Life in a Northern Town

A couple of days ago, someone asked me via PM if I could give them some advice on starting a professional writing career (they were interested in writing SFF and romance). I'm probably not the best person to ask given the current state of my professional writing career -- but I went and wrote out a ginormous infodump in a PM, and then I decided to repost it here, because it might be useful to someone else, I guess?

Plus, you guys can tell me if I'm way off base with any of this. Or if anyone has additional suggestions, tell me, and I can edit them in!

( Advice for aspiring writers )

So there it is ... maybe someone will find this handy, or maybe you guys have some better suggestions and/or would like to point out places where I'm way off base here?

The latest book from my Library Pile is one that I’d thought to be a historical murder mystery from the cover, but once I started to read, I realized it was a mystery-romance. The heroine has a meet-cute with a guy on the ferry that she’s taking to the Greek island where the events of the book take place. On the island, he is giving her a lift in his sporty little car, when he accidentally knocks over an old lady’s fruit stand, knocking oranges all over the road. Immediately, he stops, apologizes, and helps the old lady pick up her fruit.

And this really gave me pause; it made me stop and go, “Wow, I like this guy! This one’s a keeper, lady.”

… then about five pages later, the actual romantic hero shows up, which is clearly signposted because he is a total dick and the heroine hates him. Just to be sure, I turned to the blurb on the back (normally I avoid those, being a spoilerphobe) and discovered that not only is Dick Boy our “hero”, but the guy I’d liked so much is slated to be the murder victim.

Yeah. No. This one goes straight back to the library.

But this made me realize just how thoroughly over the alpha-hero trope I am. Over. Done. I want characters (male and female) who are the sort of person who would stop to help an old lady pick up her oranges. I am hungry for kind characters in literature, the sort of people who are aware that they exist as part of a community; who, when they accidentally hurt someone, notice and apologize for it, even if it’s a stranger, and doubly so if it’s a loved one.

And I think it was very eye-opening for me how startling it was, to encounter a scene in the opening pages of the book in which the character that I had believed to be the hero does something kind and altruistic. That’s rare. And it shouldn’t be. And this isn’t a problem specific to the romance genre. I read so many books in which the characters are misanthropic loners or just general jerks. I can enjoy me some misanthropic loners, but these days, I find that I’m really craving books about characters who aren’t. (Even if they may occasionally mistake themselves for one.)

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Crossposted from Wordpress.  

The final post in the Worldbuilding Blogfest – full list of participants here – is an excerpt from the work in progress. This obviously poses a bit of a problem for me because I went and changed everything. I tried writing some snippets from the new version, but I don’t really have a good enough handle on it to write it yet; I’m not sure who the characters are, or how closely it’s going to resemble the previous plot. So here’s an excerpt from the original story, “Angelcutters”, in which Franza, the protagonist, is investigating a murder that she’s really not supposed to be looking into.

( Read the rest of this entry )

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.

Something I keep forgetting to include: The full list of Worldbuilding Blogfest participants is here, so you can check out everyone else’s posts, too! There’s some good stuff.

Anyway, what’s currently happening to Karamanda is an excellent example of my creative process in action! I’ve been discussing it with Schneefink in the Dreamwidth comments (and also here) and, after running into some major worldbuilding dead ends on the structure of their city and why it’s located in the mountains, I became completely taken with the idea of “fixing” my problems (like the climate) by putting it on a Mediterranean island. A lot of the cultural stuff was originally drawn from the Greeks and Romans, after all. So worldbuilding that (and sketching the new, improved, island-dwelling Karamandans) is basically what I did yesterday. It’s now a lot less hard-boiled PI and a lot more … uh … I don’t know what, exactly. Epic fantasy? YA? Something a lot less gritty and dark, certainly — more light, adventuresome, and suited to their newly sundrenched world. (And now my plot no longer works. Fugnuts.)

Yesterday’s initial attempt at designing my island-dwelling Karamandans. (Click for bigger.) I was going for something that was sort of Greece + South Pacific, and accidentally ended up with more of a Native American look instead. (Not that there’s an inherent problem with that, but it’s not what I was aiming for.)

Anyway, all those posts you just read? It kinda … no longer works that way. The basics are still fundamentally the same: two separate groups of winged people, bird-worship religion, no magic, etc.

Here are the older posts, for the sake of completeness and comparison:

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

Then yesterday, I wrote this:

( Read the rest of this entry )

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.

Still no Internet at home … aargh. Obviously this is going to make it slow to reply to comments. Bear with me.

Also, for anyone coming in via links from elsewhere, I have anonymous commenting turned off on the WordPress blog because of the spampocalypse. However, all these posts are crossposted to my Livejournal account, where I do have anon commenting turned on! Anyway, on to Day 2.

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

Karamanda: Political Overview

The city has an interesting, uneasy push-pull between the elected government who run its day-to-day workings, and the Angels who are the ceremonial and religious leaders.

( Continued under cut )

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.

I wrote 7000 words on the novel today. Combined with yesterday’s 3800 words … I actually have a draft of the second novel in the urban fantasy series.

It’s not exactly complete. The plot of this one has been a mess, and there are big holes where I simply summarized what was supposed to go there without actually writing it, along with large scenes (and possibly whole chapters) that are going to need to be removed, moved somewhere else, or completely rewritten from scratch.

But I finally have the end, and I think it’s a darn solid end, too. I feel good about it. I got all the characters where I want them, and the character relationships where I want them. And best of all, I’ve finally gotten down the part that I was having the most trouble with: the final battle. It might not be easy getting everything to fall into place from here, but I have an ending I like, and that’s a big thing.

( Read the rest of this entry )

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.

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!”

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Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.

I’m working on edits to my urban fantasy novel this afternoon and thinking about research. I just got back from three and a half weeks in the New York area, partly to visit my sister and partly to research my novel. (And my heart goes out to everyone who’s suffered and is still suffering in Hurricane Sandy; some of the places that flooded are places where I was just standing a week ago. To all of you on the East Coast, I hope that you and yours are safe!)

During my time in Ithaca and environs, I did pick up quite a few details that I’d gotten wrong (hence the revisions!), as well as collecting impressions to (hopefully) convey the sort of local flavor that you can only get from spending a lot of time in a place or talking to people who have.

But eventually I started to hit a point where I was researching things that I suspect 99.9% of locals don’t even know, which made me realize that there’s a certain point beyond which it makes just as much sense, if not more sense, to make things up rather than trying to get them exact in every detail. An example: we drove out to Trumansburg (a small town northwest of Ithaca) to see what grew in the ditches, since I have a scene where the characters scramble through a tangle of blackberry vines in a ditch beside the road near Trumansburg. And then I realized … who actually cares? It’s important to research the sort of details that people would notice if you got wrong (like the kind of doors on a particularly well-known Cornell building; I had gotten it all wrong before actually walking around campus). But then there’s the sort of thing that you can totally make up, provided you have some basic knowledge of the general area. I wouldn’t put blackberry brambles in a ditch if I were writing something set in Alaska, because they don’t grow wild here. That’s exactly the sort of detail that detail-nitpicking locals might notice (I know I would!) and go “Hey, wait a minute.” But blackberries grow wild in New York, and could quite plausibly grow in a roadside ditch, and I’m not convinced that scrutinizing the actual ditches in the actual Trumansburg area to see if any of them have blackberry thickets (and if not, what they do have) is a good use of my time.

And there are even some times when it’s actually better to fake it rather than using a real business or a real neighborhood, especially if you plan to blow it up. *g* Giving yourself permission to make things up also gives you more freedom to, say, give your building exactly as many floors as it needs for your plot, regardless of whether the actual buildings in the area are four stories or five. Aside from perhaps an architecture student, who stands around counting floors on the buildings in their neighborhood? Who’s going to notice if you add or subtract one?

I’ve always disagreed with those who describe fiction as a form of lying, but it is a sort of augmented reality, and as long as you know enough to plausibly fake it, I think you can totally get away with it. If you’ve never even SEEN a farm, then probably you should do a bit of research before writing about one, but I’ve spent enough time on and around farms that I think I can get away with writing plausibly about farm country even if I’m not up on the exact details of what the ditches look like in that particular spot of farm country.

(For the record, in this case, I think the blackberry thicket is plausible based on what I saw on our drive. Most of the area seems to have shallower, less overgrown ditches than I had imagined, but I also saw places that were similar enough to what I’d envisioned that I don’t think it would jump out as wrong to someone who was familiar with the area. And I had fun exploring, so it’s not like it was a waste of time! But even if the scene doesn’t correspond exactly to reality, exploring the ditches to figure out what grew in them was probably a completely pointless level of research, unless it was going to be tremendously important to the plot. Which it isn’t.)

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

At a time when the rest of the U.S. is probably wondering if summer will ever end, we in Alaska are starting to notice yellow in the trees and a hint of bite to the air. Hence the new autumn-themed header image on my WordPress blog (from last year’s autumn photos — this is an aspen tree in the gravel pit between our house and the highway).

EMG-zine is now in the last half of their final year. They’re not a paying market, but they have good-quality short fiction, art and articles; they’ve published two of my short stories. Themes for the issues still accepting submissions are:

October – Magic
November – Wolves
December – Stars

(I’d like to try to write something for at least one of these! Deadlines are one month before the issue comes out: so the deadline for October is Sept. 1.)

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

Poetry Fishbowl today at ysabetwordsmith's journal. (Instructions/explanation at the link.) She does these regularly, and I think it's a fabulous idea and keep meaning to link to them, but I am so sucktastically erratic about reading my LJ friendslist that I don't usually notice one is going on 'til it's over. Also, the theme this time is Hart's Farm (scroll down to the description), which is a setting of hers that I really like.

Meanwhile, I have been learning a metric shit ton of stuff about writing lately. It's interesting to have been doing this as long as I have been (technically speaking), and still feel like I am at the bottom of the learning curve. But one of the things I've been learning about lately is finding my own voice. There have always been things I've written that I have connected to very strongly, and things that I haven't, and I think I'm starting to figure out the difference between them.

My natural tendency as a writer, generally speaking, is to focus on "up" beats rather than "down" beats -- I do write dark, unhappy stuff, and I kill characters and so forth, but I would say that my general view of the world and of human nature is pretty optimistic, and this is reflected in my fiction. I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of years, however, writing short stories and trying to sell them to various SF markets, and attempting to match the general style of the markets I'm submitting to, which in most cases means that I'm trying to write dark, dystopic stories with unhappy endings. And I've been realizing lately that no wonder those stories weren't selling -- either I didn't really enjoy writing them, or else I had to fight my natural tendency towards happy(ish) endings in order to end on a "down" beat, and of course that is going to make the finished product feel stilted and formulaic.

It sometimes feels that there is not much of a market out there for the kind of stuff that I tend to write, but that doesn't mean changing what I write; it means finding the markets that fit my type of story (which was what I did - successfully! - with Sword & Sorceress) rather than changing my style to fit the markets. Which is basic Writing Theory 101, but it seems like it never helped to be told that; I had to figure it out for myself via a lot of unsuccessfully laboring on incredibly depressing stories that never went anywhere.

(It probably says a lot that I have never had this problem with fanfic at all, and usually not so much with self-published stuff, either. it's only when I specifically aim to write stuff for publication that I end up in a self-conscious zone where I'm trying to guide my work to a specific stylistic goal, and usually failing. It's not just self-conscious striving for publication - it's also trying out stylistic experiments that don't work, which is what some of Raven's Children is - but the point, I guess, is that I'm finding myself doing it more naturally and less self-consciously as I learn to relax and settle into celebrating my own strengths as a writer rather than trying to fight them.)

I've been trying my hand at some romance lately, which has never entirely been my cup of tea, but one of the reasons why I thought it might be a fun way for me to write something salable is because romance is all about the happy ending. Ironically that is one of the big reasons why it often isn't my cup of tea, because I prefer my happy endings uncertain (snatched from the jaws of defeat!) and dislike knowing from the beginning that things will work out for the characters. On the other hand, I have read romance that I liked, and the process of figuring out the aspects that made me like it, and then attempting to translate that into my own writing, has been really interesting.

Edited to add, because I'm still thinking about this: I remember commenting as far back as 2003/2004 that Kismet, which was my "play place" - a dumping ground for ideas that I considered too bizarre, silly or cliche to burden my "serious" novels with - was getting a great audience response and was so fun to work on that, unlike RC, I never got tired of it and couldn't really see myself getting tired of it. But I don't think I had ever carried it through to the conclusion I've come to now: that what made Kismet fun to read and to write was that it was closer to my natural "voice" than anything else I was writing at the time, and that was a style worth pursuing.

Edited yet again: To add another link! I knew there was something else I wanted to link here. The SF/fantasy webzine Crossed Genres is trying to raise the funds at Kickstarter to pay their authors pro rates. (If you visit the page, there is more info - you'll notice they've already met their first goal, but since that went smoothly, now they're aiming for a second, higher goal that requires significantly more funding.) It would be great to have another pro SF market out there, especially since my general experience with them has been that they're great to work with!