Kate Elliott's Blog, page 36

I muse about writing Cold Steel, Spiritwalker, & first drafts.

About 70,000 words into book 3 of Spiritwalker (Cold Steel), I am coming to see two patterns in the larger architecture of the books. One is that they involve travel and movement. The other is that the first two books both involve what I call "turn overs" -- points right about in the middle of the book where a thing turns over within the plot that then propels the book through the second half.

There is also a pattern in the writing, but this is common to all my first drafts, not just these particular books.

Opening is hard. Like sludge. I hate writing openings. They make me feel incompetent. But there always comes a point as I slog forward through things I'm pretty sure have to happen that something truly and utterly unexpected happens, and then I know the book's pulse just started.

Now, that already happened with Cold Steel and I know exactly where.

But the next thing that happens after that is I hit a point where I realize I have to either massively rewrite something in the opening or that I have to move scenes around or jigger them in a big way rather than a small way. When that happens I have to stop where I am, go back, and revise from the beginning up to where I left off. This may happen more than once during the extended process I call a first draft (although by the time I finish my first draft there are portions of the book that have gone through several draftings), but it always happens at least once.

I just hit that point today. I wrote 1850 words at Starbucks and realized I had to take a scene from earlier and move it to where I was, rewriting it to fit the new parameters. Which means something has to go where it was, something that will make where it was a deeper and better and more thematically awesome interaction, with bonus set up for something that is going to happen later.

By the way, you may assume that since I have written 70,000 words I'm almost done with the first draft, but you would be, alas, wrong. My first drafts run really really long, and then I cut as part of revising.

Character Genres I Avoid

Okay, I asked permission and am totally stealing this from manga_crow .

In my post "In common: Susanna Kearsley's A WINTER SEA and Diana Rowland's MY LIFE AS A WHITE TRASH ZOMBIE," I begin by saying

There are genres, sub genres, settings, things, character types, and plot lines that are not to my taste.

I then go on to discuss why I really enjoyed the two aforementioned books despite them being woven of elements I normally don't care for.

A discussion ensued, but I was particularly struck by this comment by the aforementioned manga_crow :

I've really discovered over the years that I don't really care about genre conventions - it's the equivalent of the color of the paint when choosing a house. The real deal-makers/breakers are the characters and to a much, much lesser extent, the plot. Give me good characters and it doesn't matter if they're flying around on dragons trying to prevent evil wizards from taking over their kingdom, running around New York sewers fighting vampires, being a medic in the far-flung reaches of the galaxy, or, well, you get the idea.

If I were in charge of labeling genres, they would look something like this (so I could avoid them):

Supposedly brilliant detective who can't solve crimes without having the answer shoved in his/her face.
Ungrateful jerk has life saved by being turned into something not-quite-human and won't shut up about how they want a normal life again.
Supposedly experienced political figures are taken in by tricks that wouldn't fool a three-year-old.


This is a great way of categorizing things I can't read. Because it's true: I can really read anything if the characters grab me, as my love for the two mentioned books proves.


What character genres do you despise? Be as specific as you need to be. No need to spare your scorn!

I'll go next:

Serial killer is a complex, dark man of deep meaningfully depicted psychological chasms and gritty back story, and yet still is obsessed with killing nubile young women after sexual violence described in detail.

Within five minutes of first setting eyes on each other, hero and heroine are forced into a state of orgasmic confusion over the overwhelming sexual attraction between them, to the point that they must spend much of the book having intense sex as the only relief to their bewildering symptoms.

Jolly sex worker in a world without decent medical care never gets any form of venereal disease or infection.

kateelliott @ 2011-07-13T22:56:00

Meanwhile, go look at this awesome photo, part of a series I'm going to figure out how to link up or run or do a web page of or something, which I will call

Hairstyles of Angkor Wat

JARAN: When "what if" deals with gender & culture

Science fiction is often defined as a "literature of ideas," and many famous SF stories can be identified by the idea, or nifty concept, or "what if" speculation that lies at their heart. Is my sf novel JARAN just a rousing adventure story with a romantic element, or is there some kind of science fictional speculation involved?

Glad you asked. (Because I've discovered that people usually don't ask. Too often they seem to just assume there isn't because nothing in the book (if they've even read the book) fits the received and accepted definition of a sfnal "idea.")

What if, in a low-tech, chieftain-level pastoral society in which labor remains divided along fairly traditional (by our standards) gender line, women had real authority?

Not lip service authority. Not a lot of talk about women being the repository of honor in the home, or the teachers of the next generation, or the keeper of the house in a way that specifically limits them to the house, or the biologically equipped nurturing machines whose scriptural mandate is to be mother and helpmeet, but real authority: "The right and power to command, enforce laws, exact obedience, determine, or judge." (The American Heritage Dictionary, 1976)

As authority, that is, held over all members of society and not just over children and social inferiors. And not just some women, those who by birth or accident or exceptionalism have managed to wrest authority for themselves out of a patriarchal society by being "as good as a man," but all women.

What would such a society look like? How might it function to grant equal dignity to women and men and yet at the same time fit realistically into a broader world and with an understanding of human nature and the needs of survival in a low-tech world with a high mortality rate?

Over the course of envisioning and revising the book, I had to ask myself a lot of questions. Am I reinforcing notions of biological determinism by splitting labor along traditional gender lines as the average USA reader knows and expects them to be observed even today but particularly in our view of the past? Yet if I can only write women as "free and powerful" by freeing them from their "traditional" roles, am I not then implicitly agreeing with unchallenged cultural assumptions that devalue women's labor and women's experience? How can I mediate between these two extremes?

I don't have an answer to these questions, although I can say that over time I've learned how fluid division of labor by gender is from society to society. For instance, in the jaran I made men the ones who embroider, but of course embroidery is not a universal female occupation; most USAians just tend to think it is.

In any case, in JARAN and the other volumes in the sequence I explore what respect and authority mean and how they might interact through and between genders and, by doing so, shape how the culture of the jaran tribes developed in the past and continues to develop when a disruptive new force begins to alter the social fabric of the tribes.

Yet I didn't want to create a "matriarchy" in which women rule and men submit--an inverted patriarchy. I wanted to explore the idea of a culture in which all adult roles are truly respected. So I started with an assumption: For women to maintain authority, institutions within the culture have to support that authority.

I made the tribes matrilineal, and in addition borrowed from many Native American traditions in which the right to hold certain offices and to inherit property follow down the female line.

I also made the jaran matrilocal: Under most circumstances, a new husband goes to live with his wife's tribe. The locus of power within any given tribe centers on extended families of sisters. A woman's relationship to her brother is considered to be the most stable female-male relationship, based on a shared mother and upbringing, and within extended families, cousins related through sisters or a sister and brother are considered like siblings (however, this is not true for cousins related through brothers).

In addition, women have possession of the tents and wagons, and they manage and distribute food and labor available to the tribe. As with the Iroquois and Cherokee, jaran etsanas (headwomen) have the power to install or depose male tribal war leaders.

These familial, economic, and political relationships give women a network of support as well as a respect and autonomy that reinforces their authority.

Another aspect I played with was the cultural norms of sexual behavior. The hoary old cliché of male sexual aggression contrasted with female sexual passivity is still with us in a multitude of forms. I chose to make jaran women the sexual initiators: They choose lovers at will when unmarried, and are free to continue to (discreetly) take lovers once they are married. To drain off a bit of the "power" implicit in sexual choice, I gave men the choice in marriage. Although in practice almost all men (at the instigation of or with the assistance of their mothers and sisters) would negotiate with the other family first, it would be possible for a man to marry a woman whom he wanted but who did not want him. This contrasting pattern assured that neither sex had complete power over the other. Even in a strongly patriarchal society that is highly restrictive toward women, women will seek avenues of balance and redress when they can, including underhanded ones. History is full of such examples. I wanted to place mine right out on the table.

I catapult my protagonist into this culture without preparing her for it. Since she comes from a future Earth where the dregs of our patriarchal past still hold some sway over her way of thinking, she often has the opportunity to misinterpret what freedom and authority mean among the jaran. And when I look back at the book now, almost two decades later, I can see ways in which my own thinking has changed, things I might have written differently but which reflect the era and attitudes in which I grew up.

Ultimately, looking back, I wish that discussing my speculative ideas behind the jaran society weren't still timely. To quote sff writer N. K. Jemisin in "Here's the problem with this wholesale rejection of both societally-imposed and self-chosen "typical" women's behaviors — in the end, it amounts to a rejection of nearly all things feminine. And that's definitely not good for women."

That's the idea I was trying to explore, back then. We're still struggling with it now.





*** This post was adapted out of the introduction I wrote to the 2002 edition of JARAN, published by DAW Books.

In common: Susanna Kearsley's A WINTER SEA and Diana Rowland's MY LIFE AS A WHITE TRASH ZOMBIE

There are genres, sub genres, settings, things, character types, and plot lines that are not to my taste. Sometimes strongly so, sometimes weakly so. I try very very hard never to criticize such things in an essentialist way: All epic fantasy is crap because it is all about bad and stupid things and is written for idiots except for the one book I like because it is superior due to my decision that it must be superior because I succumbed to liking it. Just as a for example.

So what do Susanna Kearsley's A WINTER SEA and Diana Rowland's MY LIFE AS A WHITE TRASH ZOMBIE have in common?

They both are novels written with multiple elements that I generally avoid, not because I think these elements are bad things but because they're not my thing. And yet, both books really worked for me.


I am not the prime reader for urban fantasy. Most urban fantasy doesn't work that well for me. I wish it did, because there's so much out there to read. But in the main I've learned that it's a very hard sell for me.

I don't like zombie films. And the current zombie rage (as much as I joke about having zombies in Cold Fire, I don't really, well, not mostly really) in books does not float my boat, plus I'm getting a bit tired of all the attempts to do "something new" with it. Oh, and HBO's The Walking Dead? Sucked.

Yet Rowland's MY LIFE . . . is an urban fantasy with zombies, and it's appealing, and funny, and it all works in a way that I could never have predicted. What a delightful surprise! Also, this could totally be a movie or tv series.


As for the other, I do not do Scotland books. DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $100.
And I don't like books with time slippage or weird links into the past. Particularly not when they involve Scotland.
Oh, and by the way, books in which the main character is a writer who is writing? Not my ticket.

A WINTER SEA is all that. A writer travels to Scotland to write a novel set in the past oh god.
Literally the only reason I read it was because of the DABWAHA tournament from earlier this year, when COLD MAGIC faced off (and defeated) A WINTER SEA in the first round. I was curious why it (and the other books in our "crossover" division) had been picked for the tournament.


And I have to tell you, I fell in love with this novel. Utterly, besottedly in love with this novel. It's sweet, it's romantic without being sickly, it's serious about its politics and sensible about its relationships, and beyond all that beautifully and evocatively written.

So: two strong recommends.



Have you any examples of books you've enjoyed which actually included elements or genres or plots you normally don't care for?

Cold Magic/Spiritwalker/Cold Fire questions

As many/some of you know, the mass market of Cold Magic is coming out at the end of this month.

(if you haven't seen it already, I've posted both the trade paper and the new mass market covers on Tumblr, where you can compare the two looks.)

Meanwhile, Cold Fire debuts in mid-September.

(here, also on Tumblr, the not quite final version of the Cold Fire cover.)

I'm gearing up to write a few blog posts, post some teaser chapters for Cold Fire (starting in August), and meanwhile of course I am working on Cold Steel.

Are there any questions you have for me? Aspects of the book or world you wish I would discuss or address? These can be non spoilery or spoilery in nature (I would tag spoilery discussions, obviously, so people could avoid them if they hadn't read Cold Magic yet).

Thanks in advance.

World SF: (Global) Women in SF Roundtable

With: Aliette de Bodard (France), Joyce Chng (Singapore), Csilla Kleinheincz (Hungary), Kate Elliott (US), Karen Lord (Barbados), Ekaterina Sedia (Russia/US).

I've excerpted quotes but there's lots more on the actual roundtable which you can find here.

Joyce: I feel that – as what I have ranted – is that the discussion is still very US/UK-centric. It is fine that the POC and minorities are speaking out in – say – the States, but that is still very US-centric/dominated. I also feel that women from places like Southeast Asia might not have the same experiences/common ground to talk about and we end up grappling and confused. There is a lot of intersectionality – what are Southeast Asian women (with different experiences/backgrounds) going to say? What are Southeast Asian women supposed to say? Likewise, when it comes to SFF, what we experience might be similar but vastly different as well. Often as such, we end up trying to conform to foreign-sounding standards and end up feeling confused.

How am I going to approach SFF with this skein of experiences?

Aliette: I appreciate the Russ Pledge, I really do; but it does leave a slight impression that SF is the important genre, and that fantasy doesn't even bear mentioning. Of course, it's always the case when you start putting genre boundaries; but there's something about this that bothers me. You could argue that we're making the Russ Pledge because fantasy doesn't need it; but I'm not even entirely sure that this is the case. All major fantasy bestsellers are written by men, and there are known biases in that genre as well. I'm not quite sure what to think. Still, I guess we have to start somewhere in order to tackle inequalities.

Karen: I think that the problem isn't whether women write or read different things. It's the imposition of boundaries and the assigning of value that's the problem – whether that boundary is genre vs literary, world sf vs Western, or women writers vs men. As a reader, I don't want to miss out because the next great SF/F writer happens to be the 'wrong gender' and has been discouraged from writing what they're best at writing.

Ekaterina: One thing is true: it seems that the mainstream tolerates only one level of otherness (as in deviation from white male default) at a time. You can be a woman or a POC or a non-Anglophone, but if you're more than one of those categories, frames of reference become increasingly divergent from the conditioned default (because let's face it, with the penetration Hollywood and Western media have all over the world, pretty much everyone is exposed to and is expected to relate to a white American dude as a hero. Once you start introducing separators — race, gender, nationality — you lose chunks of audience. Sure, some people find different perspective interesting and refreshing, but many more find them alienating and difficult, especially when they are reading "for pleasure" (another weird phrase, because why the hell else would you read?) Really, the advantage of being a cultural dominant is that you don't have to know how to relate to anyone else, and I have no answer as to how that can be changed. The irony is that as some of the US-based SF is becoming more internally diverse, it seems more closed off to the outside influences. If that makes any sense.

Csilla: What you said made me think about non-Western fantasy and science fiction, speculative fiction so different from what we used to label SF that even the writers and readers don't realize it's SF. This strangeness may come from the stylistic approaches of the mainstream, the themes and sometimes merely from the fact that these works reflect very strongly the angst and mentality of a certain nation. All non-Western countries have these books, but we are so used to being told what SF is and what SF should be that anything that doesn't follow the US/UK trends automatically falls into the mash category of the mainstream (and I am not talking about magic realism, nor those who study literature, just the general idea of SF that lives in the heads of an average reader). Now that I think about it, it's exactly these works that could contribute the most to the dynamism and diversity of global SF (as "world SF" is used to define non-US/UK SF I have the need of a more universal term, is there one…?)

First SFF Novel Analysis & my Robert Silverberg story

In a previous post I asked people to name the first science fiction or fantasy novel they read, if they remember.

I just went through and did a very casual analysis of the results.

I suspect more people would have said fairy and/or folk tales, as many did (as I did), but I did specifically request genre, that is, a story that we would consider to fall into fairly clear genre parameters. The kind of stuff, you know, that some journalism outlets write snarky articles about, wondering why the heck it is those strange people (us) read that geeky unreal childish stuff. But I'm digressing.


As expected, The Hobbit was mentioned many times.

I was surprised by how many people started with C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, but I shouldn't be. I suspect that's only because I didn't find those books until I was in college; they simply weren't on my radar. My parents did not read sff, and for some reason my high school English teacher who did read sff and who greatly encouraged me in my writing and reading habits (some of you know him: Chip Sullivan, former president of IAFA) never steered me to them.

Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

A couple of mentions of the Oz books (which were big early reads for me, possibly before the Silverberg novel I tend to identify as my first clearly sff title).

And a few mentions for Lloyd Alexander, Alan Garner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Richard Adams' Watership Down, as well as miscellaneous other fantasy.

SF mentions are less frequent but include multiple mentions of Robert Heinlein and the aforementioned Silverberg, as well as the Star Wars books.

However, I expect a prize ought to go to twinsuns who writes:

Basically, you were my first favorite modern-day sff writer.

Aww! That's sweet, but also terrifying.


Let me tell you my Robert Silverberg story.
[Be aware this is merely my take on the story. I can't vouch for Silverberg's recollection of the same events.]

Two fucking decades ago (damn), I was introduced to Robert Silverberg at a convention when I was a newly published writer. Robert Silverberg has of course been an immensely prolific and notable writer and seemingly around forever (from my perspective).

I said, perkily (and cluelessly), "So glad to meet you! You wrote the first science fiction novel I ever read, REVOLT ON ALPHA C! I was in fourth grade!"

He got A LOOK on his face of perhaps that disjunction we hit once we pass a certain age when we are periodically forced to recall the inevitable crawl of advancing years as they slowly obliterate us. But he graciously smiled and replied, "thank you. I was ten when I wrote it." {That was a joke. Or maybe not . . . he did start writing early.}

I never got to know Mr. Silverberg beyond occasionally saying hello to him at conventions. In fact, the second time I met him, I said, "You probably don't remember me, but -- " At which point he cut me off and said, "oh, I remember you."

Time passes in the way it does in films where water flows under the bridge, usually accompanied by a musical piece.

Dear reader, you will find me at AussieCon, in September 2010 (just last year!), in scenic Melbourne.

Who do I encounter there but Robert Silverberg! (at the after-Hugos party, to which I was not invited but I got in anyway -- that's another story).

And I said to him, "I know you remember me, and I have a story to tell you."

He gave me A LOOK like oh god what is it going to be this time?

I smiled and said, "I just had a new novel come out with a new (to me) publisher and editor. And my new editor, Devi Pillai, sent out the Advance Reading Copies accompanied by a letter which began, 'I first read Kate Elliott's Jaran when I was 13.'"

Trust me, you would have paid money to see his expression.

Because, you know, it's kind of like being a grandparent.

A Random Survey re: YA Preferences

I can't do a poll thing because, um, well, I dunno. Because I never have done one before, and I don't have a Paid or Plus Account, and am generally lazy. My apologies.

Instead of a poll, consider this a Short Answer Question.

If you read or have ever read YA with a fantastical element (as opposed to straight this world no fantasy or future elements), which setting (s) do you prefer? Which don't you like?


Dystopia (either near or far future).

Science fiction (spaceships or space opera or near future)

Portal (person from this world is drawn into another world)

Secondary world fantasy (the entire story takes place in another world which has no link to our own)

This world with a supernatural element of some kind

Some other option, which I have sadly neglected


Thanks in advance.

My COLD FIRE Description

The descriptive quote I cooked up for COLD MAGIC goes like this:


An Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk Regency with airships, Phoenician spies, and the intelligent descendants of troodons.




After much back and forth with my daughter (she's a harsh critic), I'm proposing this for COLD FIRE:


More Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk with sharks, fire mages, the peculiar legal interests and perilous eating habits of feathered dinosaurs, and a Caribbean that wasn't "discovered" by Columbus.





Official release date of COLD FIRE is Sept 26, 2011, although I've been informed that it may ship earlier. On August 1 to celebrate the release date of the mass market edition of COLD MAGIC, I'll post chapter one of COLD FIRE online.