I had a few interesting things happen this weekend, nothing earth shattering, though. I wrote a new short story I want to clean up and submit to Asimov's. I also met an author by conincidence at Borders yesterday. I finished Glen Cook's excellent Tower of Fear. However work is being a bit of a pain and I won't have time to do all these topics justice right now. With a little luck, I'll have a more expanded post later today.
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I haven’t finished with Glen Cook’s Tower of Fear, so no review yet. I can say that this book is the template for every Steven Erickson doorstopper he’s written. Only Glen Cook being Glen Cook, he does it in half the time. The plot is so intricate it’s breathtaking. Seriously engrossing. Not perfect but better even than most of his Black Company sequels.
IM gaming went ok. I’m still feeling my way around, trying to create characters and the world. Now I happen to like world building but I think I’ll take a walk this weekend and see what I can come up with. I seem to think better when I’m moving. Otherwise, I’m going to try to get another two chapters or so done tonight and maybe do a revision of a short story to get it ready for submission. Two more chapters done last night. Ugh. Slow going but I’m trimming as I go. I made a couple of changes, getting rid of one tent with an axe (literally) and altering how Jael becomes more human. As it was previously written, it felt too much like a way of teasing Jacob when she had (at that time) no intention of anything romantic towards him. Now it is something that happens without her control. I just need to add a few more lines of internal dialog in her next POV chapter. Which is ironic, since I’ve been cutting internal dialog right and left. Ah well, it does serve a purpose sometimes.
The read-aloud really does help with pointing out where I can afford to kill the internal stuff because it’s coming across in actions or external dialog. Or maybe it’s just the way I’m reading it aloud. Frell. You can tear your hair out over the uncertainty. Lucky for me, I’m bald. My phone died part of the way through Larry Corriea’s discussion on Action and Pacing. The worst part was, it died while he was answering the question I called in with. Arg. I got most of my answer, I just hope I didn’t come across as rude or anything. Stupid cordless phones. I still have a corded phone. I’m going to hook it up and maybe go find an old speakerphone box as well. Sometimes the old ways are better. Anyway, tonight is gaming night, so not much writing progress is expected. I may have a book review for Friday (Glen Cook’s The Tower of Fear is awesome, by the way) but I may not be done with the book by then. One thing I thought I’d pass along from David Farland’s Daily (weekly?) Kicks: “Larry Corriea, author of MONSTER HUNTER INTERNATIONAL, et al, will be our next guest on Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 9:00 PM, EDT. He'll be talking to us about The mechanics of Writing Action and Pacing. To find out how to join this free conference call, go to http://www.authorsadvisory.blogspot.com/” Larry is a pistol-packing, indy-publishing success story. He writes witty, action-adventure urban fantasy. I’m going to listen in tonight before I do my writing and hopefully I’ll come up with a good question or two to ask him.
As for Angel Odyssey, I got three more chapters done last night. But I’m thinking about cutting one or two. The chapters aren’t bad but I’m wondering how necessary they are. I wanted to show the mounting misery and frustration one of the characters is feeling. It seemed more organic and natural if that resentment grew over time instead of appearing all at once in one chapter. I still think that’s the best way to do it but I’m wondering if there isn’t another way. I guess this just goes back to me wondering if I should even include this character at all. The story moves faster without him but it also loses some depth. And, based on the feedback I’ve been getting, depth is something this story needs. I’m also cutting a lot of internal dialog, still. I think it’s is/was a crutch for me, to tell the reader what the characters are thinking instead of really getting tight into their POV and letting their actions and dialog show their feelings. On the other hand, a lot of things never get said aloud and some of those things are important. You can set up a certain dissonance or even irony by people thinking one thing and saying another. I don’t know, it’s something to think about for novel #3. Of course that book is a first person, present tense story, so we’ll see how that goes. Sigh. I really, really want to be done with Angel Odyssey and have it out the door. There’s so much more I want to write. I got another rejection letter, this time from Beneath Ceaseless Skies (http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/) but this time it was personalized. Yea! They actually said what they did and didn’t liked in the story. So I immediately edited another fantasy short story set in the same world as the rejected story and submitted it. Then I got to work on Angel Odyssey and finished another chapter.
I’m not sure what to do with the short story that BCS rejected. It IS dark with a doomed and unsympathetic protagonist. But it’s not badly done. I wonder if there’s a pro-paying mag out there that might take something with sex, death and the like? Hmm. Well, if not, I still think it’s a good story. Just not a happy one. Tonight I’m going to try hard to get more Angel Odyssey done. The chapter I finished has a couple of POV issues that I ‘fixed’ but I’m wondering if a re-write might be better than the nip and tuck work I did. It was one of the longer chapters and my throat was dry by the time I was done reading it aloud. It’s interesting how different things sound when you read them aloud. The dialog is helped immensely by it but some of the internal stuff and the dialog tags themselves do not translate well. Most stories are not read aloud and I don’t think they all should be. Some things sound better inside our heads or on the page. That can’t be all bad, after all, very few of us read aloud all the time. No new progress to report, I’m afraid. I haven’t gotten any Angel Odyssey work done these last few days. I know, I know, I’ll get on it tonight.
I did get one short story critiqued. This is one I was really proud of, a mythic fantasy short story of a kind I haven’t seen in a long time. Naturally, it didn’t go over well. I seem to have a problem with endings. This is something I really need to study and improve on. Endings for short stories are so important. Ending wrap up the plot, the theme…everything. Mine seem too abrupt. I also did something unpleasant with commas, apparently. That made me a little down this weekend. I seem to write fast and sloppily. I need to show more care and revise more but I need to be able to write beautiful prose without strangling what creativity and originality I do possess. Which of course led me into a dark spiral of questioning my ability to even write beautiful prose. I’ve never been a stylist, I try to be a storyteller. Luckily the weather has been heavenly or I might have had an even worse weekend. Anyway, tonight I’m back on Angel Odyssey’s read-aloud pass. I’ll see if I can beef up the characterization of Jacob and Jael as I go. I know I can create and write interesting characters. Now I just need to prove it. It’s nice to be able to write an unreservedly positive review. Empire in Black and Gold is an excellent fantasy novel with steampunk trappings and a unique world background.
There’s a lot going on in this first book, from a plot viewpoint, from a character viewpoint and from a worldbuilding viewpoint. Let’s start with the last first. The world and culture is like nothing I have ever read in a fantasy or science fiction novel. The humans of this unnamed world have risen from primitive times to a near-Industrial Revolution level but have taken an odd magical evolutionary sidestep along the way. Insects, which are often of huge size in this world, have been the totem animals and the cultural inspiration for society. So you have ant-aspected people who enjoy fighting (other ants most of all) and can join in a communal hive mind with other ants and you have dragonfly-aspected people who are expert fliers and so forth. The main driving force is the rise of a fascist Wasp culture. And I use the word ‘fascist’ advisedly. Let’s move onto plot and character because I want to springboard off that ‘fascist’ remark. Adrian Tchaikovsky (real name Adrian Czajkowski) has written the best fantasy Nazis I have ever read. That’s what the Wasp-kinden is his book read like and I assume deliberately. But, and here’s the fun part, I’m guessing Mr Czajkowski/Tchaikovsky has read his Shirer*. The Wasps are show with all their might, all their evil and all their humanity. That is what sets this book up and above so many fantasy novels. The characters are well-rounded, real and even the villains can almost be sympathetic, when seen from their point of view. It takes a great writer to pull this off and so I name Adrian Tchaikovsky a great writer. The book has several point of view characters, on both sides of the conflict that drives this book. Some I liked better than others but all are well done and well worth the reading. As soon as I was half way through this book, I had already purchased the second. That’s the second highest praise I can give, the first, is that I’m passing this first book along to my friends for them to read and get hooked as well. The world is interesting, exotic and original. The war and the build up to war is exciting. The characters are interesting. The action is well-staged and well-described (another rarity in fantasy, alas). There are a few flies in the ointment and I’ll share them here with an eye towards fairness. There aren’t enough reversals and failures for the heroes. There is one major reversal which throws off everyone’s plans but from a plot viewpoint, the main characters go from success to success. That is rather boring, especially in a book that is otherwise nothing like heroic fantasy (ala Conan). No one important dies, no one makes any sacrifice worth the name. This is just the first book, so there may be more drama to come but it became almost more interesting to see the Wasp character’s POV as he is the character that suffers the most and has the biggest reversals of fortune…which is interesting in itself. I’m not saying Mr. Tchaikovsky needs to go all George Martin on us but I stopped feeling any sense of danger towards the main characters about three quarters of the way through the book. An example: Cheerwell Maker (wonderful name but my least-favorite character) is captured by the Wasp. She is almost raped, almost tortured, almost killed. And each time the situation listed previous occurs, I sat forward on my seat, tense and concerned. But when time and again she is left almost cheerfully unharmed, I became less and less interested in her so-called drama. This is baffling to me as in almost every other way, the world feels real and the decisions people make are realistic despite the fantastic setting. The refusal of the author to ‘pull the trigger’ on Cheerwell or anyone else pulled me out of the book and cooled my infatuation a mite. There is so much more to talk about in this book that I could go on and on. If I ever corner the author at a convention, I’m going to ply him with booze and talk his ear off. But I’ll wind up this review with a solid endorsement of this book to anyone who loves a good fantasy novel and especially to anyone looking for something different. Reccomended. *I’m referring to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich here. A fascinating, horrible masterpiece of historical non-fiction. I wrestled last night for about an hour with three chapters in Angel Odyssey. I toyed with the idea of cutting them or combining them but in the end, I left them as they are. All three chapters are very short, which is where the cut or combine impulse came from. On the other hand, they were easy to read and the POV insights weren’t bad. The story is ticking along, I feel, at this point. So…I’ll leave it in until someone paying me says to change or cut them. Easy to say, soon the problem will be finding someone to buy said book. But that’s a little ways away.
I’m cutting out a lot of internal dialog, I find. Most of the time, I’m showing what needs to be said. The internal dialog is just hitting people over the head and, yes, sometimes it even comes out a bit whiny. I’m a little concerned that Jacob and Jael are coming off a little two dimensional. I can write well-rounded characters so I’m puzzled what the problem is (if there even is a problem, I may be imagining things). I’m hoping that cutting down the internal dialog and varying thoughts and actions more will help. I don’t know. I’m starting to worry that this draft won’t be my last draft to get it out the door. Maybe I need to pony up the serious dough to hire a content editor. I hope not but I’m starting to wonder… Luckily I spent April writing short stories, so I’m still getting my fix of rejection from editors and I have lots of stuff for my critique group to poke holes in. Still, we keep moving forward. Got another rejection, from Asimov’s this time. Too bad, I thought that story was a good fit for that magazine. Well, one more for the pile. I did a quick readover and sent the story off to Orson Scott Card’s Intergalatic Medicine Show. (There’s got to be a shorter way to refer to that mag) I’m wondering if I’m not reading enough short stories. Most of the stories I’m reading are George Martin’s or Raymond Chandler’s or belonging to writers in my critique groups. I wonder if I should be writing short stories directly targeted at a particular magazine or a particular editor, once I figure out what his/her taste is?
On the other hand, the short stories were just a happy accident, a little challenge and palate cleanser after slogging through month after month of revisions. So if something from that sells, great. If not, at least I’m getting used to rejection again. I write for myself, first and foremost. I have to, otherwise it’s not really fun. Of course, I’m not a professional writer, yet. I’m not doing this for a living. If/when I am, my objectives may change. I wonder if that is the reason so many follow-on books loose the thing I liked in an author’s first books. Not every writer, of course. Some are consistently good but for a lot…I wonder if those first few books were labors of love, created (like mine) out of stolen hours and written for the sheer joy of telling a story. Once you quit your day job and write full time, there’s got to be a new pressure on a writer. To produce stuff that sells. I don’t know, maybe it gets easier once you’re published and have a few books under your belt. I got a couple more chapters finished last night but I paused at the end of one chapter. I’m debating how important it is. It feels superfluous, the only thing that ‘happens’ in it is Jael and Jacob’s discussion about wishes. The rest is just emotion and getting inside Jacob’s head after the leavetaking. I may cut it and combine the important paragraphs with the next two chapters. Which may mean a re-write of those chapters. Oy. I have a sneaking suspicion that I wrote that chapter just to keep my alternating POV structure. Man am I kicking myself over that decision. I guess we’ll find out soon if it works or not. Bleh. Writing is fun. It’s all the stuff that’s not writing that’s hard, frustrating and confusing. |
AuthorI'm a lightly-published author with several novels completed and I hope to have them up on Amazon shortly. Archives
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