B.R. Sanders's Blog, page 44

Writing Snippet: Shandolin

This is from a brand new story I’m writing!

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I set a goal for myself that I would finish one piece of fiction every month for the next year. I like finishing things! I am on track to reach that goal — I finished “Crossing the Bridge” in January, Assassins in February, and “Blue Flowers” in March. But I’ve spent all of April mired in the black hole that is rewriting The Long Road.

Now, that’s not a bad thing, but I needed a little variety. My fingers get itchy when they’re not writing narrative pieces after awhile. And I’ve had an idea bouncing around in my head: a set of detective stories featuring two elvish women in an on-again-off-again relationship. One is an assassin. And the other, Shandolin, is a political firebrand.

This story’s about two-thirds of the way through, so stay tuned because I’ll be needing beta readers for it by May 1st!

Book Review: CONJURE WIFE

I should have known from the cover model’s unnecessarily bared shoulder this would raise my feminist hackles

Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife is a strange little book.It is expertly written, and it is also utterly misogynist. Conjure Wife, written in 1943, is generally well-regarded and pointed to as an early and promising example of horror and urban fantasy. Some go so far as to call it a classic. Three films have been made using it as a starting point.

But, were anyone to ask me (and obviously no one did as this book review, like all of my book reviews, is unsolicited and will likely disappear, unread, into the great, all-consuming maw of the internet), it’s got more than a few problems. It has strengths, for sure…but for me personally the flaws outweigh the strengths in the grand scheme of things. We’ll get to my analysis of it in a second. Before we can analyze anything, however, we have to know what we’re working with, yes? So, let’s plunge ahead into HUGELY SPOILER LADEN plot territory.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Conjure Wife goes a little something like this:

There’s a youngish professor of sociology named Norman Saylor currently working at a small liberal arts college somewhere. He doesn’t fit well at this college — he’s the sort of irrepressible and brilliant young scholar that is always causing trouble (like threatening to give lectures about the glories of premarital sex to the Off-Campus Mothers League or having wild parties with his actor friends from New York City) that his students love but his colleagues are less thrilled with. Somehow, in psite of this lack of fit, he is ding well for himself in the academic world. He’s got a nice comfortable life with his wife Tansy, and their little cat, Totem. He’s even up for the chairmanship of his department.

But then, for literally no reason (in fact, Leiber goes out of his way to mention that this specific act is largely out of character for Norman Saylor), good Professor Saylor goes snooping through his wife’s dressing room. In it, he finds strange little things — vials of graveyard dirt, fingernail clippings, mysterious flannel packets* — that he recognizes from his research as the odds and ends used in conjure magic. Perplexed, he confronts her about it and she tearfully confesses that yes, she has been practicing magic right under his nose all these years. He tells her to stop, she agrees, and they set about ridding their house of her protective charms. And then, the shit hits the fan. One thing after another after another goes wrong for Saylor. A deranged student tries to shoot him. An equally deranged student accuses him of coming on to her. Their beloved cat Totem is killed by a mysterious force that may or may not be a stone dragon that is sometimes perched watchfully outside his office window. He not only fails to get the chairmanship of the sociology department, but his career is jeopardized when his colleagues start taking a closer look at his behaviors.

He starts to wonder, in spite of his highly prized rationality, if maybe there was something to Tansy’s charms after all. Of course, he still thinks deep down that there isn’t, and as if she’s some sort of recovering addict, he refuses to tell her everything that’s going down for fear she’ll fall off the wagon. But it becomes clear soon enough that things are going badly, and after a raucous night of drinking and cavorting (of a chaste 1943 variety), Tansy pulls off one last piece of magic — she has him unwittingly transfer all the harmful spells targeted on him to her.

That’s when the going really gets rough. It turns out that the people behind all this are the other faculty wives, women who are jockeying for position amongst each other and using their husbands’ careers as pawn pieces. It’s not entirely clear at this point why Norman Saylor is being targeted so malevolently, but it’s clear that the other wives are behind it. They work together to make the finishing blow against the Saylors, which leads Tansy to run off in the dead of night leaving only an unfinished set of scribbled instructions for her husband. He follows a trail of broken notes and tries to perform a spell to pull her out of danger (though what the danger is, precisely, he doesn’t know), only to complete the spell one single minute too late. The husk of his wife — his wife in body only — is returned to him and tells him the faculty wives have stolen her soul.

From there, the book follows Norman Saylor as he desperately tries to learn as much about magic from the soulless (but still quite communicative) husk of his wife so he can rescue her soul and return it to her body. He finds out that the vast majority of women practice magic in secret, and that because of the secrecy most spells are worked out laboriously, in isolation, through trial-and-error. Saylor tricks an old math professor friend of his (whose wife happens to be one of the three faculty wives terrorizing him for not yet clear reasons) into working out the underlying essential elements of various magic spells that will help him get Tansy’s soul back, and does so by using magic himself to steal the soul of one of the faculty wives. He forces a trade: the faculty wife’s soul can go back to her body if she returns his wife’s soul to his wife’s body. The faculty wife concedes and all looks like it’ll turn out well after all.

But the plot thickens! Just then, the wife of the old math professor comes by the house as Tansy is explaining that the wife of the old math professor, in fact, masterminded this whole soul-switching thing. And that Norman really should shoot the wife of the old math professor because she’s definitely up to no good. But he doesn’t. Instead, he winds up playing bridge with the three evil faculty wives while the terrible spouse of the old math professor goes on about how much fun she’s about to have in Tansy Saylor’s body (specifically how much fun she’ll have with Norman Saylor in Tansy Saylor’s body) and explains that she’s brought them all there for her coup de grace: switching bodies with Tansy Saylor permanently. And then, with Norman’s help, she does it.

But wait! Remember how our Norman Saylor is clever and brilliant? Yes, he outsmarts them all. Turns out the old hag had already switched bodies with Tansy Saylor (seriously, trying to keep up with who was in who’s body and who had who’s soul was a little like watching the shell game) and that he’d realized this when what looked like his wife was trying to get him to shoot the old lady. He saw right through that and engineered the fateful bridge game himself to get his wife’s body and his wife’s soul reunited for real this time. And he did. And he and Tansy (presumably) lived happily ever after.

As you can see from the detailed plot synopsis above, tons of stuff happens. Really, it’s a very quick and satisfying read. But towards the end of it, I found myself plagued by questions. The biggest issue for me was how gender was treated throughout the book. Now, again, I recognize that this was written in 1943, but I don’t think its age excuses the outright sexism strewn throughout the book. It seemed like Leiber was, through much of the book, trying to say something about the restrictiveness of gender roles during that time period. The way he writes women as these shadowed puppeteers of men’s lives, the way they enact power by subtly manipulating men who have societally recognized power, is a clever if often-used example of the trope about how behind every powerful man, there’s a powerful woman. It didn’t even really bother me that most of these powerful women lurking in the shadows were of the Lady MacBeth type. It is, after all, a horror story. What bothered me was that the meager amounts of agency this construction of men and women’s roles give women is demolished when Norman Saylor runs in and saves the day.

Think about it: he’s hyper-masculine in his rationality. It takes him basically the entire book before he’s willing to admit that maybe magic actually works. He routinely derides women for their inherent irrationality — hell, his first big academic break was some tome about how the fairer sex is suspicious and riddled with neuroses — and ties the practice of magic to their intuitiveness and said irrationality. The underlying essentialism of this, not to mention this whole idea of men are rational/women are magical is inherently binarist, really rubbed me (a genderqueer person who’s had a shit ton of misogyny heaped on them throughout their life) the wrong way. That would be enough for me to want to throw the book out the window. Then, though, everything got upended. Turns out Norman Saylor is so damned rational that he rationally finds a way (via that aforementioned old math professor, who incidentally also a totally manfully rational man) to practice magic, and of course this masculinized, rational form of magic is much more powerful than the magic of witches who have been practicing their arts for decades. He’s more or less a prodigy. So, not only do we have a book in which a man swoops in to save the damsel in distress, but we have one in which a man co-opts the only sort of power the women around him have, perfects it, and then uses it to save the damsel. A damsel, it should be noted, he himself earlier dismissed as neurotic for protecting him with said feminine power earlier in the book. So, while this starts as an interesting look at male paranoia and male privilege, it certainly doesn’t end that way.

I also had problems with the villain. Mrs. Carr, the wife of the old math professor, is apparently a revolutionary and brilliant witch. Tansy Saylor says as much when she tells Norman that before Mrs. Carr, women had never used their magic in tandem (really? never, really?). Mrs. Carr orchestrated the first group plot, worked out magic with other women willingly and openly, and basically found a whole new way to get shit done. Now, that’s kind of cool, isn’t it? I think so. Imagine if the book had been about the women and how revolutionary it could have been if they learned how much more complex and far-reaching their spells could be in groups. Imagine, if you will, if the women’s lib movement was actually a mass movement of magic-based table turning helmed by a seemingly benign old lady. That could’ve been a hell of a book done right.

But in this book, Mrs. Carr is not exploring and amplifying the strength of her magic because she finds her lifelong role as a supportive companion to a bumbling math professor confining, or even to just better understand the nature of the magic she uses itself. No, she uses it because she’s obsessed with youth and has the hots for Norman Saylor. It seemed strange to me, when her ultimate motivations were revealed, that that’s all she wanted. A woman with that much potential, that much ambition, and all she wanted was a man who clearly couldn’t stand her and body upgrade? It just read as so reductionistic, and patronizing, that nothing else could motivate her. And that’s when the book really lost me. In the last chapter, during the climactic bridge game, I found myself wondering more about Mrs. Carr and what kind of live she must have lived that she would use such awe-inspiring power (because honestly, soul stealing is heavy duty stuff) just to get a chance to live out the rest of her years pretending to be another woman, to live with a man she know actually despises who she really is. I didn’t care much about whether things worked out for the Saylors, frankly.

In sum, this was a well-constructed book but also an incredibly anti-feminist one. I wanted to cut it some slack because of when it was written, but I can’t — I mean, Virginia Woolf had already strutted her stuff by then; it wasn’t like no one was working in critiques of gender socialization into literary works. Conjure Wife, ultimately, feels like a long-winded bit of benevolent sexism: well-meaning and unintentionally condescending, but condescending nonetheless.

*The magic used throughout clearly owes a whole lot to voodoo, but all the practitioners in the book were middle class white women. So really this book needs a much more intersectional critique highlighting the racial elements of the text as well, but I am not qualified to provide said race critique on account that (a) I am white and I’d rather center a woman of color’s voice on this, and (b) I don’t know enough about the racialized contexts of voodoo to make that critique myself.

Rewriting THE LONG ROAD – Week 8

excel, and powerpoint, and scrivener, oh my!

This is the eighth in a series of posts about the redrafting process of THE LONG ROAD which will be composed and published as I rewrite the book. The other posts in this series are here.

To recap, my goal from last week was:

By this time next week, I’ll shoot to have this character-level timeline worked out as well as I can through the end of the story (which is incidentally the end of the war COUGHspoilerCOUGH). This should provide me a much clearer sense of who is going to be important in the book and who will have to wander off into their own stories to be written later.

What actually happened:

I finished the character-level timeline! And it is a beauty, let me tell you. Check it out:

don’t be shy; take a gander at this baby

I plotted out who is doing what where and with who all the way through to the end of the book. This was actually an extremely useful exercise since it made me think through some hard choices about how someone would end up where they are at the end of the book(s).

The color coding works really well to visually distinguish (a) which characters are together at a given point, and (b) the scope of a given plot arc. One thing this sort of thing does for me writing-wise is it helps me clarify my instincts. For instance, there’s a character named Kellidion who I’ve had this nagging instinct to put in this story. He popped up years ago as a character mentioned in passing in a totally different book, and then I wrote a set of shorts about him, and he’s popped up here and there. His story overlapped in a glancing way with this one, and on a hunch I gave him a row on the above timeline. And it’s going to pay off. It makes sense in about a million ways for him to be involved and now I’ve worked out why.

Ok, so by now you may have noticed I get carried away. All of my seemingly simple information structuring techniques turn into these peculiar baroque creations, and this is now exception. I went through it again when I finished it, and the act of going through sparked ideas, so I used Excel’s comment feature to note these down. And so really the timeline looks like this:

a veritable avalanche of plot!

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!

Finishing the timeline means I have a better sense of character arcs, which means that I can do a whole lot of very fun work building out character trajectories and backstories.

seriously this is hella fun

This is getting done in the Aerdh Bible so that these character notes can be used in future projects and updated according to those projects as needed. Information centralization! It’s a thing I believe in!

I’ve also started this nifty thing:

look at all those lines and bubbles

This is the relationship web I mentioned in my last post in this series. I find it useful to have a visual representation for this which works to jar my memory of what I’ve built out at a glance. Turns out powerpoint is really good at this.

All in all, this has been a productive little week.

So. For next week, I’m planning to have character sheets written out for all the characters on the timeline and hopefully have then mapped out on the web.

Next steps are to redraw the world map and track paths on it as well as changes to the landscape as a result of the war.

I’M AN ABNA 2013 SEMI-FINALIST!

HOLY BALLS

ARIAH advanced again! From the last round, the powers that be whittled the 100 quarter finalists in my category down to just five — and I am one of those five! Honestly, given the teeny tiny number of semi-finalists (25 total across all categories from 10,000 entrants) I did not expect to make it this far. I am honored for the recognition and also quite pleased with myself. *pats self decidedly and enthusiastically on the back*

Below is the Publisher’s Weekly review of ARIAH for those interested (it left me beaming!)

 

ABNA Publishers Weekly Reviewer

Set in a beautifully crafted fantasy world where races of elves uneasily coexist, and most are under the dominant hand of the brutal Qin, this poetic coming-of-age saga is focused on relationships and how “all of us exist in a web of other people, tethered to them and pulled by them this way and that.” The elf Ariah is apprenticed in a strange country to teach him control of his two magical gifts: perfect mimicry and the ability to read and shape the emotions of others. He trains with Dirva for several years and is groomed to be a linguist like his teacher. But what could have been a mundane life of good-enough takes a turn toward the extraordinary when Dirva is called back to his home country and Ariah accompanies him. That’s when Ariah’s real journey begins, as his training ends abruptly and he develops the relationships that will become critically important in his life. Moving from obedient and docile to reckless, self-sabotaging and disastrously unformed, Ariah is a marvelous protagonist whose mixed blood sets him apart even in the elvish ghetto. There are bandits and pirates and elven queens and magic; treks across the desert, brutal slavery and racial discrimination. The author’s skill at blending classic elements makes the story fresh and exciting. Splendid prose and an absorbing story are built on realistically complicated, well-developed characters and relationships, and the explorations of pride, vanity, humility, love, philosophy, and sexuality make this vivid tale of Ariah’s journey towards maturity a must-read.

Book Review: JUST KIDS

just scrappy little urchins who ended up counterculture icons, that’s all

Just Kids by Patti Smith is a rare little gem. To me, Patti Smith has always exuded a punk rock swagger, an only half-bridled aggression. I see her, and I see only the hard, sharp angles of her. And Robert Mapplethorpe: leather, whips, unapologetic sex acts with a peculiar defiant dignity to them. Both of them are creatures who seem to have been launched straight from the scene, fully-formed and antagonistic right from the start.

But they weren’t. Just Kids is a memoir by Patti Smith about her time living in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe while they were both shaking off the dull scraps of adolescence and trying to break out as artists. Strewn throughout the book are pictures of them as very young excitable artists-in-training joined at the hip.

Smith’s prose reads like a soft-focus fairy tale. The sections set in the Chelsea Hotel, especially, have an almost Dickensian quality to them; they read as a quaint story full of larger-than-life characters, most of whom have hearts firmly of gold. Reconciling this wistful retelling of her youth with the persona I associate with her was intriguing to say the least. And obviously I am not the only one who found the disconnect between Patti Smith’s presence and her internal life jarring – there are places in the text where she discusses how those around her took her for a lesbian (she is straight), or a junkie (she seems not to have experimented with pot until she’d moved out of the Chelsea). Her prose is light and airy, and her memories sepia-tinged and wholesome, despite the fact that anyone who knows the history of that scene knows just how much death and self-immolation is happening just off screen. Patti Smith herself seems to have waltzed through it unscathed, and her writing dances along the edges of the darkness that her scene held*. Without the debauchery, the excess, the Chelsea Hotel in the 70s reads as an almost Victorian affair.

The book is structured in a circle: it opens with the moment Smith hears of Mapplethorpe’s death, then jumps back in time before they have met. Smith discusses her teenage pregnancy and the process of giving her child up for adoption, her failure at teacher’s school, and her time on a New Jersey assembly line in a brisk and somewhat sanitized fashion; again, there seems to be in her writing a distaste for discussions of the negative, of the hard and bleak moments of her life. From there, the book jumps forward to her first meeting with Mapplethorpe, their sweet and heartfelt romance, the little poverty-stricken life they build together, and how hard they worked to evolve their relationship with each other when their life trajectories began to diverge. The book ends with a far jump into the future, back to those last few weeks of Mapplethorpe’s life and ends with his inevitable death, right back where the book started.

Given that the book is told from Smith’s perspective, it is perhaps not surprising that her motives and desires are clear throughout, but over the course of the book Mapplethorpe becomes more and more opaque. A boy who seems simple when she first meets him grows into a man full of contradictions. The person whose viewpoints and life goals seemed to mirror hers so closely at first winds up yearning to be part of the social circles that Smith herself actively avoids. It became increasingly unsettling as I read the book. What does he get from her that keeps him around? How does he see her and their ever-changing relationship? Very little is explored here in the text, and Smith herself seems to take their relationship at face value, as a thing complete in itself with little context surrounding it. It just is for her, and her wholesale acceptance of it is so radically different from the way I, personally, live out my significant life-altering relationships that it was hard for me to understand at times what their relationship was exactly. But there is an authenticity to her writing that explains the halcyon haze through which she remembers that time of her life. That period, above anything else, was her period with Robert Mapplethorpe, for whom she had a love so total and accepting it is essentially blank, without specificities, and all the hardness of that time is drowned out in remembrance of him.

Just Kids is, like most memoirs, ultimately a work that says as much or more about its author than the subject matter itself. The story there is as much in the telling as it is in the content. And it’s a fascinating look into the mind of a woman who is so very different than the person I assumed her to be. It is a love letter to the late Robert Mapplethorpe, but it’s a love letter to her young self, as well. I can’t help but wish there had been some balance to it, some acknowledgment of the difficulties of living so poor, or of loving a man who seems to fall into and out of and into and out of love with her, or of the pain of watching her friends get consumed by drugs right in front of her, but that’s not the book she wrote. It may not be a book she’s able to write. I can’t help but think of her as an unreliable narrator for her own life, but ultimately that’s what we all are. It’s hard to tell the bald truth about your own life. It might be impossible. But still, the unanswered questions nag at me. I found this book absolutely fascinating, but when it was over, it felt insubstantial. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading.

*Swimming Underground by Mary Woronov of Warhol’s Factory crew is a bird’s eye account of the dark addictions Patti Smith seems to prefer to keep just out of frame. I highly recommend it, too, and it works as a very interesting counterbalance to Just Kids.

Rewriting THE LONG ROAD – Week 7

prepare yourself for some bitchin spreadsheets

This is the seventh in a series of posts about the redrafting process of THE LONG ROAD which will be composed and published as I rewrite the book. The other posts in this series are here.

To recap, my goal from last week was:

By next week, I should (FINALLY BECAUSE I WON’T BE DISTRACTED) have all the major events of the war built out in the Aerdh Bible. I will probably have an utterly absurd file structure brewing in there. The next big step is to create a visual timeline of the war itself with the arcs of all involved groups represented, so hopefully I’ll be organized enough to start that (BECAUSE I WILL BE MAKING PROGRESS ON THIS OVERARCHING GOAL FOR REALSIES).

What actually happened:

Timelines! Timelines is what happened. I’m still chugging away at the Aerdh Bible, but the Aerdh Bible is fleshed out enough now that it has become a bit of a black hole. What I mean to say is that I have the capacity to drill down further and further and further into the worldbuilding way past the point at which it becomes a time suck. I can chase that rabbit down that particular hole into oblivion. Check out the difference between the Scrivener folder structure in the Aerdh Bible two weeks ago vs. this morning.

My name is B and I have a problem with elaboration.

The Aerdh Bible will still be useful going forward, especially as a place to put scraps of notes and information for the back end of the worldbuilding that doesn’t quite make it into the actual book. But, I think it’s best if I step way from it a little now lest I lose my self in the tiny nitty gritty details no one really cares about but me.

Since I have the course of the war built out pretty well, I went ahead and set up a timeline. Timelining is really valuable for me and the stuff I write for a couple of reasons:

the assorted sentient species in Aerdh have different capacities to perceive and use magic, a side effect of which is varying life spans. So, what is a generation worth of years for one group (elves) could be more like two generations worth of time for another group (humans). Similarly, since folks have different expected lifespans, it’ useful to timeline the plot so I can get a better sense of how old Person A is in relation to Person B at a given point.
As a writer I think in terms of character arcs. I don’t really think in terms of plot at all. The upside of this is that I have a pretty nuanced feel for my characters, and the events that transpire in the text are usually well-grounded in the character’s motivations, desires, etc. the downside is sometimes I just forget what happens and what the relationship between events actually is. This is especially bad when i’m dealing with Big World Events as opposed to interpersonal life events since said Big World Events most often happen to the characters and not necessarily because of the characters.
Given that I write a whole lot in Aerdh, and given that characters from one piece have a habit of meandering into another piece, timelining is important to make sure that it’s actually feasible for said character to be in said piece. Internal consistency within the universe and between books is important to me.

So! Timelines!

I poked around on the web for a good free or very cheap program in which to build said timelines, but ultimately my poking around was for naught  There are good programs out there, but alas, none are for the secondary world fantasy writer as they all are built to use real-world calendar dates. Which, since my worlds are secondary and don’t use our calendar systems, makes them unusable for my projects. I turned to my trusty old friend, Excel.*

I created a workbook with separate tabs for separate kinds of timelines. One is for an overarching eagle’s eye view of the course of the entire story (which will likely be broken into two or three books).

seriously though you should click through and look at this puppy up close

This will make keeping track of who is doing what when very easy (way easier, say, then thumbing through pages of handwritten notes or sifting through the overly intricate Scrivener structure mentioned above). Yeah, it took five weeks of foundational worldbuilding to get to a point where I could make this relatively simple timeline.

WHICH MEANS

YOU GUYS, WHICH MEANS

That now I can begin plotting out the actual story! And my first little baby step in that direction is this timeline:

it’s a veritable rainbow of fake information!!

This is the second tab in the timeline workbook. What I’ve got going on here is a timeline layered with each notable or influential character in the book I have identified so far (also organized by what their affiliations are). I’m building it so I can see who is with who, who’s participating in what events, approximately how long something takes. And I’m formatting the left-hand column with the characters’ names to differentiate who is a leader vs. who is not and using color codes to denote who is probably going to end up as a POV character.

I have a few more things I’d like to do before delving into the outlining proper (not necessarily in this order):

redraw maps of Aerdh and mark out the movements of factions, groups, and specific characters
draw a relationship web to figure out who knows who and how well and for how long

this will be an interative process also involving sketching out character backgrounds to clarify relationships, roles, etc.
it might also involve sketching the characters themselves in a literal draw them sort of way


sketch out (JUST SKETCH OUT, KEEP YOUR FOCUS, SANDERS) how characters involved in the war who are not prominent characters fit into the overarching structure of this Big World Event. It’s a Big World Event, man, there’s a whole lot of stories in it and not all of them are going to fit into one book.

By this time next week, I’ll shoot to have this character-level timeline worked out as well as I can through the end of the story (which is incidentally the end of the war COUGHspoilerCOUGH). This should provide me a much clearer sense of who is going to be important in the book and who will have to wander off into their own stories to be written later.

PS – I did make a valiant effort to just say no to side projects but this still happened anyway:

I just can’t help myself. I REGRET NOTHING.

Expect more of this sort of thing to happen as I do more hardcore work on character stuff in the upcoming weeks.

*I am an Excel wizard, though the above use of it is really very basic. I spend roughly eight hours a day as a K-12 education data analyst working in increasingly and perhaps overly complicated Excel spreadsheets.

Rewriting THE LONG ROAD – Week 6

prepare yourself for some bitchin spreadsheets

This is the seventh in a series of posts about the redrafting process of THE LONG ROAD which will be composed and published as I rewrite the book. The other posts in this series are here.

To recap, my goal from last week was:

By next week, I should (FINALLY BECAUSE I WON’T BE DISTRACTED) have all the major events of the war built out in the Aerdh Bible. I will probably have an utterly absurd file structure brewing in there. The next big step is to create a visual timeline of the war itself with the arcs of all involved groups represented, so hopefully I’ll be organized enough to start that (BECAUSE I WILL BE MAKING PROGRESS ON THIS OVERARCHING GOAL FOR REALSIES).

What actually happened:

Timelines! Timelines is what happened. I’m still chugging away at the Aerdh Bible, but the Aerdh Bible is fleshed out enough now that it has become a bit of a black hole. What I mean to say is that I have the capacity to drill down further and further and further into the worldbuilding way past the point at which it becomes a time suck. I can chase that rabbit down that particular hole into oblivion. Check out the difference between the Scrivener folder structure in the Aerdh Bible two weeks ago vs. this morning.

My name is B and I have a problem with elaboration.

The Aerdh Bible will still be useful going forward, especially as a place to put scraps of notes and information for the back end of the worldbuilding that doesn’t quite make it into the actual book. But, I think it’s best if I step way from it a little now lest I lose my self in the tiny nitty gritty details no one really cares about but me.

Since I have the course of the war built out pretty well, I went ahead and set up a timeline. Timelining is really valuable for me and the stuff I write for a couple of reasons:

the assorted sentient species in Aerdh have different capacities to perceive and use magic, a side effect of which is varying life spans. So, what is a generation worth of years for one group (elves) could be more like two generations worth of time for another group (humans). Similarly, since folks have different expected lifespans, it’ useful to timeline the plot so I can get a better sense of how old Person A is in relation to Person B at a given point.
As a writer I think in terms of character arcs. I don’t really think in terms of plot at all. The upside of this is that I have a pretty nuanced feel for my characters, and the events that transpire in the text are usually well-grounded in the character’s motivations, desires, etc. the downside is sometimes I just forget what happens and what the relationship between events actually is. This is especially bad when i’m dealing with Big World Events as opposed to interpersonal life events since said Big World Events most often happen to the characters and not necessarily because of the characters.
Given that I write a whole lot in Aerdh, and given that characters from one piece have a habit of meandering into another piece, timelining is important to make sure that it’s actually feasible for said character to be in said piece. Internal consistency within the universe and between books is important to me.

So! Timelines!

I poked around on the web for a good free or very cheap program in which to build said timelines, but ultimately my poking around was for naught  There are good programs out there, but alas, none are for the secondary world fantasy writer as they all are built to use real-world calendar dates. Which, since my worlds are secondary and don’t use our calendar systems, makes them unusable for my projects. I turned to my trusty old friend, Excel.*

I created a workbook with separate tabs for separate kinds of timelines. One is for an overarching eagle’s eye view of the course of the entire story (which will likely be broken into two or three books).

seriously though you should click through and look at this puppy up close

This will make keeping track of who is doing what when very easy (way easier, say, then thumbing through pages of handwritten notes or sifting through the overly intricate Scrivener structure mentioned above). Yeah, it took five weeks of foundational worldbuilding to get to a point where I could make this relatively simple timeline.

WHICH MEANS

YOU GUYS, WHICH MEANS

That now I can begin plotting out the actual story! And my first little baby step in that direction is this timeline:

it’s a veritable rainbow of fake information!!

This is the second tab in the timeline workbook. What I’ve got going on here is a timeline layered with each notable or influential character in the book I have identified so far (also organized by what their affiliations are). I’m building it so I can see who is with who, who’s participating in what events, approximately how long something takes. And I’m formatting the left-hand column with the characters’ names to differentiate who is a leader vs. who is not and using color codes to denote who is probably going to end up as a POV character.

I have a few more things I’d like to do before delving into the outlining proper (not necessarily in this order):

redraw maps of Aerdh and mark out the movements of factions, groups, and specific characters
draw a relationship web to figure out who knows who and how well and for how long

this will be an interative process also involving sketching out character backgrounds to clarify relationships, roles, etc.
it might also involve sketching the characters themselves in a literal draw them sort of way


sketch out (JUST SKETCH OUT, KEEP YOUR FOCUS, SANDERS) how characters involved in the war who are not prominent characters fit into the overarching structure of this Big World Event. It’s a Big World Event, man, there’s a whole lot of stories in it and not all of them are going to fit into one book.

By this time next week, I’ll shoot to have this character-level timeline worked out as well as I can through the end of the story (which is incidentally the end of the war COUGHspoilerCOUGH). This should provide me a much clearer sense of who is going to be important in the book and who will have to wander off into their own stories to be written later.

PS – I did make a valiant effort to just say no to side projects but this still happened anyway:

I just can’t help myself. I REGRET NOTHING.

Expect more of this sort of thing to happen as I do more hardcore work on character stuff in the upcoming weeks.

*I am an Excel wizard, though the above use of it is really very basic. I spend roughly eight hours a day as a K-12 education data analyst working in increasingly and perhaps overly complicated Excel spreadsheets.

Website update: Published Articles List

Hey all! While I have not formally published fiction yet, I do have a number of scholarly and nonfiction pieces floating around. I’ve compiled a list for any and all who are interested, which will be updated as things come out here. Below is the list of my work to date:

Sanders, B. “Pregnancy and Parenting While Genderqueer.” Hoax 7: Feminisms and Change. 2013. http://www.zinewiki.com/Hoax_Zine

Sanders, M. R. & Mahalingam, R. (2012). Under the radar: The role of invisible discourse in understanding class-based privilege. Journal of Social Issues, 68 (1), 112-217.

Sanders, M. R., & Mahalingam, R. (2012). Social dominance orientation and John Henryism at the intersection of race and class. Political Psychology, 33 (4), 553-573. 

Edelstein, R. S., Stanton, S. J., Henderson, M. M., & Sanders, M. R. (2010). Endogenous estradiol levels are associated with attachment avoidance and implicit intimacy motivation. Hormones and Behavior, 57, 230-236.

Sanders, Melissa. “Sexual Harassment in the Workplace.” Justice 20 March 2008. Print. http://rngton.socialistalternative.org/news/article16.php?id=790

Cheng, C., Sanders, M. R., Sanchez-Burks, J., Molina, K., Lee, F., Darling, E., & Zhao, Y. (2008). Reaping the rewards of diversity: The role of identity integration. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2, 1182-1198.

Darling, E., Molina, K., Sanders, M. R., Lee, F., & Zhao, Y. (2008). Belonging and Achieving: The Role of Identity Integration. In M. Maehr, S. Karabenick, & T. Urdan (Eds.)Advances in Motivation and Achievement: Social Psychological Perspective on Motivation and Achievement, Volume 15. Elsevier Press: NY.

Sanders, Melissa. “A Military Mother Speaks Out Against the War — An Interview with Sara Rich.” Justice 23 May 2007. Print. http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article13.php?id=548

Sanders, Melissa. “The Case of Suzanne Swift — U.S. Female Soldiers Doubly at Risk.” Justice 4 April 2007. Print. http://socialistalternative.org/news/article13.php?id=528

Seid, Jon & Sanders, Melissa. “Washington’s racist plan to divide U.S. & Mexican workers.” Justice 15 Nov 2006. Print. http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article15.php?id=462

Sanders, Melissa. “Sexism in the Military — What the Army Brochures Wont Tell You.” Justice 1 July 2005. Print. http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article16.php?id=70

Sanders, Melissa. “Stealing With the Rich to Pay for the War.” Justice 1 March 2005. Print. http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article13.php?id=131

Sanders, Melissa. “Why I Am a Socialist.” Justice 1 Sept 2004. Print. https://socialistalternative.org/news/article22.php?id=1305

Gallup, John & Sanders, Melissa. “The Myth of American Democracy.” Justice 1 Sept 2004. Print. http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article10.php?id=1297

#ThankAWriter Project: China Mieville

go read this book right now

I saw the #ThankAWriter project over on Nathan Bransford’s blog. Writing letters like this to my favorite authors has actually been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, so I’ve jumped right on the bandwagon. I’ll be double-posting these thank you letters here and on my gomighty blog.

Thank you, China Mieville, for validating my existence.

You don’t know me, and we’ll probably never meet, and you likely won’t even read this, but thank you anyway. I have been a fan of your work for some time, and when I heard you were writing a book referencing Moby Dick I nearly shat myself with excitement. Mieville! Melville! One of my favorite authors riffing on one of my other favorite others!! So, I pre-ordered Railsea and inhaled it as soon as it arrived on my doorstep.

I was expecting to love Railsea, but I wasn’t expecting to connect with it so deeply. I didn’t think aspects of myself I have spent so long grappling with, coming to terms with, would be mirrored so beautifully in this book. I’m genderqueer. I am a parent in a triad. Doc Fremlo’s effortless, almost unremarkable gender variance was a revelation. Fremlo was what I am, but utterly at peace with it in a world where what they were was perfectly acceptable. I can count on one hand the number of genderqueer or agender characters I’ve seen portrayed in books, and none of them have been written with such ease or such simple comfort in their own skins. Fremlo was living the life I want to live. Femlo was deeply resonant and deeply inspiring to me. So, thank you for Doc Fremlo. Thank you a million times.

That would have been enough to shoot Railsea up to the top of my list of most favorite books ever, and then I met the Shroakes, and Caldera and Caldero told me about their family. I have a kid — a wonderful, lively kid that I love more than anything in the world — and my kid has me, and her mom, and her dad. Inside our little family unit everything makes perfect sense, but to the rest of the world we don’t. Which one of us is the nanny? Which of the three of us are her ‘real’ parents? These are the questions we navigate everyday. To read about the configuration of the Shroake family (even after it’s been so irreparably broken) was like meeting Doc Fremlo all over again: an overwhelming sense of validation, and of being understood. So, thank you for the Shroakes, as well.

Again, I know we’ve never met and probably never will. I know I don’t know you. But I am immensely grateful for having brushed against you ever so slightly via your writing. I am glad you exist, and that you took the time to write these characters into your book, and I am glad I stumbled on your book and read it and felt less alone and bizarre for who and what I am.

Thank you.

B Sanders

Rewriting THE LONG ROAD – Week 5

I…didn’t say no. LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES, FRIENDS!

To recap, my goal from last week was:

I should have all the major events of the war built out in the Aerdh Bible. I will probably have an utterly absurd file structure brewing in there. The next big step is to create a visual timeline of the war itself with the arcs of all involved groups represented, so hopefully I’ll be organized enough to start that.

What actually happened:

None of that! I got distracted. Waylaid by my own sprawling brain. I am most of the way through mapping out entries in the Aerdh Bible for the course of the war, but the thing is I keep veering off course. When I’m sketching out an event, sometimes the event is fascinating, or the characters in the event are fascinating, or both, and I feel a story brewing. A good story! With excellent themes! Which could be structured in a very interesting way! You can see the process happen below:

1) OH WAIT THIS IS COOL Syndrome

a febrile mind at work

As you can see here, I interrupted my own writing to make a note about something I want to write. Initially, this was just a mark-it-put-it-aside-for-later thing, but then on the bus ride home this happened:

2) MAYBE I’LL JUST START IT Syndrome

trusty notebook! we meet again!

I wrote the entire hour long commute. I cranked out 5 full pages. Maybe I just missed the pure hit of narrative fiction writing. I don’t know. All I know is when I sat down next time to work on the Aerdh Bible, dutifully stowing the notebook containing the spontaneous beginnings of a draft of a story I really shouldn’t be writing just now, this happened:

3) IT DOESN’T COUNT AS CHEATING IF I’M JUST THINKING ABOUT IT Syndrome

eyes on the prize, Sanders

Yeah. So. I started a Scrivener project where I am currently outlining all the super cool story ideas bursting forth from the Aerdh Bible process which would not work in the actual book I am trying to rewrite. BUT I’M NOT WRITING THEM, OH NO, SO IT’S COOL TO TOOL AROUND IN HERE INSTEAD OF MAKING ACTUAL PROGRESS ON THE ACTUAL BOOK THESE STORIES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE RELATED TO.

The thing about me is that I am a pretty disciplined writer. I have a hell of a work ethic, and I trust myself to churn out reams of text with little effort. But for this project, I need to become a slightly more focused writer. All these story ideas will still be here when I’m done with the rewrite. The burgeoning stories are extremely useful in terms of building up ambient richness for the book itself, but they are also new and shiny and different and intriguing and seductive. Hopefully this craving to write them will dissipate a little when I actually get to the writing stage of the book.

By next week, I should (FINALLY BECAUSE I WON’T BE DISTRACTED) have all the major events of the war built out in the Aerdh Bible. I will probably have an utterly absurd file structure brewing in there. The next big step is to create a visual timeline of the war itself with the arcs of all involved groups represented, so hopefully I’ll be organized enough to start that (BECAUSE I WILL BE MAKING PROGRESS ON THIS OVERARCHING GOAL FOR REALSIES).