Kate Elliott's Blog, page 19

How Much Sex Is Too Much Sex In Your SFF?

Many of you read the Extras chapter for COLD FIRE, which was not in the book because it is not written from Cat’s first person point of view but rather Andevai’s third person point of view. Some wished the chapter had been included in the book; some were happy that it was available but not in the book; some did not read it at all because they do not like to read the explicit sexytimes.

I mention this because I’m about 83,000 words into a a new epic fantasy novel (projected to become another trilogy). I am writing this one in third person multiple points of view.

Writing in first person for me means I have to adhere to the sensibilities of my narrator. If s/he would talk explicitly about sex, then I can; if s/he would not, then I can’t even if it is germane to the plot.

Writing in multiple third allows more leeway along several axes.

Even if I’m writing in tight third (where the text only sees, mentions, and notices that which the pov sees, mentions, and notices), the narrative still sits one step outside the pov, and that space gives me room to make decisions about what to describe that I don’t have in first person where the narrator would either mention something or would not.

Furthermore, writing with multiple povs means different characters will necessarily be written with different sensibilities. In fact one of the great things about multiple third is its ability to supply diverse views of related events and characters.

In The Spiritwalker Trilogy I was constrained in writing about sex by what the narrator, Cat, would say. [By the way, there is a reason the Spiritwalker books are narrated in first person; it's not an arbitrary choice or a "flavor". But you have to read the whole thing to understand what I mean by saying that.]

In the new book I’m not limited (in that particular sense) by first person. I’m writing in several different points of view, and a number of the characters have sex, like people do sometimes (or even often). I have leeway. I can be vague and allusive, or I can be absolutely as explicit as I want to be.

Hence my question:

How much sex do you like in your sff?

I need to specify an important clarification: I am speaking of consensual sex. This question is not intended to devolve into a discussion of representations of rape in epic fantasy because I have previously talked about that here and here and because I’m more interested in how consensual sex is depicted.

And it is a curious thing, is it not, that many readers seem more comfortable reading about non consensual sex than consensual sex as if non consensual sex is properly dramatic and consensual sex is not?

But again there was a great discussion of that specific issue in this post earlier this year.

So, how much sex DO you like in your SFF?

Should epic fantasy should be pristinely free of sexual feelings or reference? Are vague foreplay and kissing all right as long as the curtain is drawn early and often? Is explicit sexual description acceptable as long as it is only described when it absolutely matters to the plot? Or are sexytimes always welcome, regardless? Or something else entirely which you will note in the comments?

Tell me what you think, people. After all, presumably you may end up reading these scenes and lamenting that they have too much or too little sex in them. Speak!

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

But wait! There’s more! Epic fantasy on the way

Hard on the heels of announcing my new YA deal, I want to announce that:

I am also working on a new epic fantasy trilogy for Orbit Books.

Details and publication dates to come.

All I can say right now is that of last night I had 83,000 words written on book one. I’m hoping that’s about halfway but we’ll see. Don’t laugh. 150,000 words is a crisp, efficient length for an epic fantasy. RIGHT?

More later this week as I want to ask everyone a question about sex.

 

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

Announcing a YA fantasy sale! (Spiritwalker Monday 2.5)

I’ve mentioned in passing here and there online that I have been working on a YA fantasy but now that I have received an editorial letter that runs 11 single-spaced pages I think I can safely announce:

via my agent Russell Galen of the Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency I have sold an all new all original (new world) YA fantasy to Andrea Spooner at Little Brown Young Reader, the children’s/YA division of Hachette Book Group.

The book’s working title is MASK (subject to change).

The industry announcement of the sale describes it thusly:

A girl’s skill at a forbidden sport shakes the foundations of a rigid aristocracy.

That’s a decent assessment of the plot although it barely scrapes the surface of what the book is actually about.

My pitch line goes like this:

Little Women meets the Count of Monte Cristo in a fantasy setting inspired by Greco-Roman Egypt.

So that’s the GREAT news. I’m super excited to be working with LBYR and with editor Andrea Spooner and her assistant Deirdre Jones and the whole fabulous crew there.

The bad news? Well, I can’t say there is really any bad news in this wonderful project. However, the lead time for YA publishing is a lot longer than it is for adult fiction. The first draft is done (and in fact my agent and I agreed that to try to enter the YA field I needed to submit a manuscript rather than a proposal so I wrote the book on spec and sold it based on a complete manuscript). But given the time frame, what with space built in for revisions and LBYR’s timeline in which they want to be able to produce clean ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) 6 – 9 months before publication, MASK (or whatever title it picks up) will be published in the Spring/Summer 2015 season.

So, yeah, that’s a long time. But I’m still super excited that this is going to be a really great project.

Tomorrow I’ll have more news to announce. It’s gotten busy around here.

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

Writing a woman who eats what she wants without being shamed (Spiritwalker Monday 2)

The fourth giveaway winner is bee-ww-oh-bee. She asked:

Why did you choose to elaborate on Cat’s love of food? I thought it was interesting that we have a heroine who actually appreciates food. Was this in response to societies view on female bodies or did you just write it as part of her character?

 

Have a story:

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

A Reconciliation Within SFF (A Speech by N.K. Jemisin)

I RTd this on Twitter but I want to post a link here as well because I think this speech by N K Jemisin (which many of you will already have read) is an important statement for our field.

It is time that we all recognized the real history of this genre, and acknowledged the breadth and diversity of its contributors. It’s time we acknowledged the debt we owe to those who got us here — all of them. It’s time we made note of what ground we’ve trodden upon, and the wrongs we’ve done to those who trod it first. And it’s time we took steps — some symbolic, some substantive — to try and correct those errors. I do not mean a simple removal of the barriers that currently exist within the genre and its fandom, though doing that’s certainly the first step. I mean we must now make an active, conscious effort to establish a literature of the imagination which truly belongs to everyone.

 

Read the whole thing!

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

Cat & Bee’s love; writing what’s already been written; back to SF? (Spiritwalker Mo

It’s June.

COLD STEEL comes out this month!

FINALLY.

RT Book Reviews has given it a Top Pick (4.5 stars) review in RT Book Reviews: “the conclusion is delicious.”

Here’s your weekly reminder that I’ll be doing events in San Francisco (June 27), San Diego (June 29), New York City (July 2), Seattle (July 8), and Portland (July 9).

The COLD STEEL giveaway is over (winners picked by random number generator), and now I have to start answering the amazing questions people asked.

I’m starting with three questions from winners Rima, Elodie (needs an accent mark above the first E), and Eve. No spoilers involved.

 

Rima Z asked:

My question is: where did your initial idea to make the primary focus of the novel about the relationship between Cat and Bea come from? Most people are either ‘plot driven’ or ‘character driven’, but I find that you have a really excellent mix of both, which means that at points the plot is independent of relationships (in particular, Vei and Cat), but still finds ways to bring together the importance of most of all the characters introduced.

 

Answer:

Thank you for your kind words. I do try to balance plot and character (and setting) because that is what I love best to read. A central concern for me as a writer is in how people’s relationships inform and influence the choices they make. I always try to take into consideration and to develop who people are and where they come from in terms of how they fit into a family structure, a lineage, a society.

The story of Cold Magic came to me originally as an image of two young women in an 18th/19th century style setting who are sitting together in a classroom and looking out over a courtyard as a carriage drives into the courtyard with a mysterious visitor. In that image I knew already that the two girls were sisters (or cousins) who loved each other deeply and whose central relationship was with each other. From initial conception through final volume, the steadfast love Cat and Bee have for each other has always been the emotional core of the Spiritwalker books.

As well, I was eager to write a book in which female friendship/sisterly love was central, not secondary. I love books that treasure and foreground this kind of relationship and I’m always excited to read (and write) more of it.

 

Elodie asked:

Did you ever feel like a story you were writing (or parts of it) had already been written before by someone else, but without knowing if it was true or just a feeling (or which book it could come from )? If yes, how did you react?

Answer:

I think that everything we read and experience gets churned into the clay out of which we shape our stories (or art or music or however we express our creative selves). Story doesn’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus. It’s all linked up and bound in to everything else.

So if I write a love story I know that I am writing a story that in some ways may be like all other love stories or that may be influenced by specific love stories I have read, but I also know that my unique take on the story and characters I tell is something only I can bring to it. In terms of creating it’s worth remembering (in my opinion) that as a creator you are unique. No one else can bring the perspective you bring even to a story type that seems to have been told a thousand times before.

In a specific sense: Have I ever thought I was inadvertently paraphrasing or rewriting an actual book I had read, and yet wasn’t fully aware of what I was doing?

When I was young and learning how to write I at times modeled what I was writing on things I had read. It’s not quite full-blown imitation; I think it’s a normal part of the learning process in writing. [aka "I loved Lord of the Rings so I'm going to write a world with noble elves in it . . . and then there will be a handsome elf lord who falls in love with a human girl . . . " No, I did not start writing that story when i was 16, what could you possibly be thinking?]

I continue to be influenced by what I read in ways I can’t always consciously process. So I do occasionally have to stop and look very carefully at something I’ve written.

 

 

Eve N asked:

Early in your career, you wrote SF; your later work (to the best of my knowledge!) is all fantasy. Do you envision going back to SF at some point?

 

Answer: I would love to write SF again and hope to do so in the future. I have far more ideas I’m super excited about than I could ever write in one lifetime, and because I make my living from writing I do at times have to prioritize those ideas according to how whether I think they can make me a living wage (I don’t write fast enough to toss off side projects, and in fact at the moment I’ve so heavily booked up that I don’t have time for side projects regardless).

I do see a resurgence of science fiction in the YA field right now, and I’m hopeful that may open up sf in book form again (SF is pretty standard on tv and in film and gaming now; it’s basically gone mainstream in the visual media.)

 

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

Cold Steel giveaway winners

Random number generator has picked four winners. Congrats.

I need them to contact me:

Rima Z

Elodie

Eve N

Zoe (tumblr)

 

Thank you so much to everyone who entered. There are so many excellent questions.

I have over 150 questions to answer. Be patient. I am going to answer all of them. It will take me a few months of doing at least one answer post a week (hopefully more), and I’ll answer them in batches, probably of related questions. Also, any whose answers will contain spoilers I will probably hold until toward the end of the process. So if you’re looking for the answer to the question you asked, keep your eye on my blog (I’ll mirror on livejournal and cross post to tumblr).

 

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

“Is it ever difficult *not* to fall into writing that caters to male gaze?” (Spiritwalke

Over the next few months I will be answering, a few at a time and probably more than once a week, the many excellent questions (and they are all excellent questions) asked as part of the Cold Steel giveaway.

However before I start doing that I am going to answer a few questions still in the queue that are unrelated to the giveaway. I do read all email and questions I get and I try to respond to it all; it just sometimes takes me a while in which the “while” may extend to weeks, months, or in a few embarrassing cases years.

In the wake of my September 2012 post The Omniscient Breasts, girljanitor asked:

I was wondering, is it ever difficult *not* to fall into writing that caters to male gaze? A lot of the time I find myself writing in a way that is reactionary without being subversive.

I’m not going to define “male gaze” here. If needed, read the above linked post where I do so. And I’m going to answer the question not specifically by discussing the male heterosexual gaze that sexualizes women (which is what I focus on in the post) but to define it in the larger sense of the default cultural gaze, the one that surrounded me as I grew up in the USA and which is still heavily dominant in so much of the USA media and narrative and casual talk.

My answer is that it is ALWAYS difficult for me NOT to fall into writing that caters to the default cultural gaze.

The default gaze is easy. Like the One Ring, it wants to be found.

The received wisdom I heard over and over again as a child about how women are, how men are, how society is (in the largest sense including any sort of discussion about gender, race, nationalism, history, ethnicity, heteronormativity, and so on) continually rises out of my backbrain and insinuates its way into my stories.

Continually.

I am involved in a constant struggle to pick apart those assumptions and not perpetrate them in my stories.

Sometimes I grab that bull by the horns right out in the open and confront the stereotype or old default head on as I’m writing. Sometimes I write a scene and only later realize how I catered to the old lies and then have to sort out where I slid and figure out in revisions how I really want to deal with the situation. Sometimes I don’t catch some reactionary interaction or plot choice until I see the book in print by which time it is too late to change. And other times I don’t see it at all and only realize defaults I fell into after they are pointed out in a review. And it lurks in all my writing still.

I’m wracking my brains for a few concrete examples from my work of which there are many because they reach back into the entire drafting process for each book. For example, the relationship between Anji and Mai in Crossroads was easy to write because it is based in a traditional male/female gender split. I think I did a good job with that story (and torqued it in a specific way meant to counter-examine that story) but that doesn’t negate that it was a piece of cake to write exactly because it so heavily skewed to comfortable old gender roles. Meanwhile, in my current WIP, I am having to constantly remind myself to build ways in which my young heroine (there is also an old heroine but her story has different inherent difficulties) can act rather than be acted upon because the initial iteration of her story involved her being acted upon but in fact it does not have to be written with her as a passive bystander thrown into a raging current of story; she can decide to jump into that river of her own volition.

I don’t expect to be perfect. I expect to make mistakes. I expect to fail sometimes. I expect to be human. Therefore I try to be aware and to learn something each time and do better.

An apt analogy might be picking apart embroidery. I have to cut it stitch by stitch and pull it out of the fabric in order to re-do it. This stuff goes deep.

In other words:

Part of my writing process is unlearning.

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

Cold Magic: Nook Daily Find (May 27 only) at $1.99

COLD MAGIC is featured as the Nook Daily Find today, May 27, for $1.99.

Nook BookStore is here.

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.

Nook Daily Find

Spiritwalker Monday will be coming later today but for now a quick mention that the Nook Daily Find today, Monday 27 May, is COLD MAGIC for a mere $1.99

You can find it here.

After May 27 the Daily Find will become a different book.

Mirrored from I Make Up Worlds.