(content warning: discussion of ableist terms, reference to other slurs)
I changed the URL and title of this blog yesterday, to remove the ableist slur 'stupid'. I apologise wholeheartedly for not doing this sooner and for failing to treat this issue with the gravitas it deserves until now.
The rest of this post is addressed to anyone who thinks this is making mountains out of molehills, or that I needn't have bothered making the change.
Let me start with the obvious: words matter. They have power. I'd be a pretty poor writer if I didn't believe that. And power is always dangerous - not necessarily always harmful, but always accompanied by the danger of causing harm.
Words can become harmful in lots of ways, but one of the most serious is when used to justify (or in the justification of) harmful policies. We rightly regard racial slurs like the n-words as harmful because of their association with governmental policies and societal patterns of slavery and segregation - policies and patterns with costs both measurable (in death and injury figures) and immeasurable (in lost human potential and complex, oppressive legacies).
Why, then, is 'stupid' harmful? It is, after all, a very common word, and one not normally connected to any great opprobrium.
The simplest answer to this is a direct comparison with racist language. Constructions of intelligence have sometimes been used as viciously as constructs of race to justify policies every bit as horrible. The eugenics movements of the early 20th century are the best examples of this - in the 20s and 30s, many 'developed' nations including Britain and America forcibly sterilised people who failed to meet certain standards of 'intelligence' (usually measured with IQ tests - the exact purpose and value of which remains controversial to this day). More famously, Nazi Germany sent people to concentration camps and even gas chambers on 'intelligence' grounds as well as racial.
It's generally good policy to not throw around as insults words that the Nazis used to justify genocide.
One final thing; I want to point out how easy it is to overlook this issue. When I started this blog, I was twenty-three, already in possession of a master's degree and well on my way to a doctorate - hardly able to claim general ignorance, and yet I had no idea that my choice of phrase (a reference to Bill Clinton's famous campaign policy from 1992) could be harmful. Worse, I was literally working in disability support for students at the time - none of my (actually quite limited) training had addressed this issue.
And it gets even worse than that, because a year or two later I was working with a student whose course included modules of disability studies and special educational needs. There were several lectures about ableist language, including specific problems with the language of intelligence, and I still didn't see a problem with my own blog title. It's very easy to dismiss issues when they require you to change.
Learning to rid my everyday vocabulary of words like 'stupid' - to put them in the procribed category where they belong - is not easy. But there are plenty of better words, both as insults and to refer to things that are strange/absurd. We can - and should - live without words that are imbued with such harm.
Here's a great resource for examining ableism generally, and here's their excellent collection of articles addressing specific ableist terms.
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Monday, 9 March 2015
Thursday, 6 November 2014
NaNoWriMo 2014
(Disclaimer: contains shameless self-congratulation and bragging. You are under no obligation to read any further).
When I finished NaNoWriMo 2010 in a little under 8 days, I knew I could do better. I proved that in 2011, by bringing my personal best down to under 7 days. At that point, I foolishly opined that I could complete the 50k in five days, if I had them completely free. That would require me to be able to take time off work, though, which has not really been possible for financial reasons in the intervening time.
I improved my personal best again in 2012, to six days and fourteen hours, despite still having various professional commitments. Last year I was on track to better even that, but my chosen project ran into a thick tangle of character and theme issues which weren't fixable within a NaNoWriMo mindset (it would be fair to say, too, that I neither prepared well nor was quite as committed to it as my ambition required). Having thought at one point that I would break 6 days, I ended up finishing the 50k on the last day of the month, and then only by switching to another project altogether for the last 10-15k.
That actually gave my writing confidence quite a hit, and this year I've been going back and forth over whether to do NaNo. The biggest question was what project I was going to write; with the Second Realm over, I was having all kinds of trouble deciding what to work on next anyway, and choosing a project suited to the intensive, relatively research-and-planning-light NaNo process just made that question more difficult.
I settled on a plan whereby I'd only do NaNo if I could finish last year's project before November, so that I could get on with its sequel this year (that series remains almost uniquely suited to NaNo, as far as my ideas go). I failed utterly to get last year's project finished on time, though I did at least make some progress.
So I thought I wouldn't write something new for NaNo. I figured I could get on with one of the many bits of editing I need to do. Then I discovered that reading week for the courses I teach on falls this year on this week, the first week of NaNo. Since this entails not having to do anything this week for what this year is the much more significant of my jobs, I was gutted that I didn't have a proper NaNo project. I started to think about some way to make the 'edit things' plan more concrete.
Then life dropped another heavy hint. My current client for my other job turned out to be on a field trip from last Friday through this Wednesday (i.e. yesterday). Since that meant not seeing him until Friday of this week, the first week of November was now completely free. I gritted my teeth and tried to pretend I'd never bragged to myself that I could do it in five days if I had them completely free. I told myself I'd get through an entire editing pass on the season 1 collection of The Second Realm instead (no mean feat given that's currently around 125,000 words). I prepared accordingly.
And then the powers that be got sick of dropping hints altogether. I woke up on Thursday morning from a dream about the tail end of a horror movie scenario, the heroine finally escaping and burning down the haunted house, to realise that I had been given the seed of a new idea, well-tuned to address a theme I've been keen to address for some time.
Even then, I prevaricated somewhat, hemming and hawing over whether I had a setting I could write in, an ending I could write towards, a selection of characters which befitted this commitment. The muse, or whatever other vengeful god it is that sees to it we are required to make good on our outrageous boasting, obligingly answered my every question.
I wouldn't speak in such mystic terms, but seriously, it is sometimes pretty hard not to be superstitious. An entire novel plan fell into my lap in the space of about thirty hours right on the cusp of the best writing opportunity I've had in about three years.
So I wrote the damn thing. Well, in honesty, I wrote about half of it, padding frantically and egregiously. It's NaNo, there isn't time to stop and think about whether what you're writing really serves your final goals. The last day's progress included some pretty big I'm-definitely-editing-this-out-later moments; the main character's mother turned into an appauling comedic stereotype in the midst of an otherwise serious narrative about haunting and harassment, and I took a couple of thousand words to just tell a random unrelated ghost story mid-scene, for example.
But as of about 11:30 last night, I'd written my 50,000 words, in five days flat. Strangely, it's been physiologically the least debilitating NaNoWriMo I've ever done. I planned better, was careful to always get enough sleep, to take regular breaks, to make sure at least some of my snacks were healthy (cherry tomatoes are god's gift to the compulsive snacker). Today, apart from a slightly sore wrist, I feel great.
Whether that feeling will persist once I go back and look at what I've written remains to be seen. I do intend to finish a first draft this month, though I'm taking a couple of days off first. If you want to see me actually writing in real time, you can follow me on Twitch.tv, where I've been live-streaming most of my writing for the past few days (disclaimer: at the moment, it's just my Word doc, no webcam or anything, and I've no idea whether it's interesting to watch).
In the meantime, I'm off to look up the definition of 'month'.
When I finished NaNoWriMo 2010 in a little under 8 days, I knew I could do better. I proved that in 2011, by bringing my personal best down to under 7 days. At that point, I foolishly opined that I could complete the 50k in five days, if I had them completely free. That would require me to be able to take time off work, though, which has not really been possible for financial reasons in the intervening time.
I improved my personal best again in 2012, to six days and fourteen hours, despite still having various professional commitments. Last year I was on track to better even that, but my chosen project ran into a thick tangle of character and theme issues which weren't fixable within a NaNoWriMo mindset (it would be fair to say, too, that I neither prepared well nor was quite as committed to it as my ambition required). Having thought at one point that I would break 6 days, I ended up finishing the 50k on the last day of the month, and then only by switching to another project altogether for the last 10-15k.
That actually gave my writing confidence quite a hit, and this year I've been going back and forth over whether to do NaNo. The biggest question was what project I was going to write; with the Second Realm over, I was having all kinds of trouble deciding what to work on next anyway, and choosing a project suited to the intensive, relatively research-and-planning-light NaNo process just made that question more difficult.
I settled on a plan whereby I'd only do NaNo if I could finish last year's project before November, so that I could get on with its sequel this year (that series remains almost uniquely suited to NaNo, as far as my ideas go). I failed utterly to get last year's project finished on time, though I did at least make some progress.
So I thought I wouldn't write something new for NaNo. I figured I could get on with one of the many bits of editing I need to do. Then I discovered that reading week for the courses I teach on falls this year on this week, the first week of NaNo. Since this entails not having to do anything this week for what this year is the much more significant of my jobs, I was gutted that I didn't have a proper NaNo project. I started to think about some way to make the 'edit things' plan more concrete.
Then life dropped another heavy hint. My current client for my other job turned out to be on a field trip from last Friday through this Wednesday (i.e. yesterday). Since that meant not seeing him until Friday of this week, the first week of November was now completely free. I gritted my teeth and tried to pretend I'd never bragged to myself that I could do it in five days if I had them completely free. I told myself I'd get through an entire editing pass on the season 1 collection of The Second Realm instead (no mean feat given that's currently around 125,000 words). I prepared accordingly.
And then the powers that be got sick of dropping hints altogether. I woke up on Thursday morning from a dream about the tail end of a horror movie scenario, the heroine finally escaping and burning down the haunted house, to realise that I had been given the seed of a new idea, well-tuned to address a theme I've been keen to address for some time.
Even then, I prevaricated somewhat, hemming and hawing over whether I had a setting I could write in, an ending I could write towards, a selection of characters which befitted this commitment. The muse, or whatever other vengeful god it is that sees to it we are required to make good on our outrageous boasting, obligingly answered my every question.
I wouldn't speak in such mystic terms, but seriously, it is sometimes pretty hard not to be superstitious. An entire novel plan fell into my lap in the space of about thirty hours right on the cusp of the best writing opportunity I've had in about three years.
So I wrote the damn thing. Well, in honesty, I wrote about half of it, padding frantically and egregiously. It's NaNo, there isn't time to stop and think about whether what you're writing really serves your final goals. The last day's progress included some pretty big I'm-definitely-editing-this-out-later moments; the main character's mother turned into an appauling comedic stereotype in the midst of an otherwise serious narrative about haunting and harassment, and I took a couple of thousand words to just tell a random unrelated ghost story mid-scene, for example.
But as of about 11:30 last night, I'd written my 50,000 words, in five days flat. Strangely, it's been physiologically the least debilitating NaNoWriMo I've ever done. I planned better, was careful to always get enough sleep, to take regular breaks, to make sure at least some of my snacks were healthy (cherry tomatoes are god's gift to the compulsive snacker). Today, apart from a slightly sore wrist, I feel great.
Whether that feeling will persist once I go back and look at what I've written remains to be seen. I do intend to finish a first draft this month, though I'm taking a couple of days off first. If you want to see me actually writing in real time, you can follow me on Twitch.tv, where I've been live-streaming most of my writing for the past few days (disclaimer: at the moment, it's just my Word doc, no webcam or anything, and I've no idea whether it's interesting to watch).
In the meantime, I'm off to look up the definition of 'month'.
Wednesday, 29 October 2014
Diversity
My books are not very diverse. In all my published work and in my trunk novels, I have never written a black character. I've never written an openly gay character, or one who is not cisgendered. I briefly approached disability as a topic with Dora in the first season of The Second Realm, but fell into at least one common failing of mainstream disability narratives - the disability-that-is-also-a-superpower (think Daredevil).
I could give narrative reasons for at least some of this, but that would be to paper over a genuine personal and creative blind spot. It's a problem I've been growing aware of for some time, but I think it's finally reaching the point of jumping from 'aware of' to 'actually not giving myself a free pass anymore'. (Even the fact that I could be aware of my problem without feeling motivated to deal with it is a symptom of the problem).
#Weneeddiversebooks has appeared prominently on my Twitter feed recently, with the launch of a new Indiegogo campaign, raising money to fund grants for authors, classroom campaigns and other activism in support of diverse authors and books. I've just donated, because part of the problem is that I very seldom encountered diversity in the books I read growing up.
But throwing money at other people won't fix my books or my writing. That would be Medici thinking - buying my way out of past sins. I need to learn how to write outside my own demographic.
For that, I need diverse books. There are no black characters in my books because I have carelessly, lazily imitated patterns established by the books I have read, which in my genre are overwhelmingly about white people, with other races either sensationalised or rendered as primitive savages (sometimes both at the same time). The same goes for disabled and LGBTQIA people.
It's not enough for me to contribute to the funding of diverse literature. I need to seek out whatever diverse literature exists and read it. I have (ballpark) twenty million words of epic fantasy on my bookcase, in which I can think, off the top of my head, of perhaps two well-written, non-stereotyped, non-sensationalised characters outside the straight, white, able, privileged norm. That's a big imbalance to redress.
And, of course, I need to fix the imbalance in my own work. That doesn't necessarily mean meeting some arbitrary quota of 'diverse characters', nor does it mean centering my storytelling on people whose lives I do not know from the inside - it's not my place to tell other people's stories, and doing so runs the risks of appropriation and misrepresentation. But I've got to stop writing worlds where the only race is white, the only sexuality is straight, and no character is disabled.
Fantasy novels present a reality that is not necessarily our own, but they are inescapably part of our reality - not necessarily presentations of it, but always representations of it. Diversity exists in our reality, so it must be represented in fantasy (the question of how is complex, interesting and difficult, but a topic for another time).
I don't know if I can fix The Second Realm, which I'm in the process of re-editing for a collected edition at the moment, and I'm not willing to abandon it outright (either by unpublishing it or leaving it in its current state), but I'll be choosing my next project very carefully. And, of course, following #weneeddiversebooks intently for everything I can learn.
I could give narrative reasons for at least some of this, but that would be to paper over a genuine personal and creative blind spot. It's a problem I've been growing aware of for some time, but I think it's finally reaching the point of jumping from 'aware of' to 'actually not giving myself a free pass anymore'. (Even the fact that I could be aware of my problem without feeling motivated to deal with it is a symptom of the problem).
#Weneeddiversebooks has appeared prominently on my Twitter feed recently, with the launch of a new Indiegogo campaign, raising money to fund grants for authors, classroom campaigns and other activism in support of diverse authors and books. I've just donated, because part of the problem is that I very seldom encountered diversity in the books I read growing up.
But throwing money at other people won't fix my books or my writing. That would be Medici thinking - buying my way out of past sins. I need to learn how to write outside my own demographic.
For that, I need diverse books. There are no black characters in my books because I have carelessly, lazily imitated patterns established by the books I have read, which in my genre are overwhelmingly about white people, with other races either sensationalised or rendered as primitive savages (sometimes both at the same time). The same goes for disabled and LGBTQIA people.
It's not enough for me to contribute to the funding of diverse literature. I need to seek out whatever diverse literature exists and read it. I have (ballpark) twenty million words of epic fantasy on my bookcase, in which I can think, off the top of my head, of perhaps two well-written, non-stereotyped, non-sensationalised characters outside the straight, white, able, privileged norm. That's a big imbalance to redress.
And, of course, I need to fix the imbalance in my own work. That doesn't necessarily mean meeting some arbitrary quota of 'diverse characters', nor does it mean centering my storytelling on people whose lives I do not know from the inside - it's not my place to tell other people's stories, and doing so runs the risks of appropriation and misrepresentation. But I've got to stop writing worlds where the only race is white, the only sexuality is straight, and no character is disabled.
Fantasy novels present a reality that is not necessarily our own, but they are inescapably part of our reality - not necessarily presentations of it, but always representations of it. Diversity exists in our reality, so it must be represented in fantasy (the question of how is complex, interesting and difficult, but a topic for another time).
I don't know if I can fix The Second Realm, which I'm in the process of re-editing for a collected edition at the moment, and I'm not willing to abandon it outright (either by unpublishing it or leaving it in its current state), but I'll be choosing my next project very carefully. And, of course, following #weneeddiversebooks intently for everything I can learn.
Wednesday, 22 October 2014
New Realms and Old
So, it's done then. The Second Realm is complete.
What the hell do I do now?
Actually, before I get to the future (...he said as if he wasn't entering it right now), I'd like to take a moment to look back over the series and what it's done for me.
I never actually wrote a blog post at the start of the project laying out my aims for it (though somewhere in the past three years I've convinced myself I did). In October of 2011, I'd just published Heaven Can Wait (which I might finally get around to republishing soon, but I'm not sure), and was two years into my PhD, with the hard part very much still ahead of me.
I wasn't sure how much attention I'd be able to give to my writing and platform-building over the coming couple of years, a concern that proved well-justified. I'd made what felt like a good start, joining a warm, passionate and very active community of authors spread out across social networking and the blogosphere, but it was very early days - this blog, for example, enjoyed less than a thousand pageviews in the month that The Second Realm launched (this month is on course to be the first to break 50k).
I felt a bit like I was trying to kindle (see what I did there?) a fire in a high wind. Constant attention would be needed to maintain progress, during a period in which I would have little attention to spare. A serial looked like a good option - a way to write, publish and promote in small chunks scattered through my otherwise busy life.
This wasn't just about promotion and platform-building, by the way. It was also about practicing and developing my craft. In the thirteen months November 2010-November 2011, I wrote five whole novels, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to do that again any time soon. My technique had improved markedly over the time and I didn't want to start back-sliding.
So The Second Realm had two purposes, really; to keep me writing and to keep me publishing. It wasn't, initially at least, intended to make any money. Episodes went out completely free (except for the few that I pushed onto Amazon, where I couldn't set 'free' as a price), and I'm not convinced that my introduction of pay-what-you-like mechanisms from season 2 onwards was a well-thought-out strategy.
Given those goals, I think I have to consider The Second Realm a success. I finished the thing, so I must have kept writing. Indeed, my writing has definitely benefitted, not just from repeated practice, but also from regular, robust feedback. As a writer, I've not degenerated, I've advanced.
As a platform-building exercise, the analysis has to be a bit more complex. On Smashwords, episodes and samples have been downloaded a total of over 9000 times, but while the persistent growth of that number over time entails continuing (and even growing) interest, it's not clear how much of that represents people actually reading my words. The same goes for the traffic on this blog, which has shot up over the last year - there's a lot of page-viewing happening, but not much visible sign of engagement (I get over a hundred spam comments a day, but that hardly counts).
Still, my storefront on Smashwords has 32 book covers on it, and the number 9000 is a pretty good calling-card. Money has trickled in, though not yet enough to justify the expense of getting a passport so I can apply to the US IRS for tax treaty status and actually collect my earnings.
The test will be whether there's significant carry-over into whatever I publish next, and that requires me to publish something. Which brings us up to date. I have several options, and would love nothing more than to go for all of them (I can't, after all, out-compete myself), but the demands of earning a living make that infeasible right now. When I make up my mind, you'll all be the first to know.
One thing that can't be underestimated is the value to my self-esteem and self-perception of having finished this thing. I don't feel like I have to cringe anymore when someone asks me 'yeah, but are you really an author, or are you just saying that?'. I can give them a link. Hopefully soon, I'll be able to hand them a physical copy of (at least part of) The Second Realm, or maybe hit them with it if they get really uppity about it.
Thanks for taking this journey with me. Here's to the next leg!
What the hell do I do now?
Actually, before I get to the future (...he said as if he wasn't entering it right now), I'd like to take a moment to look back over the series and what it's done for me.
I never actually wrote a blog post at the start of the project laying out my aims for it (though somewhere in the past three years I've convinced myself I did). In October of 2011, I'd just published Heaven Can Wait (which I might finally get around to republishing soon, but I'm not sure), and was two years into my PhD, with the hard part very much still ahead of me.
I wasn't sure how much attention I'd be able to give to my writing and platform-building over the coming couple of years, a concern that proved well-justified. I'd made what felt like a good start, joining a warm, passionate and very active community of authors spread out across social networking and the blogosphere, but it was very early days - this blog, for example, enjoyed less than a thousand pageviews in the month that The Second Realm launched (this month is on course to be the first to break 50k).
I felt a bit like I was trying to kindle (see what I did there?) a fire in a high wind. Constant attention would be needed to maintain progress, during a period in which I would have little attention to spare. A serial looked like a good option - a way to write, publish and promote in small chunks scattered through my otherwise busy life.
This wasn't just about promotion and platform-building, by the way. It was also about practicing and developing my craft. In the thirteen months November 2010-November 2011, I wrote five whole novels, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to do that again any time soon. My technique had improved markedly over the time and I didn't want to start back-sliding.
So The Second Realm had two purposes, really; to keep me writing and to keep me publishing. It wasn't, initially at least, intended to make any money. Episodes went out completely free (except for the few that I pushed onto Amazon, where I couldn't set 'free' as a price), and I'm not convinced that my introduction of pay-what-you-like mechanisms from season 2 onwards was a well-thought-out strategy.
Given those goals, I think I have to consider The Second Realm a success. I finished the thing, so I must have kept writing. Indeed, my writing has definitely benefitted, not just from repeated practice, but also from regular, robust feedback. As a writer, I've not degenerated, I've advanced.
As a platform-building exercise, the analysis has to be a bit more complex. On Smashwords, episodes and samples have been downloaded a total of over 9000 times, but while the persistent growth of that number over time entails continuing (and even growing) interest, it's not clear how much of that represents people actually reading my words. The same goes for the traffic on this blog, which has shot up over the last year - there's a lot of page-viewing happening, but not much visible sign of engagement (I get over a hundred spam comments a day, but that hardly counts).
Still, my storefront on Smashwords has 32 book covers on it, and the number 9000 is a pretty good calling-card. Money has trickled in, though not yet enough to justify the expense of getting a passport so I can apply to the US IRS for tax treaty status and actually collect my earnings.
The test will be whether there's significant carry-over into whatever I publish next, and that requires me to publish something. Which brings us up to date. I have several options, and would love nothing more than to go for all of them (I can't, after all, out-compete myself), but the demands of earning a living make that infeasible right now. When I make up my mind, you'll all be the first to know.
One thing that can't be underestimated is the value to my self-esteem and self-perception of having finished this thing. I don't feel like I have to cringe anymore when someone asks me 'yeah, but are you really an author, or are you just saying that?'. I can give them a link. Hopefully soon, I'll be able to hand them a physical copy of (at least part of) The Second Realm, or maybe hit them with it if they get really uppity about it.
Thanks for taking this journey with me. Here's to the next leg!
Friday, 17 October 2014
Acknowledgement
Lynne Hunt has been my beta reader/crit buddy for The Second Realm since episode 3, back in February of 2012. I'd initially planned to try to get a different test reader for every episode, which quickly proved both impractical and misguided (not only was The Second Realm not the instant, overnight literary revolution I'd hoped for, but as a serial it was quite useful for a reader to have read all the episodes, not just one random chunk from the middle of it). I got the vague idea Lynne might be the perfect person for the job when she instantly identified the episode title, A Hole in Her Mind, as a reference to Babylon 5.
"Yes," I thought, "this is someone I can trust."
And trust I could. Since episode 3, Lynne has fielded everything I've thrown at her. Some 280,000 words of the main series, various side projects, a number of other things I've written and wanted a second opinion on. When I've emailed her saying 'I really needed to ask you about this last week, can you get back to me yesterday?', which has happened far more times than it should have, she's done everything short of actually bending time to help me out.
Sartre argued that we only ask people for advice when we know what they're going to say. I'm normally a fan of the man, but working with Lynne has proved him dead wrong on this point. She's been consistently as incisive as a surgeon in identifying the weaknesses of my first drafts - weaknessesd I'd never in a million years have spotted myself.
The Second Realm is stronger for Lynne's attention, but I am also a stronger writer. There can be no better lesson than having someone follow you through your own work for a long period of time, pointing out - precisely but never harshly - its weaknesses. For a long time, for example, I had a pathological inability to start stories without a page or two of waffling. Lynne called me on it every time, until I finally started editing my own first pages before sending them to her.
It hasn't all been criticism, either. People somewhere in the world are definitely reading The Second Realm (it passed 9000 total downloads on Smashwords last week), but Lynne is the only one I hear from regularly. Writing can be a lonely process; Lynne has made it less so. Intimidating as feedback can sometimes be, I always look forward to an email from her; her enthusiasm for and dedication to my little project has been heartening and profoundly moving.
Of course, it's not all about me. Lynne is a fine writer in her own right; I've been lucky over the years to have a sneak peek here and there at her work. She has nothing for me to plug at the moment, but you can be damn sure you'll hear of it when she does.
And as if that wasn't enough virtue, she's also a keen charity fund-raiser. Last time I met her in the real world, she was having her head shaved for charity whilst simultaneously hand-cooking a bajillion pizzas to feed the crowd assembled at her house for an annual charity party she hosts. As someone who can barely manage 'take pizza out of freezer, remove packaging, put in oven', I found this awesome just as a feat of domestic organisation, never mind the hundreds of pounds raised for a local hospice charity.
Lynne, you're one of the finest examples of humanity I know, and I'm honoured to have had the benefit of your wit and wisdom these past three years.
Thank you.
"Yes," I thought, "this is someone I can trust."
And trust I could. Since episode 3, Lynne has fielded everything I've thrown at her. Some 280,000 words of the main series, various side projects, a number of other things I've written and wanted a second opinion on. When I've emailed her saying 'I really needed to ask you about this last week, can you get back to me yesterday?', which has happened far more times than it should have, she's done everything short of actually bending time to help me out.
Sartre argued that we only ask people for advice when we know what they're going to say. I'm normally a fan of the man, but working with Lynne has proved him dead wrong on this point. She's been consistently as incisive as a surgeon in identifying the weaknesses of my first drafts - weaknessesd I'd never in a million years have spotted myself.
The Second Realm is stronger for Lynne's attention, but I am also a stronger writer. There can be no better lesson than having someone follow you through your own work for a long period of time, pointing out - precisely but never harshly - its weaknesses. For a long time, for example, I had a pathological inability to start stories without a page or two of waffling. Lynne called me on it every time, until I finally started editing my own first pages before sending them to her.
It hasn't all been criticism, either. People somewhere in the world are definitely reading The Second Realm (it passed 9000 total downloads on Smashwords last week), but Lynne is the only one I hear from regularly. Writing can be a lonely process; Lynne has made it less so. Intimidating as feedback can sometimes be, I always look forward to an email from her; her enthusiasm for and dedication to my little project has been heartening and profoundly moving.
Of course, it's not all about me. Lynne is a fine writer in her own right; I've been lucky over the years to have a sneak peek here and there at her work. She has nothing for me to plug at the moment, but you can be damn sure you'll hear of it when she does.
And as if that wasn't enough virtue, she's also a keen charity fund-raiser. Last time I met her in the real world, she was having her head shaved for charity whilst simultaneously hand-cooking a bajillion pizzas to feed the crowd assembled at her house for an annual charity party she hosts. As someone who can barely manage 'take pizza out of freezer, remove packaging, put in oven', I found this awesome just as a feat of domestic organisation, never mind the hundreds of pounds raised for a local hospice charity.
Lynne, you're one of the finest examples of humanity I know, and I'm honoured to have had the benefit of your wit and wisdom these past three years.
Thank you.
Thursday, 9 October 2014
Endings
As I said last week, I'm spending most of this month on posts relating to the end of The Second Realm (a week from Saturday!). Today I'm tackling a topic that's been on my mind most of the year: what makes a good ending to a story?
I've been unsatisfied by the endings of most of the books I've read this year, or at least by the endings of most of the stories I've read this year - several of those stories have been multi-book affairs, and I don't demand to be satisfied by the ending of book 1. (Don't worry, by the way, there are no spoilers ahead).
I have to be careful with words like 'unsatisfied', of course. Literary types, who enjoy throwing stones at us lowly genre writers, are scornful of the idea of 'satisfying' and 'unrealistic' endings. What they seem to have in mind are 'happily ever after' endings where everything in the entire world is resolved and no-one will ever be unhappy again.
When I say 'I was unsatisfied', though, all I mean is that I felt the book flopped towards the end - that it lost or squandered the power built up through the course of the story.
Whether or not the endings of these books were 'happy', most of them left me feeling like one or more key themes had been dropped short of full development. Sometimes a character's motivation would shift out of nowhere, or he/she would be cheated of the opportunity to express their final development in response to the book's central conflict.
With The Second Realm, as I discussed last week, the central theme is narratives of heroism. A simple ending, then, would be some of the characters doing heroic things and saving the day - this, I think, is the kind of ending people have in mind when they sneer at 'satisfying' endings. The problem with it as an ending is that it only has one thing to say about heroism - that it happens, or perhaps that it feels good.
An ending where no characters do heroic things and the day isn't saved would be no better; it would say the opposite of the upbeat ending, but it would not say more. There's more to an ending's being satisfying, or complex, or interesting, than it acknowledging the persistence of negative emotions.
And it's possible for a complex ending to be both joyous and realistic. I read a book recently in which the Vice-President of the US, after years of being a political joke, is thrust into the Presidency by the assassination of his predecessor. He faces stiff opposition from the Senate to a liberal legislative programme including tax cuts for millions of struggling citizens and long-overdue social justice measures, but gets it all passed through a combination of political deftness, determination and skulduggery.
That's not to say everything is resolved by the end of the book; the complexities of the new President's nature threaten the harmony of his cabinet, he has earned the enmity of powerful forces in the legislature, and there's a devastating war on the horizon. The author could have written a tragedy instead of a triumph by letting the story run a little further before drawing it to a close; he chose to end on the heroic high of legislative triumph.
I promised there would be no spoilers; those aren't, they're history. The book was a biography of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro's The Passage of Power. It's not actually the last in the series, since there's one volume yet to come (one we know will have a downer ending), but it's probably the most satisfying ending I've read this year. As for whether it's unrealistic? Well, it's exactly as unrealistic as reality, which is pretty unreal some of the time...
I've been unsatisfied by the endings of most of the books I've read this year, or at least by the endings of most of the stories I've read this year - several of those stories have been multi-book affairs, and I don't demand to be satisfied by the ending of book 1. (Don't worry, by the way, there are no spoilers ahead).
I have to be careful with words like 'unsatisfied', of course. Literary types, who enjoy throwing stones at us lowly genre writers, are scornful of the idea of 'satisfying' and 'unrealistic' endings. What they seem to have in mind are 'happily ever after' endings where everything in the entire world is resolved and no-one will ever be unhappy again.
When I say 'I was unsatisfied', though, all I mean is that I felt the book flopped towards the end - that it lost or squandered the power built up through the course of the story.
Whether or not the endings of these books were 'happy', most of them left me feeling like one or more key themes had been dropped short of full development. Sometimes a character's motivation would shift out of nowhere, or he/she would be cheated of the opportunity to express their final development in response to the book's central conflict.
With The Second Realm, as I discussed last week, the central theme is narratives of heroism. A simple ending, then, would be some of the characters doing heroic things and saving the day - this, I think, is the kind of ending people have in mind when they sneer at 'satisfying' endings. The problem with it as an ending is that it only has one thing to say about heroism - that it happens, or perhaps that it feels good.
An ending where no characters do heroic things and the day isn't saved would be no better; it would say the opposite of the upbeat ending, but it would not say more. There's more to an ending's being satisfying, or complex, or interesting, than it acknowledging the persistence of negative emotions.
And it's possible for a complex ending to be both joyous and realistic. I read a book recently in which the Vice-President of the US, after years of being a political joke, is thrust into the Presidency by the assassination of his predecessor. He faces stiff opposition from the Senate to a liberal legislative programme including tax cuts for millions of struggling citizens and long-overdue social justice measures, but gets it all passed through a combination of political deftness, determination and skulduggery.
That's not to say everything is resolved by the end of the book; the complexities of the new President's nature threaten the harmony of his cabinet, he has earned the enmity of powerful forces in the legislature, and there's a devastating war on the horizon. The author could have written a tragedy instead of a triumph by letting the story run a little further before drawing it to a close; he chose to end on the heroic high of legislative triumph.
I promised there would be no spoilers; those aren't, they're history. The book was a biography of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro's The Passage of Power. It's not actually the last in the series, since there's one volume yet to come (one we know will have a downer ending), but it's probably the most satisfying ending I've read this year. As for whether it's unrealistic? Well, it's exactly as unrealistic as reality, which is pretty unreal some of the time...
Tuesday, 30 September 2014
Changing the World
Epic fantasy, the (sub)genre I feel most at home in, is about the changing of a world. Done well, as for example by Janny Wurts, Robin Hobb or Patrick Rothfuss, it is about the changing of a world through the changing of characters caught at the crux of events. Done poorly, and this once I'll refrain from slinging mud, it can be about the changing of a world as the result of lazy, simplistic narratives about heroism and destiny.
Why reflect on this now? Well, in three weeks' time, shortly after its third birthday, The Second Realm will come to an end. I'm going to be spending the next few weeks reflecting on the series in different ways, and I want to start with one of its key themes, which is the problem with lazy, simplistic narratives of heroism.
This is not a theme that came about deliberately. When I began work on the project, Rel was the Hero, and that meant he was going to Change the World, guided more by the forces of narrativium than either his character or the situation I was trying to construct around him. It was only as I started to plan out the arc of the story (and work out how to end it) that I ran into the shortcomings of this approach.
But I'm quite happy to have ended up tackling this theme. Rel gets some of his near-messianic self-belief from me. I struggle, when addressing changes I'd like to see in this world, to not think of myself as the future leader of such changes. The lessons I have taught Rel in the story are lessons I need to learn myself.
Confronted with questions about whether he's doing the right thing, whether he's engaging deeply enough with the situation, Rel often responds by dismissing the criticism and the views behind it. In his mind, he's standing unbowed in the face of cowardice or collaboration or outright conspiracy - he views this courage as the essence of leadership. Truthfully, though, it has more to do with paranoia and self-absorption, the sense that his personal narrative of himself as hero has no room for dissent.
In some ways, the recognition of and listening to others that Rel must learn (and that I'm still learning) is just a matter of growing up a bit. It's not necessarily a bad thing to centre your own world on yourself and your personal story, provided you can recognise that everyone else has the same right. Rel tends to assume that, where people he encounters don't fall into line with his narrative, their stances are chosen purely to obstruct him, as if they don't exist outside his encounters with them.
With one or two exceptions, Rel isn't much good with people, but he does learn eventually that genuine concern (and even, shock horror, complex personalities) can lie behind the faces of people who disagree with him. And, because there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of heroism, properly tempered, he does get a moment of heroism, though it's not one he (or I, for that matter) would have been able to recognise as such at the start of the story.
Why reflect on this now? Well, in three weeks' time, shortly after its third birthday, The Second Realm will come to an end. I'm going to be spending the next few weeks reflecting on the series in different ways, and I want to start with one of its key themes, which is the problem with lazy, simplistic narratives of heroism.
This is not a theme that came about deliberately. When I began work on the project, Rel was the Hero, and that meant he was going to Change the World, guided more by the forces of narrativium than either his character or the situation I was trying to construct around him. It was only as I started to plan out the arc of the story (and work out how to end it) that I ran into the shortcomings of this approach.
But I'm quite happy to have ended up tackling this theme. Rel gets some of his near-messianic self-belief from me. I struggle, when addressing changes I'd like to see in this world, to not think of myself as the future leader of such changes. The lessons I have taught Rel in the story are lessons I need to learn myself.
Confronted with questions about whether he's doing the right thing, whether he's engaging deeply enough with the situation, Rel often responds by dismissing the criticism and the views behind it. In his mind, he's standing unbowed in the face of cowardice or collaboration or outright conspiracy - he views this courage as the essence of leadership. Truthfully, though, it has more to do with paranoia and self-absorption, the sense that his personal narrative of himself as hero has no room for dissent.
In some ways, the recognition of and listening to others that Rel must learn (and that I'm still learning) is just a matter of growing up a bit. It's not necessarily a bad thing to centre your own world on yourself and your personal story, provided you can recognise that everyone else has the same right. Rel tends to assume that, where people he encounters don't fall into line with his narrative, their stances are chosen purely to obstruct him, as if they don't exist outside his encounters with them.
With one or two exceptions, Rel isn't much good with people, but he does learn eventually that genuine concern (and even, shock horror, complex personalities) can lie behind the faces of people who disagree with him. And, because there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of heroism, properly tempered, he does get a moment of heroism, though it's not one he (or I, for that matter) would have been able to recognise as such at the start of the story.
Tuesday, 16 September 2014
New words
More from the book of 'Things that really irritate Rik':
No, not the first part, the second. The bit about how new words are killing the language. I actually followed this one up to check if Conan really said it, and was disappointed to find that he did - normally I like the guy, but I think his sentiments are badly misplaced on this one.
In fairness, it's not as bad as the normal run of memes on this topic, which tend to suggest that the mere fact of a new word being entered into the dictionary is evidence of the death of the language. It feels like it happens every time new words are added to the Oxford, and every time, it makes my blood boil.
Language isn't sacred. Powerful? Yes. Vitally important? Certainly. But immutable, incorruptible, unchanging? Quite the opposite. The world is constantly changing; to insist that a language not change is to demand that it detach itself from the world. Contrary to Conan's quip, change in language is evidence of good health, not imminent death. Want to see a dead language? Latin, which has been preserved near-perfectly across centuries.
Why was 'selfie' picked as the word of 2013? Because Oxford's research saw its use rise by seventeen thousand percent in that year. Like it or not, many people talked about selfies in 2013, many of them in order to criticise or disapprove. Selfies may be an abhorrent phenomenon (they're actually not that bad, as human innovations go - vanity and self-absorption are hardly the worst of our vices), but if people are going to talk about them, someone had better keep a note of what they mean.
The presence of a word in a dictionary, or even on a list of words influential or important in a given year, isn't an endorsement of what the word refers to. It can (and probably does, in the case of 'selfie') indicate a great deal of disapproval, and since it's quite difficult to disapprove of something you don't have a word for, surely it's better to have the word than be without?
No, not the first part, the second. The bit about how new words are killing the language. I actually followed this one up to check if Conan really said it, and was disappointed to find that he did - normally I like the guy, but I think his sentiments are badly misplaced on this one.
In fairness, it's not as bad as the normal run of memes on this topic, which tend to suggest that the mere fact of a new word being entered into the dictionary is evidence of the death of the language. It feels like it happens every time new words are added to the Oxford, and every time, it makes my blood boil.
Language isn't sacred. Powerful? Yes. Vitally important? Certainly. But immutable, incorruptible, unchanging? Quite the opposite. The world is constantly changing; to insist that a language not change is to demand that it detach itself from the world. Contrary to Conan's quip, change in language is evidence of good health, not imminent death. Want to see a dead language? Latin, which has been preserved near-perfectly across centuries.
Why was 'selfie' picked as the word of 2013? Because Oxford's research saw its use rise by seventeen thousand percent in that year. Like it or not, many people talked about selfies in 2013, many of them in order to criticise or disapprove. Selfies may be an abhorrent phenomenon (they're actually not that bad, as human innovations go - vanity and self-absorption are hardly the worst of our vices), but if people are going to talk about them, someone had better keep a note of what they mean.
The presence of a word in a dictionary, or even on a list of words influential or important in a given year, isn't an endorsement of what the word refers to. It can (and probably does, in the case of 'selfie') indicate a great deal of disapproval, and since it's quite difficult to disapprove of something you don't have a word for, surely it's better to have the word than be without?
Wednesday, 3 September 2014
London, and the rest of Britain
I'm looking for some book recommendations. Specifically, can anyone recommend to me a recent (last 20 years or so) urban fantasy novel by a British author which isn't primarily set in London?
I ask because I've read four different urban fantasy stories by three different British authors this year, and all of them were largely based in London: Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere takes place almost entirely within London; Catherine Webb's Waywalkers and Timekeepers trot the globe a bit, but come back to London a lot, and her A Madness of Angels (published under the name Kate Griffin) is quite openly a serenade to the city; finally, I recently tried Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season, and the furthest it gets from London is Oxford, except for one flashback.
Now, sure, London's a big city, especially for such a small country. It's the seventh-largest metropolitan area in the world by population, and by the figure given in that list accounts for almost a third of the British population. Also of interest are its place at 29 in the list of most populous urban areas and 23 in the list of cities proper, according to which it accounts for almost a sixth and over an eighth of the nation's population respectively.
So we should expect a pretty large portion of British authors to be from London and its general region and thus naturally inclined to write about the city. But assuming my sample is random (it's not, of course, particularly since two of the books were forwarded to me by my sister, who now lives in London), who's writing about the other 40-50million Brits?
And when I say that these books are set in London, I don't just mean that they're set in London the way some Hollywood films are set in London - Big Ben or the Tower of London floating by in the background every now and then. I mean that every single one of the books I've listed had at least one moment where I felt like I needed to have a map of the London Underground to hand to understand what was going on.
The Bone Season, which is freshest in my memory, has two lengthy sections, including a chase scene, set in and around Seven Dials. I'd never even heard of the place until I read the book, but the chase scene gives you the name of every street the characters run down (without saying much about which directions they turn). I'm confident I could trace the whole route on a map, but I was completely lost trying to follow the action without a map.
I talked last week about how I tend to underdevelop locations in my books, but I think this problem of too much detail (or the wrong kind of detail) is as bad. I don't remember struggling with Raymond Chandler's L.A. or Tom Clancy's Washington like this, or indeed with the entirely fictional cities in the fantasy novels of Brandon Sanderson and Scott Lynch. In Mark Chadbourn's Age of Misrule trilogy, there's a sequence in Edinburgh which felt much more accessible, about the closest I can remember to what I'm looking for (though I gave up on Age of Misrule not long after, for unrelated reasons).
There's a cultural dimension to the problem, as well, when dealing specifically with London. The city's size relative to the rest of the country means it has a tendency to suck economic and cultural activity towards itself. There are plenty of fantasy novels set largely in rural Britain - by authors like Dianna Wynne Jones and Alan Garner - but the novels I'm aware of about British cities outside London tend to be more of the Trainspotting variety; many things, but not fantasy in the genre sense.
So if you do know of urban fantasy set in a non-Londonish bit of urban Britain, please let me know. Some of the projects I'm working on at the moment are urban fantasy, and I'm interested to see how other cities get represented.
I ask because I've read four different urban fantasy stories by three different British authors this year, and all of them were largely based in London: Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere takes place almost entirely within London; Catherine Webb's Waywalkers and Timekeepers trot the globe a bit, but come back to London a lot, and her A Madness of Angels (published under the name Kate Griffin) is quite openly a serenade to the city; finally, I recently tried Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season, and the furthest it gets from London is Oxford, except for one flashback.
Now, sure, London's a big city, especially for such a small country. It's the seventh-largest metropolitan area in the world by population, and by the figure given in that list accounts for almost a third of the British population. Also of interest are its place at 29 in the list of most populous urban areas and 23 in the list of cities proper, according to which it accounts for almost a sixth and over an eighth of the nation's population respectively.
So we should expect a pretty large portion of British authors to be from London and its general region and thus naturally inclined to write about the city. But assuming my sample is random (it's not, of course, particularly since two of the books were forwarded to me by my sister, who now lives in London), who's writing about the other 40-50million Brits?
And when I say that these books are set in London, I don't just mean that they're set in London the way some Hollywood films are set in London - Big Ben or the Tower of London floating by in the background every now and then. I mean that every single one of the books I've listed had at least one moment where I felt like I needed to have a map of the London Underground to hand to understand what was going on.
The Bone Season, which is freshest in my memory, has two lengthy sections, including a chase scene, set in and around Seven Dials. I'd never even heard of the place until I read the book, but the chase scene gives you the name of every street the characters run down (without saying much about which directions they turn). I'm confident I could trace the whole route on a map, but I was completely lost trying to follow the action without a map.
I talked last week about how I tend to underdevelop locations in my books, but I think this problem of too much detail (or the wrong kind of detail) is as bad. I don't remember struggling with Raymond Chandler's L.A. or Tom Clancy's Washington like this, or indeed with the entirely fictional cities in the fantasy novels of Brandon Sanderson and Scott Lynch. In Mark Chadbourn's Age of Misrule trilogy, there's a sequence in Edinburgh which felt much more accessible, about the closest I can remember to what I'm looking for (though I gave up on Age of Misrule not long after, for unrelated reasons).
There's a cultural dimension to the problem, as well, when dealing specifically with London. The city's size relative to the rest of the country means it has a tendency to suck economic and cultural activity towards itself. There are plenty of fantasy novels set largely in rural Britain - by authors like Dianna Wynne Jones and Alan Garner - but the novels I'm aware of about British cities outside London tend to be more of the Trainspotting variety; many things, but not fantasy in the genre sense.
So if you do know of urban fantasy set in a non-Londonish bit of urban Britain, please let me know. Some of the projects I'm working on at the moment are urban fantasy, and I'm interested to see how other cities get represented.
Tuesday, 19 August 2014
Home is where you AREN'T DECORATING
I really hate living with the decorating process. Five rooms in the shared house where I live have been scheduled for decorating this summer, with my room as the fourth. I just finished moving out yesterday so that I can start the actual decorating work today, so I'm coming to you now from the cramped attic bedroom where I and all my stuff will be living for the next two weeks.
It should only be two weeks (he promised himself, in a tone of rising desperation..). My carpet is being fitted on September 1st, assuming nothing drastic goes wrong, and all the painting has to be done by then, for obvious reasons.
And it's not like this rash of decorating wasn't sorely needed; the three bathrooms all had bare plaster on most or all of the walls, the bedrooms have had bare floorboards poorly hidden by ratty rugs, and the less said about the fireplace in my room the better.
Thing is, I was actually happier living with the undecorated mess than I am living alongside the decorating process. Even undecorated, this place wasn't the worst place I've lived during my studenthood. At least here, none of the walls move if you lean on them, and none of the beams are propped up on loose bricks. The damp only gets in in one room, rather than pretty much all of them.
I've found I can live with a degree of comfort in even pretty dilapidated environments provided those environments aren't in flux. If things are more or less static, settled, I can tolerate them. The kind of constant moving around entailed by decorating, though, makes me a little bit crazy. If I'm not worrying myself sick about some task that still needs doing, I'm getting irrationally irritated by one or other of my housemates not acting exactly to my convenience right now. It's to the point that I'm actually going to take a few days out and visit my parents over this weekend, because I'm worried I'll snap if I don't.
All of this is because I'm a very home-focussed person. This is more than just a nice way of saying I'm a hopeless shut-in (though, of course, I am a hopeless shut-in). My comfort zone is limited to pretty much 'being surrounded by my stuff, arranged my way'. It's a safety net, in more ways than one. Knowing I have a comfortable comfort zone to come back to after anything where I go outside my comfort zone makes it a lot easier to try things, particularly since, as a writer, I can leave my comfort zone way behind just by sitting at my computer and pushing my craft.
Once the work is complete, I will have a stronger comfort zone than I do now. 'My room' will be much more mine with my choice of colours on the walls, a carpet, and less dust (if you could actually sell dust bunnies as pets, I would have made an absolute killing yesterday while moving out). For the next couple of weeks, though, I'm on a bit of an emotional tightrope.
Hopefully the most dramatic thing that will happen is publishing the next episode of The Second Realm on Saturday (hint hint).
It should only be two weeks (he promised himself, in a tone of rising desperation..). My carpet is being fitted on September 1st, assuming nothing drastic goes wrong, and all the painting has to be done by then, for obvious reasons.
And it's not like this rash of decorating wasn't sorely needed; the three bathrooms all had bare plaster on most or all of the walls, the bedrooms have had bare floorboards poorly hidden by ratty rugs, and the less said about the fireplace in my room the better.
Thing is, I was actually happier living with the undecorated mess than I am living alongside the decorating process. Even undecorated, this place wasn't the worst place I've lived during my studenthood. At least here, none of the walls move if you lean on them, and none of the beams are propped up on loose bricks. The damp only gets in in one room, rather than pretty much all of them.
I've found I can live with a degree of comfort in even pretty dilapidated environments provided those environments aren't in flux. If things are more or less static, settled, I can tolerate them. The kind of constant moving around entailed by decorating, though, makes me a little bit crazy. If I'm not worrying myself sick about some task that still needs doing, I'm getting irrationally irritated by one or other of my housemates not acting exactly to my convenience right now. It's to the point that I'm actually going to take a few days out and visit my parents over this weekend, because I'm worried I'll snap if I don't.
All of this is because I'm a very home-focussed person. This is more than just a nice way of saying I'm a hopeless shut-in (though, of course, I am a hopeless shut-in). My comfort zone is limited to pretty much 'being surrounded by my stuff, arranged my way'. It's a safety net, in more ways than one. Knowing I have a comfortable comfort zone to come back to after anything where I go outside my comfort zone makes it a lot easier to try things, particularly since, as a writer, I can leave my comfort zone way behind just by sitting at my computer and pushing my craft.
Once the work is complete, I will have a stronger comfort zone than I do now. 'My room' will be much more mine with my choice of colours on the walls, a carpet, and less dust (if you could actually sell dust bunnies as pets, I would have made an absolute killing yesterday while moving out). For the next couple of weeks, though, I'm on a bit of an emotional tightrope.
Hopefully the most dramatic thing that will happen is publishing the next episode of The Second Realm on Saturday (hint hint).
Tuesday, 5 August 2014
A Character by Any Other Name...
So it turns out the biggest problem with moving on from The Second Realm is that creating a new set of characters for a new story means coming up with a whole bunch of new character names. My next project is a short story with a named cast of four (perhaps five), and I've been hung up on it for almost a week now because I couldn't find a name that fit the lead.
Everything else is ready to go, besides a couple of details that I'm leaving to the flow to sort out. I know how the opening scene will work, down to exactly what the first two sentences need to say, but at least one of those sentences needs to have the main character's name in it, and I've been looking for that for days. Worse, I'm pretty sure I had a good name at one point and it slipped away before I could write it down (we're redecorating the house at the moment - freeing a hand to reach for pen and paper isn't always practical).
There are some writers, I'm sure, who'd shout at me for getting stuck on something like this. It's something I struggle with fairly often, after all. Atla, in season 2 of The Second Realm, took a long time to come together just because in most of my planning he was '[season 2 new character]' (more often '[noob]' for short). I do a lot of planning work with unnamed characters, and a lot of pages of my plans have 'NTFC' at the top (it stands for 'name these characters'; I'll let you work out the 'F' for yourselves).
But I can't start writing with placeholder names. I'm not good at rough first drafts generally - I fuss over every sentence enough as it is. There's something almost synaesthetic about the right character name, too; it's not just that it's appropriate to the setting, and the character's demographic within that setting. The right name just feels like it encodes something about the character.
This is, of course, completely irrational. This lead character needed a feminine-sounding name, loosely renaissance in feel, built around 'o' and 'l' sounds. To me, those are the sounds of her toughness and ingenuity, and those are the characteristics of hers which drive the story forward. Experience suggests that if I try to work with the wrong name, I'll stray and lose focus, and in a story this short there really isn't room for that.
I do now have a name, and I might go and get at least those first two sentences down once I've finished this post (there's still decorating to be done, so I don't have a lot of time for writing right now), but it's been a tough ride. Fortunately, working out this one name gave me enough to work from for the other character names - the characters are all from the same region, so their names need to fit a single style, and one of them is the lead's father, which gives him an even stronger tie. Hopefully the story will stick to just these four characters...
Everything else is ready to go, besides a couple of details that I'm leaving to the flow to sort out. I know how the opening scene will work, down to exactly what the first two sentences need to say, but at least one of those sentences needs to have the main character's name in it, and I've been looking for that for days. Worse, I'm pretty sure I had a good name at one point and it slipped away before I could write it down (we're redecorating the house at the moment - freeing a hand to reach for pen and paper isn't always practical).
There are some writers, I'm sure, who'd shout at me for getting stuck on something like this. It's something I struggle with fairly often, after all. Atla, in season 2 of The Second Realm, took a long time to come together just because in most of my planning he was '[season 2 new character]' (more often '[noob]' for short). I do a lot of planning work with unnamed characters, and a lot of pages of my plans have 'NTFC' at the top (it stands for 'name these characters'; I'll let you work out the 'F' for yourselves).
But I can't start writing with placeholder names. I'm not good at rough first drafts generally - I fuss over every sentence enough as it is. There's something almost synaesthetic about the right character name, too; it's not just that it's appropriate to the setting, and the character's demographic within that setting. The right name just feels like it encodes something about the character.
This is, of course, completely irrational. This lead character needed a feminine-sounding name, loosely renaissance in feel, built around 'o' and 'l' sounds. To me, those are the sounds of her toughness and ingenuity, and those are the characteristics of hers which drive the story forward. Experience suggests that if I try to work with the wrong name, I'll stray and lose focus, and in a story this short there really isn't room for that.
I do now have a name, and I might go and get at least those first two sentences down once I've finished this post (there's still decorating to be done, so I don't have a lot of time for writing right now), but it's been a tough ride. Fortunately, working out this one name gave me enough to work from for the other character names - the characters are all from the same region, so their names need to fit a single style, and one of them is the lead's father, which gives him an even stronger tie. Hopefully the story will stick to just these four characters...
Wednesday, 30 July 2014
That 'hit by a truck' feeling...
I finished the first draft of The Second Realm on Monday. Well, actually, by the time I finished it was the small hours of Tuesday morning, but as far as I'm concerned it's still Monday until you go to sleep. After the better part of three years working on this story, the end of the drafting phase has hit me rather hard.
That's not to say that there isn't a lot more to do - editing, polishing, publishing, re-editing for the collected editions, preparing for print etc. - but now, at least, the whole story exists on (digital) paper. Every scene of it is now stored somewhere besides in my head, pinned down in words.
And I felt rather out of sorts all day yesterday as a result. It didn't help that I didn't sleep well - the problem with finishing a story at two in the morning is that you can't really jump around and shout a lot to work off the rush of joy and relief, so I went to bed buzzing and got only fractured sleep at all.
I woke up, though, feeling like I'd actually spent the night at a wild party (I assure you that, once upon a time, my life was interesting enough that I can still remember what that feels like). My eyes were gritty, my head ached, I had a couple of mild dizzy spells. A substantial breakfast, rehydration and a shower seemed to be the important parts of the cure, as well.
Tired as I was, I spent most of the day in a cloud. It was the first day in almost three years where I didn't have some part of The Second Realm either to write or to feel guilty about not writing. There was stuff I could have usefully done, but not Second Realm stuff.
I still feel weird today, not in a medical sense, but in a things-aren't-as-they-usually-are sense. I feel like my life is actually significantly different now, like I'm a different person to the author who drafted The Second Realm. Perhaps that's an effect of working on something for so long; previously, the longest I'd spent on any one project was about six months, and I did a lot of other things as well in that time.
Maybe it'll pass with time, as I sink back into the story for editing and stuff, and I'm sure I'll be reevaluating this moment in a few months when I publish the last episode (October 18th, all being well). I'm going to save any kind of retrospective analysis of the project until then, because it hardly seems fair to act as if it's over for me while anyone reading the thing (and thank you all, by the way, for making last week the best week yet for downloads) still has months to go.
Still, there is a sense in which I'm different now. The voices of Rel, Pevan, Taslin and the rest will start to fade towards the back of my mind as other characters and stories come forward. They'll stay with me, I hope, but I also hope they won't clamour for my attention quite as noisily as they have done for the last three years.
I owe big thanks, of course, to a lot of people for helping me in various ways with The Second Realm (particularly Lynne Hunt, my long-suffering and indomitable beta reader), but again, I'll wait until the project really is complete to do proper acknowledgements.
That's not to say that there isn't a lot more to do - editing, polishing, publishing, re-editing for the collected editions, preparing for print etc. - but now, at least, the whole story exists on (digital) paper. Every scene of it is now stored somewhere besides in my head, pinned down in words.
And I felt rather out of sorts all day yesterday as a result. It didn't help that I didn't sleep well - the problem with finishing a story at two in the morning is that you can't really jump around and shout a lot to work off the rush of joy and relief, so I went to bed buzzing and got only fractured sleep at all.
I woke up, though, feeling like I'd actually spent the night at a wild party (I assure you that, once upon a time, my life was interesting enough that I can still remember what that feels like). My eyes were gritty, my head ached, I had a couple of mild dizzy spells. A substantial breakfast, rehydration and a shower seemed to be the important parts of the cure, as well.
Tired as I was, I spent most of the day in a cloud. It was the first day in almost three years where I didn't have some part of The Second Realm either to write or to feel guilty about not writing. There was stuff I could have usefully done, but not Second Realm stuff.
I still feel weird today, not in a medical sense, but in a things-aren't-as-they-usually-are sense. I feel like my life is actually significantly different now, like I'm a different person to the author who drafted The Second Realm. Perhaps that's an effect of working on something for so long; previously, the longest I'd spent on any one project was about six months, and I did a lot of other things as well in that time.
Maybe it'll pass with time, as I sink back into the story for editing and stuff, and I'm sure I'll be reevaluating this moment in a few months when I publish the last episode (October 18th, all being well). I'm going to save any kind of retrospective analysis of the project until then, because it hardly seems fair to act as if it's over for me while anyone reading the thing (and thank you all, by the way, for making last week the best week yet for downloads) still has months to go.
Still, there is a sense in which I'm different now. The voices of Rel, Pevan, Taslin and the rest will start to fade towards the back of my mind as other characters and stories come forward. They'll stay with me, I hope, but I also hope they won't clamour for my attention quite as noisily as they have done for the last three years.
I owe big thanks, of course, to a lot of people for helping me in various ways with The Second Realm (particularly Lynne Hunt, my long-suffering and indomitable beta reader), but again, I'll wait until the project really is complete to do proper acknowledgements.
Tuesday, 22 July 2014
Failure for Writers
My writing marathon to finish The Second Realm is going well. Yesterday I finished the third of four episodes in the final story of the series. I set myself the goal of approximately 25,000 words by the end of July, and I'm currently on 20,783 with ten days to go. I'll probably overshoot to the tune of 2-3,000 words, which is fine by me.
It goes to show the power of setting definite failure conditions. Wanting to finish a project is a pretty nebulous desire, one that can be put off and off and off again quite happily. It's easy to tell yourself that you're still 'working on' a project while doing nothing towards it; in fact, delaying the end of a project can forestall the scary business of choosing a new project, which is an added advantage.
Wanting to finish a project by a certain date is a stronger, more precise desire, but if the date is self-imposed it's only as strong as your willpower. Since, in my case, willpower is what I've been lacking, a few such self-imposed deadlines and targets have slipped by. Even during this marathon, I allowed myself a couple of days off that I shouldn't, just because it's really hot and humid (by British standards, anyway) here, and I find that hurts my concentration and energy quite badly.
Wanting to not fail, though, that's a different beast. Failure is scary and horrible any time it appears, even if the worst I'd suffer from failing as a writer is having to go and get a proper, grown-up job. Telling people, "I'm going to do X amount of Y by day Z" sets up something to work away from, as well as towards. Whether or not anyone actually notices you saying so, whether or not you think anyone will actually follow up on it, the bony, putrid spectre of failure is now on your trail.
There's a deeper truth about writing here, too. Assuming that you're in this for the writing (and I still believe there's no other reason to be in the writing business), the only real failure is not doing any writing. Failure isn't just giving up, or not starting in the first place; failure is also not making progress. If you're 'working on a project', but telling yourself you'll actually work on it later, when conditions are better, you are failing.
That's not to say that you can't have a day off, now and then. In addition to the two days where I didn't write because my brain felt like soup thanks to the weather, I took a day off to help my housemates rearrange a bunch of furniture so they can do some redecorating. I'll probably be taking another day or, if progress permits, maybe even two to help with actually doing the decorating, towards the end of the month. Real life is, unfortunately, real, and when there's good reason and clear limits, it's fine and even necessary to let it come first.
But again, it's clear limits that matter. Taking time off because of the weather is dangerous because I can almost always find some excuse in the weather for not working (I hate pretty much all weather, even when I stay indoors). Taking a break to help a friend decorate works because there comes a point when she's finished decorating.
Of course, you should take all this with a pinch of salt; I'm writing this now partly as procrastination against starting the final episode of The Second Realm...
It goes to show the power of setting definite failure conditions. Wanting to finish a project is a pretty nebulous desire, one that can be put off and off and off again quite happily. It's easy to tell yourself that you're still 'working on' a project while doing nothing towards it; in fact, delaying the end of a project can forestall the scary business of choosing a new project, which is an added advantage.
Wanting to finish a project by a certain date is a stronger, more precise desire, but if the date is self-imposed it's only as strong as your willpower. Since, in my case, willpower is what I've been lacking, a few such self-imposed deadlines and targets have slipped by. Even during this marathon, I allowed myself a couple of days off that I shouldn't, just because it's really hot and humid (by British standards, anyway) here, and I find that hurts my concentration and energy quite badly.
Wanting to not fail, though, that's a different beast. Failure is scary and horrible any time it appears, even if the worst I'd suffer from failing as a writer is having to go and get a proper, grown-up job. Telling people, "I'm going to do X amount of Y by day Z" sets up something to work away from, as well as towards. Whether or not anyone actually notices you saying so, whether or not you think anyone will actually follow up on it, the bony, putrid spectre of failure is now on your trail.
There's a deeper truth about writing here, too. Assuming that you're in this for the writing (and I still believe there's no other reason to be in the writing business), the only real failure is not doing any writing. Failure isn't just giving up, or not starting in the first place; failure is also not making progress. If you're 'working on a project', but telling yourself you'll actually work on it later, when conditions are better, you are failing.
That's not to say that you can't have a day off, now and then. In addition to the two days where I didn't write because my brain felt like soup thanks to the weather, I took a day off to help my housemates rearrange a bunch of furniture so they can do some redecorating. I'll probably be taking another day or, if progress permits, maybe even two to help with actually doing the decorating, towards the end of the month. Real life is, unfortunately, real, and when there's good reason and clear limits, it's fine and even necessary to let it come first.
But again, it's clear limits that matter. Taking time off because of the weather is dangerous because I can almost always find some excuse in the weather for not working (I hate pretty much all weather, even when I stay indoors). Taking a break to help a friend decorate works because there comes a point when she's finished decorating.
Of course, you should take all this with a pinch of salt; I'm writing this now partly as procrastination against starting the final episode of The Second Realm...
Thursday, 17 July 2014
A Madness of Angels
This isn't really a book review, but if it is, it's a review of A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin. With that in mind, let me start by recommending the book, very highly, to anyone who likes reading... well, words, really. The words in this book are excellent, beautifully chosen, and the story they tell is pretty good too (I'm not sure about the ending, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm actually just generally ending-averse).
The book is a 'modern fairytale' sort of affair, something I'm very interested in but so far always disappointed by. Mark Chadbourn's 'Age of Misrule' was brilliant for about the first two chapters, then traded all its modernity for hippy hagiography. Even Neverwhere, a delightful story, felt backward-looking and nostalgic (though it has the excuse of being almost twenty years old).
A Madness of Angels has the advantage (you would think) of only being five years old. Well, probably six or so; its publication date of 2009 means it was probably written no later than 2008. It's set around that time, too - no earlier than 2005, and probably more like 2007-8ish. That makes it younger than Facebook, probably younger than Twitter, contemporary with the first iPhones.
I said this wasn't really a book review. What I'm actually getting at is how fast the world is changing. Madness felt (to me, specifically looking for a 'modern fairytale') hopelessly out of date. This is a book published after I became an adult, and not just in the legal okay-we'll-let-you-drive-now sense; by the time Madness came out in paperback, I'd started my flippin' PhD.
I don't remember a character in the novel sending an email (it's kind of implicit that emails are being sent in the world, but they don't appear on the page). Half-way through, the main character buys his first ever mobile phone - granted, he's been out of circulation for a couple of years, and prior to that lived quite a rootless life, but I was a relative latecomer to mobile phones and got my first when I was about fifteen (2002 or so). The internet as a whole barely figures in the story.
All of which is terrifying to me, as a modern writer trying to write (not always directly) about modern life. My first finished novel, which I wrote in late 2010, does feature tweets, emails and smartphones, but a lot of it takes place on blogs and online message-boards and yet there's no mention at all of Tumblr. By the time I get back to it to give it the heavy rework that any writer's first novel needs, there may not be much point.
The advantage of writing fantasy that cuts further away from reality (like The Second Realm, which I like to think has some pretty modern themes in it) is a level of insulation from this problem, but it does also put up a barrier to really engaging with new developments as people in my audience experience them.
I do, genuinely, recommend A Madness of Angels, but I'm not sure it lives up to its cover quote ("'Neverwhere' for the digital age"). But then, given the time it takes to write, edit, polish and publish any novel, I'm not sure that anything could ever live up to that billing.
The book is a 'modern fairytale' sort of affair, something I'm very interested in but so far always disappointed by. Mark Chadbourn's 'Age of Misrule' was brilliant for about the first two chapters, then traded all its modernity for hippy hagiography. Even Neverwhere, a delightful story, felt backward-looking and nostalgic (though it has the excuse of being almost twenty years old).
A Madness of Angels has the advantage (you would think) of only being five years old. Well, probably six or so; its publication date of 2009 means it was probably written no later than 2008. It's set around that time, too - no earlier than 2005, and probably more like 2007-8ish. That makes it younger than Facebook, probably younger than Twitter, contemporary with the first iPhones.
I said this wasn't really a book review. What I'm actually getting at is how fast the world is changing. Madness felt (to me, specifically looking for a 'modern fairytale') hopelessly out of date. This is a book published after I became an adult, and not just in the legal okay-we'll-let-you-drive-now sense; by the time Madness came out in paperback, I'd started my flippin' PhD.
I don't remember a character in the novel sending an email (it's kind of implicit that emails are being sent in the world, but they don't appear on the page). Half-way through, the main character buys his first ever mobile phone - granted, he's been out of circulation for a couple of years, and prior to that lived quite a rootless life, but I was a relative latecomer to mobile phones and got my first when I was about fifteen (2002 or so). The internet as a whole barely figures in the story.
All of which is terrifying to me, as a modern writer trying to write (not always directly) about modern life. My first finished novel, which I wrote in late 2010, does feature tweets, emails and smartphones, but a lot of it takes place on blogs and online message-boards and yet there's no mention at all of Tumblr. By the time I get back to it to give it the heavy rework that any writer's first novel needs, there may not be much point.
The advantage of writing fantasy that cuts further away from reality (like The Second Realm, which I like to think has some pretty modern themes in it) is a level of insulation from this problem, but it does also put up a barrier to really engaging with new developments as people in my audience experience them.
I do, genuinely, recommend A Madness of Angels, but I'm not sure it lives up to its cover quote ("'Neverwhere' for the digital age"). But then, given the time it takes to write, edit, polish and publish any novel, I'm not sure that anything could ever live up to that billing.
Wednesday, 25 June 2014
Fear of Starting
Those of you who are following The Second Realm (thank you! <3) may have noticed that it's not exactly been going smoothly in the first half of this year. There have been a series of delays in the actual publishing schedule, and in all honesty only a lot of mad scrambling behind the scenes kept things from being much worse than they were. I owe major thanks to my beta reader, Lynne Hunt, for working so hard and quickly for me at such short notice for so long.
I have a few legitimate excuses, which I've covered before - mainly a very disjointed work schedule and the concluding challenges of my PhD - but those ran out a couple of months ago, and I've struggled to pull things back together since. I'd like to say I've had writer's block - I've certainly felt like I've had it quite a lot - but in truth, when I've actually sat down to write, I've mostly been able to write just fine.
The problem has been sitting down to write. Writing The Second Realm is hard. For whatever reason, my average pace writing The Second Realm is about a third of what I used to consider normal for me (if I'd written The Second Realm at the same speed I wrote my previous large fantasy project, I'd have finished the first draft in about August 2012). It may just be that I'm a better writer now and thus paying more attention to nuance and detail, but that's not what it feels like when I'm sat at my desk and trying to make words happen.
And with the feeling that something is difficult comes the fear of failing. After almost three years of working on this series, I've had just enough days where I sat down to write and nothing happened that I know failure is a possibility. Just enough to seed the fear that my mojo might have gone - and that being a writer might not have been the right career choice for me.
Once that question got into my head, it was better to not try to write at all than to try and risk failing again, gathering more 'proof' that I made the wrong choice. Not trying can be hand-waved away, as being too busy, too distracted, too messed-about by the weather (summer and I really don't get on). Trying to write and failing is less easily explained.
But the truth is that all writers have days where nothing comes. Some can deal with that by changing projects, or writing waffle to be deleted later. I prefer to work on something writing-related instead, whether that's planning, or editing, or blogging. None of those things are as damaging as not trying.
Allow yourself too much not-trying, and your commitment to a project starts to falter. I've always told myself that The Second Realm isn't suited to writing marathons and binges, which are my preferred ways to write, but during NaNoWriMo 2012, I wrote 50,000 words of season 2 in a week.
So, it's writing marathon time for me. The goal I've set myself is to finish the remainder of season 3 by the end of July, somewhere between 20k and 25k words in five weeks or so. It works out to about 700 words a day, which is wayyy slow compared to my normal marathon pace, but baby steps.
I've known this was the solution for a long time, but I've been afraid to commit to it, because what if I fail? Poor preparation and overambitiousness almost cost me NaNoWriMo last year, and I basically did fail at my intended project. My confidence took a big hit after that. If I fail at this one, my confidence will probably take another big hit, but at least I'll be able to say, for the first time in a while, that I tried something definite on my own initiative.
It's easy to ignore failures born of not trying, but that doesn't mean they aren't failures.
I have a few legitimate excuses, which I've covered before - mainly a very disjointed work schedule and the concluding challenges of my PhD - but those ran out a couple of months ago, and I've struggled to pull things back together since. I'd like to say I've had writer's block - I've certainly felt like I've had it quite a lot - but in truth, when I've actually sat down to write, I've mostly been able to write just fine.
The problem has been sitting down to write. Writing The Second Realm is hard. For whatever reason, my average pace writing The Second Realm is about a third of what I used to consider normal for me (if I'd written The Second Realm at the same speed I wrote my previous large fantasy project, I'd have finished the first draft in about August 2012). It may just be that I'm a better writer now and thus paying more attention to nuance and detail, but that's not what it feels like when I'm sat at my desk and trying to make words happen.
And with the feeling that something is difficult comes the fear of failing. After almost three years of working on this series, I've had just enough days where I sat down to write and nothing happened that I know failure is a possibility. Just enough to seed the fear that my mojo might have gone - and that being a writer might not have been the right career choice for me.
Once that question got into my head, it was better to not try to write at all than to try and risk failing again, gathering more 'proof' that I made the wrong choice. Not trying can be hand-waved away, as being too busy, too distracted, too messed-about by the weather (summer and I really don't get on). Trying to write and failing is less easily explained.
But the truth is that all writers have days where nothing comes. Some can deal with that by changing projects, or writing waffle to be deleted later. I prefer to work on something writing-related instead, whether that's planning, or editing, or blogging. None of those things are as damaging as not trying.
Allow yourself too much not-trying, and your commitment to a project starts to falter. I've always told myself that The Second Realm isn't suited to writing marathons and binges, which are my preferred ways to write, but during NaNoWriMo 2012, I wrote 50,000 words of season 2 in a week.
So, it's writing marathon time for me. The goal I've set myself is to finish the remainder of season 3 by the end of July, somewhere between 20k and 25k words in five weeks or so. It works out to about 700 words a day, which is wayyy slow compared to my normal marathon pace, but baby steps.
I've known this was the solution for a long time, but I've been afraid to commit to it, because what if I fail? Poor preparation and overambitiousness almost cost me NaNoWriMo last year, and I basically did fail at my intended project. My confidence took a big hit after that. If I fail at this one, my confidence will probably take another big hit, but at least I'll be able to say, for the first time in a while, that I tried something definite on my own initiative.
It's easy to ignore failures born of not trying, but that doesn't mean they aren't failures.
Tuesday, 17 June 2014
My Literary Hero
A couple of weeks ago, one of those Facebook things went round my writer friends, something like 'Authors celebrating authors day'. The idea was to put a photo of your favourite author as your profile picture for the day. I kinda missed it, because I got up late and had too many other things to do that day, but afterwards I struggled a bit with the question.
My favourite author, from the obvious how-much-I-like-reading-her-books point of view, is Janny Wurts. I love pretty much everything about pretty much every book of hers I've ever read (though there are still a few missing from my collection). But there was something in the blurb of the facebook thingy about picking authors who inspire you as an author.
And that's a more complex question, because while Wurts is a big part of the reason I still believe in, celebrate and write epic fantasy, she's done relatively little to affect my attitude to writing as a career choice. After some thought, I'd have to say that Neil Gaiman wins out on that count.
Which is weird, because I'm not the world's biggest fan of Neil Gaiman's writing. I loved Good Omens, but he only gets half a point from that because I'm also a huge Terry Pratchett fan. I found American Gods very solid, even strikingly inventive in some places, but Neverwhere left me pretty cold, particularly the ending - I really didn't buy into the main character. Gaiman's prose is excellent, but his plots have disappointed me a little.
Why does he inspire me so much? Well, he's not just a novelist. He does lots of things, albeit mainly focussed around the written word. In his own idiosyncratic way, he's an amazing public speaker. He's a very visible figurehead for creative types in the digital world. Mainly, though, he's professionally Neil Gaiman.
In this speech, which I've blogged about before, he gives a few examples of things he's done which have helped his career. He talks about both the completely spontaneous (such as the example of hiding a doodle under a rock in the street somewhere, tweeting the location, and seeing who picked it up) to the simple taking of odd opportunities (his calendar-based collaborative-art project with Blackberry), and about 'being dandelions' - not being afraid to do things that may fizzle out without profit.
That's not to say that I don't think he does any work. I have no doubt that Gaiman works very hard. Since he has a family, it's pretty much certain that he works hard at at least some things which are unpleasant - children come with certain responsibilities, after all. But he seems to be able to spend a lot of time doing things he is interested in and making money from some of them, without worrying too much about any preordained script. It's the possibility of a life like that that really entices and inspires me - not an easy life, but a largely self-driven one.
My favourite author, from the obvious how-much-I-like-reading-her-books point of view, is Janny Wurts. I love pretty much everything about pretty much every book of hers I've ever read (though there are still a few missing from my collection). But there was something in the blurb of the facebook thingy about picking authors who inspire you as an author.
And that's a more complex question, because while Wurts is a big part of the reason I still believe in, celebrate and write epic fantasy, she's done relatively little to affect my attitude to writing as a career choice. After some thought, I'd have to say that Neil Gaiman wins out on that count.
Which is weird, because I'm not the world's biggest fan of Neil Gaiman's writing. I loved Good Omens, but he only gets half a point from that because I'm also a huge Terry Pratchett fan. I found American Gods very solid, even strikingly inventive in some places, but Neverwhere left me pretty cold, particularly the ending - I really didn't buy into the main character. Gaiman's prose is excellent, but his plots have disappointed me a little.
Why does he inspire me so much? Well, he's not just a novelist. He does lots of things, albeit mainly focussed around the written word. In his own idiosyncratic way, he's an amazing public speaker. He's a very visible figurehead for creative types in the digital world. Mainly, though, he's professionally Neil Gaiman.
In this speech, which I've blogged about before, he gives a few examples of things he's done which have helped his career. He talks about both the completely spontaneous (such as the example of hiding a doodle under a rock in the street somewhere, tweeting the location, and seeing who picked it up) to the simple taking of odd opportunities (his calendar-based collaborative-art project with Blackberry), and about 'being dandelions' - not being afraid to do things that may fizzle out without profit.
That's not to say that I don't think he does any work. I have no doubt that Gaiman works very hard. Since he has a family, it's pretty much certain that he works hard at at least some things which are unpleasant - children come with certain responsibilities, after all. But he seems to be able to spend a lot of time doing things he is interested in and making money from some of them, without worrying too much about any preordained script. It's the possibility of a life like that that really entices and inspires me - not an easy life, but a largely self-driven one.
Tuesday, 20 May 2014
Life choices
My day-jobs both involve working for universities, so my employment year is defined not by the tax year or the calendar year, but by the academic year. Universities operate a pretty minimal version of that, too - I've just finished work for the summer, and don't expect to be in again until the very end of September. Factor in the Christmas and Easter breaks, and I only work six months in the year.
And only part time at that - I average about 12-15 hours per week the 26-28 weeks of the year that I work. That makes for a total of barely 350 hours' day-job work in a whole year's worth of employment. (Disclaimer: I'm not a professor, lecturer or permanent employee of any kind - those people do a lot more work than me). Fortunately for me, my jobs pay well enough, just about, that I can make enough to live on this way.
I'm often heard to complain about being poor, but the truth is I wouldn't choose anything else. The rare periods where I have worked something like full-time (mainly summer jobs as an undergraduate) have been really frustrating for me. I hate commuting, hate having to get up on someone else's schedule every morning, hate having such a large chunk of my life given over to things I'm not doing for their own sake.
It makes an excellent lifestyle for a writer, as well - I get six months every year in which to focus on my writing. Last time the PhD didn't get in the way, in the 2010-11 academic year, I wrote five novels in thirteen months (and yes, at least two of them were crap, but they were great learning experiences). Even with the PhD in full swing the last couple of years, I've written and published 250,000 words of The Second Realm.
Since finishing the PhD, though, people have started to ask me what I'll do next, and I'm not sure how much longer 'Keep going the way I'm going' will cut it. My mother insists on referring to my lifestyle as 'Bohemian', which certainly isn't an unambiguous compliment. At what point does it become irresponsible or selfish to live like this?
I take no direct financial subsidies from the state, in the form of benefits or tax credits or anything. I'm not currently paying off my student loan (about £15,000 in total), but that hardly makes me unique. I do have some impact on state- and society-funded infrastructure, of course, but it's minimal. As a young and relatively healthy man, I'm not taking very much from the NHS. I have no dependents who I'm failing to support, but by not having a surplus income, I'm not putting any money aside for the future, which is setting up for problems on down the line.
This isn't a question I have a clear answer for. The cultural pressure to 'get a real job' is a very problematic phenomenon, particularly these days when there are so few 'real jobs' at entry-level which aren't totally degrading and exploitative, but it's also difficult for me to claim that I'm a productive member of society when so few people express any interest in my books.
J.K. Rowling lived on benefits for a couple of years while she wrote Harry Potter, and as I understand it this was in part a deliberate choice. It worked out pretty well for her (which really only means 'but there must be thousands of writers who tried that and failed). My question, really, is at what point would she have counted as having failed, if the strategy hadn't borne fruit?
I'm certainly not going to change my approach to life for another (academic) year. My employers have both expressed interest in having me work for them next year, and, God willing, that means I've got another sixteen months or so of living expenses lined up. If I succeed commercially as a writer in that time, great. If not, I'll probably be writing this blog post again, but with a slightly more urgent and distressed tone, next year sometime.
And only part time at that - I average about 12-15 hours per week the 26-28 weeks of the year that I work. That makes for a total of barely 350 hours' day-job work in a whole year's worth of employment. (Disclaimer: I'm not a professor, lecturer or permanent employee of any kind - those people do a lot more work than me). Fortunately for me, my jobs pay well enough, just about, that I can make enough to live on this way.
I'm often heard to complain about being poor, but the truth is I wouldn't choose anything else. The rare periods where I have worked something like full-time (mainly summer jobs as an undergraduate) have been really frustrating for me. I hate commuting, hate having to get up on someone else's schedule every morning, hate having such a large chunk of my life given over to things I'm not doing for their own sake.
It makes an excellent lifestyle for a writer, as well - I get six months every year in which to focus on my writing. Last time the PhD didn't get in the way, in the 2010-11 academic year, I wrote five novels in thirteen months (and yes, at least two of them were crap, but they were great learning experiences). Even with the PhD in full swing the last couple of years, I've written and published 250,000 words of The Second Realm.
Since finishing the PhD, though, people have started to ask me what I'll do next, and I'm not sure how much longer 'Keep going the way I'm going' will cut it. My mother insists on referring to my lifestyle as 'Bohemian', which certainly isn't an unambiguous compliment. At what point does it become irresponsible or selfish to live like this?
I take no direct financial subsidies from the state, in the form of benefits or tax credits or anything. I'm not currently paying off my student loan (about £15,000 in total), but that hardly makes me unique. I do have some impact on state- and society-funded infrastructure, of course, but it's minimal. As a young and relatively healthy man, I'm not taking very much from the NHS. I have no dependents who I'm failing to support, but by not having a surplus income, I'm not putting any money aside for the future, which is setting up for problems on down the line.
This isn't a question I have a clear answer for. The cultural pressure to 'get a real job' is a very problematic phenomenon, particularly these days when there are so few 'real jobs' at entry-level which aren't totally degrading and exploitative, but it's also difficult for me to claim that I'm a productive member of society when so few people express any interest in my books.
J.K. Rowling lived on benefits for a couple of years while she wrote Harry Potter, and as I understand it this was in part a deliberate choice. It worked out pretty well for her (which really only means 'but there must be thousands of writers who tried that and failed). My question, really, is at what point would she have counted as having failed, if the strategy hadn't borne fruit?
I'm certainly not going to change my approach to life for another (academic) year. My employers have both expressed interest in having me work for them next year, and, God willing, that means I've got another sixteen months or so of living expenses lined up. If I succeed commercially as a writer in that time, great. If not, I'll probably be writing this blog post again, but with a slightly more urgent and distressed tone, next year sometime.
Thursday, 24 April 2014
A creature of habit
The next episode of The Second Realm still has no release date. What this means, really, is that I've been a laughably ineffectual writer over the last four months, and it's time to make some excuses...
The essence of my problem has been disorganisation. By preference, I'm a creature of habit - I like being able to know a week in advance where I'll be at any given moment. I thrive when I can take a few minutes on a Sunday afternoon to run down the coming week, see where my fixed commitments are, and fit all my creative activities around them.
This helps me focus my otherwise rather hyperacSQUIRREL (why is it always a squirrel?). This helps me focus my otherwise rather hyperactive and distractible brain to the project I want to work on next as I'm winding up to it. It helps me maintain the essential habit of writing (which doesn't necessarily mean writing every day, but it does mean writing often enough to keep momentum up). It also helps me manage my own psychology, by giving me at least the illusion that I control my life (you'd think our secret reptilian overlords would be more helpful in that regard, but I've yet to hear from them).
Anyway, organisation since Christmas has been in short supply. All my employment plans were rather drastically shaken-up at the end of the Christmas break; one of my employers decided they didn't have money to pay me for this term's work and so let me off all my obligations to them until September, and the other switched me from the reliable, stable client I'd been working with for a year and a half to a new client who was... I really can't call it anything nicer than 'chaotic at best'.
This meant less money and thus more stress, but the real problem was just that often I couldn't know even an hour in advance where I was going to need to be. Many times I made the 40-minute journey to work (which is actually a half-hour journey but I tend to err drastically on the side of caution), only to stand around waiting for the client for my contractually-mandated 15 minutes and come home. Once I got a cancellation message for a 9AM meeting with the client at 4AM the same morning.
So while the repeated cancellations did technically mean more free time, I spent a lot of it commuting unnecessarily and the rest of it not really knowing whether I was coming or going. There was also the small matter of stumbling my way into a new relationship, which was and is great but relationships are and should be largely spontaneous, which is to say not organised.
The upshot of which is I've done about half as much writing, about half as well, as I would have liked. The frustration from that, combined with all the other stresses which come from uncertain employment, left me possibly more fatigued at Easter than I've ever been before. Still, the wondrous freedom of summer is just around the corner and things should get better from here on out. Or at least if they don't, it will probably be my fault rather than the cruel whims of fate...
The essence of my problem has been disorganisation. By preference, I'm a creature of habit - I like being able to know a week in advance where I'll be at any given moment. I thrive when I can take a few minutes on a Sunday afternoon to run down the coming week, see where my fixed commitments are, and fit all my creative activities around them.
This helps me focus my otherwise rather hyperacSQUIRREL (why is it always a squirrel?). This helps me focus my otherwise rather hyperactive and distractible brain to the project I want to work on next as I'm winding up to it. It helps me maintain the essential habit of writing (which doesn't necessarily mean writing every day, but it does mean writing often enough to keep momentum up). It also helps me manage my own psychology, by giving me at least the illusion that I control my life (you'd think our secret reptilian overlords would be more helpful in that regard, but I've yet to hear from them).
Anyway, organisation since Christmas has been in short supply. All my employment plans were rather drastically shaken-up at the end of the Christmas break; one of my employers decided they didn't have money to pay me for this term's work and so let me off all my obligations to them until September, and the other switched me from the reliable, stable client I'd been working with for a year and a half to a new client who was... I really can't call it anything nicer than 'chaotic at best'.
This meant less money and thus more stress, but the real problem was just that often I couldn't know even an hour in advance where I was going to need to be. Many times I made the 40-minute journey to work (which is actually a half-hour journey but I tend to err drastically on the side of caution), only to stand around waiting for the client for my contractually-mandated 15 minutes and come home. Once I got a cancellation message for a 9AM meeting with the client at 4AM the same morning.
So while the repeated cancellations did technically mean more free time, I spent a lot of it commuting unnecessarily and the rest of it not really knowing whether I was coming or going. There was also the small matter of stumbling my way into a new relationship, which was and is great but relationships are and should be largely spontaneous, which is to say not organised.
The upshot of which is I've done about half as much writing, about half as well, as I would have liked. The frustration from that, combined with all the other stresses which come from uncertain employment, left me possibly more fatigued at Easter than I've ever been before. Still, the wondrous freedom of summer is just around the corner and things should get better from here on out. Or at least if they don't, it will probably be my fault rather than the cruel whims of fate...
Friday, 28 March 2014
The Iron is Cooling...
What do you do when you're running up against a deadline and you can't get into the right headspace for writing?
I've had a brilliant start to the year. As I discussed last time out, numbers are up across the board. When I logged in to write this post just now, I discovered that this is the first month I've ever had on this blog where I've had over 10,000 pageviews.
But this month, I've barely written anything. In fact, by the standards of previous years, I've barely written anything in the whole time that things started looking up. It's not quite writer's block; I can write sometimes, but I'm a lot more prone to getting blocked on a scene for a while. Doors (my writing nemesis) are stickier than ever. I've spent far too many hours this week staring at the full stop at the end of the most recent paragraph of The Second Realm (whichever paragraph that happened to be at the time), with my brain feeling Tipp-Exed out between my ears.
There are several factors at play. My imagination just hasn't been as active since getting seriously stuck into the writing of my PhD thesis a couple of years ago. I've thought or dreamt up far fewer new ideas - only two that I thought were any cop in the last twelve months. I'm sure this is just a matter of finding time to properly unwind, but I don't think such time will be available in time (if that makes any sense ;D).
There's also the length of time I've been at work on The Second Realm. This month's episode was the twenty-fifth, spread across twenty-eight months, and through that time, work on it has been fairly constant. I've taken breaks, for NaNoWriMo 2011 and 2013 (in 2012, I wrote Second Realm episodes for NaNo) and for a couple of other hiccups, but for over two years my normal state has been 'working on The Second Realm'. I don't take well to this kind of drawn-out process; I prefer to work in short, sharp bursts with long periods of down-time (more accurately, other projects) in between.
Thirdly, there's everything else that's happened in the last three months, particularly with my day-job. Since there are issues of client confidentiality involved, I shouldn't say very much, but what I will say is that it's been impossible to tell, week to week and sometimes even day to day, when I would be in work and whether I would get paid if there were cancellations. As a creature of routine and habit, I've found this hugely exhausting and disruptive. I am desperate for the Easter break to start, but there's another week still to go even before that.
And I feel like I'm letting an opportunity slip through my fingers. I know that bursts of interest like the one I'm reading to all these sharp spiky peaks on all my graphs need nurturing, that they can drop off very quickly if you don't keep delivering. Ideally, I need a new episode of The Second Realm to put out in no more than about three weeks' time, but my strategy for 'delivering' seems at the moment to be 'hiding from the blank space at the bottom of the page in the next episode' and playing lots of World of Warcraft.
So I'm appealing for suggestions (besides the obvious ones, like 'less internet/gaming/moping') - what can I actually try to rejuvenate my inspiration? How do I tackle scenes where I'm getting stuck every other paragraph trying to work out what a character would say next?
I've had a brilliant start to the year. As I discussed last time out, numbers are up across the board. When I logged in to write this post just now, I discovered that this is the first month I've ever had on this blog where I've had over 10,000 pageviews.
But this month, I've barely written anything. In fact, by the standards of previous years, I've barely written anything in the whole time that things started looking up. It's not quite writer's block; I can write sometimes, but I'm a lot more prone to getting blocked on a scene for a while. Doors (my writing nemesis) are stickier than ever. I've spent far too many hours this week staring at the full stop at the end of the most recent paragraph of The Second Realm (whichever paragraph that happened to be at the time), with my brain feeling Tipp-Exed out between my ears.
There are several factors at play. My imagination just hasn't been as active since getting seriously stuck into the writing of my PhD thesis a couple of years ago. I've thought or dreamt up far fewer new ideas - only two that I thought were any cop in the last twelve months. I'm sure this is just a matter of finding time to properly unwind, but I don't think such time will be available in time (if that makes any sense ;D).
There's also the length of time I've been at work on The Second Realm. This month's episode was the twenty-fifth, spread across twenty-eight months, and through that time, work on it has been fairly constant. I've taken breaks, for NaNoWriMo 2011 and 2013 (in 2012, I wrote Second Realm episodes for NaNo) and for a couple of other hiccups, but for over two years my normal state has been 'working on The Second Realm'. I don't take well to this kind of drawn-out process; I prefer to work in short, sharp bursts with long periods of down-time (more accurately, other projects) in between.
Thirdly, there's everything else that's happened in the last three months, particularly with my day-job. Since there are issues of client confidentiality involved, I shouldn't say very much, but what I will say is that it's been impossible to tell, week to week and sometimes even day to day, when I would be in work and whether I would get paid if there were cancellations. As a creature of routine and habit, I've found this hugely exhausting and disruptive. I am desperate for the Easter break to start, but there's another week still to go even before that.
And I feel like I'm letting an opportunity slip through my fingers. I know that bursts of interest like the one I'm reading to all these sharp spiky peaks on all my graphs need nurturing, that they can drop off very quickly if you don't keep delivering. Ideally, I need a new episode of The Second Realm to put out in no more than about three weeks' time, but my strategy for 'delivering' seems at the moment to be 'hiding from the blank space at the bottom of the page in the next episode' and playing lots of World of Warcraft.
So I'm appealing for suggestions (besides the obvious ones, like 'less internet/gaming/moping') - what can I actually try to rejuvenate my inspiration? How do I tackle scenes where I'm getting stuck every other paragraph trying to work out what a character would say next?
Thursday, 20 February 2014
#writerproblems: This damn door sticks
I have a problem: I can't write doors.
Well, actually, I can write doors just fine. Doors, gates, thresholds, eldritch wormholes of nether terror. Portals of any kind, right here. What I can't do is get my characters through the blessed things. I don't get writer's block very often, but when I do it's usually because one of my characters is stood outside a door he or she needs to go through.
It's a particular problem in The Second Realm for some reason. Now, The Second Realm has 'the perilous threshold' as a major thematic element - every crossing between the First and Second Realms in the story is supposed to be frightening and potentially lethal, and to be representative of more metaphorical crossings as well. But while I can usually engage pretty well with those kinds of portals, more mundane doors get me really stuck.
For example, right now I'm stalled badly on the next episode because a character has to go into another character's bedroom to wake him up because there's a crisis and I just. Can't. Write it. I've called up the Word file enough times that I can picture the text exactly; the character knocks quietly, waits for a response, and -
There are a few reasons why I might struggle. I think I find it difficult when a character enters a new environment to sort out which details to mention first - there's a whole new room to introduce, without breaking the flow of the story. It's difficult to whittle that down to the (at most) one-paragraph space it has to fit into. I've always had a bit of a problem with environmental detail anyway - a friend of mine once told me that one of my first novels read like a prolonged phone conversation, so little sense of setting did he get from it - so this is certainly part of the problem.
Another part is my own anxiety problems. I find it quite nervewracking to be at an unfamiliar door and to enter unfamiliar environments. Heck, on bad days it can be quite nervewracking to come home to my own front door (I live in a shared house, and occasionally get quite anxious about contact with my housemates - this is not a rational illness). Some of that anxiety will, of course, creep into even my most confident characters.
But even when there are no contextual reasons to worry about going through a door, I tend to make a meal of it. There's a scene in the final episode of season 2 where Rel and Pevan have to get into a room where there are some hostile agents, and I remember going into intense detail about exactly how they got the door open and how Rel went through it. The rest of the action is heavily truncated and summarised, but I had to know exactly how they handled the door.
So I'm wondering if other writers feel the same way about doors, or if you have other equivalent sticking points. And if you do, do you have any tips on how to deal with them? Because seriously, 'Guys, I forgot how to door' is a terrible reason for missing publishing deadlines...
Well, actually, I can write doors just fine. Doors, gates, thresholds, eldritch wormholes of nether terror. Portals of any kind, right here. What I can't do is get my characters through the blessed things. I don't get writer's block very often, but when I do it's usually because one of my characters is stood outside a door he or she needs to go through.
It's a particular problem in The Second Realm for some reason. Now, The Second Realm has 'the perilous threshold' as a major thematic element - every crossing between the First and Second Realms in the story is supposed to be frightening and potentially lethal, and to be representative of more metaphorical crossings as well. But while I can usually engage pretty well with those kinds of portals, more mundane doors get me really stuck.
For example, right now I'm stalled badly on the next episode because a character has to go into another character's bedroom to wake him up because there's a crisis and I just. Can't. Write it. I've called up the Word file enough times that I can picture the text exactly; the character knocks quietly, waits for a response, and -
There are a few reasons why I might struggle. I think I find it difficult when a character enters a new environment to sort out which details to mention first - there's a whole new room to introduce, without breaking the flow of the story. It's difficult to whittle that down to the (at most) one-paragraph space it has to fit into. I've always had a bit of a problem with environmental detail anyway - a friend of mine once told me that one of my first novels read like a prolonged phone conversation, so little sense of setting did he get from it - so this is certainly part of the problem.
Another part is my own anxiety problems. I find it quite nervewracking to be at an unfamiliar door and to enter unfamiliar environments. Heck, on bad days it can be quite nervewracking to come home to my own front door (I live in a shared house, and occasionally get quite anxious about contact with my housemates - this is not a rational illness). Some of that anxiety will, of course, creep into even my most confident characters.
But even when there are no contextual reasons to worry about going through a door, I tend to make a meal of it. There's a scene in the final episode of season 2 where Rel and Pevan have to get into a room where there are some hostile agents, and I remember going into intense detail about exactly how they got the door open and how Rel went through it. The rest of the action is heavily truncated and summarised, but I had to know exactly how they handled the door.
So I'm wondering if other writers feel the same way about doors, or if you have other equivalent sticking points. And if you do, do you have any tips on how to deal with them? Because seriously, 'Guys, I forgot how to door' is a terrible reason for missing publishing deadlines...
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