Life in a Northern Town

Day 1: Geography & Climate – on WordPress | on Livejournal | on Dreamwidth
Day 2: History & Politics – on WordPress | on Livejournal | on Dreamwidth
Day 3: Religion & Magic – on WordPress | on Livejournal | on Dreamwidth

There is some really interesting discussion going on in the Dreamwidth comments to the earlier entries: here and here. I love this kind of worldbuilding brainstorming. And I’ve more-or-less decided to shift them from mountains to islands now — not because I feel like I’m being pressured at all (Schneefink, I definitely don’t want you to think that!) but because this is how my creative process WORKS. See, this is why it’s so hard for me to finish a novel. I am a complete flailbot when it comes to constantly changing my mind and being carried away by a shiny new idea. *g* And one of the reasons why I wanted to worldbuild Karamanda is because I have very little strongly established canon for them yet, and lots of things that could still change, or haven’t been developed at all.

Anyway, moving on to today’s topic!

Karamanda: Religion

Karamanda does not have actual, literal magic, in the fantasy-world sense. (Though it’s possible you could argue for some low-level magic being necessary to enable a being that’s roughly human-sized and human-shaped to fly. My kludge is that their gravity is a bit lighter than ours, but when it comes right down to it, they probably shouldn’t be capable of flying as easily as they can. The world doesn’t have magic in the traditional sense, but I reserve the right to claim magic for their flight if necessary!)

Traditional religion in the city takes two forms: the old religion (of which the Angels are the ceremonial leaders) and a somewhat debased form of it that is centered around the worship of particular kinds of birds — so there’s a pigeon cult, a sparrow cult, etc. There are also small groups of worshippers who follow various alternate religions introduced from outside.

The ceremonial life of the city is centered around a deity that is personified as a peregrine falcon, of which the Angels are its priests. This is the state religion, and all the official holidays and citywide public functions take place under this deity’s patronage. Falcons are sacred birds and may not be harmed. Angels keep them as pets (only Angels are allowed to) and hunt with them.

The different bird cults each have their own traditions and ceremonies. They are tolerated and mostly ignored; most of them include falcon reverence and follow state rituals/ceremonies while adding their own embellishments. Plenty of people are officially part of the falcon religion while privately following the teachings of one bird cult or another.

(If I do put them on islands, seagulls would be a major local bird; I should probably account for that …)

It’s going to be interesting trying to get these posted daily, because we haven’t had Internet at home since last Monday, and the nearest coffee shop is a 12-mile drive. Still, the Worldbuilding Blogfest starts on Monday, and I have my posts all roughed out. I’m posting this one a bit early, due to the aforementioned connection issues. Technically it’s due to go up Monday, but, uh, it’s Monday in some parts of the world? Ahem.

I thought about which world to develop for this — it’s not like I don’t have enough of ‘em — but I decided to work on Karamanda, because it really does need a lot of developing, so this will be a good opportunity to work on it. Karamanda is the setting of a short story that some of you beta-read for me in an earlier draft, titled “The Angel Killers” at the time. (It’s now called “Angelcutters” and I’ve tried shopping the finished version around, but can’t sell it. I’ve thought about trying Karamanda as an experiment in crowdfunding, since I would like to write more stories in the world, but other projects keep taking priority.)

Anyway, feel free to comment on any of these entries, critique what I’ve posted, or ask more questions. This is mostly brainstorming to figure things out, so input is welcome! Even if I take awhile to respond to things until we get reliable Internet again.

The Karamanda stories are, basically, hard-boiled P.I. stories set in a city in which everyone has wings. Here’s what’s coming up:

Day 1: Geography & Climate
Day 2: History & Politics
Day 3: Religion and/or Magic
Day 4: Food, Drink, Holidays & Culture
Day 5: Worldbuilding Excerpt

You can also see a list of participants and visit their blogs at the Worldbuilding Blogfest site and more details on each day’s topic here.

Karamanda: Geography & Climate (plus a brief Karamanda overview)

( Continued under cut )

Sketch Fest is currently ongoing (until Sunday at noon, Alaska time – check your local time) for any interested artists among you! I spent this afternoon at ellenmillion‘s, doing Sketchfest art and playing with her unbelievably cute baby. (Seriously, I think what she claims is a baby is in fact an actor hired to play a cute baby, because I don’t think they come this naturally adorable.) I’ve finished two sketches so far, for the prompts Red heart turning blue and Flower fairy based on a flesh-eating plant.

In the last four days, I’ve revised 90,000 words of (unfinished) novel and rewritten chunks of it in the hopes of figuring out how it ends.

Spoiler: I still don’t know how it ends.

Aargh.

In the meantime, an interesting link: The Worldbuilding Blogfest – this looks like immense fun! I think I’m going to sign up. I’m not sure if I want to use it as a platform to explore one of my existing worlds (Kismet, maybe?) or if it would be better to develop something entirely new. But anyway … fun! I thought some of you might enjoy it too.

Two new posts over at my (not so) top-secret romance-alias blog, one on my current romance-related projects and the other on upcoming anthology open calls I’m thinking about writing for. I continue to remain undecided whether having a separate romance alias is a good idea or not. Part of me says yes, part of me says no. And it adds an extra level of pain-in-the-ass to submitting things, though I suppose I’ll get used to it. I reserve the right to quit using it and revert back to my regular name if the pain-in-the-ass elements become too much to bear.

(I was also amused to notice that the Dreamspinner Press anthology in which I have a story also has a story by another “Laylah”, with an H. I had thought about tacking an “H” onto my name for my romance alias, but decided not to. I suppose it could be her real name, but I’m not laying odds. I am, however, the ORIGINAL Layla, if not the only one! 36 years and counting. Accept no substitutes.)

The weather is warmer than usual (which for us, means it’s about 10F rather than -30), so I’ve been getting out in it as much as possible, taking long walks with my faithful canine companion in the falling snow. My usual walk with Lucky is down to the mailbox and back (it’s on the highway, about a half-mile from the house). I almost never go beyond the mailbox with him, and clearly, everything further out has been mapped “Here there be dragons” in his dog brain, because he starts out chipper and then the farther we go, the more he attaches to my leg like a 60-pound remora, until I’m tripping over him.

The warm weather is supposed to hold for the next few days (actually, they’re predicting freezing rain for Sunday … aaiiieeee!), so with luck, he’ll have a chance to get used to it. I really do need more exercise.

And I am gleefully, joyously DONE with the final rewrite on my urban fantasy novel! I am letting it sit for a few days while I procrastinate write a query letter, and then I’ll do a final pass for errors and start sending it out to agents. I am SO grateful to everyone who’s helped me with it so far. Apparently, it takes a village to write a novel, and I couldn’t have done it without mine.

My head is in full-on editing mode, which means that I’m going around with “editing brain” turned on. Right now I feel like I should make myself a sticky note and slap it at the top of my computer screen: Do not overwrite!

One of my betas pointed out (accurately) that I have a tendency to over-explain my characters’ state of mind and actions. This is something I’ve been particularly focused on during my current round of revisions on the urban fantasy novel — not just in that area, but all of my overwriting tendencies. I still maintain that you will pry my adverbs out of my cold dead hands. But there are two specific things I’ve recently become aware of in my own writing, that I’ve been trying to fix.

Meandering descriptions of characters’ states of mind is the big one. “Where did he go?” she asked. She could hardly think for her worry; if only she had asked him for more details about his plans when she last saw him!

As opposed to: “Where did he go?” she asked, worried. Or just: “Where did he go?”

Obviously there is often a need for a little of this, but overdone, it turns into a sea of words, getting in the way of the reader actually seeing what’s going on.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I often use too many descriptors. I like writing description. I think I’m pretty good at it. But there is no need to shovel in every detail of a scene, and in particular, I tend to overuse a similar construction to the following:

The canister was probably plastic or a dull metal. He upended it and dumped a handful of bright blue, glass or plastic beads into his palm.

The reason why I get tripped up on this one is because, often, the viewpoint character doesn’t have any way to know the exact specifics of the scene. So it feels (to me) as if being more specific, giving specifics the character doesn’t know, breaks out of their viewpoint. Stumbling through the dark room, she tripped over a chair or maybe a table. She can’t tell if it’s a chair or a table — it’s dark! But it doesn’t actually matter, unless the ambiguity is important. Far less intrusive to write: Stumbling through the dark room, she tripped over a chair. Just pick something and move on. As long as it doesn’t egregiously break POV, the reader won’t care.

Or: He upended the metal canister and dumped a handful of bright blue glass beads into his palm.

Who cares if the viewpoint character can tell at a glance if they’re glass or plastic? Maybe it’s obvious. Mostly, it just doesn’t matter. It’s extra, needless words to wade through, that don’t add anything to the scene. And it draws the reader’s attention to a completely pointless ambiguity. Unless, of course, the ambiguity is important. And it might be, especially in a sci-fi setting:

The canister was made of plastic or a dull metal; she’d never seen its like before.

I guess you don’t want to go overboard with the de-ambiguifying, obviously, by getting too specific for what the character can actually see or what they know. It’s not always “specific good, nonspecific bad”. It’s mostly the “this or that” construction that can usually be shortened down to “this”. Eight or nine hours later, they left the inn versus Eight hours later, they left the inn. Or Some kind of bird was singing outside the window, maybe a robin, as opposed to Robins were singing outside the window. Wading through a bunch of this kind of thing is making me want to shake my writer-self and go, “Just PICK something already!”

It’s that time again, when I look back on the previous year and check last year’s goals to see how I did.

Last year’s goals, and my progress:

Revise the novel and start submitting it to agents.

Revise, yes; submit, no. But after one more relatively minor round of revisions, I plan to send it out in January.

Start updating at least one (1) of my various Kismet projects as a webcomic

I suppose that technically I did manage to do this one, but what I actually meant was “update, and keep updating” rather than “update, then stop”. Still, I got another 15 or so pages on Sun-Cutter, which is something.

Write another novel

I got about 90% done and stalled out. But I’m mostly there. And I finished two novellas. I think I was pretty damn close on this one. Another 10,000 words on the novel would have done it, but I was so stuck on the ending that I figured it was better to let it sit for awhile, then revise it and write a decent ending, rather than slam out something that I’d have to completely rewrite just to check this one off the list.

Get the Freebird book together

‘Tis done!

Get the Hunter’s Moon book together

No, but now that I’ve discovered how easy (and cheap!) it is to go through CreateSpace, this one is definitely on the agenda for 2013.

As for what I actually accomplished … I’m awfully happy with what I did get done this year, which is:

- Got the Freebird book out, got it in local stores, and did local signings.
- Sold a short story to a pro-rate market.
- Got the urban fantasy novel ready to send to agents (except for one more round of revisions, which won’t take too long).
- Finished most of the urban fantasy novel sequel (book 2) and got a pretty good idea of what book 3 is going to be about.
- Wrote (and finished!) several long short stories and novellas.
- Sold a short story under my “Layla M. Wier” romance alias.
- Started doing art again – and selling it!
- Worked more on Kismet, even if I didn’t get that far along.

2013 goals are coming in a new post …

I mentioned a little while back that I had been writing romance and thinking about using my maiden name as an alias for it. Well, I made my first sale under that alias, a short story in the anthology “Snow on the Roof” from Dreamspinner Press. So I am activating my new romance alias (special pseudonym powers: ACTIVATE!) and it now has its own wordpress blog: laylawier.wordpress.com.

Hopefully this is not a terrible idea that will sow only confusion.

I will be making absolutely no secret of the fact that both Laylas are the same person, and I’ll be frequently linking back and forth between the two blogs — Layla M. Wier’s upcoming releases will be linked from the Layla Lawlor blog and vice versa. If it turns out to be simply too hard to keep things straight, I’ll probably end up rolling the two blogs back into one. But in the meantime, the Layla M. Wier blog will pretty much be all romance all the time (with an occasional “oh hey, I sold this other thing as Layla Lawlor”), and this blog will be for everything else.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

I’ve never been all that much of a holiday person, and I haven’t decorated the house for Christmas (or anything else, really) since we bought this place in 2004. But I’m in my mid-30s, without children, and I’m starting to kind of miss Christmas. I enjoyed last Christmas at my brother’s place — they have an 8-year-old, and my sister-in-law really gets into doing all of the things for all of the holidays. So this year, inspired by that experience, I’m going to make the house all pretty.

I went out this morning and bought some garlands and ornaments and things. The back half of our 11 acres is a spruce-infested swamp, so I figured I’d go back there today and cut a Christmas tree. I said something to Orion about this, asking if the chainsaw was working, and he said, “Just use the hedge clippers.”

My response was basically along the lines of “Hedge clippers? Pshaw, you can’t cut a Christmas tree with hedge clippers! Don’t be silly.”

However, faced with trying to get the chainsaw running at 30 below zero, I grabbed the hedge clippers and trekked back into the swamp, and damned if he isn’t right. I seriously underestimated the sheer puniness of the Alaskan swamp spruce. There is hardly a tree in the swamp that has a trunk any bigger around than my wrist, and most of the trees under 20 feet look like broomsticks with a few little clumps of branches sticking off here and there.

Undaunted, I picked my tree and clipped off the top five feet, which is presently defrosting in the garage. I figure that you can hide anything with sufficient quantities of ornaments.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

There was a great review of Freebird in yesterday’s News-Miner (our local paper) – you can read it here!

Lawlor spins out a slice-of-life tale of the minor mishaps and small triumphs that [protagonist] Karen experiences as she settles into life amid a collection of mostly lovable losers who are in Fox because they’re so cantankerous they can’t even hack it in Fairbanks proper. It isn’t a deep read, but it is a sweet account of a group of people with exceedingly strong and usually clashing personalities trying to find some semblance of tranquility despite their close proximity to one another as neighbors or family members.

Also, I think I forgot to link to this at the time, but SL Huang had a really fantastic rec/review of Freebird at her blog recently:

It can be hard to write flawed characters without losing the audience, but somehow all of the characters in Freebird manage to be human and still keep us rooting for them.  Or perhaps we root for them because they are so human. … They have all different views (politically, morally, and philosophically they’re all over the map) and all different relationships with each other (some hate each other, some love each other, some tolerate each other, and everything in between) and they’re still all people we like.  Three-dimensionality at its finest.

Full reviews at both links. Thank you very much to both reviewers!

I had two local book signings last week, at Gulliver’s and Forget-Me-Not Books, both of which went well! I sold some books and saw some friends, and had a lot of fun.

Today I’m feeling accomplished because I just finished a draft of a story for an anthology called Big Damn Heroines from Storm Moon Press (here’s their open anthology call page). The open call describes the anthology as “plus-sized women kicking ass”, and I really wanted to write something for it, so I’ve been working on that story over the last couple of weeks. (The rough draft clocks in at about 19,000 words, which is a leeeeetle longer than I was aiming for, but the maximum for the anthology is 20K, so I’m still under!) I also finished the rough draft of a 35K novella in November, which I’ve been calling the “lesbian werewolves in Alaska story”. It’s going to need a pretty major rewrite because the villain essentially comes out of nowhere 2/3 of the way through the story, so I need to figure out how to bring him in earlier, and some sort of plausible motivation other than (as it currently stands) apparently just being evil. So now I have both of those to rewrite, and I have my urban fantasy novel to edit and hopefully send out to agents in the next couple of months; I’m definitely keeping busy.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.