But Enough About Me!

Hope springs eternal. Mostly.

If I had infinite energy and time, here’s what I would accomplish in 2011:


Spiritwalker:

-- Revise Cold Fire. Followed by copy edits and page proofs. Publication in September (mass market of Cold Magic available in August).
-- Draft Cold Steel (and preferably a first draft shorter than Cold Fire's first draft).
-- Make a decent North American/Caribbean Basin map for this Earth.
-- Write a novelette from the point of view of Bee (which would need illustrations).
-- Write up excerpts of journal entries by Daniel Hassi Barahal.



Crossroads:

-- Finish a draft of Crossroads 4
(I’ve written 45,000 words, but the story needs some re-visioning because the 45,000 words I’ve written constitute perhaps one quarter of the story and possibly less, so obviously I need to rethink how I’m approaching it)



Crown of Stars Universe proposal:

Write up a proposal for a short trilogy (<==don’t laugh!) set in the Crown of Stars universe, possibly with a YA focus, set 450 years after the events of the septology.



Jaran Universe:

Sketch out more of the “political” (as opposed to emotional) plot for Jaran #5 in preparation for actually writing it.



Research: A ton.



Read more fiction, by wasting less time online.



Posts:
I have a set of posts I’m working on, surrounding issues of craft and the writing process, that I would like to complete and post throughout the first half of the year together with, I hope, a dedicated blog that will be mirrored on lj.


Travel to Spain in October (for research for Cold Steel).
(I had hoped to make a short trip to the Dominican Republic this month--January--but other necessary things have eaten my time and $$ and so this will not, unfortunately, be happening.)



That’s all, but only because I’m not even touching on any potential new projects, of which there are always some churning in my head, including a side project set in the Cold Magic universe.

The chances I can manage all the above are, as we say, slim to none.

Sometimes my mind becomes so full of thoughts churning away that I stop reading fiction because there is no space for it**. I stop posting because I have too many posts I want to write that I can't settle on starting with one, and after all you have to start with one. You have to start somewhere.

I am working on Cold Magic #2, currently titled Cold Fire (as Cold Steel is now being saved for book 3), and it is going so well that it is almost impossible to start writing each day because my head is surging with images and scenes. Also, quite honestly, the plot has catapulted me into a landscape whose contours I am so supremely not knowledgeable about, and which is so complex (and politically charged) that I could never be knowledgeable enough about it, that all I can do is shake my head over the paths my daemon (I don't have a muse; I have a daemon because, I gotta tell you, he is one hot dude) drags me down and be grateful that my protagonist will be traveling through these climes as a foreigner and know that at least I am not writing historical fiction but a form of alt-history which I am calling "Earth in a different universe." Never a dull moment. It's also why I love writing. And hate writing. And love writing.

A couple of weeks ago I had hit what I call mid-book slump.

Let me digress a moment, although this digression should be its own post.

When I talk about writing, I talk in a code that other writers understand but which people who don't write may not always understand.

When I say "I wrote two crap scenes today" I don't mean that I don't take my writing seriously, or that I am not taking the particular book seriously that I am referring to. I take every word I write very seriously, and every book I write seriously, and I never do less than my best. Besides that I do feel I owe the readers my best work, quite honestly I can’t bear not to do my best no matter what because that is how I am wired. I am very self competitive, as it were. As long as I know I have given it everything I have to give, I can live with the outcome. I may and always do hope to improve, but the moment, in the moment, I can nod, accept that I’ve done the best I can, and move forward.

What I mean when I say “I wrote two crap scenes today” is that the words don't look good to me at the moment, or that I am in a period of doubt about whether anything I write is good and so it all looks bad, or it may even be that the scenes aren't particularly good but are more or less placeholders that I have to get down in order to move forward and to which I will come back and fix/trim/rewrite/sharpen once I have finished the first draft or gotten a better handle on what needs to be in them. And etc and so on.

These ways of looking at my own writing are so predictable that if I stomp into the kitchen and say to my spouse, "oh gosh, this book is awful; it is simply unworkable, and I think this time I have finally lost my ability to write" he will usually say: "Oh, are you 2/3rds of the way through?" To which I will reply, in vast surprise, "Why, yes, how did you know?" and he will say, "because that's what you say every time."

Every damn time. Seriously.

So, when I say I had hit mid-book slump what I mean is this: after my usual struggles getting started on Cold Fire (agonizing), and then hitting my stride through a long opening sequence as the overall shape of the plot began slowly to cohere, I had hit that place in the middle where I knew what I had to do over these 2 or 3 transitional scenes that are of crucial importance to the plot but which I would not be able to fully fill in at the depths I wanted until later in the writing process due to the way I work. So I hit a kind of sag where my mind began wandering. I had my little demi-outline of the three scenes and what they needed to do and snippets of dialogue fit in and comments to myself about background and description to heighten tension blah blah blah . . . . stare at the wall . . . . god, when can my character have sex already? . . . . gee, any new reviews online? no, no, of course not I am already consigned to the trash heap of history . . . oh, wait, I have to make sure that Character X still has her knife . . . did I fold that laundry?

Two things happened. A friend of mine, here in Hawaii, had just read the Jaran books. And Desert Book Chick reviewed Jaran (I've already linked to this post twice, so just for you, I have linked to it again). The confluence of these two things caused me to develop a sudden powerful urge to re-read a bit of The Sword of Heaven (published as the two-parter An Earthly Crown and His Conquering Sword) which led to me re-reading parts of The Law of Becoming.

And my brain . . . well, she didn't explode so much as just start upwelling on a particular plot line that I have long planned but not thought about much.

Now, I have to tell you, that as I go into detail in this post over here, there are economic and professional reasons I have not yet written Jaran #5. This is my job, not a hobby. If you want those details, read that post.

But the dirty secret that I don’t share, because honestly there’s a lot in my thoughts I don’t share because it’s really no one’s business but my own, is that the Other Reason I have not pushed harder about writing Jaran #5 is because of a major plot problem on which I was Stuck. And not just kind of Stuck, but Major Stuck. Literally, a situation I did not know how to resolve. And it was so major I couldn’t skate around it. It had to be dealt with.

That Stuck Plot Issue was not the plot line that started upwelling. That was another plot line entirely. And for four days my brain did nothing but spew forth (not meaning this to sound like the horrific Gulf oil disaster, but unfortunately everything reminds me of that these days) scenes, dialogue, and back-story for one of the major plot lines that would be present in Jaran #5.

I gave up trying to work on Cold Fire. Sometimes you just have to let go.

I wrote twenty five pages of single spaced notes on the plot line in question, and a peculiar thing happened. When I had worked through that plot line, its resolution solved the Stuck Plot Issue. I can’t tell you how (because it would constitute a spoiler), but it was the oddest damn thing and yet, I see now, inevitable both in terms of the plot and in terms of the characters.

I thought: Whoa. I can write Jaran #5 now. Working title: The Game of Princes.

Well, I can write it after I’ve finished the Spiritwalker Trilogy, and completed Crossroads #4 (of which I have about 45,000 words written but whose plot spine isn’t quite straight enough yet; once it is, Crossroads #4 should be a piece of cake to write). But I now know how to write Jaran #5.

How bizarrely the mind works.

Because after the upwelling slowed down, and I could step back from my compulsive and obsessive thinking on that one plot line, I turned around and sat down in front of Cold Fire, and the mid-book slump had vanished. I charged right back in, got to the turnover (that’s a plot turnover, not an apple turnover) and the transition, and so onward.

I mean, I’m now stumbling forward into a landscape I don’t know, but what the heck. To some degree, I’m always writing into a landscape I don’t know because to some degree, as I hope this long post has made clear, it is the way I work. I can see the path, or part of the path, or glimpses of the path, but each twist and turn and ridge and hollow can still bring me to an entirely unexpected vista. This is thing that makes writing deadly awful to suffer through and yet also like being transported into an altered and ecstatic frame of mind. I mean, besides the dull, slogging mud-sticking-to-your-shoes parts in between the two extremes, which is also part of the day to day routine of writing.

Yesterday I managed to get a shark and a zombie in the same scene. Maybe today I can finally get to a scene with some sex.





** except the one book I’m reading as a beta reader!

Wow. Here is a really nice review of my novel Jaran

I love it when a reader totally gets what I'm trying to do.

Although I am hesitant to do so, I feel I must discuss the issue of the Jaran novels. I am hesitant to do so not because I do not want readers to ask about the possibility of more Jaran novels--I don’t mind such questions at all and I think it is completely reasonable for people to ask--but because I don’t like the answer I feel I have to give, which is not “yes” and not “no” but “it’s complicated.”

( complicated and very very long after the cut )

fezabel asks:

What is your favorite book or series that you have written? Or do you love them all equally?

Good question.

In a way my books are like my children. I love them all equally for what is best about them, and I put up with the faults since there's now nothing I can do about those -- unless I was willing to revise and republish, and I am not at this time interested in revising and republishing any of my already published books (even if I could find a publisher to do so), because

1) I have tons of other books to write

2) each book seems to me to reflect where I was at the time I wrote it, and revising the book would lose that context, which I think matters because I see my books as part of a progression in my life as a writer.


Here is a thing I love about each of my novels/series (ask me tomorrow and I'll tell you something different for each one):

The Labyrinth Gate: How I worked in the working class correspondence societies of late 18th/early 19th century Britain.

The Highroad Trilogy: Published in 1990 (in three volumes, natch). Most of the characters (including the main character) are PoCs because I tried to set out a "realistic" scenario for colonization, which happened to result in this outcome. I like that I was able to think a bit out of what was then (and is often still) "the box" two decades ago.

The Novels of the Jaran: I love the jaran. I doubt I could write quite so romanticized a culture now, but I admit that I'm glad I did it then.

Crown of Stars: Hugh. No, srsly. It's not often one creates a villain so many people love to hate.

Crossroads Trilogy: Traitors' Gate is the best thing I've ever written in terms of characters revealing themselves purely through action and interaction.

Cold Magic: (publication details not yet announced, but a revised version is complete): Beta readers keep telling me that there are actual funny things in this book that make them laugh out loud. I've never managed that before (I mean, unless you count disdainful readers laughing AT me).