Diminisher of Peace
Always Becoming
A Corner Not Dipped In Styx
Nanowhere Chapt. 1
Here's a page from one my many attempts to put some of my writing into something more visual. The first scene of Saltwater Witch, with Kassandra falling into Red Bear Lake in Nebraska. She was pushed. I saw the whole thing. Click for a larger view--or click over to my deviantArt page to get even more. (http://the0phrastus.deviantart.com/art/Getting-graphical-89733965).
I just received an email from Paula at Juno Books, the subject was "Books!" Yes, she has Seaborn in print, and she's going to send me a box.
Good ones. Skott points to a great source of European names, what looks like a scan of an early census document at the Internet Archive:
http://textiplication.com/2008/06/06/where-have-you-been-all-my-life/
I printed out the latest PDF of SEABORN, and I'm going through it with an orange highlighter, slapping on little yellow stickies to mark the pages.
All of them are minor, and all but two or three are very minor, a line that should be italicized but isn't, that sort of thing.
Any author reading words aloud should check out Mary Robinette Kowal's eighteen--yes 18--part series on how to do it right, I mean everything from the basics, to cross-gender voices, to vocal fatigue.
Part 1: http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/reading-aloud/
And I thought I was doing well with my reading of SEABORN chapter one
Thanks, Skott!
Sylvia Kelso (Amberlight) asked me if I was doing a reading at WisCon, and...no…I hadn't actually signed up for anything. My first time at the con, and Seaborn's still a little ways out--3 months and closing...awfully fast. I really should have, but I missed the deadline back in January--back when July seemed so far off.
Nothing to prevent me from getting into practice, though. I sat down at the mic and read the first chapter--and I'd like to hear what you think.
I've converted it into a few formats. If you're inclined--say you really want an ogg version--use the 30MB 128kbps MP3. Let me know, and I'll link to it, or you can send it to me: chrishoward.author@gmail.com
Click on one of the formats below or download it. (The m4a opens in Quicktime on my machine, the wma is Windows Media Audio format). To download in Windows: right-click, select Save Target As... from the popup menu | Mac: Ctrl+click and then "Download File"
SEABORN-Chapter1-48kbps-44.mp3 (MP3)
SeabornChapter1.m4a (MP4)
SEABORN-Chapter1-48kbps-44.wma (WMA)
Larger, better quality version:
SEABORN-Chapter1-256kbps1.mp3 (MP3, 30MB)
Enjoy!
Let's set aside poetry the art form, rhythmical composition and elevating anyone's thoughts, and think of it in a purely structural way: poetry as action, description, mood, story, in a succinct form.
Think of it as stylized sketching for writers. Have you ever written poetry as a way to bring ideas together for a work of prose?
There's a bunch of brainstorming (storystorming?) methods that I've tried successfully. I have thumbed through the dictionary, pulling out appealing words, writing them down on a big piece of paper, stringing them together--just to see what is born out of them. Sometimes nothing much, although--in my somewhat limited experience--exercises like this usually yield something, maybe not something special, but something worth paying attention to, something useful.
I've used mindmapping software (mindjet.com, freemind) for word doodling, throwing down ideas, which amazingly--As Seen on TV!--grow into other ideas, and soon you have this spreading network of thought and action and characters and motives and "what if?" questions. Really cool stuff. I recommend at least goofing with these kinds of tools just see what you build.
But I've also found that writing poetry works for brainstorming story ideas, helps tie together a set of interesting words, a flow of ideas, and even more as a way to tell a story or backstory without burying me with too much to take in. I also think writing poetry sends me in unexpected directions, helps open doors I wouldn't have even noticed with other methods.
The idea here is to get your story ideas down in a concise way, tell a story, fill in background, create a mood, write action, with a handful of descriptive lines. It's also about taking some time to work with words, be creative, build impossibilities.
There's...um...only one problem with this post.
I wrote a poem a couple nights ago called The Wild Children that I kind of liked, and refined, played with it until I thought I should submit it somewhere rather than post it here. So I did--we'll see if it goes anywhere. Anyway, I wrote The Wild Children for one of my current book projects, a fantasy set in a post-virtual universe, where the world's human population has gone completely sim.
What if there was an apocalypse and nobody came?
You can think of it as post-apocalyptic urban fantasy, only there wasn't an apocalypse, no judgment day, just the singularity, the hissing speed of progress pulling everyone into their nanobuilt V-pods housed in city-sized storage spheres of diamond with walls a meter thick. Humanity vanishes off the face of the earth--or any planet we've colonized.
Humanity has gone total virtual, billions of us, living out our lives in pure simulative worlds--worlds without limit--without hunger, pain, limitless capacity for growth. New generations of humans are born, grow and live forever without ever having a physical form--that they know of. The virtual world is just that good. But it doesn't really matter. The story's not about them.
It's about the ones who were left behind.
What about those who didn't make the go-virtual deadline, and now have to live out their physical lives in a depopulated world? And is it really depopulated? There's tech around, empty cities, nanoware that can provide benefits, but what about old world powers, things ignored by human progress, that lived at the borders of humanity, that lived in the forest, under the leaves, in the earth? They were here before there were humans. They just let us run our course--maybe even helped us along, and now they're free to roam the far ice reaches, the hundred-mile forests, the cracked pavement, empty office towers, the deep sea.
What about the humans who were left behind, generations of us, sharing our empty world with them?
There, that's my setting, and it all came out of some poetry brainstorming.
What do you do to help jump start your story ideas? I've covered a few methods. What have I missed? Anyone else use poetry?
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Caitlín Kiernan is one of my favorite authors. She's influenced my own writing and love of words. She needs a little help with medical expenses. Simple as that. Bid on signed books at eBay or donate direct.
Find out more here:
http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/428785.html
Donate directly here:
http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/428947.html
Jeff Vandermeer, Paula Guran have also blogged about this. Spread the word.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caitlín_R._Kiernan
http://www.caitlinrkiernan.com/
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Here's a trick I do when I write and it's going a bit slow. I know I need to open this scene with something bright, something heavy, bloody, claustrophobic, there's a mood I need to drop the reader into.
One of the things that can get me going is to grab a dictionary, thumb through it, pull out a random word or four to see if they spark anything. It doesn't always work, but I'll write them down, more words, trying to pick interesting ones, especially if they have some--even remote--connection to the idea I'm trying to capture.
Writers have a toolbox, a database of ideas, a vocabulary well to draw on, but like all things, these are limited, and a novel is a long work. We've all read books in which an author has used a word too often, or it's word that's different enough to stand out, to catch our notice. It doesn't have to be in the same book. (Alice uses the phrase "skirt pooling" to mean a sex scene in any romance book, and it comes right out of Nora Roberts, because Nora has used those words too often, you open a Nora Roberts book, you sort of expect to have one of the protag's skirts "pooling around her ankles" before you reach the end).
I just picked these:
metallic mouthwash ratline dribble
Go ahead. Tell me words don't have power.
Several good posts on this already, but I'm going to add the things I do. (I'm near the end of my fourth novel, so I'm not writing from a huge well of experience, but these things work for me).
By writing, I'm talking construction, how you go about the writing stage of a novel, the activity that takes place after you've outlined, planned the arc, and your characters are doing stuff, getting hurt, committing crimes, making eye contact, re-forging ancient swords, drinking blood, whatever.
I'm pretty sure all authors have a particular way of getting things done with common ground that we all have to cover to complete books. I'd love to read what others do--So, if you know of other "How to write a novel" posts out there, let me know.
Here's what I do, keeping in mind that this is the general flow:
After the overall story ideas are in place in my head and in my journal, I may write a chunk of the ending first. I like to have something to aim for. If things go as they have the last four books, I will then start at chapter 1 and write the chapters in order until I'm about 2/3 through. That's when things start to go all gappy, inconsistencies will catch up to the characters and demand evening out, holes in the plot yawn open and demand to be filled.
By gappy I mean...picture a landscape full of rocky towers and bluffs, only it's not erosion that accounts for the space, but that the writer hasn't gotten around to filling everything in. Think Monument Valley at the southern edge of Utah and northern Arizona. From the side, the last ten chapters of the story look like this:
Okay, now fill it in.
At this point in the process I will also find it difficult to stay with the chapter order and move into story line order, following a particular character far--sometimes to the end before I can go back and pick up a second story line.
To take this one level lower:
I do outline, but it's rather loose. I need to know where to go, but not necessarily be clear about how to get there, and keep in mind that I usually do a decent amount of thinking, journaling, sketching, painting, and writing scenes, bits of action, before I really dig in to the real writing.
I've posted several times on the need for authors to sketch and paint scenes, characters, etc., but in case you haven't seen those, these are the kinds of things I do for every book. The first is actually all the action from chapter 15 from my current book rolled into one work. The second is a character study, which I use to get a character's look in my head--mainly so I don't go overboard on description. It works, I'm telling you.
At some point--after the first eight or nine chapters--I will build a complete chapter list, typically with bad descriptive titles like "Monster kills Anthony." This will be shaky for a while, and whole new chapters will spring up in the middle, others will die and fade from the list.
I write mostly in MS Word because of the Document Map feature, but I do occasionally use OpenOffice. One of these days I'll get a Mac--but only when I can carry it around in a manila envelope--oh wait, didn't that just happen? Anyway, it's been Windows or Linux for me for a while. I've heard good things about Scrivener. One of these days.
Here's what the Doc Map feature in Word looks like (on the left)--I use it mainly to jump between chapters:
And here's a bit on how the Document Map works.
With the badly headed chapters in a list I can jump to any of them and jot down an idea I think belongs there. I update the outline as the writing progresses because things change, things fit together better in a way I didn't see in the beginning. Eventually I'll fold the outline into the chapters, and it all becomes the same document.
Another thing I do to keep the action in a particular unwritten chapter clear is to put the line, "Ends with..." at the end. So in a chapter called, "Monster kills Anthony" I will have something like this:
Ends with Irene standing on the porch holding Anthony's severed head.
(You want to end chapters with something sharp--or at least much heavier than you thought it would be, with eyes bulging from their sockets and drippy).
To cap it all off, I think taking the time to just close your eyes and think about the story is as important as the actual writing.
I sit down all the time and just make myself write, but I also need to take some time to think. Best time is early in the morning, somewhere around 5 AM. I don't get up at that ungodly and undemonly hour, but I sort of drift around in the story soup, blow up the raft, get on and paddle here and there, trying to see how things are going, circling the areas that are giving me trouble. I figure all writers have a pretty good head for their own words, their own story, and you can play it, rewind it, play it back at half speed, rewind... That's what I do until I get it right.
Okay, now I have to get back to writing.
Links:
http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/?p=398
http://jaylake.livejournal.com/639909.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_Valley
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
Seaborn's sequel: I'm into the 20's of about 33 chapters, and I've started the phase (this has happened with the last three novels) where I begin filling in bits of the remaining chapters as the ideas strike me, writing whole scenes, action, dialogue, without completing the chapter. Then everything starts to sort of ooze together. I'll start finishing chapters out of order until the last of them is complete--up to now, I've pretty much followed a direct course from chapter 1, writing some of the ending early on to hammer a stake in the ground, to giude me. So, as it stands, I have 1k - 2k word chunks of several upcoming chapters started. Hoping to complete the story by the end of the month.
Got this from Stacia Kane via Fangs Fur & Fey:
Top ten signs a book was written by me (Chris Howard).
1. Half the book takes place underwater
2. The other half is no more than three miles from the coast, on board a ship, close to the water, you get it.
3. There's at least one good line in ancient Greek ...têi kreagrai tôn orchipedôn helkoimên es abysson.
4. At least one of the families--the protag's or some other major characters'--is really messed up, capital D Dysfunctional.
5. Someone commits suicide--usually for a cause.
6. There's a brutal internal struggle going on--I love plot lines around characters fighting themselves, fighting some change in themselves.
7. Female protag. I haven't written a male protagonist in the last three novels.
8. Someone is brought back from the dead--sometimes many someones, sometimes many times, sometimes armies of them.
9. One of the characters is from the Azores. (I can't say why this is, some deep fascination with the islands, I'm thinking).
10. Aristotle is mentioned in a favorable light, if not all out gushed over. "Greatest hacker who ever lived, man."
Pass it on: Skott, Craig, Jeff, Lee, Sonja, and Lee.
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Painted this afternoon. Here's where my main character is right now...
Here's an update...with tentacles.
Amberlight by Sylvia Kelso
Juno Books (November, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0809572052
ISBN-13: 978-0809572052
Way late on this. I'm in the middle of Carole McDonnell's Wind Follower--hoping to follow up with a post on it shortly.
I read Amberlight a few weeks ago and loved it. I bought it at the Prime Books/Juno booth at World Fantasy 2007 in early November, but with work and other things going (oh, you know, that writing and painting stuff) I didn't get to it until the end of the month. And recent news: over on the Juno Books blog I see that Jeff VanderMeer has placed Amberlight on the great sf/f gift list along with Glen Cook's Chronicles of the Black Company and Moorcock's The Metatemporal Detective, and others. Kick ass!
Okay, let's go upriver for a bit.
I read Amberlight in a day. It's a downhill-without-brakes on an unknown very steep undreamt of street sort of story. It's a story of trust, the search for lost memories, nations at war, the demand for something so valuable some of those nations cannot survive without it; it's the struggle against a culture as hard as stone, but at every turn--and there are a lot of them, very real and tender and heartbreaking.
Amberlight is the story of Amberlight--the city and its place in the world, of Tellurith, head of one of the great ruling Houses of Amberlight, Alkhes, the mystery, and qherrique...
Qherrique, a stone with remarkable abilities, sentience and choice among them. Qherrique is "the core and crown of Amberlight." It can only be mined by women in Amberlight, and outside of Amberlight, it can only be used in one of its forms. The rulers of other lands use qherrique to maintain power, order, control their unruly elements. Naturally, there's demand...and discontent.
The story begins in the streets of Amberlight...
High moon over Amberlight, commanding the zenith, radiant, imperial, the city's fretted-ink porticoes and balconies gnawing that torrent of aerial snow. Domes shed it, men's towers drip with it. Under the vertical black rampart of the citadel wall, the qherrique outcrops glow to their depths with it: cabochon slabs girdling the hill's waist, broad as cathedral floors, zones of luminous milk slanted between ragged frames of earth and grass. Qherrique. Pearl-rock. Moon-stone. The core and crown of Amberlight.
Tellurith and her entourage find a man in the night, bleeding, raped, on the cobbles...
Sweet Work-mother . . ." Her hand creeps out. One finger, reaching to the blackness on the cobbles, dares to touch.
One turn of kindness that turns on a point when the man wakes with a Dhasdein salute.
He's a mystery, even to himself. His injuries have taken his memories and left him with hints that come out as the story progresses, sometimes as reflexes--the salute. Other indications of who he may be in his manner, language, his skill as a soldier, the boots in which they find him.
You shadow Tellurith through her own desire to discover who the outlander is, why he's there, wringing your hands when your level of trust doesn't equal hers. But you will be charmed by Alkhes as much as Tellurith--by his strength, his drive for identity...and justice, and you will share in Tellurith's power struggles, her love, her defense of the outlander, battling the intrigue of the other Houses of Amberlight.
All of this and so beautifully written. I loved the fast, up-to-your-neck-in-action-and-ideas style, the gorgeous mix of vivid, very bold imagery, speed scenes, places where it seems sort of stream of consciousness, and what I would call "parenthetical drops." Kelso drops words, whole lines--without parentheses--right in the middle of dialogue--names, information, quick who's or what's--kind of like road signs when you're speeding by in a car; there there for a second to let you know you're on the right track--or which road you're on--and then you're rolling through the dialogue again.
I immediately fell in love with Sylvia Kelso's river world, the strength of her characters, her magic use of words.
Looking forward to Riversend.
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http://www.juno-books.com/blog
http://www.omnivoracious.com/2007/12/four-great-sff.html
http://www.amazon.com/Amberlight-Sylvia-Kelso/dp/0809572052
http://www.juno-books.com/amberlight.html
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Saw this at Tobias Buckell's, passing it along: An organization dedicated to helping, growing, protecting the fan writing community, led by a board of teachers, professors from a range of disciplines, chaired by Naomi Novik.
The vision (from the site),
We envision a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity. We are proactive and innovative in protecting and defending our work from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. We preserve our fannish economy, values, and creative expression by protecting and nurturing our fellow fans, our work, our commentary, our history, and our identity while providing the broadest possible access to fannish activity for all fans.
I was only vaguely aware of the interesting ideas and work being done over at the IAF--how unfortunate for me. Thanks to an invite from Ellen Kushner (via Facebook) to check out the Interstitial Online Salon, I've set out to find more about "art made in the interstices between genres and categories," and I encourage you too. I've been pulled in by everything I've read so far, essays by the amazing Delia Sherman, Theodora Goss, Holly Black, Jeff VanderMeer, Terri Windling, and some of the messages going at the second Interstitial Online Salon.
Find out more, join, participate.
http://www.interstitialarts.org
http://p081.ezboard.com/finterstitialartsfrm2.showMessage?topicID=323.topic
Gail's post at Fiction Beyond The Ordinary few days back got me thinking about motivation and writing...and drawing.
I'm a visual sort of person--maybe we all are. In writing, I always "see" what's happening to my characters, I picture scenes, see the tension in the room through the posture, the space between two characters, the expressions on their faces. I see characters in action and I write what I see. Pretty much the way it works for me.
I have sketched scenes and characters for years, and it helps me in several ways:
Drawing scenes helps anchor the future plot, keeps the plot from straying. Drawing also helps keep the characters fresh. Characters grow during the story. They're rarely--or perhaps shouldn't be--unchanged when you reach the final chapter. An early character sketch can show characters smiling, untroubled by all the bad stuff your plot's going to hand them a moment later. It's good--it works for me anyway--to have character studies at key points in the story.
I also use character studies to keep them fresh in my mind. There's the old writing rule: don't go back and read or edit everything you write. Move forward or you may stall and never complete the book. For the most part I do write forward, but I do look back--mainly for motivation. I go back and re-read my work. A lot. I may read the first 3, 5, 10 chapters a hundred times before I've completed the book's first pass. When those chapters become unbearably dull through over-reading, I usually move on to the middle of the book. And this is where those early character studies help me. They're the inspiration to keep going without having to re-read anything. I don't have to read anything to get a fresh picture of the characters and how far they've come. I just browse the sketches.
I've been drawing and painting for years. I have no formal training. It's mainly just me goofing with a pencil or pen or brush. For a novel, I'll typically draw or paint fifty or sixty pieces, some not much more than quick character outlines in pen or pencil. Others just seem to require more effort, and need to be completed. Here's an example. Click the pic to see the detail view.
At last year's Boskone (Great F&SF convention in Boston every year), Wen Spencer led a room full of us through her sketches--which weren't much more than stick figures--but she didn't need more to show us swords swinging, blood flowing, characters falling, parrying desperately, biting, going in for the kill. With a few pages, she choreographed an entire fight scene. I thought this was brilliant, and reinforced my own views about all the good things a writer can get out of drawing.
It really works for me. What about you? Do you have good (or bad) experiences drawing your characters or scenes? Do you find them helpful?
Here's a quick sketch from a chapter at the end of my current work. It's sloppy, but that doesn't matter. I treat sketches like this as visual counterparts to the stuff in my writing journal. I write notes on them, names, what's going on, where the scene's taking place. It helps keep the scene in mind--even seven chapters away, because it's that scene--that sketch--that's leading me. In this form, the sketch is like a map. It shows me where I need to go.
Click the pic to see the detail view.
I made emoticon happy mermaid t-shirts and stickers over at CafePress.com in a variety of styles. (Click the pic to view full-sized). I broke some rules, adding tildes for hair, and then the line, "SEABORN ¤ Chris Howard ¤ Juno Books" underneath.
Get yours here:
http://www.cafepress.com/seaborn
There's a point in the journey of writing a novel when the story starts to come together, all the action begins to converge, plot falls in line, and there's a real story heading toward completion. I'm not talking about early plotting exercises, outlining, a couple chapters. I mean when you're halfway through the book and although there's still some εuρυχωρiα--sea room, room for your characters to maneuver, get their ships turned around, buy guns, cast spells, and learn to fly helicopters, you pretty much know how it's all going to turn out, and all you must do now is get down to the business of finishing.
It isn't the finish line--the finish line may not even be in sight, but it's all starting to gel. You know what I'm talking about. You can feel the plot heading right for that glutinous consistency that characterizes an almost--or gonna be--finished novel.
Well I'm there with my latest, not done, but the story's starting to go all gelatinoidal on me. Long way to done, probably sometime around January, early February, but I just need to write now. The story's pretty much set. I'm not making up the next piece of the plot--which is the way I work, btw, an outline, rather loose, and although I know this guy needs to get from A to B and do some badness to C, I haven't necessarily put thought into how he's going to do that. I'll let the story and character purpose guide some of that process. Most of that is done.
Writers seem to work well with a certain length of book; some write 85k and can't break the 100k barrier if their life depended on it, others have trouble keeping it under 300. I always seem to end up with four or five chapters I don't need, somewhere around 130k words, and I know I need to plan on pruning back to around 110k for the completed book. It's the way it works for me.
What's your experience? Where are you in your current story? Starting to gelatinate? Still rather runny? Characters running amok, anyone flying helicopters?
Here's to many gelatinousnesses!
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I've just started goofing with a web site (a page or two really) for my novel Seaborn. It won't be in stores for months, but I figure I can't be too early for some things. Got to start building a presence and momentum now. As far as domain names, Seaborn.com was taken, but I've picked up SeabornBook.com, SeabornOnline.com, NineCities.com, and SaltwaterWitch.com, and I'll probably alias them all to one.
Anyway, I'd love it if you took a look at my first pass and commented here on what you think. If you click the pic on the left, you'll see a screenshot of the site. Click the link below to see the latest--which may or may not have changed:
New: http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/saltwater_witch/index2.html
One of the things I'm particularly interested in knowing is how it appears in different browsers. I'm checking with IE7 and FF2, but I don't have Safari, Opera or others. Let me know how it looks Safari users!
We're off to Saratoga Springs, NY in a couple days for World Fantasy Convention 2007. Where will you be this weekend?
Take a look at the amazing list of people attending. I just went through and grabbed some names: Guy Gavriel Kay, Lois McMaster Bujold, Chloe Howard, David Louis Edelman, Holly Black, Kelly Link, Scott Lynch, Garth Nix, Scott Westerfeld, Lou Anders, Christopher Barzak, Elizabeth Bear, Ellen Datlow, Hal Duncan, Craig Shaw Gardner, Christopher Golden, Sharyn November.
So many more. Check it out:
http://www.lastsfa.org/wfc2007/membership.php
Chloe--my daughter--is on the list. She and I will be attending Friday-Sunday with varying agendas, while Christopher and Alice explore upstate New York. Chloe's agenda involves seeking out Scott Westerfeld, Garth Nix, Holly Black, and more of her favorite authors.
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Here are a few things I know about writing and getting published, but only if you catch me in an optimistic mood. Otherwise, I'll deny ever writing this.
I have never felt more certain about the writing path on which I've found myself--never more certain of the steps I am taking. With some careful contemplation, chin scratching, thoughtful "hmmmm" noises, I have broken it into four main points, Writing, Rejection, Uncertainty, and Time (WRUT?)
Here's what I think I know:
Writing
That age-old pro writer advice to "keep writing" turns out to be absolutely true. I have been writing fiction since high school in the late '70s. It took me--off and on--thirty-five years to get my first story published. (Yeah, I'm a slow learner). Here's what I think: I stepped over some word or story threshold a while back, around 2003, and I said to myself, "ἐξαίφνης"--exaiphnês--"Suddenly!"--you know, like Platonists seeing the Forms after their intense fifty-year graduate studies. Okay, never mind. Let's keep moving. Somehow I just knew that I had finally written enough to feel right with what I was writing, all that writing over the years paid off, writing isn't the word-brawl it used to be, words flow more freely from my fingertips to the keyboard. Writing isn't easy--and probably won't ever be, but I don’t struggle as much with plotting, sentence structure, dialogue, words. What I write is never right the first time; it just feels closer to right than ever, and I'm a better self-editor than I've ever been. Because I write--write all the time. I completed SEABORN in January and since then, I have written three short stories, completed an 85k word YA fantasy SALTWATER WITCH (going to my agent next week). And I'm over 60k words into THE NEW SIRENS, sequel to SEABORN. NaNoWriMo, it's not just for November anymore.
Rejection
Get rejected early, get rejected often. Get used to it. It sucks but it's going to happen a lot. I used to keep a folder with all my rejection letters, but gave up after I broke the 100-reject mark. It's nothing personal, and I even think it has more to do with mood and what music the editor's/agent's assistant is listening to at that moment, how high in the stack your manuscript is, how high the stack is, than anything else--especially if you feel that you're over the above writing threshold. That a writer "ought to be" published makes no difference. We all ought to be published. It just doesn't work that way.
I can't remember my first rejection letter, but I know it was a form reject, and it was in 1980. I do remember a rejection a year later from Andrew Offutt, then editing a fantasy anthology called Swords Against Darkness (Charles de Lint's first professional sale was in this anthology). Here's a scan of the letter Mr. Offutt sent me, rejecting my story (I can't remember the title), and here's one of the first posts I made on http://theophrast.us about that early rejection experience. I have great rejection letters from Jennifer Jackson, Rachel Vater, and others, real letters that gave me real hope. Rejection can be good.
Uncertainty
Good writing is rejected every day, some small fraction of everything going through the post never makes it to its destination, butterflies are flapping their wings somewhere, causing all kinds of bad shit to happen to your manuscript, your query letter, your chapters--and agents and editors are the busiest people on the planet, and they have moods and attention spans like everyone else. They also have incredible talent for finding talent. We know this because there are successful writers out there--obviously--and some agent found them, some editor took a chance, some publishing house--big NYC firms and small presses--invested in them, wrote up contracts for those authors to sign, cut checks, spent marketing dollars on them, paid artists for cover art, paid type designers and cover designers and copy editors, blogged about the whole thing, went to cons and introduced their authors to other authors and industry insiders. We know this stuff happens. It's just difficult to know how or when it will happen. Uncertainty.
Writing, rejection and uncertainty can all be tied together and developed, handled, manipulated by you the writer to some extent. On the other hand, you can't do anything about time. Don't even attempt it. Time always has the upper hand because it's never ours, but someone else's.
Time
I think it's the only thing you can't do anything about. Everything takes time, and in publishing, double everything. Learn patience--that's from me, the slow learner. I can't tell you how many times I've been writing a letter or about to write a letter--nice ones, mind you, fingers are on the keyboard, passion in my soul...and that's when I get something in the mail or email from the editor or agent, and in every case I've thought "whew!" I'm glad I didn't finish that email. Be lazy when it comes to following up on anything you send to an agent or editor. Wait it out and you will be rewarded.
There's my take on it. There's always another book to write. WRUT. Write on.
This is from Adele Griffin, author of where I want to be (National Book Award Finalist):
"From the first page of Seaborn, you are immersed. Chris Howard navigates a wild ride through a brilliantly edgy and richly atmospheric alter-world. Here is a fresh, formidable spin on the fantasy genre, and Howard is a talent to watch out for. Seaborn will leave you spellbound." --Adele Griffin
Wow.
My first novel SEABORN will be in stores July 2008 (Juno Books). In the mean time, I'm giving away an all new edition of my novel, Nanowhere in PDF format. Download it here, read it, let me know what you think! chrishoward.author@gmail.com
Cory Doctorow: "Interesting and well-written...Chris Howard has released an sf thriller Nanowhere under a Creative Commons license, along with a bunch of supplementary materials that purports to be the lab notes and publications of one of the book's characters."
http://www.lykeionbooks.com/nanowhere/
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I just got an email from Lazette Gifford, and she likes my article on POV for young writers. (I wrote this one in a lesson format for my kids). On top of writing and running/owning Forward Motion (http://fmwriters.com), Lazette is the editor of Vision - A Resource For Writers.
Current Issue:
http://lazette.net/vision/Vision41/about.htm
Back Issues:
http://fmwriters.com/Visionback/
Here's my very first attempt at page 1 of a graphic version of my short story, "The Gatherer." I'm actually in the process of doing some quick sketches of various scenes throughout the story, but I assembled a couple here, a whale's tail and whale's eye closeup along with the first scene text from the story. My intent is to post the text of the story and a graphic version when Seaborn comes out next summer.
I don't think this is how it will end up, just storyboarding, rough sketching, and gathering experience for now, and thought I'd share what I'm up to. (Also posted this over on deviantArt).
Click the pic to view full sized.
It's not just for genre writers, establishing new worlds, unearthly conflicts, alien flora and fauna--even hissing fauna (I'm an Of Montreal fan). I have seen Jodi Picoult speak twice, once in Exeter for her launch of Nineteen Minutes, and once in New York at a writer's conference, and although she did a reading for the launch, her primary focus was on the research she had to do for her books. (She's a great speaker).
I love the research part of writing, the creation of worlds, magic systems, political structures. But what about the form these take? Do you write notes, just stating the facts? Have you tried other methods, like writing fictional accounts, diaries, newspaper articles? As a writer, one obvious path to take is to write about the world from the viewpoint of an author in that world, an observer, and these fictional out-of-story helpers can become characters in themselves, characters that will help you write your story. It just occurred to me that one interesting way to explore the world would be through the diary of someone young or very old, through their eyes. Same world, different perspectives--always keeping in mind that the purpose of world building and all this research is not to dump it on the reader, but to make you the writer so comfortable in your world that it becomes second nature to tell stories about what goes on inside it. (That's rule number 1 of world building, BTW. It's for you, not the reader).
For Nanowhere--an old novel of mine I gave away under a CC license, I wrote several drafts of a scientific article establishing the theory that self-awareness in humans is the result of two separate conscious faculties in hierarchical order, one outward facing and one that was inward facing (conscious of, or managing the first conscious faculty). I posted the papers and collateral material here if you're interested. (I wrote them. The authors listed on the papers are characters from the story).
I sort of stumbled into this post idea this morning when I was looking for Visio on my notebook and found an old family tree I did of Aristotle (The Philosopher) for a novel I will get back to when I'm done with my current WIP, The New Sirens.
That's the other cool side of research, is that we writers do so much of it that it piles up after a while, and we forget about some of the crazy and cool things we did to dig into some particular world in the first place.
Here's my Aristotelian family tree with notes and even a dashed line back to Zeus, which was popular in those days (click the pic to see it larger). If you're interested in the Visio format or SVG, let me know (email at bottom of right column).
Happy researching!
Links:
http://www.jodipicoult.com/nineteen-minutes.html
http://www.lykeionbooks.com/nanowhere/
http://creativecommons.org/
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I was in Barnes & Noble in North Shore Mall (Peabody, MA) at lunch to pick up Scott Westerfeld's Extras for Chloe (birthday present), and swung through the fantasy/SF section to look for Juno Books authors on the shelves--and without really looking (I didn't have a lot of time) I found Matt Cook's Blood Magic, Carole McDonnell's Wind Follower, and Best New Romantic Fantasy 2 edited by Paula Guran. Click the pics below to see them a bit larger. What's cool is that there are three copies of Matt's book on the shelves and another two on the "Dark Fantasy" end cap along with Patricia Briggs and a bunch of others. Nice placement.
http://www.juno-books.com/bloodmagic.html
http://www.juno-books.com/windfollower.html
http://www.juno-books.com/bnrf2.html
Click the pics to see them larger.
We'll be off to Saratoga Springs, New York on November 1st for World Fantasy. Alice booked us rooms somewhere in the vicinity (I'm a bit late signing up). The MC is Guy Gavriel Kay, and look at the list of attendees here. Some of the Juno Books authors will be there including Matt Cook (Blood Magic), and editor, Paula Guran.
Are you going, Skott?
Hope to see you there. More info:
http://www.lastsfa.org/wfc2007/index.html
WORLD FANTASY 2007
SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK
November 1 – 4, 2007
Links:
http://www.lastsfa.org/wfc2007/membership.php
http://www.lastsfa.org/wfc2007/index.html
Blood Magic
by Matthew Cook
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Juno Books
ISBN-10: 0809572001
ISBN-13: 978-0809572007
Running from the remorseless Mor, from the doomed battle at Gamth's Pass, Kirin draws on her forbidden powers to protect her love, Jazen Tor--but too late to save him, too late to retract her "sweetlings," the things she has "birthed" of the spirits of the dead.
The story of Kirin, blood magician, scout, mother, bear-killer, "abomination," starts at a relentless pace and never lets up through skirmishes, political turmoil, prejudice, deadly encounters with the Mor, and the challenges of controlling powers she doesn't understand. In alternate chapters, Cook skillfully guides the reader through Kirin's past, growing up in the shadow of her demanding twin sister, haunted by a marriage gone bad and her sister's brutal murder, but empowered by the teachings and the hidden books of wise old Edena.
When Kirin is saved by the beautiful Lia Cho and suspicious Brother Ato, her life takes on a new set of difficulties and hard lessons to learn, mourning her old love, fostering the possibility of something new. Lia, a runaway student with the extraordinary power to summon lightning, is taken with the mysterious Kirin, in defiance of the priest of Shanira who openly declares Kirin an abomination--damned, someone who manipulates the dead, and draws her power from the blood of the living.
Matthew Cook's Blood Magic is a dark feast of loss and blood and love, a fast paced fantasy in a world reminiscent of Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion, compelling characters with the ability to draw on otherworldly powers, who push the boundaries of life and death. I look forward to reading the sequel next year, exploring Cook's world further, and discovering where Kirin's tale takes us.
Links:
http://www.juno-books.com/bloodmagic.html
http://bloodmagicbooks.blogspot.com
If you're in the Boston area and you're serious about writing SF & F, I really recommend this 10-week course by Jeffrey A. Carver & Craig Shaw Gardner.
More here: http://www.starrigger.net/workshop.htm
And that's not all:
Jeffrey A. Carver has posted the first three chapters of his latest novel Sunborn (Tor, Fall 2008)
Working on a second edit pass of Saltwater Witch--a dark YA fantasy set in the same world as Seaborn. At the beginning of the month, I received a bunch of suggestions from my agent. He enjoyed the tale a great deal, but pointed out some logic and consistency issues--most of which surfaced after my prior editing pass in which I weakened some of characters' motives. I'm also tightening up the first six or seven chapters, getting them a bit leaner…swifter in the water.
We worked out a schedule. I've just finished one pass, printed it out for some reading and peer critiquing, and then I'm planning another edit pass to be completed around the end of October. Then I'm going to send everything to him and he's going to "start selling it."
Cool.
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Story idea...Picture it, rebels control the bridges. He who controls the spice bridges controls the universe! I've said it a few times, and I'll keep saying it: if you are a writer of fantasy and you do not subscribe the The Medieval Review list, you're missing some great story generating ideas. They send you long detailed book reviews by email.
Here's one:
