All those people who said the elves story was more appropriate for NaNo were right. After starting to try and outline Dragon of the Fen it became clear to me that I need to do way more research. I need timelines and maps and to look up what is known about people on the Norman side, who I had hitherto ignored, like William de Warenne. It’s all very well making up fictional characters, but unless I want to start making up fictional major players in the political landscape of the time, I need to know to which lords those characters owe allegiance, what happened to them, and which Normans took over from them, when.
So, I’m going to have to re-read my numerous text books and make copious notes, and I just don’t have time before November.
Which means it’s “Away with the Faeries”, a rural paranormal featuring well dressing, the Nine Ladies stone circle on Stanton moor, morris dancing and troublesome phantoms in an upmarket health spa.
I tried very hard to outline both Dragon of the Fen and Away with the Faeries using yWriter which looked like a fantastic thing. I know at least one writer who swears by Scrivener, and yWriter is the nearest thing available for the PC (with the bonus that it’s free). And I look at these things and think “how cool does that look? I bet that would make things a lot easier than doing all my notes and outlining in longhand. And it even produces your synopsis for you!”
So, I got it, and I spent two days filling in character sheets and scene details and links to information on locations etc for Dragon of the Fen, and I ground to a halt and thought “this is a hell of a lot of work, and I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere. All it’s giving me is stuff I don’t want.”
Today, I took my longhand notebook and a pen, sat down on the sofa, and said “OK 50,000 words = 20 chapters of 2,500 words each. I wrote down the numbers from one to twenty and for each one filled in something that could happen, which followed on from what had happened before and lead into what was going to happen later.
I already have character descriptions. Ben looks like Rupesh from Torchwood CoE. Chris looks like tank-top man from that episode of Dr. Who where the Master came back. Grace looks like Mma Makutsi from the No.1 detective agency, and everyone else can get described as they come along. I do try to be organised, but I think it’s counterproductive. I can never really get the book moving until I abandon the character cards and scenes and storyboarding and just do it.
So, I’m armed with 20 paragraphs of rough outline, and for this book I think that’s all I’m going to need.
Once I’ve done my research for DotF, armed myself with timelines of the battle and have a clearer idea of the difference between the rights of stallage, picage, pannage, murage and pontage, I may try the yWriter again. I’ll certainly have a lot of notes which might benefit from being collected in one place.
Happy Birthday! Along with Tolkien, you are one of the only two people to speak a language for which I require no dictionary and no translation: a language that seems to me to pass straight beyond words and go straight through to truth. If I could live in a book, it would be a toss-up between whether I moved to Rivendell or to Karhide, and if I acquired magic in the process I’d much rather study at Roke than at Hogwarts.
I was going to quote that wonderful passage from The Left Hand of Darkness that ends with “if this was the royal music, no wonder the kings of Karhide were all mad,” but then I found this speech Bryn Mawr Commencement Address posted by altariel in her LJ and decided it was more topical:
Literature takes shape and life in the body, in the womb of the mother tongue: always: and the Fathers of Culture get anxious about paternity. They start talking about legitimacy. They steal the baby. They ensure by every means that the artist, the writer, is male. This involves intellectual abortion by centuries of women artists, infanticide of works by women writers, and a whole medical corps of sterilizing critics working to purify the Canon, to reduce the subject matter and style of literature to something Ernest Hemingway could have understood.
But this is our native tongue, this is our language they’re stealing: we can read it and we can write it, and what we bring to it is what it needs, the woman’s tongue, that earth and savor, that relatedness, which speaks dark in the mother tongue but clear as sunlight in women’s poetry, and in our novels and stories, our letters, our journals, our speeches. If Sojourner Truth, forty years a slave, knew she had the right to speak that speech, how about you? Will you let yourself be silenced?
But because it’s also the birthday of The Left Hand of Darkness, happy birthday to my joint favourite book of all time, and congratulations on the snazzy new edition with the first really gorgeousand appropriate cover for the last 20 years 🙂
G.K Chesterton knew a thing or two about the great opening line. How about this, from “The Napoleon of Notting Hill.”
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
In fact the whole first paragraph is a gem:
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, ‘Keep tomorrow dark,’ and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) ‘Cheat the Prophet’. The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. Then they go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.
Oh Chesterton, you are barking mad, witty, beautifully phrased and very very clever all at the same time. It’s been a while since I read “The Napoleon of Notting Hill” and I’m rediscovering it as if it was the first time. It’s wonderful!
On my own writing news, I have some characters and the idea of a first chapter for Dragon of the Fen, which is progress, but not as much as I had hoped for. Hidden Conflict, however, is coming on apace and may even be released early. But to balance that out, I still haven’t had my edits on The Mysterious, which is supposed to be due out in time for Halloween, and I’m not sure how it can be, now.
If this bill is defeated, it will be the first step in turning the tide on the anti-equality dinosaurs. Please do what you can to make Maine the first victory over ignorance.
Feel free to crosspost!
If you’re not in the USA, I’m afraid passing this on is the only thing you can do. Even the one place they gave for donations only allows you to donate if you’re in the USA.
Hurray! I’ve finished a story for the I Do Two anthology. I’m particularly pleased as I have real problems in coming up with ideas for short stories – and even then they tend to be along the lines of “character a and character b sit in a room and discuss the meaning of life”.
This is one of that sort too, but I’m just glad that I managed to think of anything at all.
Now I’ve got next week to do a plot plan for Dragon of the Fen, then it’s half term holidays for the last week of October, and then it will be NaNoWriMo!
In the mean time, I must hoover the house. I’ve got the Molly from the Mepal Molly side coming round tomorrow. He wants to try on my petticoats and pinafore with a view to borrowing them, and the house needs to look less squalid than usual if we’re having guests 🙂
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 80th birthday is on 21 October 2009 and I’m going to post a Happy Birthday Ursula message on my website and my blogs that day, and I think I have some other folks talked into doing the same.
I just thought it might be fun if a lot of websites and blogs wished her Happy Birthday. (It’s also the 40th anniversary of Left Hand of Darkness.) Her website is www.ursulakleguin.com (the actual content begins on http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html)”
Make a note of this, and feel free to repost to your own blog.
Two lots of coolness, in fact 🙂 First of all, I’ve just come back from the bi-monthly RNA lunch where 12 romantic novelists living around Cambridge get together in a not very local to me pub, to eat and talk about the romance publishing world.
I’ve been suffering with very sore shoulders for about three months now. I can no longer raise my hands behind my back to do up my bra-strap because my left shoulder is so painful. And it’s painful all the time, including making it difficult to find a position to comfortably sleep in at night. I had thought this was something to do with my terribly sedentary lifestyle, and then I went to the RNA lunch and they all had the same thing!
Clearly this is a writer’s industrial injury. The best bit was that one lady had already seen the physiotherapist about it, and said she’d had a lot of relief from the following two exercises:
1. Grip both sides of your chair and lean to one side, stretching the arm that you’re leaning away from for a count of ten, then lean the other way and do the same for the other arm.
2. Sit up very straight, push out your chest and try to make your shoulderblades touch in the middle. Do that for a count of ten too.
Do each of these things ten times, four times a day.
I’m going to try it, and I’ll report back on whether it works or not for the benefit of anyone else who might be suffering from a similar case of Writer’s Shoulder.
On other news of coolness, I’ve just had my first royalty statement for False Colors, covering the first six months of sales, and the book has already earned back its advance. I really hope this is good news for the future of the series as a whole, because future books would surely build on that and sell even more, without the expense of having to establish a known brand.
It definitely makes up my mind to write “Dragon of the Fen” this November and leave the elves til later 🙂
Hee! I have tickets to see the Morris movie (aka “Morris, a life with bells on”) tomorrow! Andrew’s side, Coton Morris Men, have been asked to dance outside the cinema before the film is shown, and I’m a tiny bit piqued that Elriot wasn’t asked to come and dance too. However, we will be there in civilian clothes to cheer the lads on. I guess that with the movie being about the men-only world of the Morris Ring, they didn’t want any of us unholy and inconvenient women around, being all over-enthusiastic and not doing things the time honoured masculine way. (That sounds familiar for some reason. I wonder why?)
On other morris news, we were learning a completely new dance last night: Bideford Bridge – new not only to us new dancers, but to the whole side. I really enjoyed it, though I did end up with bruised knuckles. We’re not used to holding the sticks in the middle! It’s a nice heavy, leisurely, very Border-morris-ish dance, which suits me because I am heavy and leisurely too 🙂
That’s not us. That’s Bideford Phoenix morris, but the dance is the same.
Also, I have now been out twice in public playing my bodhran, and on both occasions was complimented for my playing. Woohoo! Not bad since I’ve only been practicing for a month and a half. It is made easier, though, by the fact that all Elriot’s dances seem to be fairly slow reels, so I only had to learn one rhythm. (I can do a jig beat as well, but we don’t seem to dance those. A slip-jig is still well beyond me, though.)
I’ve had my head down today working on the novel formerly known as “Boys of Summer”, now re-christened “Shining in the Sun”. And lo! It is finally finished at 77K 😀 It feels like it’s taken forever, but that’s partially because I broke off to edit False Colors and to write “Blessed Isle” in the middle of it.
So, now I need to send it out to publishers and hope that they don’t mind Darren’s foul mouth, and the fact that both my heroes are the most beta of beta males ever to run away from a fight.
Now the question is what do I write next? I want to try and do a short story for the I Do Two anthology, but I also want to get together a plot plan in time for NaNoWriMo in November. Long, serious, Saxon historical for a Running Press follow up, or a lighthearted rural paranormal with elves for Samhain? I can’t decide.
I’m guessing that most people who read my LJ are familiar with the Speak Its Name review site for m/m historical fiction? It’s an excellent review site where the reviewers actually know about history and care about literary quality and are not afraid to give a bad review if they think one is merited.
What may be less well known is that SiN has a sister site called Bosom Friends a review site for f/f historical fiction. This has been in abeyance for a while, but Erastes, who is in charge of SiN has just taken over at BF as well, and is working hard at getting a list of books to review and a list of reviewers who will review them.
If you have a f/f historical novel you would like reviewed, or you have a backlog of old historical f/f reviews you would like to see get a good home, or you are interested in reviewing f/f historical books in the future, do go over there and get in touch
The Boat of Small Mysteries - A cozy mystery aboard a narrowboat, in which a murder and a disappearance keep our aroace detective from fully relaxing into the idyll of country life.
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