Seizing the ideals

One of the highlights of this past Worldcon -- for me, anyway -- was getting to hear Tom Doherty's tales of the publishing industry. Speculative fiction has always been a genre for people who think big and take chances. He'd love to see a novel submitted to Tor, he said, about a protagonist who discovers endless clean energy. People would read that book, root for that protagonist, and think about how this real-world energy crisis can be solved. Speculative fiction can make people think, Mr. Doherty said. Speculative fiction has the power to change the world. I was pretty overwhelmed by the truth in that. For the rest of that afternoon, I was shiveringly excited at the thought that ideas can do that.

It's a nice change from the school of thought that fantasy and sci-fi are silly escapist fluff. A lot of times, they are, yes. But writing in general is romantic and escapist. Isn't it nice to think that human pain has some greater meaning? Literary characters suffer and struggle for a reason, even if the reason is simply to be part of a satisfying story -- real life doesn't always wrap up that neatly. While we're doing this escapist fiction thing, it's always nice to take a lesson away and apply it to real life. Be kind to your loved ones because they won't be around forever; give weird people a chance because they might be wonderful on the inside; don't do anything you're unwilling to face the consequences of. Fiction makes life's lessons a lot clearer. So why not add some speculation to the mix? Hey, if book characters would tackle a future energy crisis and find a way to fix it, why can't we? Do that carpe diem thing we're always hearing about.

I really believe that fantasy can open minds. That's a big part of why I write about non-human sentients: it shows that empathizing with someone very different from you is possible. If we can feel like we know a dragon as a friend, judging other humans by their gender or skin colour suddenly looks pretty ridiculous. I'd like to do what I can to show humans how to be better people. It won't really help the energy crisis, but it's something!

That most wonderful time of the year

I'm finished line-editing Remedy, and the agent submissions will begin shortly. Anticipation sits in my throat like an inadequately chewed hunk of danish, except that anticipation is far more delicious.

As for this November? Well,I 'm still waffling on whether to do NaNoWriMo. Hammering out fifty thousand words of a new manuscript would be great, and I have plenty of worldbuilding notes to work with. And the community! Lots of writerly folks flock together at this time of year! My favourite coffee shop even makes itself an official NaNo hotspot. If I can quit being a weenie about the 1667-words-per-day average, I might just give it a try.

So, blog-following people! Are you doing NaNo and/or trying to talk yourself into it?

We can all just get along!

I just came across this Dog, Cat, Rat video. Three animals normally considered enemies, who have instead been raised to be friends. Their owner tours them around to promote peace: if these animals can live in happy harmony, then what excuse do humans have?

It just makes me really happy to see stuff like that, and it's a thought I use a lot in my fantasy works. So I figured I'd share.

A different kind of buzz

I wonder why you don't see many insects in mainstream fantasy.

I mean, I know why. For most people privileged enough to spend their time writing novels, insects are pests. Bugs are the little gross things at the edges of life that indicate poor sanitation. They're probably too unpleasant to mention in an idealized fantasy world, or a necessary presence too mundane to be worth talking about. The few insects with a positive image in North American society -- say, butterflies -- aren't exactly the stuff of sweeping plot movements. Why think about that when you can worldbuild yourself a dangerous, carnivorous animal that might actually affect the characters' lives?

It's a shame. Insects have a lot of potential. Grasshoppers and ants can be food. Maggots and leeches, normally thought of with revulsion, can help clean wounds or improve circulation. I'd love to see a world where oversized crickets are kept the way we keep chickens, and healers have jars full of medicinal arthropods. Even negative associations with insects can be used as story elements -- biting insects spreading disease, say. Carnivorous insects could hunt mammalian prey in swarms and/or use venom, to prove themselves just as lethal as a dragon.

Don't get me wrong, I go into girlish hysterics when I find a crawly in my own house. But while we're suspending disbelief, hey, why not get some more variety out of the worldbuilding? Insects are the most numerous and diverse living things on Earth, so they can surely provide some inspiration.

Time has no meaning here

Yes, I keep telling people, the book is going well. I'm almost done editing. I hope to be querying people in a week or two. Last night I was looking at some instant messenger logs, and I found that I've been saying this stuff for months.

How does time keep dilating? It honestly feels like I could finish the last of my editing work if I were feeling especially awesome that day, but that's an exaggeration, all right. It was insanely optimistic to think that I could breeze through line-editing in a week. But half a year? Really? There haven't been any significant plot changes while editing Remedy, just combing tangles out of my prose.

I guess it's not much different from sitting down after dinner to read a book, and suddenly noticing that, whoa, it's 3 AM. Books are unassuming -- just some bound paper, just an Openoffice file -- but they have the power to grab your mind and fill it with things you never anticipated. I don't regret taking this long. I'm pleased with how Remedy is turning out. But maybe I'll stop talking about it in casual conversation for a bit, at least until I have all my paper edits transcribed into digital format. That'll mark me being actually pretty much almost done. And so help me, that stack of purple-scribbled pages is going down.

A refreshing drink for authors, too

Last night, I read Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen. And I do mean last night -- I started at ten PM, figuring I'd get a few chapters in, and was smiling at the last sentence around sunrise. It's a really absorbing story, full of society's castoffs.

Anyway, one line particularly sticks in my mind. It's where Jacob learns of some intrigue, and says that a "bad feeling ferments" in the pit of his stomach. Fermenting was what hooked me. How apt that is, comparing a bad gut feeling to the foul, burbling mass of something rotting. But there's a vague hope about it, too; the icky process of fermentation will sometimes give us a new food to savour. Good might come out of the situation, however gruesome it is right now. And, heck, that fermenting bad feeling has some nice parallels within the story, too. Since the story takes place during Prohibition, Jacob and his circus friends have many and varied problems involving alcohol.

The beauty of writing is its ability to crystallize moments. One well-chosen verb can suggest more than a paragraph of description ever could. One metaphor can let someone feel like they understand completely. Anyone can leaf through a thesaurus and add some filigree, but there's much more skill in simple perfection, like summing up how awful and queasy the hero feels in three words.

This stuff only fires me up further for line editing. Awww yeah, Remedy's going to get its vocabulary tuned. I can smell the coffee and printer paper already.

What's in an R rating?

I was reading this post by Sister Coyote, on the folly of thinking that dark, depressing fiction is innately superior to lighthearted fiction. Ah, that old chestnut.

It makes me think of inexperienced writers trying to be edgy. Look, I wrote a thirty-page torture scene! That's not appropriate for children, so it's clearly more mature writing, right? As opposed to the fluffy happy Teletubbies stuff? The problem is that, like anything in fiction, the events and themes need a reason for being there. Yes, sadness and pain and hate are an unavoidable part of life. But so are taxes, and you're not going to make all your characters fill out reports for three chapters, right? Realism isn't necessarily meaningful.

Fiction can find that life has meaning and joy, and question where to find these things. Fiction can look at the bonds of love and friendship that let characters endure beyond their limits. Sister Coyote's analogy of light and dark seems very apt to me: without happiness to contrast it, sadness is meaningless. Claiming that one side of the equation is inferior and brainless? That's the the real immature attitude.