape of the story while I make changes, take up too much of my brain space. I get worried about trying to cram two entire stories in there. Not to say that the world-building edits for my science fiction romance would have leaked into the fantasy I was writing, but my mind just makes that terrible rusty-gears-grinding sound whenever I try to flip over from a story in revision to any other.

I'm not sure what this means. That I delve more deeply into a story during revisions than when I'm writing it? Maybe it's because revisions are closer to the ultimate finish line than drafting, and my brain's protesting how I'm leaving a project when it's just…so…close…

Anyway, this discovery has been brought to you by the letter K and the realization that I really need to wrap up the current novel-length piece for good before I can start jamming on the sf romance short.

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A snippet of an sf romance story

I figure I should put up a science fiction free read before Slip Point comes out. Here's the beginning of the current candidate story.

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Read the rest of A snippet of an sf romance story (368 words)

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Drive-by reviews of romantic-ish fantasy short stories

These don't always leave you feeling bubbly and happy about the couple, the way a strict romance would; but they all feature wonderfully engaging relationships, and the stories themselves, I think, will provide their own satisfaction.

"The Dead Girl's Wedding March" by Cat Rambo, published in Fantasy Magazine

A rat and a zombie in a city of the dead. If you are intrigued at all, try it; this falls under the realm of "so weird it wraps around to being good."

Her name was Zuleika, and she was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and smelled only faintly of the grave, because every evening she bathed in the river that flowed silently beneath her window.

"A Fairy Tale Princess" by Shweta Narayan, published in the Cabinet des Fées

A sly yet charming look at the prototypical fairy tale princess. I can slip this in here, even though the focus isn't on the romance, because it technically does have a HEA!

"If only we had a daughter," the king said to his queen one day, with the smile that had heated her blood after the first gruelling pregnancy was over, warmed it to a sense of Oh why not after the second, and now after the third sent entirely the wrong shivers down her spine.

"The Third Wish" by Joan Aiken, reprinted in Strange Horizons

This is another in the fairy tale vein, but it's moving rather than clever, for all its simplicity.

"Yes, I do, I do love you," she said, and there were tears in her eyes again. "But I miss the old life in the forest, the cool grass and the mist rising off the river at sunrise and the feel of the water sliding over my feathers as my sister and I drifted along the stream."

"Waiting" by Eilis O'Neal, published by Strange Horizons

I'll throw in an original piece in SH. It's a bit predictable plot-wise, but I liked the language.

"She was a swordsman," he said finally. "The best of her time. She served the Emperor Janken, led his warriors into battle. Won the battles, all of them. They say she was like a blade herself, as sharp and keen-edged and quick, as if she were made of steel and lightning. She disappeared. They looked, but they never found her."

"Throwing Stones" by Mishell Baker, published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies

This is lovely and thoughtful. A teahouse worker with ambitions and a goblin.

In the city of Jiun-Shi the third shift was known as the goblin watch, but some of us were not very watchful. I, for one, was so absorbed in the daily details of living a lie that it took me three months to learn that one of the regulars at the Silver Fish Teahouse was a goblin. By the time our paths collided three years later, I had been promoted to third-shift manager, and my lie had been promoted to widely established fact.

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A first draft out of the way: next steps

I wrapped up Through All Four Seasons at 44,000 words. Yay! But I'm hardly done:

Yes, even though I've got a complete draft, I'm going to attempt a structural outline. This is a first for me: I'm very much an organic writer, and a non-sequential one while I'm at it, which is a problem here because the romance isn't predicated upon instant first-look attraction. It creeps and grows and then pounces. But it's difficult to keep track of the creeping and growing if I'm writing the key scenes out of order. Feelings may plausibly ebb and flow, but there needs to be some sort of overall crescendo, and I want to make sure I include such an escalation.


I also need to fill in areas I glossed over. This means coming up with minor characters' names or better word choices, going back to plant Chekhov's gun in earlier scenes, and smoothing out inconsistencies. Sometimes it's a bigger issue, like ensuring strong motivation for a character throughout or adding grittiness to the overall setting. I'm guilty of throwing in the towel for some past stories and decreeing, "It's good enough," and in fact did get those works accepted–only to have the editor point out the same issues I waved off, and ask me to fix them.  So I might as well hash out the problems I'm aware of beforehand. (Theresa Stevens also has a handy checklist.)


Off to my poor brother for a trusted reader review. I appreciate his eye because it isn't acclimated to romance, so he focuses on world-building and whether the external plot makes sense; and he'll be absolutely honest if the sex scenes occur too often or at stupid intervals instead of sighing over how wonderful it is that the characters are finally experiencing ultimate intimacy. I try not to abuse him as a reader too much, since I don't want him getting used to romance tropes through my works, either.


Finally, a read-through aloud using TextAloud, my text-to-speech software. The artificial voice I use makes all dialogue sound somewhat stilted, so it's not too helpful in that regard.  But this step does let me catch awkward sentence constructions that made complete sense when I wrote them–and typos, too. I follow along in the manuscript as it's read aloud, and the slow pace forced by the software often lets me notice errors that might otherwise slip past me.


I've actually already written the cover letter and synopsis–these are usually procrastinatory tools during the drafting stage–so after I'm happy with revisions and have double-checked the formatting, off it can go as an official submission. Log it in Duotrope, pop an entry into my calendar that reminds me when it's time to query, then forget about it.


Take a deep breath.


Then start the next story.

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A snippet of Through All Four Seasons: Ambush!

I finally finished the first draft of Through All Four Seasons. Yes, this is the story I started for NaNoWriMo 2009 (here's an excerpt of the opening). There's still lots to do, but more on that later; for now, here's an excerpt.

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Read the rest of A snippet of Through All Four Seasons: Ambush! (494 words)

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Dead of Night by Jim Bambra and Stephen Hand

My brother recommended this one to me as an example of a good gamebook in the Fighting Fantasy series. YOU are a demon stalker!

What I liked about the opening is that you're heading back home to check up on your parents — not some princess in a distant tower, not your gendered sweetheart, not some random person you don't know but whose distress you intend to banish anyway.

Also, there's a special section just to provide explicit warnings about how cunning and deceitful demons can be, which immediately made me paranoid. It actually drew me more deeply into the story, because I accepted that premise and treated the threat as real. My decisions weren't made casually, but instead followed a Princess-Bride-Vizzini-esque train of thought.

So off I went to rescue the parentals. (I try to steer clear of spoilers, but have cut for length.)(...)
Read the rest of Dead of Night by Jim Bambra and Stephen Hand (429 words)

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Ever longer

Each of my novellas has been longer than the last. This one tipped over 40,000 words, and I could feel the difference. Not in a good way; I was lost and confused. But I struggled on, and I think I narrowed down my Longer Length Demons to conquer as I continue down this path toward novels:

Subplots. In a tight story of short length, you focus on the main conflict (or rather, the main struggle — see Patricia C. Wrede's notes on obstacles). When you have more room to roam, it may be better to find other interesting things that are happening, because not all books can keep up a highwire-level of tension while addressing a single issue. However, I kept eyeing my subplots and wondering whether they truly were necessary. After all, the main storyline could stagger on without them. The thing is, subplots might not be critical, but they can still be helpful — give you room to develop relationships more gradually, establish situations that will come to a head in your final climax — and the point is to build the best story possible, not the leanest story possible.


Chapter breaks. This one's because I write out of order and then (as my brother puts it) spackle over the gaps between scenes. I focus so hard on keeping a continuous flow between my snippets that the next thing I know, I have one long chapter stretching from the beginning to the end. This is valid for some literary works, but I'd rather find some natural breathing points and not make the story a single breathless rush. I note this as a difficulty because there are more gaps in a long story (so it's hard to notice which ones would actually be left intact as a chapter break), and because you have to have more damn chapters.


Travel and time flow. Since I'm not trying to write A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (in oh-so-many ways, I am not), and not even Many Sequential Days in the Life of a Fictional Character, there are often periods when nothing special happens — you know, your character's traveling across the continent and you don't really want to detail every moment — and you're basically saying, "Time passes." You have your handy three centered asterisks, and you've got blithe statements like, "Time passes." These probably shouldn't be abrupt or distracting or come in too frequent intervals. However, the more expansive my storyline, the more likely I'll have these little hand-wavey stretches of time, especially as there are likely to be more locations and thus more transitions.


Build-up and resolution. Because you're spending more time on this story, it needs to deliver in proportion. All those loose ends you've got dangling, more than usual because — that's right — this is a longer story? Yup, they all need to be tied up. Did your couple dream of each other for four hundred pages? They can't be brought together as summarily as they might in a short story. Similarly, if you're planning to reveal a twist at the end, you have a lot more covering up to do throughout all the rest of the story. Fun times.

I'll note that as I typed this list up, I kept thinking of published novels that were exceptions to the guidelines I so desperately tried to follow, and rather successfully. But that's how good writers roll. "Rules?" they scoff. "Psht."

I look forward to my novel-writing "Psht" days.

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