Notes from the Week

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I approved my edits and got my contract from Reynard’s Menagerie! I have filled it out, and will send it soon. Exciting!

Yesterday, I visited a place most conducive to writerly thinking: a cemetery. That may sound morbid or disrespectful – I don’t mean it either way. Holly-Wood Cemetery, located in Richmond, is a quiet and beautiful place. Because of its beauty, and because I have no relatives or friends buried there, it didn’t seem as somber as I expected. It was more like a sweeping park, with trees, hedges, and magnificent statuary doing honor to the memories of thousands.

I think that what makes a cemetery writerly is that, like a book, it is a suggestion of so much more than what you see. When you read a story, even one with intense detail, much of the world is left to your imagination. If you see a character mentioned once, you must realize that so much else must exist in that book’s world: the character’s past, thoughts, hopes, favorite foods, memories, friends, inspirations, possessions, and ancestry. A web of fictional existence centers on that character, stretching in every direction beyond the scope of the book. (I concede that not all characters have all of these things, but most have at least some of them.)

A grave is the same way. It is a name for which you must assume a family, a mind, a life – an entire story. The best books, I think, give you the impression that even a character who appears only briefly has a story, just as every person you see in a crowd or driving on the road is the center of his or her own life. A cemetery is a place where this is not just a hoped-for suggestion but the truth. Sometimes, a grave even hints at the story, whether by an inscription, recent flowers, or even just a level of carving that obviously cost money. In the same way that a sentence can outline a minor character in a book, people in the cemetery were marked with brief descriptions: “Mother” or “Father” (in one heartrending case, “Daddy”), or a military rank. Sometimes, they had quirks: one stone bore a beautifully engraved and totally unexplained raccoon.

It is also worth noting, of course, that one can find excellent names in a cemetery.

This actually inspired me to possibly include a trip to the cemetery for the protagonists of The Dogwatchers. It would be a highly convenient way to come across a particular plot point, and I can think of a reason they would go. I think I will do it, though I’ll have to mull it over a bit for two reasons. First, I tend to want to include anything which interested me in recent life in my writing, and it is sometimes not relevant. (Sort of like when you watch Lassie and decide you want a collie.) Secondly, I would have to be sure that the cemetery didn’t take the story to a dark place that I don’t mean it to. Holly-Wood Cemetery gave me just the feeling I’d like my protagonists to have and for my readers to get from reading the scene; if I can recreate that, I will be quite happy.

Back to Work!

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I missed a week, and nearly missed this week (I count it an entry if it falls between Sunday and Sunday, so I’m just squeaking in under the deadline here). However, I have an excuse: I was graduating! Very exciting. Now, though, I am home and sufficiently unpacked and relaxed to resume writing.

I worked some more on The Dogwatchers. I’m intrigued to realize that it may unexpectedly have a villain. Before, I thought it was shaping up to be a sort of “huge misunderstanding/lost person” plot, which is, roughly speaking, how the plot of Rabbit and Cougar goes. (The two stories take place in the same world, but are not otherwise connected.) However, a villainous character who I knew figured in one of the characters’ backstories has reared his head, and I believe he will add an excellent new dimension to the story. I’m rather questioning of my ability to write villains, but I think this one’s motivations are coherent, though not probably sympathetic. If the two extremes of sympathy levels are moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash villain and angst-ridden always-meant-for-the-best villain, this one is definitely closer to the former, though hopefully still an acceptable compromise.

In miscellaneous writing thoughts, I think it must be very hard to write a set of books. I say “set” and not “series” because I think of a series as something which, besides a basically coherent world and character or group of characters, need not connect the stories too much. A series could be the Animorphs books, or the Baby-sitter’s Club; like many TV shows, it seems like it could pretty much keep going as long as there is an audience. There may be arcs that span multiple books (or episodes), but things tend to be pretty wrapped up at the end of each one.

A “set,” on the other hand, might be better represented by the Narnia, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings books. (Fantasy is what I know, all right?) When one has three books that are closely tied together and which clearly build one storyline and have one real climax and resolution (despite possible mini-climaxes and resolutions within the separate books), one generally calls it a trilogy; four can be a quartet. One might even have quintets, but when a set gets to be more than five books long, people tend to call it a series. Personally, though I do sometimes mention “the Harry Potter series” or such, I like to differentiate. A set of books is meant to go all together; generally, the whole set was planned at the same time, and the books tell more of a story together than they do separately – not just a longer story, but a bigger story. I have heard that a trilogy and a three-book series are different things, and this is, I think, the difference. Tolkien, I’m told, thought of his famous trilogy more as one book than three, and I’ve heard similar things about the Harry Potter books.

The reason I think it must be difficult to write a set is that early books are published before later ones are finished. (If one writes all of the books before publishing any, the difficulties I’m about to discuss disappear.) I often have to go back to earlier parts of my novels to make things consistent with a new change, or to hint at what’s coming later. Losing the ability to do that would be terribly difficult for me to deal with; the only thing I can think is that successful writers of sets either plan very, very carefully or just have an extremely good idea of what they mean to write. Of course, I’m sure that in some cases multiple books are written before any are published. This seems like it would help, even if one still had to finish the last book or several books with the first few set in stone, as it were. (Or whatever modern book-printing devices are made of. Probably not stone. Probably something less alliterative.)

This is relevant to me because I am planning, probably following this novel or the next, to write a set. It still needs considerably more fleshing-out, but I was thrilled when I realized that the idea I had was simply too big for one book. I think it will probably be a quartet, though possibly a trilogy.

On another note, exciting news! Reynard’s Menagerie, the magazine that accepted my short story “This, That, and Th’Other,” just put out the issue before the one in which that story should appear. This means that I could get my contract any day now. Also, the current issue not only includes a story by my friend Michelle, it features her story on the cover with a cool illustration! Check it out!

RavenCon and Advanced Fiction Final

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Late again! I’ll try to do better. It’s still within the right week, though, and since I only ever claimed to try for once-a-week entries, that’s about good enough.

This past weekend, I went with a group of friends to RavenCon. This is a science fiction and fantasy convention with a literary focus, and at least two of the friends who came with me also write fiction (including fantasy). I’d been to the con twice before, and it was great. This year was also a good time, though the panels were perhaps down a little in terms of literature. (The con was ambitious this year in other ways, such as the masquerade.) My three con-going occurrences of most note writing-wise are as follows.

1. I got a fun writing idea. This happens to me all the time at conventions and conferences. Maybe it’s just being saturated in a writerly environment, making me think of things in terms of how I could write them; oh, wait, no, I do that constantly. Maybe it’s hearing other people toss ideas around. Who knows. Anyway, the very first panel I attended upon my arrival Friday evening was called “Writing the Perfect Blurb.” (I could tell from the description, and it was confirmed in the panel, that the name should have been something like “Writing the Perfect Cover Letter.”) The panelists were several authors and an editor of a sci-fi/fantasy magazine. At one point, an author panelist was trying to point out good versus bad ways to approach an editor.
“So, let’s say you want Ed” – the editor panelist’s name was indeed Ed – “to read your story on . . . oh . . . cross-dressing dragons.”
“Ha,” I thought. “How would you have cross-dressing dragons? I don’t see -”
“DING,” said my brain. I took notes. Now, I have actually written this story (more on that after we leave RavenCon).

2. I learned things about podcasting. This could be important because of my hope to podcast Dragons Over London this summer. A number of RavenCon’s guests had podcasts, and there were several panels on the subject. I went to one on podcasting for promotion. One panelist was an author who had podcasted a book, and there were three other people who just had podcasts (though they sounded interesting; two were comedy, and one was about technology and the future). Anyway, they talked mostly about their content (largely interviews), and I took notes, but then asked the author some questions afterward. She recommended that I go to the hour-long workshop on podcasting later; I said I could make it to the first half, probably, but the second half coincided with a panel on literary worldbuilding. She was nice, and said that if I came she’d try to tailor it to me.
I did go to the workshop. The author, who was the moderator, asked a question or two that were helpful to me, but the workshop was largely on technical stuff. This could have been fascinating to me, I think, if put in a way that was not utterly terrifying. The panelists had brought something like twelve microphones between them, massive amounts of wire, microphone stands, interfaces, laptops, cases, headphones, and more. The table looked like someone’s attempt to hotwire an alien radio station. Also, most of the other people at the panel seemed to already know a lot about podcasting. As best I could tell, they were there in order to say things like,
“Oh, the Luna. That’s a nice one. I got one of those on eBay for sixty bucks. I got really lucky.”
It didn’t help that I had to leave halfway through. However, when I reached the worldbuilding panel and told Becky briefly about what had happened, she assured me that podcasting is not scary and alien, but doable.

3. I almost learned things about worldbuilding. I say “almost” because, while the panelists gave lots of good, true, important advice, I’d heard practically all of it before. I’ve been to panels on worldbuilding – in fact, I’m pretty sure I went to one at RavenCon last year. Anyway, a few basic points for those who wonder what kind of things the panel covered:

Do:
– be internally consistent.
– think through all the implications of anything you change. (This ties into the previous Do.) If your magic system allows people to easily speak with the dead, realize that you will have trouble writing a murder mystery.
– make the rules clear quickly, at least to the extent to which your point of view character would know them. If your POV character is a psychic but can only read the minds of redheaded men, make this clear in some way, or people will wonder why the character isn’t reading the mind of that woman who holds the vital information. Likewise, if your character can read minds and you don’t let readers know, they’ll feel baffled and left behind when he starts peeking into someone’s thoughts. Possibly the worst is to have a POV character who clearly has some powers (i.e. we know she’s a mage), but does not explain how powerful they are or what they do. You could probably get away with one or the other, as long as you give an idea of both (i.e. she controls fire, but is only a novice and much less skilled than older and more practiced mages).

Don’t:
– assume all of your people are nice, nonagressive, and upstanding (unless there’s a reason they would be). If your world has people who use magic and people who don’t, and mages don’t rule the world, there had better be a reason why not.
– make your entire world – or even its countries – a monoculture. Even people who speak the same language often have different cultures. Within any group of reasonable size (a country, a town, possibly even a large family) will be conflict: any time when people have different priorities, they will have conflict. With different philosophies, alliances, politics, etc., potential for such conflict increases.
– make your aliens like humans without a reason. If they evolved on a planet just like Earth, maybe.
– make things too regular. This is rather like the monoculture issue; if your vision for Country A is that it is extremely capitalist, that doesn’t mean that every single person there favors the capitalist system. Not to say that you need to have a token communist or anything, but don’t make your characters carbon copies. This goes for natural things as well. You have to be careful not to throw people off, but most rules do have exceptions.

As someone who writes a lot of fantasy (and has put loads of work into worldbuilding), my favorite advice ever on writing magic came from a book called The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy. (I highly recommend this book and its follow-up, The Fantasy Writer’s Companion. Funnily enough, I got both at RavenCon.) It has a lot of great advice, but I found the part on magic systems particularly helpful, as magic is a huge part of any world which uses it. Not only does it set parameters for the possible, it can change the tone of the world. The Complete Guide suggests considering three things when designing your magic system and analyzing how it will affect the rest of your world: power, price, and availability to the general population. The book talks about these factors in terms of ratings from 1 to 10. It’s actually pretty easy to translate a system into numbers. For example, magic in the Harry Potter universe is probably an 8 or 9 in power (can do almost anything possible within the world), a 2 or 3 in price (many spells cost nothing in materials and virtually no time or effort; most spell components of even difficult spells seem to be easily obtained within the world), and a 1 or 2 in availability (most people cannot use magic, at least not under ordinary circumstances, and cannot be taught).

Interestingly, you can design a world for any combination of ratings; it’s just going to be a world more or less shaped by its magic. For example, if someone told me to design a world where magic had a 1 in power, a 1 in price, and a 10 in availability, I might set up a system wherein all the people can, by snapping their fingers, change the colors of their eyes. Common, easy, and fairly useless magic. If you were to, say, change the price to 10, you would have a world where no one was likely to use magic at all (say, it takes a lifetime of study and the replacement of your hand with a fist-sized diamond to change the color of your eyes). On the other hand, you could have a world with a 10 in power, a 10 in availability, and a 1 in price. Now everyone has magic that can do anything. Your world might be chaotic, but could certainly be written. A 5 in each might represent a world in which all women (or the firstborn of every family, or all people of a fairly common race) can use magic, which is powerful enough to do most things modern technology can, but for which the more powerful effects require years of training and hours of set-up time. If you want a fun worldbuilding prompt, take a ten-sided die (or random number generator set from 1 to 10), roll three times, and set up magic systems to go with the numbers you get.

My major fantasy world uses a magic system which is probably a 9 power, 4 or 5 price, 3 or 4 availability. If you write fantasy and care to comment on a magic system you’ve developed, feel free!

This brings me, sort of, to the story I wrote on cross-dressing dragons. I enjoyed it very much. I find that, no matter how I work at the short stories I write for class, most of my favorite short stories are ones for which the idea just came to me. This is the first such that I turned in for Advanced Fiction. (Most ideas I get are for longer pieces.) I edited it and turned it in as the final story for my Advanced Fiction class.

I feel it worth noting that my Advanced Fiction class had a barbecue at the end of the semester, during which two of my classmates made and played a drinking game based on English-major terms. They called it “Allegory.” Since we mostly knew each other in the context of writing, such terms kept coming up. Someone would use words like “narrative flow” or “point-of-view violation.” “Allegory!” they would shout, and take a drink of beer. Becky and I, who don’t really drink, were highly amused. Eventually, both players ended up in the host’s neighbors’ wading pool. (I think the neighbors were lending it to our host, as it was in his house’s yard, but he said it belonged to them.)

Just thought I’d mention it as this blaze of nerdy, writerly glory seemed an appropriate end for an excellent creative writing class. As a hopeful creative writing professor-to-be, I’d love to teach classes as well as Professor Robbins did us.

In Which I Write Things Which Are Not Fiction

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. . . because I had to, that’s why. Incidentally, this is why this week’s entry is so late: it is the week before final exams here, and also the last week of classes, so I had to *cough* finish – by which I definitely do not mean “write from the beginning” – two papers this week. One was my philosophical and practical reasons for banning smoking; the other was a motivational analysis of David Bowie. If you’re going to write nonfiction, specific and interesting is the way to go. 🙂

Anyway, we had a very good last Advanced Fiction class, and not just because the professor brought cake. We had each written a two-to-three-page piece for the class, and the professor printed them onto transparencies. He had a person pick one out of the stack at random, then had someone edit it on the overhead projector (with some class input). It was really helpful! (I just realized that I’d never given my professor’s name! He is, in fact, best-selling war writer David L. Robbins, and you can check out his cred here.) Anyway, Professor Robbins is great at telling us why an edit is a good one. In one case, a fantasy piece with winged characters, a character was trying to be sneaky. The sentence read:

“[He] flapped his wings.” A sentence followed indicating that he would fly in order to be quieter than walking.

I read and reread these sentences, then said, “I really want that to say ‘he spread his wings,’ not ‘he flapped his wings,’ but I don’t know why.”

Professor Robbins pointed out that this was contradictory onomatopoeia – “flapping” is not quiet. This seems obvious, actually, but at the time I just couldn’t see why I wanted to change that verb.

Good news! Spindle is up online! It looks excellent. Also, there you can read my short story “Five Days of Health Rabbitry” (under “prose” on the left-hand sidebar).

In other good news, RavenCon is this weekend! I have attended this literarily-focused sci-fi/fantasy convention twice already, and it has been fabulous. My science fiction/fantasy club friends and I are heading to the con today, and I expect to learn great new things and have loads of fun.

THAT’S What He Meant!

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I’ve finally worked out that issue from The Dogwatchers. The protagonist’s motivation is secure. The rat is dead. I can proceed.

As I may have mentioned before, my Advanced Fiction professor talks a lot about active protagonists. We hear the phrase “who is driving this story?” about three times per class. It’s pretty valid, really, given that we tend to edit three stories per class (after finishing the scenes at the beginning of the semester), and many of our stories need that question to be asked of them. In the past, I’ve had some trouble with this, but I think I’ve finally really got it, so I feel like sharing.

The first thing that gave me trouble is obvious: like most rules, this has exceptions. Not every great story is driven by its protagonists. When our professor first told us this, someone immediately asked about The Great Gatsby; you could tell the professor was waiting for it. Yes, passive protagonists can sometimes be done well, but in some ways, they’re actually more difficult. You have to give them a reason to be present at all the important scenes (because your story will be a real letdown if you never see the good stuff, and that’s assuming people can even understand it). When a protagonist drives the story, he/she is almost always present, because these things would not happen without him/her.

What stumped me for a long time is that being physically active does not an active protagonist make. You can have a character who never stops to catch her breath, but who is still not driving the story. If all she does is react to others or follow instructions, she’s not being active. Your protagonist must be why the story happens. This is what threw me, as I think of many stories as centering around a conflict or problem usually caused by the villain, not the protagonist. For example, detectives do not cause the murders they investigate, yet the story could not happen without the murders. Good guys, I argued, do not start fights with the bad guys. The bad guys start fights – and thus stories – because they’re the bad guys.

I finally found one question which simplified things enough for me to really get it: Whose story is this? In the case of The Great Gatsby, the story is Gatsby’s, though the POV is not. Usually this is not the case. Even in stories wherein the protagonist is essentially reacting to another character or event, the story quickly becomes defined by the way in which the character acts. Think of The Hobbit: the story starts with Gandalf and the dwarves telling Bilbo to do something. Does this mean that Bilbo has no hope to be anything but reactive? Of course not. Whose story is The Hobbit? If we put aside the title and even the point of view, it’s still Bilbo’s story. Let’s say the book was written from Gandalf’s point of view, or that of one of the dwarves – pick one. Would it make the story belong to that person? No. It would be Bilbo’s story with a strange – one might even say poor – choice of POV character. At best, it would be a fantastical Great Gatsby; at worst, confusing and boring. (Can you imagine all the scenes wherein Bilbo would have to explain how, while the POV dwarf was wandering in the woods/hiding in a barrel/etc., Bilbo was off doing awesome things which advanced the plot? Besides, what about things about which Bilbo doesn’t immediately tell his comrades? It would just appear later: “Oh yeah, and I have this magical ring.”)

This is also, in my opinion, the best reason to change POV. Of my four longer works, two have included POV changes, both written in third person close. Rabbit and Cougar alternates between Rabbit’s POV and Cougar’s, switching at every chapter. Although I wrote it years before this class, I noticed that the chapter length varied based on whose point of view seemed most important at the time, especially toward the end, when the two spend some time separated. Since Rabbit and Cougar travel together for most of the story, that covers the “will he be there for the important scenes?” pretty well, but I think it’s best to write the POV of the person most integral to those scenes, if that viewpoint makes sense to use. The person with the highest stake tends to make an interesting POV. For Lord of the Dark Downs, I switched between seven viewpoints. Yes, it’s a lot, and it worried me at times. However, the times I had the most trouble were those when I found the character I was writing was not the one most heavily invested in the situation. Happily, since I wasn’t doing any sort of pattern, I would then just rewrite that section for the point of view of a character whose motivations in the scene were more interesting to me. This means that some characters’ points of view appear more often than those of other characters, but I think the story benefits, and I don’t think any one character has so little to say that he or she should be taken out.

Anyway, I just thought I’d share that because it helped me see some things more clearly.

My website has not gone up yet. I will note when it does. It’s still pretty exciting to me! 🙂

You Know, That Thing I Do That Isn’t Writing . . .

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I’ve been reading a lot. This is notable partly because I haven’t had much time to read in the recent past, and partly because I’m reading nonfiction, which I rarely do except for very specific little bits that are research for writing. At the moment, I’m researching a different kind of writing: a paper for class, accompanied by a presentation, which I am thrilled to be doing on David Bowie. Thus, I’ve been marinating in biography for days.

This means, sadly, that I’ve had little chance to write. I know what the next step needs to be in The Dogwatchers, but I’m having some plot issues that are inextricably tangled with a dead rat. Funny, the way plots work sometimes. There are two scenes I really need to add, and I so far have a plot which goes as follows:

*Plot skips merrily along* Death of rat *Plot dusts itself off and continues skipping* Action C, a consequence to action B, which is a consequence of action A, and must be completed while dead rat is still moderately fresh.

You may notice a problem in the absence of actions A and B. I am currently almost as far as action C, but just realized that I really need B in there to justify C (which I earlier thought would be all right on its own), and I need A to happen for B to happen. Thus, I need to try to insert actions A and B during the plot’s initial skipping, because – convenient though it might be – I just don’t think they can happen while the dead rat lies there, mouldering. It amuses me no end to have this strange limitation.

I had a short story idea the other day, too, so we’ll see whether that goes anywhere. At any rate, not much to report this week, but I did put some thought into The Dogwatchers today, and hope to get back on it tonight or soon after.

Plans!

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This past week, I got the official notice that one of my short stories will be published in the online literary journal Spindle. I submitted to the journal through my friend Michelle from the Advanced Studies in England program – hooray for writerly friends! Anyway, I expect much coolness from the journal. Check it out here. I filled out the publishing contract and sent it in. Exciting!

What’s also exciting about this is that it has me in gear for work on my website, which will hopefully be up by the end of the week. I don’t know whether you can tell just by reading it, but I’ve just upgraded this livejournal account; this will allow me (and by “me,” I mean “Becky,” my fantastic and web-designery roommate) to put the blog directly on my website. I won’t put it on the front page, because I don’t want visitors to have to scroll – certainly not this much, if at all – on the front page, but it will have a part of the site. I’ve owned the domain name www.anicalewis.com for about a year now. An article for writers strongly recommended buying “www.yourname.com” ahead of time, just so that someone else doesn’t use it. Now, I actually have server space (a vacant lot on the Internet!).

I read a tutorial on HTML, and hope to learn more; until then, Becky will help me. I’ve looked up several dozen authors’ websites – those of my favorite authors, and then just a lot of pages from a database of authors’ websites – and found a few things in common, giving me an idea of what I want on my site, at least to start with. Obviously there are things I can’t put up until I’m actually published (even, in some cases, until I have a book out), but I plan to have links on the front page to pages containing:

– this journal

– a brief bio of myself, including whatever contact information I deem necessary; I suspect my webspace will provide me with an e-mail address I can use for this

– a list of links I use for writing and which I think might be helpful for other writers

– possibly some form of message board or guestbook, though I might wait until I have reason to think people will use it

– descriptions of (and, where appropriate, links to) publications I have or am going to have (at the moment, Spindle and Reynard’s Menagerie)

– possibly an overview of the fantasy world in which I write, though I am nervous about placing much of it on the great unsheltered plains of the Internet, what with the love, research, and years of work I’ve put into it

– eventually, maybe, my Super Exciting Possible Project, described below

Before moving on to my Super Exciting Possible Project, just a note that if I seem to be missing anything, do tell! Same goes for any general website-building tips you might have. Also, if you really like a particular author’s website – beside DWJ’s, Neil Gaiman’s, Terry Pratchett’s, Lemony Snicket’s, or J.K. Rowling’s, as I have looked at those already – please let me know! 🙂

Right – on to the Super Exciting Possible Project. During a recent phone conversation, my mom told me about a fellow who was interviewed on NPR about his success in podcasting his novel. (If you want to hear the three-minute interview, it’s here – just click on “Listen Now.”) The idea is that one reads one’s novel aloud in installments, usually weekly, and podcasts them for free. Naturally, this is somewhat scary, as it’s essentially giving away for free something for which one put in lots of work. However, I think it could be the perfect solution to a tricky little problem I’ve had: how to deal with my novella, Dragons Over London.

I like the story a lot, but I’ve pitched it to agents, and it’s just not long enough to be a novel. (It’s just over 57,000 words, so much too long for a short story, but not written for young enough readers to be a chapbook or any such thing.) It’s one of the most dynamic and accessible of my works, and the only one I think I’d feel really comfortable reading aloud for a podcast, since it’s set in the real world and has as its first-person protagonist a young, female American. It’s not entirely representative of my work, not being set in my usual fantasy world, but it is fantasy, and I think it’s lots of fun. I’ve already read some of it aloud to WordShop, where it was well-received, and I think it would work well for the weekly format that the chapters tend to end in some form of cliffhanger. Also, my aunt, who works with gifted children, gave the story to the father of one of her students, who read it aloud to her before bedtimes. The father then wrote me a nice letter about how he and his daughter (I believe she was nine years old) liked it, with some constructive criticism for the parts they liked less, and a copy of one of his books (he’s a poet). Besides, much as I love the story, I did write it for NaNoWriMo – unlike my other novels, which took at least a year or two each, Dragons Over London took thirty-four days. I have less to lose on it that way – though I do love the story.

So. Obviously, I’d have a bit of editing to do, and I’d want to read the whole thing aloud to myself to see how it sounds. The main thing I wonder about there is whether to do voices. They’d be fun and interesting, that’s for sure, but I’d have to not only decide on voices for all the characters but practice accents: the story contains several English and Irish characters and one from Finland. I would hate to do the accents badly, but it seems like it might be lame not to even try. The other question is whether to provide a downloadable file of each chapter as it becomes available in podcast form.

At any rate, this might go up over the summer. Anyone who has thoughts on it, feel free to chime in!

Even on a Slow Week for Writing . . .

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. . . I do get some things done!

I just finished printing a short fiction and a nonfiction piece to enter into two of five writing contests for students here (the other three concern plays and poetry). My entire Advanced Fiction class has been more or less pressured to enter by our professor. It’s a good thing; we really have no excuse not to! We’ve all got the work lying around anyway! Still, it means stiff competition. WordShop, too, has notified members of the contest. My freshman year, I won the fiction contest (the Tiberius Graccus Jones award then; that name is now on the nonfiction contest). So it – well, I don’t want to say “it can be done,” both because that’s obvious inasmuch as someone has to win, and because the “it” in question is really a different contest now in terms of entries and probably also judges – but it could theoretically be done by a person who was, to some greater or lesser extent, me. Even if it’s someone else in my class (at least one other of whom won one of these awards before), that would be quite cool.

Besides that, I really didn’t get a lot of writing done this week. I did a bit of editing and also some worldbuilding, and I made two unsatisfying attempts to restart my last story from the point of view of a more-active character. I love the character; I think I’m just choosing the wrong jumping-off point for the story. Anyway, I have another sort of rough story idea I’d like to work on, so I may give the first one a rest for awhile. If nothing else, working on that story has allowed me to build the kingdom in which it takes place to a greater level of detail. I now know how their rulers and other members of the royal family write their official signatures. 😛 For what it’s worth.

Our Advanced Fiction class this week encountered more inactive protagonists, though thankfully not mine this time. Funnily enough, the same person who took so long to realize and accept that my last story was fantasy was the most adamant that one of this week’s stories did not contain a supernatural element that it claimed, in plain language, that a character had.

“It never occurred to me that he could really have telekinesis,” she said. “I just assumed from the beginning that it was a metaphor.”

“You resist fantasy!” I told her.

“You know, I do!” she said.

To be fair, in this case, she was right. Still, one wonders how to show some people that a story actually is fantasy . . .

But anyway, regarding the inactive protagonists: it’s an easier trap to fall into than I once thought. Our professor has prescribed antagonists to motivate our protagonists, many of whom could be said to struggle against their worlds, to the extent that they really struggle at all. He hasn’t required that we write antagonists into our next works, but I’d like to try. We’ll see how that goes!

Follow-Up

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Unsurprisingly, I got hit for having a passive protagonist and for some plot problems that I just didn’t have time to fix before sending the story out. What did surprise me was that some people had trouble realizing it was fantasy. Last semester, of the four short stories I wrote for the class (mostly the same classmates), two of them prominently featured lycanthropes; I love fantasy and talk about it often; I have misinterpreted other people’s stories as fantasy often enough that it’s become a running joke in the class. However, of my story’s fourteen pages, one person didn’t get that it was fantasy until page six, and another person until page eight. Now, if you will, consider the following:

Page One:
– mention of the Royal Mage Academy

Page Two:
– dead body levitated by magic, done by a person explicitly called the Royal Mage

Page Four:
– mages run around changing the colors of things

Page Five:
– mage changes the color of POV character’s clothing, with magic special effects at center stage

Page Six:
– prince arrives on magical flying horse (at this point, Person Two speculated that it COULD be fantasy, while Person One went, and I quote, “AHHH! What? I bought the healer/mage academy thing, but nowhere else did you indicate that this world was otherwise extraordinary!”)

Page Eight:
– prince’s backstory includes enchanting doors and mirrors – at the use of the verb “enchanting,” Person Two conceded that the setting could be fantasy.

Funny? I thought so.

Storytime!

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This week, I volunteered to write one of the short stories for our Advanced Fiction class. It felt rather daring, as I had no idea at the time (last Tuesday) what I would write about, but since we all have to write them anyway, it seemed just as well to go ahead and do it during a less-busy week. So, after spending several days actively trying to think of something, I finally got an idea on Saturday and started writing the story in the evening (due Sunday at 8:00 pm). I spent over six hours on Sunday – most of my awake time – finishing it, and had no time to edit; it was two minutes late before I could even run spell check, and the professor isn’t big on lateness. (Not that many professors are.)

So anyway, after working for most of my Sunday on this story and then sending it out, I sort of flopped back and thought, “What have I done?” Not with horror, as it might sound, but actual curiosity. My roommate, also a writer, understood: sometimes, after coming up for air from a long session of writing, you realize that you know very little about your story. Is it good? That’s the main thing, actually. If, for example, I tried yesterday to remember whether I had done a specific thing – did I resolve that plot issue? – it wasn’t hard. But had I done it well? Ye gods, had I done any of it well? I was highly tempted to hang around anxiously as my roommate read the story, and I did ask her later what she thought. I still mean to reread it before class.

The story was pretty fun. (It has no title at the moment, thus my referring to it as “the story.”) It’s set in my fantasy world; unlike my longer works, which are almost all set in that one world, my short stories are often either modern-day fantasy, set in alternate, less-developed fantasy worlds, or even not fantasy at all. I like having the room a longer work gives me to unfold the complex world I’ve spent so much time building. Don’t get me wrong – I do my best to avoid info dumps, and I think I’m pretty good about it. It’s just that I do think the world makes more sense as you see more of it, and you see more of it when there’s more story. Still, I enjoyed this one, and think it mostly worked fairly well.

Also atypical for me, the story begins with a body. Obviously, given that, the late character is hardly beloved of the readers; he doesn’t even get a name for awhile. However, his death is important to the story; most of it is about how his household reacts (and the kingdom, as this is in fact a king). Although the story doesn’t include the king’s actual death, it’s unusual for me to treat death much at all, and it made an interesting writing experience.

My prediction is that I will catch it in class today for having a passive protagonist: our professor is not a fan of such at all. I don’t think my point of view character is all that passive, but he’s not all that active, either. Besides that, I didn’t have enough time to edit, so there are a few things that come up early and are not all that well-resolved. There are also a few things I wondered about, namely, terms referring to the fantasy world without being explained (in this story, for example, a slang word for “mage,” and a day of the Querran week). I’m not going to explain a term my POV character would accept without question (and that no one else would need to have explained), because that would be difficult to do well, at best. My roommate said, and this is what I would hope for above all else, that she finds these bits to hint at a larger and more complex – and thus more real and interesting – world. I think the best fantasy writers can do this. Even people whose writing is set in the real world can do this, just creating the feeling that their characters, cities, etc. go on outside the specific story they’re telling. There can be a fine line, of course; sometimes you just confuse people.

So that’s my take at the moment, but we’ll see; Advanced Fiction class starts in half an hour!