Some of the Options

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Books, Fantasy, NaNoWriMo, Question for you!, Sci-Fi

My current options for November are:

1. Arres. According to my records, his story first appeared in April 2011, in a dream I had. It was subsequently built on a little while listening to music in my parents’ car (Uriah Heep: Circle of Hands), and was the brief subject of a collaboration in an attempt to figure out how the heck he gets from his home village to, well, anywhere interesting, really. The biggest roadblock with Arres is that his motivations start out relatively small (find his father, find out why he left him this crazy scabbard tattoo thing) and have to be dragged somehow to something larger.
2. Dayna, and how she ended up in the future. Dayna has been around since… hmm, actually, since the original Hero Machine, a character creator I once found on the Interwebs. I created her there and she promptly grew a story, personality, and so on, and I don’t think I even have records for when she began, beyond that a couple of my image files for her were last modified in May 2003. She’s a Martian-born space cop in the late 2100s, the era of humanity’s First Contact in my Galactic Federation timeline. When a horrible plague breaks out on Mars, she’s eventually infected. The Galactic Federation offer their aid, but one of their hospital ships goes astray and is lost in deep space for several hundred years… until it’s found by a particularly hostile and remorseless species, who wake the stasis-preserved passengers for bioweapons research.
3. Cleris, and what it really means to have wild, imagination-limited magic in the world. I may be happy with Mysteries Unite as a piece of writing, but I was never quite happy with myself for writing it. It did its job — it won me a writing competition in 2007 (for which I never did get my prize: the prize was 2kg of chocolate and the exec ate it before the meeting in which I would have got it!) — and it was an interesting way to write, and it worked very well. But as the short story stands, it’s antithetical to everything I am and everything I stand for. It says this world, this wonderful, incredible world, isn’t beautiful. It says the fathomless mystery and majesty of the universe is worthless. And so I determined to fix it, somehow. In the end, I realised, it would take a book. A book for which the original Mysteries Unite was just a prologue. A book that would end in a truly heart-wrenching choice…
4. Tsien, and how she and Siris won the war. At the other end of humanity’s part in the Federation’s timeline (it goes back to long before our First Contact!), the galaxy has been plunged into cataclysmic war. Tsien and her siblings are the culmination of three hundred years (Earth time) of research by the brightest minds in the Federation. If they can’t win the war, civilisation as we know it will die.
5. Kirai, and the half of his story that doesn’t exist yet, a tale actually born out of a Waterstones competition to fit a short story on a large postcard in 2008. He’s the one who’s since got the furthest without participating in any writing challenges, and much of his tale already exists, at least up to the point where there’s a rather unfortunately fateful family encounter. The second half, however, doesn’t, and could really use my going on with it – I got to the point where all the truly huge conflicts were set up and poised to snowball, and then got distracted.

So there you have it. There are more, lots more, but I think a shortlist of five is more than enough for me to choose from. (There is a sixth option, which is “whatever I dream in between now and then”, but that’s quite beside the point.)

Questions or suggestions? Sling them at me in the comments! I’m happy to expand on any and all of the above!

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Clearing Up That Mystery

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Question for you!

My lack of posting in recent days may in fact be explained by my being away for a friend’s birthday. It was excellent fun, but as a result, I didn’t finish the next Fused chapter on time… as you may have noticed. I do know what’s in it, though! And I know what’s on the other side of that hatch… what do you guys think is going on through there, though?

Quality and Style

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Books, Question for you!, Style, Thoughts

My local library is, while very good, somewhat small, and doesn’t cycle books as quickly as I can read them. (Few people do; that can hardly be a criticism.) As a result, I’ve taken to wandering about areas I don’t normally read, desperately looking for something without a picture of some shoes or a frilly dress on the cover. Such things make excellent “DO NOT READ” signs! In any case, I found myself a variety of potentially interesting books, including a crime novel by someone who by the account of the back had won much praise from various vaguely reputable sources (assorted newspapers, mainly) for a previous book.

The plot was interesting enough, and sufficiently convoluted that I didn’t see all the twists coming, but that’s not what I’m really going to remember and it’s not what I intend to discuss – because my oh my, the style. I appreciate that this really shouldn’t surprise me after Twilight (which I’ve skim-read just to find out if it was as terrible as I’d heard, which it was) and 50SoG (which I haven’t because all my FFN filters say NO NO NO, which is the correct response to bad fanfic), but it still does. Not a single member of my family has written like that since well before their age hit double digits. (I’d have to check if the old notebooks have dates in to be any more accurate than that.) It was on the level of one of my favourite pieces of sibling literature, which chronicled the exploits of Action Man in the format “Action Man did this. Action Man did that. Then there was an enemy coming along the corridor so Action Man did this. Then Action Man did something else.” and included what may just be the best line ever: “Action Man did a splits-kick”, which amuses me unreasonably to this very day. (Which of us was responsible for this will just have to remain a mystery, as I’m not sure the author would want to be identified. Personally, I’d be proud of it, but that’s just me.)

What I probably wouldn’t do would be to approach a publisher with Action Man’s splits-kick, and what I really wouldn’t do is then expect them to say “Good, yes, more of this please.” There was a paragraph of six sentences, four of which began with the word “He”. Each sentence is a single statement, neither embellished nor illustrated. Occasionally two statements will be linked with an “and” or “but”. Punctuation is minimal as the short sentences do not require it. Contractions appear MIA. Incomprehensible references to brand names are scattered through the text. This may be an artefact of the lack of evocative description. For example, a Hollywood sign is mentioned and its history listed. However the history is irrelevant and the sign itself is never described. In one place, an entirely incorrect word is used: the text says “accent on” instead of “emphasis on” a word. Writing like this is actually growing slightly mentally painful, so I’ll stop.

Now, maybe this chap was having a year off. Maybe s/he got bored. Maybe s/he wanted to see what s/he could get away with. I’ve not read any of the apparently-many other books (although I now will read at least one so as to avoid being unfair) and really can’t comment. But I digress, because really, I don’t want to talk about one person, but rather an illustration, and this is the one I happen to have in front of me. See, reading out of my normal zone (sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction) and into the loose clutter of the uncategorised fiction area, I’m currently finding that this seems to be an effect. That the quality is a step or two lower than I’ve come to expect, that prose is poor or that questions are sidestepped. Another book, which I don’t currently have to hand as it’s back at the library, went for a semi-unreal, dreamlike effect, but neglected to consider any possible sensible actions that real people would probably take under those circumstances, rather negating any ability to sympathise with the main character. (It also didn’t help that said MC came across as completely passive and unable to take any action besides looking at the scenery without some form of direct order to do so. Any action.)

Now, perhaps that’s simply a bias stemming from my limited sample size. Further adventures in the uncategorised section will likely change my viewpoint. But I’m wondering, is this a thing? Am I going to learn to expect this? And if so, why? There’s certainly enough technically excellent writing out there that it doesn’t need to be the case. Personally, I still think publishers do a lot of useful things, but if this does prove to be a general trend, they aren’t making a very good case for their gatekeeping.

What do you think? Have my last few grab-a-book-almost-at-random choices just been unlucky? Or is this section actually, on average, of lower literary standard?

(P.S. Action Man did a splits-kick. You just can’t beat this. Action Man wins at life.)

So What’s Next?

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Admin, Books, Question for you!

Although Before the Sun Fades is live, I can’t just sit around and cackle to myself. It’s time to figure out what I’m going to do while it percolates gently through the rest of the submission process! So, what’s next on the writing agenda?

Well, there’s getting back to the Fused, which is happening. (I have a big farewell to a friend who’s leaving the country over the weekend, so possibly not next week, but if not, the week after.) But on the book front, I have several options. So far I have one highly influential vote for Ascension, the first book of the Path of the Gods series. My full set of options — all in a similar state of nearing completion — are:

• Ascension
• Convergence
• Alt-Shift (see Waypoint This is the hardest to write and will almost certainly take longer than the others would if I choose it.)
• Kirai… (whose series still goes unnamed for now. Also see Waypoint.)

The other stories listed on Waypoint will all be in one state or another of chugging gently along in the background, but they’re not as close to completion as these four, and so aren’t on my list of “potential next book out” unless one of the caged plotbunnies goes rabid again and starts chewing on my brain. (What do you mean, this doesn’t happen to you? Plotbunnies are dangerous!)

Vengeance?

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Philosophy, Question for you!, Thoughts

I read around a lot. In this specific instance, I often read the various ramblings at Chuck Wendig’s blog, Terribleminds. (I suggest you do too: it’s more interesting, and it updates more frequently!)

Today’s guest author was talking about fight scenes, and suggested that we all want revenge on someone, one way or another, so we quite like our vicarious vengeance. And that got me thinking, do we?

Unusual Dilemmas

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Question for you!, Reasoning, Thoughts, Writing process

Such things are pretty much a stock in trade of writing, of course, but now I’ve got an authorial one, and I’m not quite sure yet what to do with it. In a nutshell, I have to decide terminology.

My characters have a single word for a certain concept that does not match our word for it: this is for reasons that will later have relevance. However, in order to load the word with the correct immediate baggage in English, I have to equate their word and our word somehow. If I just use our word, then when certain things are revealed, things embedded in their word won’t have come across to the audience. If I use only their word, I have to take special care to load it with all the right baggage in a lot of early description so that I can be sure people are carrying it around, and then everyone is likely to see some things coming a mile off. But, if I use the two words interchangeably (which would at first glance seem reasonably sensible), I set up the false impression that the two concepts can be distinct in their language – which for my characters is not the case.

It’s a knotty little problem, though not one I urgently need to solve due to that wonderful thing that is the tool of find/replace: I can locate every reference in either terminology with ease. So I’m not fussed about it immediately, but in the long term, that’s something I’m going to have to work out… and it’s interesting. At least, I think it’s interesting.

Right now, I incline to thinking the best way to go about it is to stick almost exclusively to their word and try and load the baggage as subtly as possible so nobody notices I’m not putting their boxes on the cart they think I am. But maybe I’m wrong. Can anyone out there think of any relevant examples? Good or bad — what to avoid is as useful a piece of information as hints on what to attempt!

Agency, and the Lack Thereof

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Characters, Question for you!, Thoughts

I saw a film the other day. Admittedly, I was only partially watching it over the top of my computer (my usual state of watching films, since I’m not a big film person unless it’s something I really like), but I think I saw just about everything.

So what gets to me, and why I’m writing about it, is that in this particular instance, the main character might as well not have been there. Not that the MC had no personality, just that they did nothing. All the way through the film, it basically went a bit like this:

Look Who’s Back!

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Books, Chapters, Fused, Question for you!, Sci-Fi

Busy busy days, but here I am back in time for your regular Tuesday installment of The Fused! It’s a short one today, but never fear, the next chapter will be longer again!

Keep an eye out tomorrow, too, for more background information on Shipboard life — although Lindsi has stepped temporarily outside the world of regular work and play, it carries on all around her. What sort of things might she and her family do, under normal circumstances? How do people live, and what has changed over the years?

And finally, don’t forget: if you like this story, share it with your friends! ~_^ I’m planning to introduce the epub version when the whole thing is complete and I’ve gone through on a final check of it as a single unit. If enough people would rather see a periodically-updated partial epub/mobi that they can hand out to their friends rather than just passing on the DistantRealms link, I can do that too! Speaking of, if I put out a mobi of one of the short stories, would people test it for me? I don’t have a Kindle to try it on, so I don’t know how well the formatting really comes through.

Another Day, Another Story

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Books, Fallen Empire, Question for you!

Since it came up earlier, I’ve finally got around to creating an “about” page for the Fallen Empire setting, on the Waypoint list along with the others. I could write about this one all day — but I really shouldn’t! In any case, it has the basis of the setting and a brief lead-in to the events of the main story, together of course with a link to the short that appeared a while back now for a friend of mine. (I must remember to ask whether I’m okay to name her!)

And in tagging this post, I find myself faced with the eternal question. I’m kind of bad at genres: what do you think TFE would fall under?

Fantasy Animals!

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Fantasy, Question for you!, Readers, Reasoning

I have a question! Let us take a fantasy world with a noticeably different ecosystem and whatnot to our own. Now, some of the ecological niches may well be filled with animals quite similar to our own in some ways (ex: this rather cool PhDComics on the convergent evolution of wolf and hyena jaws). In such instances, would you prefer it if the author (that would be me!) used a similar well-known animal name as shorthand and only noted the differences (ex: Renais and the incident of the fork-tailed mice, which as you might expect look and act a lot like mice in our own world), or came up with an entirely different name to match the animals notably unlike ours (example from a different universe: burlen, a species of roughly horse-sized reptilians that are typically used as beasts of burden and curl up when threatened, protected by their armoured skin)? If I have burlen, would you find it weird to have things called cats in the same world (provided that, you know, there has been mammalian evolution, which there has)? If it’s reasonable that something much like a cat exists in the world, should I call it a cat, or something else? What do you think?

(And no, “stop making stuff up” is not an answer, I’m writing fantasy and sci-fi here! ~_^)