Climb The Sky:

Mantis shrimp: really cool crawlies

2012-01-27T12:40:00.000-08:00

When I'm browsing the Internet for unusual animal abilities, I always seem to pick invertibrates. Why do insects, arachnids and mollusks seem to have all the cool superpowers? I don't know, but I sure do think that Earth's small, crawly things are underrated.

Take shrimp, for example. They're delicious. We think nothing of eating a few dozen of them with butter. We call someone a "shrimp" when we want to belittle them. But take a moment to consider the stomatopods.

Better known as mantis shrimp. These sometimes-colourful little fellas have highly specialized eyesight. They can detect 10 times as many colours as a human can, plus ultraviolet and infrared light. Combine this with the shrimp's ability to fluoresce to communicate with each other. Mantis shrimp can also see polarized light, which lets them accurately determine the direction and nature of light. A mantis shrimp underwater can tell which phase the moon is in, which relates to tide patterns and mantis shrimp mating behaviour. Humans have only recently understood these things; mantis shrimp have been using them in practical ways for 400 million years.

But a wide visual spectrum isn't their only superpower. Some varieties of mantis shrimp (referred to as "smashers") have an incredibly fast and powerful jabbing strike. Specialized structures in their claw arms let them ratchet back the limb, store muscle energy, and unleash it like pulling a trigger. That lets them launch a 50 mile-per-hour punch almost instantaneously, with such fast acceleration that the water in front of the claw is depressurized and brought to boil. Pressure change like that is essentially a second powerful punch to the target. Which means that these four-inch shrimp can easily smash through crab shells -- or aquarium glass.

It sure sounds like science fiction material to me. Even scientists have been known to call these creatures "shrimps from Mars". But mantis shrimp are perfectly real, living in our oceans and beating up fish bigger than they are. Just another quiet little marvel crawling around on Earth.

"Creative" should mean something

2012-01-19T14:55:00.000-08:00

As a kid, I went to a lot of summer-camp-type programs. Not all of them were actually camps in the woods -- some were just arts and crafts projects hosted by the local college. But all of these programs were meant to ensure that only children like myself didn't spend the whole summer in a lightless basement playing video games.

One of these college-hosted programs had me in a classroom with about 20 other kids. We were given a challenge: using an allotted supply of tape, paper, drinking straws and paper clips, make a construct that would allow a light bulb to survive an 8-foot drop. It was a standby activity that got kids thinking and building for an hour.

While fiddling with the paper and straws, my assigned group didn't seem to have any good ideas springing forth. Or any ideas at all, really. So I threw out, "Hey, what if we wrap the paper around the lightbulb base like this? So it makes a cone, and the open end of the cone acts like landing gear." Everyone agreed, in the blasé but curious way of kids who don't know what to do. I basically led the exercise and my lightbulb construct ended up looking like a prototype lunar lander. The paper cone bristled with drinking straws -- so the cone wouldn't fall over, you see.

The other groups of kids made the simple models frequently seen in this exercise: crumpled balls of padding encasing the lightbulb, or landing pads to be put on the floor under the bare, falling bulb. Most of the day's constructs successfully protected the light bulb. A few failed and were followed by broken glass cleanup. My lunar lander performed perfectly, landing on its open cone end with a quiet click and holding the light bulb se.

Afterward, the program leaders stood in front of the chalkboard and graded each construct. We got scores out of 20 points in several impressive-sounding categories. This was a farce, of course -- it's not like a casual summer program is going to give a child a failing grade in arts and crafts. At the time, I was just waiting excitedly to see if my clearly awesome construct would get the best score. Getting the highest score would mean that I won, right? Or at least that I was good at doing assigned things in a cool way.

In the category of Creativity, most of the other kids got score of 16 or 17. Drawing a design on your crumpled ball of paper was enough to get a score or 19 or 20 and be called very creative. So when a program leader arrived at my lunar lander and held his chalk near the Creative category, he hesitated. His face scrunched up with thought, and he hemmed and hawed something about how he had never seen a design anything like what my group did. Reluctantly, he wrote "21/20".

And somehow, that was the most disappointing grade my teacher's-pet self had ever received. 21 out of 20? What the heck was this noise? If actual innovation broke the grading parameters, then the grade was meaningless. I could sense that even though I just wanted to be the smartest kid in the room. The program leaders had watered down the term "creative" until it meant little more than "I acknowledge that you made something".

Nowadays, I think of that experience when I'm reading reviews of mainstream fantasy. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a clichéd story about a destined farmboy, but I wince when I see those types of stories called "creative". Like there's something exceptional about redoing a well-worn trope. Sure, it's creative in the strict sense that magical quests don't happen in our real world and there aren't any dragons in our skies. But if we call a hero youth with a sword "creative", what will we do when a project comes along that shatters all our expectations? Give it 21 out of 20? Or 500 out of 20, because that's about as meaningful?

I think it's important to say what we mean, and keep our expectations high. Book grading is never anything but subjective, I know. People who are dazzled by the special farmboy probably just haven't read much fantasy, so to them, it seems like a truly creative spin on an adventure quest story. But I expect a "creative" story to break rules or try something really out there, not just put a bit of window dressing on something familiar. Personally, I write about bird-dragons on peaceful quests for personal truth and I often feel like I'm not reaching high enough. There are new models to try, if we're willing to wander away from the more obvious choices. And they might just work exceptionally well.

Our modern mainstream media shows a strong preference for safe ideas. Things that have been done before and can be doodled on to make them look new. Just look at all the franchise reboots and sequels available for us to read and watch. Creativity is something I don't think we can get enough of: we should be building strange constructs whenever possible, just to see if they work. And as a consumer of ideas, I'll always be expecting 20/20 creativity to surprise me.

What's going on

2012-01-14T10:28:00.000-08:00

So, here we are in 2012, forging on into the future and cracking a lot of Mayan apocalypse jokes. What have I been up to? Ah, working and playing video games and cleaning up the holiday fallout. And writing the opening of Render -- the actual opening of Render, or at least a closer version.

I've taken a few shots at Render drafts so far. They weren't all coherent, but each version made it a little farther into the story and laid more pieces down. I have a better idea now of what Render will end up like. I've spent enough time with the protagonist, Rue, enough to feel like I can do a good job writing her. And now I'm shuffling sentences around in the first chapter, adjusting the way characters meet and the plans they lay, trying to make all the information line up.

I'm never sure what to discuss on my blog while I'm at this stage of writing. The characters are in flux, getting tweaked whenever I have a better idea, so talking specifics about the people in Render probably wouldn't be accurate for long. And my plots never trump my characters, so the story events are up in the air, too. (Frankly, I'm just glad I don't have a deadline carved in stone for any of this.)

So if Render's mystery story is mysterious even to me, I guess I'll have to chat about other things! Stay tuned for video game plots or my life experiences or something!

How to think a large thought

2011-12-30T17:33:00.000-08:00

I found a blog post about a particularly intelligent species of jumping spider. Not intelligent in the sense that they think with mammalian ease. No, these spiders have physically tiny brains -- and they just sit there grinding away at complex mental processes for however many hours it takes.

That's certainly an interesting way of looking at intelligence. We humans tend to assume that to qualify as intelligent, a creature needs to have mental capacity similar to ours and be able to run thought processes the same way we do. But it's not that tiny-brained animals are incapable of complex thought: it's just a matter of how they go about it, and how how long the process takes.

I'm reminded of a scene from Star Trek: Voyager where Captain Janeway works with Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci is having a hard time grasping the idea of energy weapons, never mind the fact that he himself is a computer program in a mobile holographic emitter. So when da Vinci demands an explanation for all this, Janeway makes an analogy. A sparrow, she proposes, would be able to never understand French politics. A songbird's simple world and simple thought process mean that there are things beyond its comprehension. Knowing that, can da Vinci accept that there are things beyond his own comprehension? Da Vinci is humbled by this answer and he continues trusting in Janeway's incredible technology.

Really, the only reason the sparrow can't understand is that it has more mundane things on its mind. Food and mates and such. Maybe those determined jumping spiders could understand French politics or holographic programs, if they could live long enough to grind through the mental process. The spiders would need augmented memories to remember the things they figure out. Concepts like individual identity might be difficult for them. But the actual process of breaking down ideas into smaller pieces? It's not impossible. Or we can take the theory in a different direction: what understandings could a human achieve if zie could live a long life and spend it in vigorous thought? What puzzles could our mere ape brains work out?

I just like the idea that anything can think if it works hard enough.

Ravel is now available!

2011-12-17T17:05:00.000-08:00

I have triumphed over the formatting beast, and now I bring you Ravel.

Ravel: A story of Aligare

Aster Hane has all the things her insectoid people cherish: a hard-working husband, new children, and a talent for her family's traditional craftwork. What Aster doesn't have is what she senses in the wind: the knowledge of the world beyond her small village.

Then she meets Llarez of Arkiere, an avian storyteller. With his jester's approach to life, Llarez doesn't mind doing an errand for Aster -- and he doesn't mind when Aster accidentally asks for more than she intended. With new thoughts planted in her mind, Aster begins to question whether her race's ideal life is what she actually wants for herself. Llarez is glad to help her find the answer, but that only makes the choice harder.

Ravel is a romance story, although it's an intellectual romance more than a sexual one. It's about 15 000 words long and available in .epub, .mobi and .pdf formats. Download a copy from Smashwords! It's absolutely free! And if you know someone who might enjoy the story, please spread the word.

Sneak preview of Ravel: A story of Aligare

2011-12-14T14:09:00.000-08:00

There's nothing like trying to finish a story during the annual holiday hubbub, am I right, writers? Time just scurries away when you're not looking.

But Ravel is in its final proofing and formatting phase. If nothing goes belly-up, I'll have it up for download tomorrow, December 17th. And it's going to be free! I'm so delighted to be sharing another story of Aligare that I just want everyone to go ahead and download the thing.

Here's Ravel's cover:

I spent quite a bit of time agonizing over how light should fall on a ball of string.

Let's see, what else ... How about a writing excerpt? Yes, let's do that. Here's a scene from Ravel, the fantasy romance:

They arrived at the river, its surface scintillating purple in the evening dark light, the water and wind-blown leaves murmuring to fill the silence. Llarez knelt and scooped the three water pails full. He held his tail in an upward hook, placing one bucket on it so his feathers' bulk held the handle in place. The novelty held Aster's attention -- that easy way his limbs moved and bore weight. She wondered how much practice it took to carry buckets on one's tail.
They turned back toward home. In the distant fields, grassbugs sang a humming song.
"All right." Llarez looked to her in the dark, his eyes a half-hidden glittering.
"Is there anyplace specific you'd like these when we get back?"
"Really," Aster said quiet, "you've been wonderful about all of this."
"They're not so heavy, truthfully! It's-- Oh. All of this." He lifted one shoulder awkward toward his head, perhaps trying to scratch an itch when he couldn't spare a hand. "Well, Aster, what I mean is ... Let me tell you a tale. I'm not barding right now so don't fuss about owing me one thing, all right?"
"All right."
They kept walking, while Llarez inhaled and readied himself. The river trees stood behind them, the town homes. Llarez began:
"Twenty-six years ago, the winds were gusting and the clouds spoke of change. There was a young fellow named Llarez of Arkiere, a korvi child barely fledged. He used to watch the merchants and messengers coming in to land on the volcano slopes, their quills spread wide and streaking colour into the golden air. It was quite a sight for someone who'd barely seen outside his House's front door! Being that he was a curious child, Llarez asked the rest of Arkiere House where all those travelling folk were coming from.
"Opens, said Llarez's mother. Or Greenway, said Llarez's father. Likely not, his brother Zey piped up -- they were bringing goods from somewhere farther away than that. Villages on the far side of the land.
"Well," Llarez said with a tip of his head. In the dark, Aster could imagine his cloud-coloured eyes prying into the distance. "Even as a child, Llarez knew that three different answers couldn't all be the exact truth. He knew, in that fate-clad moment, that he wanted to go out and learn the answer for himself. So he fanned out his wings and announced, right then and there, that he wanted to wander. When he was bigger, naturally. He wasn't much good at flight, yet, you see -- didn't have enough muscle for it."
Aster imagined she did, in the limited way that she grasped the reality of flying creatures.
"It's a funny thing," Llarez said, "trying to choose what to do. Nothing is solid enough to measure in knucklewidths. Three years after that day, Llarez of Arkiere grew tired of waiting to be sure, and he left. But he grew frightened on his first night alone. He had planned to spend a few eightyears travelling and come back as a well-storied man. But he was back in Arkiere House for dinner not one day later."
Llarez was grinning again, a slow and reluctant motion. Youth showed in his shape, his narrow arc of neck and the lean muscle of his frame. Aster walked beside him in the endless air; she supposed her age showed, too. Perhaps in her own lines of face and frame, marked with a painted trace of new motherhood.
"I've always took it to mean," Llarez said soft, "that the proof is in the porridge. That a person needs to simply try and see how things end. If that fledgling Llarez had sat in his familiar home, he would never have seen what he could do."
"Did he have any way of knowing what the world holds for a traveller? No one ... told him what needs to be done?"
"Oh, his parents told him plenty. And they took him to hear bards spinning tales, at festivals and such." Llarez waved a hand, stirring air in bent circles. "Young Llarez thought that listening to a tale was boring compared to actually seeing places for himself. Imagine that pup becoming a bard?"
Aster smiled watery. "I wouldn't have wagered."
"It takes a while for these things to percolate, I think. I always like a legend better when I've thought on it for a while. So, that's something to keep in mind, I suppose!"

She already had a thought like that in her mind. In the greater Hane household, Aster had woven images of each Legend Creature; she held that memory under countless warm others. Those pictures of mighty Creatures were her first weavings, a crafted wish for the land's guardians to have line and form. Told words couldn't replace the feeling of real shapes, and air touching textures.

Aster had a thought on her tongue now, after her heart had hammered enough. But Llarez shifted the water pails in his grasp and fell quiet, and the Hane home's doorway threw ever more light toward them. She wished so hard to agree with Llarez. But she simply couldn't make herself speak again.

If that scene caught your interest, stay tuned for tomorrow's release of the full, free download! Now if you'll all excuse me, I have paragraph styles to normalize or something like that.

Things you normally do

2011-12-09T19:55:00.000-08:00

I was working a dinner shift the other week. My waitressing job-du-jour is with a chain seafood restaurant, one that's considered a treat and an attraction in this sparsely populated region of Canada. It was a busy dinner shift that evening and, in a free moment, I was helping out a fellow server who was struggling to keep up.

It was the little things I was looking after. Fetching side plates, clearing dishes, that sort of thing. At one point, I hurried into a quiet section of the restaurant with a fresh basket of complimentary biscuits. Which table was it I was supposed to-- ah, right. Table 65. A man and a woman sat there, waiting for the next course, the man poking at a smartphone with both thumbs. I smilingly approached the table.

"Here you go! Fresh-baked biscuits for you."
The man looked up suddenly and snapped, "Now, listen. I don't normally do this."
I nodded, trying to keep a pleasant server expression on my face. Uhh, what the heck, sir, I'm just the messenger.
"It's rude to text at the table," the man said. Briefly interrupting the steel-hard stare he was giving me, he gestured to his lady friend (who didn't look offended in the slightest). "I would never do this under normal circumstances. It's disrespectful."
"I'm sure you wouldn't," I agreed. Because honestly, it is tacky when people bring a companion to dinner and then ignore them all night to fiddle with a phone.
"I'm just texting my kids to make sure they're not doing anything they shouldn't."
"That's a good reason," I said.

Bringing up family meant that this had the potential to be a conversation. Which would certainly be nicer than just me getting lectured for a judgement I hadn't made! I shifted to a more relaxed, standing-around-and-chatting sort of stance.

"Do you have kids?"
Scratch that relaxation. Add me freezing up on the inside. People tend to guess low on my age when I'm in chirpy server mode -- so the fact that I dislike children and don't want any would be a bigger barrel of worms than usual.
"No," I said. Neutral expression, Heidi. Neutral expression. Don't have nightmare visions of children getting their sticky hands all over my video games.

Man and woman eyed me for a second. Considering.
"If they think I'm not paying attention," the man said, "they'll burn the house down. That's why I'm sending a message."
"Well," I said brightly, "if I were out with a guy and he let the kids burn the house down, I'd definitely be mad at him then. So it's good that you texted!"
The woman chuckled. Even the man smirked and eased up on his waitress-skewering gaze. I asked if they needed drink refills or anything -- no, they didn't -- and I made my escape.

It's the sort of conversation that happens all the time in restaurants. Can't really avoid it in a place where people serve other people, everyone carrying their own ideas and perceptions. This particular conversation just seemed weirdly … thorough. It had smartphone etiquette that has only come about in the last year or three, and it had the age-old expectations of what a young woman will do with her life. Text and subtext. It seemed like I had spent a lot longer talking with those people than I actually had.

It can be trying sometimes, and mundane at other times. But I do like waitressing. It makes me think.

After NaNoWriMo, and before the release of Ravel

2011-12-05T16:34:00.000-08:00

Okay, I think I can deal with writing blog words now. NaNoWriMo was a bit crazy for me, but I wrote my 50 000-word whirlwind tour of the next Aligare story. I got the important scenes in Render, the key discoveries and courses of action. All that remains to be seen is what's in between those important scenes and how I'm going to staple-gun it all together.

In December, I've been line editing the novelette, Ravel. Carefully considering each sentence for clarity and rhythm. After 30 days of hurried rough draft, this line editing feels like I'm meditating while eating strawberry ice cream. Actually, I was just generally happy to come back to it. I like how the mood of the story is turning out.

Ravel is almost finished. I hope to upload it within the week. And then maybe I'll get back to posting things in this blog of mine! Hey, readers -- any particular preference? Do you check this space hoping for worldbuilding dissection, or information about weird Earth animals, or what? Do tell!

My weekend at SFContario 2

2011-11-21T19:11:00.000-08:00

I'm out of the convention, back in northern Ontario and full of food and naps. So I think I can discuss my time at SFContario 2!

I can't find exact attendance figures at the moment, but SFC2 was projected to be 400+ and that seemed about right. My first conventions were huge animé conventions with attendance well into the thousands, so I'm always a little surprised when a convention is a few hundred people in one small hotel. But it was a great, relaxed atmosphere. Every attendee I talked to was open to the shiny ideas laid out to share, as well as full of ideas of their own. Not to mention that I saw someone cosplaying a Klingon Green Lantern. That's another square checked off on my Klingon Versions Of Superheroes bingo card!

My dealer's table was positioned beside Vanessa Rottner and her beautiful jewelry, much of which was inspired by her friend Nina Munteanu's sci-fi works. On my other side was Ira Nayman with his humorous sci-fi, and Stephen B. Pearl selling Tinker's Plague and practicing the pronunciation of the word 'nukekubi'. Then there was a dinner out with Nicole Chardenet and Ira, where we had sushi and discussion of sociology. And Erik Buchanan's stories of stunt acting. So many great conversations that weekend! And despite being around so many people with Actual Credentials, I didn't feel the slightest bit out of place for my decision to self-publish and follow my own muse. (I wasn't even the only writer of anthropomorphic fantasy, as I discovered when I met the Pop Seagull Publishing team!)

I really need to start bringing a table assistant to conventions with me, because there was a lot of programming I missed for want of someone to cover my dealer's table. But I still had a great time, and I still got Remedy into the hands of a few curious new readers. It was an awesome weekend.

Interview with Bill Jones, Jr., and other links of interest

2011-11-15T12:31:00.000-08:00

If you haven't already seen it on my Twitter, Google+ or Facebook accounts, I did an interview with Bill Jones, Jr. . He asked some great questions about my writing inspirations, genre motivations, and whether yeti crabs are awesome.

Hey, while I'm linking things, let's do a few more!

-- 25 Famous Thinkers and Their Inspiring Daily Rituals. Personally, I don't handle strict routines very well, so some of these people's habits seem like mysterious arcane rituals to me.

-- Judith Tarr posted about worldbuilding with horses. Has some good food for thought about why horses are well-suited for human use (although they're not just cars that run on hay).

-- Speaking of equines! My Little Pony Retrospective looks at the history of the franchise leading up to the new animated series. If you've wondered about the recent phenomenon of adults enjoying a series traditionally marketed to 6-year-old girls, well, this video makes some good points. (I do keep meaning to discuss the worldbuilding of the Friendship Is Magic series. It's surprisingly solid.)

-- And This Amazon.com listing for a $400 link cable has inspired some hilariously fictitious reviews. Because good signal quality allows you to transcend time and space, right? Right?

Smoots and other weird measurements

2011-11-11T17:20:00.000-08:00

I recently learned about the smoot, a measurement unit that Google Earth offers to provide distances in. Which is interesting because what the heck is a smoot? (Other than a reason to bicker with your autocorrect software. No, I don't mean "smote". Seriously.)

According to Wikipedia, a smoot is equivalent to 5 feet, 7 inches or 1.7 metres. Which is the height of Mr. Oliver R. Smoot, a graduate of Masschusetts Institute of Technology. He and his fraternity buddies invented the unit of measurement as part of a prank -- and over 50 years later, their smoot measurement markings on Harvard Bridge are still used as points of reference by locals.

When Google offers measurements in smoots, it's not for practical purposes. It's an obscure joke. The smoot was never intended to be taken seriously and people seem to find the whole thing amusing. Is that why this measurement endured far longer than most frat stunts?

Maybe it's like how the foot has endured as a unit of measurement. Using a man's foot as a unit of measure must have been practical in ancient times, but it's a bit silly to hold things against the nearest adult man's feet in modern days. Why are feet an acceptable form of measurement while smoots are a weird joke? Neither of them are more absurd than using a metre, which is defined as 1) one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, or 2) the distance light travels through a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second. How the heck am I supposed to measure a piece of string against THAT?

But then again, it's not like I could have Mr. Smoot follow me around in case I need to measure things. I doubt it's possible for a standard of measurement to be immediately practical and relevant in all situations. We're better off picking some arbitrary length, making metresticks/yardsticks to measure with, and calling it a day.

For my Aligare world, I have the characters measure short distances in "knuckles", which is the distance between two of a person's knuckles. It's about 1 inch/2.5 cm. Hand width is similar between korvi and aemets, and ferrin have little weasel paws so they use the span of three knuckle bones instead of two. Everyone knows that a knuckle is a very rough measurement, so they'll specify whether this knuckle of mint stems is generous or skimpy. Other measurement units are the "hank", the average height of a cotton plant (about 5 feet/1.5 metres). And a "stone's throw" which is, well, anywhere between 2 metres and 20. Without a government or a monarchy to impose specifics, everything is taken with a grain of salt. Or five grains. Sometimes.

Units of measurement exist so that people has some constants to relate to. Whether those units of measurement are constant to anything else is a whole different matter. Each unit has its intended audience, and we can convert measures to fill in the gaps. So if the smoot provides reference on a Massachusetts bridge -- and provides people with an inside joke -- then it's doing its job. That's the long and short of it.

NaNoWriMo 2011: this year it's wolf attacks, not ninjas

2011-11-05T23:39:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty quiet because it's National Novel Writing Month. This year, I'm trying to write 50 000 words of Render, the next story of Aligare. I figure that if I produce a fresh 50 000 words and cobble it together with the draft material I already have, I'll have a complete(-ish) story to work with.

There's always a lot of discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of NaNoWriMo. This event is all the usual emotions associated with writing and storytelling, but packed into one big frothy package, one marathon of excitement and despair and hope. Retreat to the mountains and meditate on your masterpiece for a decade? Aww hell no. We're going to slam these things down in a few days, through sheer overcaffeinated force of will.

That's why I use NaNoWriMo as a draft-writing incentive. This month-long social event is a jab of spurs that's difficult to replicate just by telling myself to spend more time writing. Right now, Render has some logistics issues that I'll gloss over, ramble around and leave in precarious limbo. Which is fine for a first draft! If this story is anything like Remedy, my revisions will produce sentences that magically manifest whole plot arcs in the rest of the story. It's like I need to wander around in the Aligare land until I trip over the shiny stones I'm looking for.

I'll try to post a bit this month, but if I don't, it'll be because I'm developing other things to share with you folks. To you fellow crazy folk doing NaNoWriMo, best of luck! And to everyone else, well, best of luck in whatever else you're doing!

My First Book Reading: what I did and what I'd suggest to you

2011-10-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

The past two nights, I held my first two book readings at the local library. Ah, the struggling writer's dream: reading your work aloud for a rapt audience.

I guess that's a thing writers dream about, anyway. I certainly do. Public speaking ranks very low on my list of fears, thanks to all the theatre, stand-up comedy and various public service I did at tender ages. It seemed like just another exciting chance to stand up, put on a smile and entertain people -- but with my lovingly crafted words! Here is my writerly self, world! Have a seat and I'll spin tales of magic!

So I hauled a bunch of Remedy paperbacks to two different library branches. I set up my poster and my main character figurines. I was going to give a brief dissertation on the history of fantasy storytelling and why it's important for us to imagine -- that only ended up happening at one reading, but both events had me reading a scene from Chapter 7. Neither event was quite what I imagined, but I'm very glad I did them.

If you're doing a book reading? Pimp My Novel has some helpful basics to suggest. I'll add a few points of my own:

1) Practice speaking your material aloud. Practice the whole thing several times through, making sure not to speak too fast. This is obviously important if you're shy, but headstrong folks like me need to practice, too. Time how long it takes you to get through it all, so you can tell the audience how long you're going to yap before they can ask questions.

2) Figure out which style of notes work best for you. I found that point-form cue cards made me abbreviate my fantasy history portion to match. A page of full-length speech material worked much better for me. It's better to memorize your material? Oh, of course it is. But people would rather see you read eloquent words from a page than see you stammer, splutter and forget your point.

3) Ideally, do a dress rehearsal for some sympathetic ears. People who will be supportive, but not too kind to tell you what doesn't work. Ask them if there were any parts of the presentation that felt rushed or needed more explanation. If you have a writing group you're comfortable in, try them!

4) Social context is very important. The library can advertise to the best of their ability but if you're standing there in front of a room full of empty chairs, few people are willing to walk over and sit down alone. Once a few people are already listening, more will be intrigued enough to come check it out. Seeding the audience with a few of your family or friends might not be a bad idea. Call in those personal favours and put butts in seats!

5 When reading your book, do character voices. People like hearing the author mimic a chirpy character or a gruff one. It also helps novel dialogue make more sense out loud, which can be an issue if there aren't a lot of speech tags.

6) If possible, bring a relevant snack to share. Since the library was providing coffee and tea for one of my events, I developed a cherry biscuit recipe and brought some in fresh-baked. Cherry biscuits are a special occasion snack for Aligare characters, something they'd eat during a festival. That was a fun bit of trivia to tell the attendees, and who doesn't feel more welcome when they're offered a bite to eat? The only downside was a few individuals who grabbed a snack and left without so much as looking at my poster. Ehh, you win some, you lose some.

Speaking of winning some and losing some! If you're a new author, you might not get many attendees. It's that social credibility thing again. Despite everyone's best advertising efforts, you might be reading to one or two people. Make the best of it and chat up those one or two people! Just start reading and see who wanders over! You're an event headliner who has written a whole book. You still have plenty of reason to be proud.

Yeti crabs: the charmers of the deep sea

2011-10-19T18:48:00.000-07:00

The deep ocean is often considered the last frontier on Earth. There are other places humans haven't conquered or comprehended, but the ocean floor is the most difficult nut to crack. Down there in the dark, cold, high-pressure water, the wildlife hardly look like Earth natives at all.

The public isn't usually excited about new deep-sea discoveries. So scientists were surprised when the 2005 discovery of the yeti crab got so much attention. But this crustacean has been turning heads because, well, look at it.

The fluffy-looking hair is actually toothbrush-like bristles, but that hasn't stopped people from making their own yeti crab plush toys. A cute, fuzzy appearance is the holy grail of convincing humans to like you.

I think the coolest part of this crab is the function of those fuzzy limbs -- the bristles house symbiotic bacteria. Science isn't sure yet what purpose the bacteria serve the crab. It might be a farmed food source, a way to neutralize toxins in the water, or something else. But whatever the bacteria do is valuable enough that the crabs hold their arms over hot, nutrient-rich thermal vents in the sea floor to nurture bacteria colonies.

In a seemingly inhospitable place, two life forms live quietly together. If the crabs weren't acting on mere instinct -- if they could think about what they're doing when they hold their bristled arms over thermal vents -- what would they think? That they're preparing their farmed bacteria for a meal? That they're looking after their vital little friends? That they have no idea why they put their arms into thermal vents, it's just a ritual they must perform to survive?

This is why I look to nature for speculative fiction ideas. When humans bother to look into our world's crevices, we can find really thought-provoking things. They might even strike us as cute, if they're lucky.

Scars: fictional meaning vs. real-life mundanity

2011-10-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

Scars have a way of seeming significant. Especially in fiction, where pointing out a character's scars can imply a lot about their life -- that they've been crushingly defeated at some point, or that they live dangerously. But the funny thing about scars is that humans can get them without doing anything so dramatic.

I burned myself at work recently. There's a mark on my thumb -- rapidly healing and apparently not going to scar after all, but it was a noticeable brown line of healing tissue for a week or so. Nothing interesting happened to cause it. I just picked up a plate that had a small ramekin of baked shrimp on it, and the still-hot ramekin slid and touched my thumb. That's a very ordinary job hazard for a food service worker. It's not like I was fighting anything or rescuing anyone (unless you consider waitressing a fight against hunger, or a rescue of restaurant patrons from low blood sugar).

Maybe scars are interesting because of the simple fact that they indicate action. You don't usually get a scar from sitting on the couch. Scars come about because the bearer was doing something or involved in something. There's always a story there -- even if it's a relatively mundane story like falling out of a tree as a kid, or trying to cut vegetables for dinner. The scar might not make a grand statement about your life but it still has something to say.

Humans have mixed reactions to scars. We instinctively think of clear, unblemished skin as a sign of health, so scars are often considered unappealing. Fictional villains might have an ugly scar to indicate that they're an unsavoury person. However, if scars are cast in the right light, they can can be an indication of a brave, strong warrior who can endure pain -- definitely an appealing trait in a hero or a mate.

When a scar triggers both positive and negative reactions in our minds, it's easy fuel for our imaginations. That means that it's easy for fiction to blow scars out of proportion and assume that they're always a big deal. I can't think of many characters who have minor-point-of-interest scars. And hey, why should real people have a monopoly on that? I think fictional characters should trip and need a few stitches once in a while, just like the rest of us.

What's up? Updates! And links.

2011-10-11T16:16:00.000-07:00

Time keeps on slippin' into the future, as a famous poet once said. My job is keeping me very busy hauling plates of food around. I'm assembling some bloggish thoughts on the waitressing life because there's a fair amount of culture and subculture involved.

Ravel, the story of Aligare? Its editing process is slogging merrily along! I've been visiting local fields and pathways with my amateur photographer dad, trying some Ravel cover concepts. The results are interesting, but not quite what I'm looking for. Ebook covers aren't a good medium for tiny visual details!

And hey, I haven't shared links in a while! Here's some cool stuff I've been reading lately:
-What Went Wrong with the Star Wars prequels, an examination of writing flaws.
-The single gene that allows limb regeneration.
-Why Fantasy Matters: A Personal Apologia, discussion of how magic and escapism can have great meaning. I'm sure it goes without saying that I agree.
-A listing of free language-learning media.
-A scan of J.K. Rowling's planning notes for Harry Potter. Check out those scribbled-out parts. What might have been?

Fantasy food and its social factors

2011-09-30T12:20:00.000-07:00

Today, I put some pork ribs into a citrus and garlic marinade. They'll be dinner in about 48 hours. That preparation time -- plus the price of ribs -- always gets me thinking about the social demand for food, and its resulting value.

If you grocery shop and cook with any regularity, I'm sure you can spot the most grievous errors seen in fantasy writing. Travellers stopping to whip up a quick stew (which is a long-simmered dish by definition). Medieval peasants going to the butcher to buy a big succulent roast (which is an everyday food only for rich and/or modern humans). Freelance warriors enjoying lots of meat and good liquor (without any mention of how they can afford the stuff). When fantasy uses an Earth-like scenario, there's no reason for these things to happen other than author ignorance. The factors involved are all fairly logical and easy to predict.

Animals products are usually relatively expensive. That's because animals take a lot of time and effort to raise and/or catch. Someone needs to kill the animal and drain the blood. And the hide doesn't remove itself, you know! Meat is nutrient-dense and delicious, but it doesn't exactly grow on trees.

Once the animal is dispatched and cut up, the value of the meat is also affected by the ease of cooking. Organs and tough cuts of meat were traditionally food for the poor, while the rich got the tenderloins and prime roasts. Foods like meatballs and braised shanks (read: slow-cooked animal ankles) were ways of making a small amount of stringy meat into something tasty, but they required time and technique. We pay for convenience. When you buy chicken in the modern grocery store, you might be able to get a whole unprepared bird for the price of two cleaned chicken breasts. This can be inverted when a restaurant buys cheap tough cuts, prepare them into something delicious, and charges for the luxury of not needing to prepare the food yourself. And with cuts like ribs, the difficulty of preparation and small quantity of meat is offset by the demand for ribs' flavour.

Plant products, on the other hand, are usually inexpensive in their native growing area. They grow freely and in quantity, they don't run away, and they sustain themselves on the light, dirt and water that just happen to be there. Humans' staple foods are almost always a grain or a starchy root because large amounts can be cultivated and stored. These staples are commonplace and cheap, but often still revered because they're so vital to daily life. Even in our modern world where importing is commonplace, shortages or rice or corn make people uneasy.

When a plant product is expensive, it's probably rare, perishable or difficult to produce. A good example would be saffron, the most expensive spice in the world. Saffron is actually the styles from the centres of crocus blooms, fragile threads that must be harvested by hand. It's not a product that can be cranked out in any large amount, and it requires a lot of work to harvest. Another extremely expensive seasoning, truffle fungi, only grow wild on the roots of certain trees and in certain soil conditions. Truffles have resisted human efforts to farm them, and their rarity makes them "the diamonds of the kitchen".

Availability is pretty easy to figure out. When you can easily gather/store as much food as you want, that food won't cost much. Apples are only harvested in autumn, but they're easy to store and they make great preserves, so apples and apple products are never particularly expensive in the places they're grown. Early Canadan and American settlers considered lobster to be peasant food because the ocean coasts were crawling with the things -- catches of lobster were even turned into the soil as cheap fertilizer. We still have holdovers like lobster sandwiches from the days when poor people made do with what was common. It took a few centuries of increasing rarity (and royalty pointing out that lobster are delicious) to make lobster the luxury meal it is today.

In summary, the value of food is determined by four things: how difficult it was to produce, whether it's available all the time, how much time goes into the preparation, and how much people want it. All of this should be considered when a writer decides what the characters are eating. If the fantasy setting is similar to medieval Earth, then there's plenty of food documentation to help out.

Personally, I love the thought of experimenting with food demand factors. It's easy to mention a spice or a meat that's imported and very valuable, but there are so many more ways to play with fantasy characters' eating habits. What if a blight strikes the major local crops? The hero might have a hard time finding the food s/he's used to, and might need to look for an alternative. What if a fantasy world has small animals as the producers in its food chain, and plants are rare? Maybe the peasantry would eat lots of rodent meat while the rich flaunt the fact that they're vegetarians. What if a common local vegetable is found to reduce the risk of a terrible disease? Farming conditions would suddenly be a major concern.

I'd love to see more fantasy stories where the local food production actually matters, instead of food supply being a vague issue that the main characters don't really need to care about. Maybe it's because fantasy loves its royalty and privileged characters, and those people can usually eat whatever they want. But putting a little thought into the local food can reveal a lot about a place, its ecology and its culture. A meal can tell an entire story of its own.

Ravel's cover: A work in progress

2011-09-24T22:44:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I mentioned the real object I'll be using for Ravel's cover. Well, when Ravel was far along enough for me to consider a cover, I knew there was only one image that would do: Llarez's Muddle. That clump of knotted string with a surprise in the middle, the one Llarez is picking apart knot by knot because the anticipation is the real point. The Muddle embodies the themes of Ravel and, heck, it shows up in the story almost like a character of its own.

But how to create the image? I considered commissioning some more gorgeous cover art, but I'd like to save that for the novel-length stories of Aligare. A relatively simple image like the Muddle can be handled by yours truly.

"Handled by yours truly" in the sense that I'm sitting here tying a big ball of knots! This isn't finished -- it needs more work and more different types of string/yarn/twine/thread woven into it. I've been combing every household supply store and art outlet I can find, looking for textures that match my mental image. But this what I have so far and it's the gist of what I'm doing. (What's at the center of the Muddle? That's a secret.)

Among the joys of self-publishing is the fact that I can choose my own cover. I can also choose to create my own cover, whatever that involves. I'm happy I have this freedom to make my visions, even when that involves string from the Dollar Store and some knots any monkey could tie. Like my writing, this cover doesn't need to be a huge expensive production -- it's simply what I want it to be.

And I'm back!

2011-09-20T11:10:00.000-07:00

Well, it seems to have been a while since I blogged! I got caught up with a new job that packed all my testing and training into one very busy week. It's the most intensive waitressing job I've ever had, but the effort is paying off.

In between feeding people, I managed to print out Ravel and make an editing pass with a disgustingly pink pen. Now I just need to transfer the edits to computer. I was really hoping to get that 12 000 words of fiction processed sooner, but oh well!

I'm feeling pretty good about Ravel's structural integrity. It's a sort of love triangle that reflects the Aligare world's positive mindset. Other than one scene timing snarl, there's not much I need to overhaul -- there's just word choice fiddling. My paper edits always have lots of marked phrases with no accompanying notes. That's how I indicate that I just don't quite like the flow, rhythm, or nuance of these words. I find those things easier to experiment with when I have a Delete key.

So, I hope to resume blogging with some semblance of regularity! In other Aligare-related news, I'm also working on the real, physical object that will be part of Ravel's cover. Maybe I'll reveal that soon!

Story length? I'll just write 'em all.

2011-09-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

Ravel draft progress: 11 686 words
Draft completeness: Just about there!
Short stories/poems buzzing around me: 7

Well, well! It's been a while since I've reported on the state of my writing. So let's have some of that.

Ravel is nearly ready to be printed out and scratched at with coloured pens. I suspect it'll gain a few thousand words in editing, since my writing usually does. So this, erm, isn't even quite a novella, but I'm still happy with the way the uneasy romance is coming out.

As for the short stories and poems, those have been dogpiling me whenever I think, "I should be writing something right now". Possibly because of my growing sense of mental freedom. I've been thinking about the way I got my name out when I was writing fanfiction for practice -- and that way was by writing whatever I felt like writing.

Some weeks, I used post four or five short stories in a scattershot variety of genres and tones. I'd get an idea about Video Game Characters B and C and I'd just whip it up. After a while, people got to know me as a writer of weird, nichey things that no one else had written. The more I think about it, the more I want my original writing to be that way. Just an assortment that people can rifle through to see if there's something they like. Or something they've always wished to find.

I do want to write more stories of Aligare, probably novel-length ones. But I might also have a short story collection sometime soon. Whatever form my work takes, I just hope readers enjoy it.

What "fantasy" means: Fiction genres and how we search through them

2011-08-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

I'm often bothered by the fact that fantasy is a term for a whole genre. Sci-fi applies, too. These terms have basically the same problem, so I won't quibble over science fantasy or any other gradient of speculative content.

When you pick up a book classed as a mystery, you can expect there to be clues to put together and a bad guy to catch, probably with a good dose of suspense involved. If the book is a thriller, it's similar to a mystery but with more action and peril. These terms not only describe the general plot of the story, but suggest the mood and the type of content the reader can expect. If you dislike tough guy characters who run around trying to stop terrorist plots, you quickly learn that the typical thriller novel doesn't appeal to you.

Fantasy, on the other hand? That classification is given to any story with a speculative element. It'll probably have a more spiritual, mystical vibe, rather than a sciencey "everything can be explained" stance. But that's about all we can demand of the fantasy label. No guarantees on how much magic there'll be, never mind what the characters will be doing, thinking, feeling or fighting.

So how weird is it that we can say a book is "a fantasy" and act like that describes anything? If Book A features a tender love story between a medieval princess and a werewombat, and Book B is a thrill-a-minute saga of competitive dragon-racing in the steampunky 1900's, those books could easily end up on a bookstore shelf right beside each other. Because they're both fantasy. Sure, some people think fantasy should be kept strictly separate from non-fantasy. We've all heard of snobby literary critics who hate thinking about anything that doesn't exist on actual modern(-ish) Earth. But does the fantasy designation really trump everything else about a story? Its pacing, its themes, its soul?

I wonder if this is the reason some readers are disappointed in my book, Remedy. Fantasy is often considered synonymous with sword fights and adventure and evil wizards who must be stopped. The most well-known fantasy stories of our time are hero's journeys with high stakes. Remedy, on the other hand, is a quiet story. It features character growth and existential questions, and some supplies trading hands during tough times. If you open Remedy up expecting an adventure epic, then, well, yeah. Remedy is boring for you. I make no apology for that; I just wonder if there's a better way to label the book. Some term that won't promise a steak dinner and then serve the reader tofu and greens.

But grouping books exclusively by content doesn't work, either. I've heard of people sifting through the Adventure section to find Conan the Barbarian, back before SF/F were deemed worthy of their own section(s) in bookstores. It must have taken a lot of browsing to find the magical, destiny-driven stories among the more contemporary works. Saying that adventure trumps fantasy isn't really any more accurate, or any more fair to the multitudes of books out there.

I think the tag system is the best way to go about it. Label every book with a bunch of descriptors, then let the reader decide how specific they want to be. If one reader wants a political action-adventure fantasy with dragon-riders, they can search for books that have all (or most) of those tags. If another reader just likes fantastic stuff and is open to all other factors, they can search for "fantasy" and see what shows up. The system works no matter which story elements you consider most important.

Tagging works very well when you're trying to filter an electronic environment, but it's problematic for paper novels. Those still need to sit on shelves in some order, any order -- it's an unfortunate consequence of having a three-dimensional physical form within space and time. This is why searching through a million ebooks can be much easier than searching through a thousand paperbacks in a store.

But there's nothing to say that we can't use an electronic tag database to look up where to find a book in a bookstore. It'd be a bit jarring at first to remove the big "Fantasy" sign from the bookstore, but people can adapt. Bookstore employees could show you how to search a database in the same way librarians teach people to use the Dewey Decimal System. I think it would be great if more booksellers took on the Amazon-style approach of tagging paper books, regardless of whether the storefront is physical or virtual. It would definitely help people navigate the ever-increasing selection of books out there. It might even help fantastic stories become truly accepted as meaningful literature, when fantasy isn't treated like a one-quest-fits-all classification to be boxed into one section of the store.

Although, tagging does raise the question of how specific we should be. Should the briefly mentioned story elements be tagged? Should each book have five defining tags, or fifty? There'll always be room for debate in a field as broad as fiction. I'm starting to think that organizing everything is, itself, a fantasy ...

The place that helps me think

2011-08-23T03:28:00.001-07:00

Good ideas come to me in the shower. When I suddenly, specifically realize what I need to do to make a piece of prose better, I'm usually in the middle of washing my hair.

Like yesterday. My brain casually informed me that the short story with black dogs in it? Would be better without that flashback scene. I needed to cut that down to 2 or 3 lines, tops. I'm not happy with the pacing of that story because the extended flashback basically puts out a leg and trips everything else.
Huh, I thought. That is the problem. I was glad this realization was a general one, not requiring me to hurry out of the shower and transcribe anything. (Some of my Remedy-related epiphanies were ... pushier.)

I'm not sure why these ideas specifically come to me in the shower. Maybe because of the relaxing, restorative nature of hot water. Or the lack of distractions. I do tend to brainstorm cool things whenever I'm idle, but the clarity of my shower brainstorming is distinct. Ehh, as long as the ideas come from somewhere!

How about you, readers and browsers-by? Do you have a particular place or situation that gives you good writing ideas?

Linkfest

2011-08-14T18:44:00.000-07:00

Cool things I've been reading lately include:

-Sharovipteryx, a dinosaur with hind legs adapted into membrane wings. Science isn't entirely sure what it's related to or how it moved around, but I think it's interesting that such an unusual body configuration was part of a real animal that lived on Earth.

-25 everyday things with little-known names. The whites of human fingernails are called lunules. That's news to me!

-The last words of Satoshi Kon, director of animated movies. He had some really touching thoughts about his own passing, and I found the anecdotes of Japanese culture interesting.

-7 Different Ways To Say Hello, some literal translations of greetings in Earth languages. And Klingon. Gotta include Klingon.

The folklore origins of a sci-fi video game

2011-08-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview with some of Nintendo's developers. They're talking about the Star Fox series of flight simulator video games -- the development processes, the team dynamics, the inspirations.

My favourite part of that interview is the reason the Star Fox series is about non-humans at all. At the time Shigeru Miyamoto was pushing early 90's technology to animate spaceships, robots were the popular thing in Japanese science fiction. Most other designers, in that position, would draw up some marketable-looking robots and call it a day. But Miyamoto did something weirder than that. Something that would stand out and be memorable. His game's arch-shaped obstacles reminded him of a local temple whose god uses foxes as messengers. The main character of the video game became an anthropomorphic fox, and his crew became other animals common to Japanese folklore. The story atmosphere even changed, as the designers note in the interview: that distinctive premise combined with cutting-edge graphics made the first Star Fox game a success. It's a fictional experience a lot of people look back fondly on.

Stuff like this is why I have great respect for Nintendo as a creative entity. And more than that, it's an example of a weird story idea that was just weird enough to work.

Special formatting in a changing publishing world

2011-08-05T20:32:00.000-07:00

Today, someone reported a possible problem with their Remedy file. Underlines were showing up all throughout it, sometimes in half-page chunks. The reader was concerned that this was a case of Review Copy Errortosis, and I answered that actually, erm, I did that formatting. On purpose.

It didn't happen quickly, or by accident. Every draft and rewrite had a different formatting pattern depending on the age of the writing guidelines I was working from. One suggestion I stuck with was using underlines in your manuscript instead of italics. If you mail off your submission to some overworked slushpile reader, the underlines will be easy to discern and less taxing on the eyes.

That made sense to me. I mean, depending on the font, italics can be a very subtle change. Arial font is a good example:

If I were tired or distracted while reading a dense page of text, I bet those italics would difficult to pick out. And Arial is a commonly used font -- how many other fonts have the same issue? I have no idea.

While I worked on Remedy, I considered the effect of my underlined text. I was using special formatting to indicate that hearing-impaired Peregrine was reading lips, which I felt was an important detail to imagine. Hearing spoken sounds is much different from watching mouth motions and piecing together the words. So I kept the visually punchy underlines to match the visual nature of Peregrine's conversations.

When I started looking into ebook formatting, those striking underlines only made more arguments for themselves. If the reader might be reading my book on a tiny cell phone screen during their commute, why not make the formatting as easy to read as possible?

In this growing ebook revolution, formatting can be an enormous stumbling block for everyone involved. Ebook files come in 3 file formats -- more like 10 if you want to count the rare ones -- and those files need to be legible on more devices than you can shake a tech support employee at. Formatting isn't just for professional typesetters anymore. And while the conventional aesthetics of written work are important, I think the function of the written piece is equally vital. The whole point of ebooks is to adapt books to our changing needs.

And that's why the ebook version of Remedy looks, at first glance, like the file conversion process mauled it. The ebook has underlines while the print version has standard italics. Maybe underlines will become more common in the electronic world than they are in the print world. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

My contribution to International Sh*tty First Draft Week

2011-07-28T17:13:00.000-07:00

I heard from The Intern that it's International Sh*tty First Draft Week. Is that spelling just coy censorship, or is this event actually named S-H-asterisk-T-T-Y First Draft Week? Inquiring minds would like to know.

However you spell it, his week honours the fact that your novel doesn't need to come out perfectly the first time you put fingers to keyboard. Every draft needs tweaking and rearranging. Some need judicious use of a machete. But as long as you keep working at improvement, you have nothing to be ashamed of. A first draft is somewhere to start from.

The actual first draft of Remedy is lost to the mists of time, and by "time" I mean switching computers four times in as many years. It was a first draft prone to wandering. That was only my second time writing a novel-length piece, and it was my first time breaking away from Ye Olde Fantasy Quest Format in my original writing. I was also still figuring out the worldbuilding and social norms of what is now the Aligare world. I still had a lot of figuring out to do -- but I still bought a charity auction for a professional editor critique, just for the sake of getting some useful feedback. Boy, did I get feedback. I got lambasted for everything from pacing to unsellable subject matter to the fact that I had used those disgusting abominations known as semicolons. That critique made me determined to continue doing what I do, only to do it better. And with more semicolons.

I'm wondering if I lost that first draft to the mists of time intentionally. Maybe I rewrote that first draft and didn't bother backing up the problematic original. Oh well. Here's a snippet of the earliest working draft I can find, from 2008:

A last look at the jagged rock all around--washed with light gold as memory--and Peregrine turned to leave. He palmed the brightcasting stone, sending shadows darting over the tunnel walls. Dragonkind belonged in the sky; he'd miss these gods-banished mines.
He focused his inner casting toward the stone, and the brightcasting light drained, thick blackness pouring in after it. Peregrine ruffled dust from the wings folded to his back, his two feet and tailtip following stone path: he'd carved every knuckle-length of this tunnel but it was in the past, now. He'd start paying attention to the sky like the rest of the korvi race, he promised himself. Details, scents and wisps of cloud. Whether Tillian prompted him or not.

This scene shows up in the published version of Remedy, changed only in prose style. The major difference is that this was the original opening of the book. It doesn't give much information about who Peregrine is, but at that stage I was worried more about the core story than about the exact level of exposition. I designed the opening to begin with the main characters and slowly pan out, if you will, to involve the world around them. But I was told that this slow start made it seem like a YA book. It clearly didn't have the tone I wanted, so I ended up adding Kelria's funeral as the opening scene. The story may be about Peregrine's efforts to change himself, but the themes of mortality and chosen fate needed to make themselves more apparent from the start. By changing the opening, Peregrine gained a clear motivation to change himself. He gained a reason to feel guilty for his need of earferrin friends, instead of him just deciding to leave his mine while thinking mopey thoughts.

So, basically, it was good for me to look back at my old stuff. Cringe-inducing though old drafts can be, they can provide perspective on why stuff works.

Shuffling my writing around

2011-07-23T18:30:00.000-07:00

I've been poking at my writing lately. At Ravel the novella, and at short stories dragged up from the depths of my personal archives. I have a bunch of prose chunks that I'm moving around and humming thoughtfully at, like a temperamental interior designer with lots of furniture to choose from.

This is especially the case with Ravel. It's being cut down and reworked from a 50 000 word NaNoWriMo thing, so I'm still puzzling out which scenes will stay and where they'll go. If only they clicked neatly together like puzzle pieces! (Oh, who am I kidding. That wouldn't be any fun. I see writing as slopping clay and paint around, not assembling a factory-made set.)

Other than Ravel, the Romeo And Juliet of the Aligare world? I have a short story about a guy facing death by black dogs. Those beasties are one of my favourite pieces of folklore. I also have a story about two lowaz. They're feathered beings with the ability to magically/psychically project their thoughts and feelings, and they're wondering what to make of big, clumsy humans speaking gutteral sounds.

So there's an assortment of stuff going on in my headspace, and a lot of that unproductive-seeming writing work where the wordcount doesn't increase by much. Any other writers in this state right now, I'll raise a glass to you. Contents of that glass are subject to how well the prose-rearranging goes.

Indigo's new evaluation policy: the 6-week deadline

2011-07-15T13:08:00.000-07:00

I'm still alive! Just haven't been feeling well enough to post coherent thoughts and stuff. Now then.

Canadian book and music chain Indigo is shifting their focus away from books, with worrying consequences for everyone involved. My writing group teammate Stephanie has some interesting thoughts on the subject.

What blows my mind is this expectation that a newly released book will sink or swim within 45 days. Just six weeks. That's a tight time frame for a casual reader to find, buy and read the book, never mind tell their friends about it and have those friends go buy, read and recommend the book. A 45-day deadline makes it unlikely that word-of-mouth advertising will help an unknown author out, especially if it's their first book and they're not an expert in self-marketing.

If they had been judged for performance after 45 days, how many now-beloved books would have been thrown out as poor sellers? The Lord of the Rings trilogy was published in 1944 and 1945, but got mixed reviews and it took ten years to become popular. Animal Farm took ten years to earn a paperback print run. The Great Gatsby went unnoticed for twenty-five years. I know those works were published in a different time, but expecting future classics to sell briskly within 45 days of launch is still absurd. Even Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone took two years to reach bestseller lists.

I don't exactly blame Indigo for their decision. This is evidence of traditional book distribution's struggle to survive, printed in the news headlines and outlined with neon. The old distribution system is flawed and it clearly can't handle the modern quantity of new books being pumped through it. This isn't about whether new classics will be able to reveal themselves; this is about business. It's about having a handful of sure-fire bestsellers. Those few household names that are guaranteed to sell to the masses. As a lover of outside-the-box writing, I think I'll stick to shopping online.

Eight-legged aquatics

2011-07-05T23:14:00.000-07:00

Found an article about diving bell spiders. New research suggests that the bubbles of air they carry actually function like gills, exchanging dissolved gases in the water around them. It lets the spiders live almost entirely underwater -- they even raise their cocoons in underwater bubbles.

I love how this is just weird enough to work. Spiders don't look particularly well adapted to swimming, but these ones can indeed swim -- they more often creep along underwater on their own silk threads, though. The hairs on their bodies trap bubbles and let the spiders move an air supply around. And the surfaces of those bubbles just happen to have useful scientific properties. Thanks to osmotic pressure, an underwater air bubble has a self-sustaining oxygen supply, unlike any scuba gear humans have developed so far. Pretty cool stuff!

Back from Anthrocon

2011-07-02T20:26:00.000-07:00

Ravel draft progress: 5 012 words
Best part of writing a romance plot: Sexual tensiooooon!

My convention trips are over for now, and I'm getting back to life without long bus/car trips. It's nice to be writing again.

But let me tell you about Anthrocon! It's an anthropomorphic/furry convention with an attendance (this year) of 4500-ish. It was my first time going, mostly because Pittsburgh is slightly out of a Canadian's way. Here's some news coverage of the convention.

I spent most of the convention sitting at my dealer's table, promoting Remedy, but I still met a lot of cool people. And the fursuit parade passed through the dealer's room, so I didn't miss that. Here's a video of the event. The fursuit parade actually sums up what what I think is cool about this type of fandom: just look at the variety in people's costumes. Everything from colourful cartoon characters to realistic-looking creatures, Earth animals and fantastic beings alike. People put a lot of money, effort and thought into their fursonas, and a lot of themselves, too.

I think it's unfortunate that the furry community so often gets a bad rap. Many people are only aware of furries as a bunch of perverts in animal suits. But I've found it to be a community that accepts everyone as they are. That's why I had fun bringing Remedy's characters to the party.

The finished Remedy display

2011-06-23T10:47:00.000-07:00

I'm in Pittsburgh right now, awaiting the Anthrocon festivities. Hey, I'd better show you folks my finished Remedy display!

Rose also got some new ears. They're this size help hold the artificial hair in place, so this isn't the definitive aemet ear design or anything.

The display also had some structural adjustments after getting home from What The Fur -- mostly removing the large base and making Peregrine and Rose into two separate pieces. Peregrine is actually very stable on his own, thanks to the tripod-like way korvi use their tails. I love it when a bit of worldbuilding turns out to be practical in real life!

Why I question the state of feminism in sci-fi

2011-06-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

I've been following some of the recent blogosphere talk of women being mistreated and misrepresented in sci-fi. Frankly, I don't think the argument is very well supported.

There are more well-known male science fiction authors than female. I don't think this statement proves that there's active sexism involved. Especially since readership polls we hear about were taken from a few hundred people (who all follow the same publication and probably aren't a random sample of the reading public). If publishers are actually looking at great sci-fi manuscripts with marketable premises and saying, "Eww, gross, a girl writer", I'd expect there to be more evidence of that. Accounts from insiders -- maybe reports of female sci-fi authors being pressured to use a pseudonym instead of their obviously female names. Or how about some statistics on the gender balance in the sci-fi slushpile? Maybe evidence that male authors get more marketing pushes or promotion? Maybe an attempt to take a broader sample of the sci-fi-reading public and see if they actually shun female names on covers? Sure, female writers exist, but I've never seen any solid evidence that they're being methodically wronged. If this is fact, there must be more proof.

Similarly, in any discussion of female representation in publishing, someone brings up the finalists for some literary award and -- gasp -- there are barely any women on the list! Clearly, the literary community is oppressing female authors! Sorry, but that's too big a logic leap for me to accept. How many women entered that contest/were nominated? More importantly, were any of them groundbreaking or exceptionally talented in their field? The final result, taken out of context, doesn't tell us anything about the process. It would be more believable that there's a problem if, say, somebody investigated the contest judges and found some sort of track record of favouring male authors. Otherwise, we're just jumping to conclusions. Why should we assume that male contest winners don't deserve their wins?

And then bloggers call for readers to go out and buy books by female authors. Well, okay, supporting authors is all well and good. But when I'm looking for something to read, I look at whether the story interests me. I don't give a squid whether the name on the front of the book is male, female or an androgynous combination of initials. Shouldn't the writing be the focus? That would suggest some sort of equality in which the author's gender doesn't determine their worth. Which is the point of the feminist movement. Right? Please tell me that the goal here is ultimate equality, not just glorifying women as downtrodden heroes in a cruel male society.

I've been called an enemy of feminism for these views. Personally, I just don't think the cure for sexism is more sexism. It sucks to be ignored, I know -- but I think women in publishing would have a stronger leg to stand on if they could prove that there's a problem, instead of just insisting that one exists.

What It Means To Be Validated

2011-06-12T21:07:00.000-07:00

Ravel draft progress: 4 026 words
Next convention stop: Anthrocon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Current quest: Slaying the international tax treaty beast … still

Since I have such a thing for cephalopods, I thought it was only right to bring home an octopus from my first authorly convention stop! Critterama's dealer booth provided me with Mr. Crinkles the Pacific octopus plush, pictured here with my cat Selphie. Heck, while I'm sharing pictures, here's Selphie reading a copy of Remedy By "reading a copy of Remedy", I actually mean stealing my breakfast.

Now then. Joe Konrath, in a recent blog post, brought up the issue of feeling validated in your field. I've been thinking about it lately, too. When a person decides to write, draw, compose, or any other artist-esque pursuit, they're basically seeking validation. Art is a form of communication, so if no one is going to approve and appreciate, there's little point to the creation. The real question is where we want the validation to come from.

As I watch my online friends develop their skills and test out opportunities, I see them figuring out what they want to do with themselves. Some are finding that they can't be the head designer or company executive they wanted to be. But they're also finding that joining an existing successful company isn't the only option out there. There are old methods ilke busking and newer methods like Internet crowdfunding. Nowadays, it's more plausible than ever to just perform your talent for an appreciative niche and be successful by a less concrete standard. If you don't want to compete your way into an old-school organization and be crowned with laurels, that's okay. That only leaves the question of how you know you've made it.

Making lots of money? Earning the adoration of thousands? Earning the respect of your peers? Receiving a stamp of approval from some prestigious organization? Just doing something that hasn't been done in your field? What is validation? Well, I think the definition is really a matter of personal honesty. It's figuring out what you want from your work -- no, really, what do you want -- and setting out to do it. Maybe you have the skills and temperament to forge ahead and claim your own achievements, without any authority figures appointed to guide you. Maybe traditional milestones match you better, the awards and traffic and buzz. Validation can be a bit different for everyone, at any given point in their life.

Personally, I write unconventional works just because I think there should be unconventional works to read. I've always felt a sense of validation knowing that my work can be called "weird" in one way or another. Who says oddities shouldn't get to exist? I'm also validated when anyone reads my fiction and enjoys it, because that enjoyment wouldn't have existed if I had just not bothered to write. And if I work at this enough, I might reach a tier of validation where I can live off my book sales. A steady stream of people paying for my work has got to mean something.

Regardless of specifics, I think it's vital for an artist to accept that they can't please everyone. Success can be defined many ways, and no definition is universal. With that truth comes the strength to do your thing and find your own validation, whichever form that comes in.

Untangling a new title

2011-06-05T19:02:00.000-07:00

Right now, I'm in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, unwinding after What The Fur. This cozy little convention of non-human enthusiasts was my first Remedy promotional event and I got to chat with some cool fantasy fans. But I'm still fitting in some work on my next story, thanks to the bus travel and the hours spent at my dealer table. (I also found a mascot for my writing. Pictures are forthcoming.)

Rhythm is getting a new title that suits it better. The original draft was mostly from Llarez's point of view. He's a free-spirited bard who plays a percussion instrument and is learning how the world works, so calling the story Rhythm made sense. But in the reworked version, Aster is the main viewpoint character. She doesn't play an instrument, doesn't quite get Llarez's worldview and, more importantly, she has a theme of trying to sort out her tangled feelings. No music involved. The word "rhythm" doesn't really resonate with Aster.

Aster is also presented with the Muddle. It's a ball of tightly knotted string given to Llarez by his brother, in a quirky tradition of moral lessons. There's a mystery object at the center of the Muddle ball and Llarez could cut through the string to get at it, sure -- but where would the fun be in that? He's supposed to pick each knot apart and savour the anticipation. Llarez often has his new friends and acquaintances take a crack at the Muddle, too, and Aster finds this messy knotted thing to be an apt representation of her frame of mind. More themes of tangling.

I like it when my fiction titles make sense in multiple ways, you see. Remedy got its name because Peregrine is delivering a remedy and trying to remedy his own identity crisis -- "Remedy" is a noun as well as verb. The title suits the medical aid plotline, but after reading the book, the title also matches the emotional themes throughout the story. It just seems more fair to the story to give it a nuanced title.

So, it seems pretty clear to me that my current story's name is Ravel. "Ravel" as in a knot (noun), and also "ravel" as in complicating or untangling(verb). The story practically approached me in my Greyhound bus seat, put out a hand and reintroduced itself as Ravel, a story of Aligare. Being this aware of the theme can only help me.

Convention season begins

2011-05-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

First things first! I wrote a contribution to Juliette Wade's Writer's International Culture Share project. It's a look at how Canadians use time to measure distance, check it out over at TalkToYoUniverse.

Second things next! My blogging might be a bit sparse in the coming weeks, since I have a parade of convention trips planned. This weekend is Anime North. That's more of a personal convention for me, a time to dress up as a video game character and frolic around with my roommate and 9 000 other geeks. I won't be thinking about my writing much and that's okay.

I'm looking forward to the anime screenings in particular. My first introduction to fantasy was video games, but my first introduction to fandom was anime. It's a medium of crisp visuals and high ambition, full of ideas plenty weird enough to work. When I watched TV as a teenager -- and discussed the shows afterward on the Internet -- I learned that if you put enough passion and style into your weird ideas, you can capture the imaginations of people all over the world.

Anime isn't something I watch much of anymore. I've seen some Miyazaki films in the last few years and I think that's mostly it. So while I like Anime North for the costumes and community, I also like having a good excuse to watch a random dose of the fantastic. I'll be able to walk into a darkened theatre to find a vividly-drawn story on the screen, probably something I've never seen before. I certainly can't argue with that.

Remedy characters take shape

2011-05-21T15:51:00.000-07:00

Convention season is nearly upon me, so I'm working on my various costumes and promotional materials. Including the paper maché display piece!

Peregrine and Rose have their base coat of paint -- no feathers, hair or clothes yet. Tillian finally exists and she's partially furred. And those white lumps will become landscape rocks (from a rocky grassland area on the outskirts of Fenwater village).

It's interesting, making the physical forms of these characters I've been thinking about for years. Paper maché isn't as easily edited as, say, clay or CGI, so there are a few details I'd change if I were doing this piece over again, mostly slight changes to the characters' relative sizes. Peregrine is slightly large and Tillian is slightly short. But it's still neat to sculpt the three-dimensional bodies of my characters. Things I had vaguely supposed -- like korvi having hip joints like a crocodile -- took physical shape under my fingers. I'm blending paints to match my own colour descriptions. It's a great way to see how all my worldbuilding actually looks. I'd go as far as saying it's a valuable exercise for any fantasy writer, if you happen to be the crafty type.

Linkfest

2011-05-16T15:58:00.000-07:00

Still working on that paper book formatting issue. These margin issues aren't going down easy.

But in the meantime, here's some interesting stuff I've been browsing lately:

-New fossil evidence of giant winged ants.
-Chimpanzees murder for land in a surprisingly methodical manner.
-100 pieces of investigative journalism on a wide variety of topics.
A gorgeous comic about the artist's soul.
-And, for today's dose of cute animals, a 4-month-old puppy versus a cat.

Non-humans in sci-fi and fantasy: short story analysis

2011-05-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

Here are two short stories I've enjoyed lately: The Language of Emotion and All of Us Can Almost. The first is science fiction, the second is fantasy. Both focus on non-human characters.

The Language of Emotion uses a fairly clinical voice. Whitemane, the horse-like protagonist, lives in a world full of logic and technology and the narrative reflects this. Information is rapidly accessed, shared, and brought up. Whitemane explains the foreign Hukai race, and dreams of what his race considers an ideal life, and considers the technicalities of surviving on a methane-based world. His behaviour is clearly different from ours, but because the reader and the character are both interpreting foreign species, there's a crossroads of understanding. When Whitemane learns of the (former) existence of humans, it seems believable that he both empathizes with humans and pities them. The story has provided plenty of specific evidence for how advanced Whitemane's race is.

All of Us Can Almost, on the other hand, takes a minimalist approach to descriptive detail. The POV character and her race are bird creatures who have grown too large and too idle to fly. Her friend Hobie is a small mammalian carnivore. That's really all we're shown. The lack of information is a bit maddening at first -- even for me, and I'm usually alright with amorphous, barely-described things. But by the end of the story, I found that the stark what facts were irrelevant. The POV character is focused on blunt emotional truths. We get only enough information to understand what she means. She doesn't go around mentally describing herself and her unremarkable surroundings; it would clutter up the story to do so. This approach puts the story's heart in much sharper focus than if we were distracted by descriptions of appearances and measures. The world building is beside the point.

To me, these stories are both effective demonstrations of why non-humans are valuable in fiction. Strange beings provide a sort of buffer distance from our modern human existence, but they still face many of the same universal issues we do. At any moment, we could stumble across a piece of foreign culture that redefines our views, like Whitemane does. At any moment, we could decide that we're unhappy with our own complacency and take action against it, like the bird-like POV character does. These personal growths don't depend on a person's appearance or social structure. A person's voice can be like nothing we've ever heard, and it can still speak truth to us.

The difference in these short stories' tones? It seems like a personal preference. Non-human POV characters are much more common -- and more readily accepted -- in science fiction. Probably because a more factual style of writing makes it easier for the author to explain an alien being that doesn't look like we do. Fantasy tends toward nebulous ideas like destiny and magic, not precise facts we can document. Faster-than-light travel is implied to be explainable and reproducible, even if the exact explanation and proof aren't shown onscreen. This is unlike fantasy forces that are usually a matter of simply believing and striving Until The Time Is Right. If readers are willing to accept that magic springs from nowhere and strange fates have a mysterious plan in mind for humans, I don't think it's so weird to accept an unexplained bird creature -- but it's still a step of faith that science fiction doesn't tend to ask for.

And I think it's pretty impressive to set up a non-human world in a short story, regardless of exact genre. Information can be tricky enough to pace out when we're talking about familiar humans. I raise a glass to the stories I've discussed today.

Things I'm learning from my first POD format book

2011-05-05T17:38:00.000-07:00

Whew. Okay! Sorry for the silence, there, folks. I've been working on the fiddlier aspects of getting Remedy ready for print-on-demand, and my headspace was too cluttered to come up with any blog material.

POD is another area I hadn't thought would be so complicated. Getting an ebook ready for upload isn't that scary once you learn a few new functions in Microsoft Word (and, if you're a Mac user like me, procure Word in the first place). In the end, it's words on a screen. I've been doing that since I was a child. I can do mutable words for a screen of unspecified size. But the paper book is a precise and aesthetically pleasing object as much as it is a story delivery device. There are a lot of details that, if left unchecked, can make a self-published book look cheap and sloppy. Professional design help is available, yes. But I'm finding the process low enough on the frustration scale to manage. And hey, learning new skills is a good use of my time.

So, this been my past week: finishing Remedy's additional copy edit, drawing up a piece of interior art, fiddling with word processor settings to get the page layouts right, and learning to use InDesign to make a book cover. There are paperback novels strewn all over my apartment, for when I need a professional book for reference. I look forward to my next novel being less of a pain in my butt!

Also, I feel there's been a lack of octopi in my blogging lately. So here's a cool octopus camouflaging itself.

The pickles of our homes and hearts

2011-04-25T18:24:00.000-07:00

This Easter weekend, my family had the traditional ham dinner. Whenever there's a meal significant enough to sit down in the dining room for, my family has a dish of pickled beetroot on the table. This meal was no exception. Every turkey or ham dinner I can remember has had these little chunks of purple vegetable that stain horribly anywhere you drop them. Beets used to be a common crop in Ontario gardens, so I guess they used to be a common pickle. Nowadays, I don't know anyone beyond my mother's side of the family who pickles beetroot at home.

Personally, I love seeing preserves on the table. Whether it's my mom's beets or my bosses' homemade kimchi or anything else, preserves link us to the old ways of seasonal eating. They harken back to when we had to preserve things, because we couldn't just import a bunch of fresh vegetables whenever we wanted. People ate preserved vegetables through so many winters that we got used to making preserves a part of our meals. Canned, jarred and preserved condiments are traditions you can't quite recreate with modern food preservation methods. Even though we don't need pickles as dietary supplements now, they have a distinctive taste and some deep-rooted cultural significance.

My mom's side of the family also serves green olives at special occasions -- the small kind, with the pits removed and a piece of pickled pimento stuffed in. Sometimes the olives share a bowl with the beets and get spotted with purple beet brine. Olives definitely aren't a Canadian crop, but they're another brined item, so they joined my family's table as a treat that could be kept on hand for long periods of time. More practicality from my grandparents' generation, carried over to today. I can eat olives anytime I want but I'd miss them if they weren't on the table beside a holiday turkey.

I've had friends who had sweet cucumber pickles at family dinners, too. They were French Canadian, but I couldn't say whether this was a spin on French cornichons or whether they just happened to like sweet cucumber pickles.

So, readers! Do you have any traditional family pickles or preserves? Are they a local recipe or a favourite imported item?

The evolution of bird feathers

2011-04-20T18:53:00.001-07:00

Bird feathers are pretty amazing. They're the most complex skin outgrowths found on any Earth animal, specialized for everything from gliding flight to just plain looking good. But as I've been reading in online articles and a borrowed National Geographic, the path to modern bird feathers isn't entirely clear.

Theoretically, feathers developed from split reptile scales. They could have been for waterproofing or insulating the body, but attractive colouring probably became a big factor, too. A theropod would have to have spare metabolic energy to spend on these extraneous little things, so display feathers would have indicated health. Who could have guessed that those straggly scale things would develop into a mechanism for level flight? It doesn't make much logical sense, but hey, Earth life has had plenty of time to experiment with ideas just crazy enough to work. The fun of evolution theory is that it's not a planned march toward perfection. I's just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and, over thousands of years, seeing what sticks.

It's kind of amazing how many forms of life have adapted to flinging themselves into the air -- giant pterosaurs, a wide variety of insects, squirrels and bats and rainforest frogs. Birds just took the less intuitive, more difficult route. For their trouble, they ended up with a flight method well suited to specialization. Diving falcons, hovering hummingbirds and albatrosses that can glide for hours are only some of the options. Pretty cool end product.

(The points above are only some of the reasons I gave bird characteristics to my Aligare dragons. Moulting can be a handy way to make a feathered character stay put!)

State of this publishing endeavor

2011-04-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

Rhythm draft status: Chopped up while I rework the voice of the story.

As of yesterday, it's been two months since Remedy was available to buy. Not counting review copies and other giveaways, Remedy has sold 30 copies.

And that's okay. Part of the reason I chose to self-publish is because I'm not going to give up if my unusual take on fantasy doesn't take off with rocket-like intensity. If I had gotten a traditional print deal and proceeded to sell 30 copies in this time frame -- heck, even 300 or 1000 copies in this time frame -- Remedy novels would probably be returned, pulped and/or forgotten by now.

But hey, that's not the reality I'm living in. I don't have a deadline for my success. Heck, I consider it a success that dozens of people have read my original work and more are planning to read it. Finding a market, building a market -- same difference.

I gave Remedy my best effort before putting it out there, but the time frame I set wasn't enough time to polish it ideally. Things you learn! So in addition to new Aligare projects, I'm working on some slight changes to Remedy -- mostly catching those slippery typos, but also adding a brief introduction and adjusting wording for clarity. Reader feedback suggests that those changes would be a good thing. Then I'll see about getting Remedy available in POD format for those who prefer their books papery.

The months ahead are going to be interesting.

Suppressed inventions in human history

2011-04-10T20:14:00.000-07:00

Here's an article about 18 cool developments that were not welcomed warmly.

Interesting how scared of change people are. You'd think that when a revolutionary invention comes out, current leaders would want that innovation in their own stable working for them, not dead and buried in an unmarked grave. Burying that development doesn't just hurt one's own future prospects, but it cripples the advancement of everyone that invention would have helped. Defending the old, flawed ways really only makes sense in the short-term.

What would our world be like if Nikola Tesla had been able to provide free, clean energy to the world in the early 1900's? Or even if cold fusion had gotten support in 1990? Why the heck did people work so hard to cover up the adverse health effects of tobacco? How can anyone justify silencing a potential cancer treatment in the 21st century? These cover-ups seem like acts of pure evil, or at least eyebrow-raising sociopathy.

I think of Tom Doherty's Worldcon '09 panel, where he said that fiction can change the world. If a speculative fiction book features the hero discovering clean energy and saving their ailing world, that story will make people think and discuss. It'll spread an idea -- and once an idea has the public's attention, it's difficult to silence. Notice how a lot of those suppressed inventions came and went before the information age?

This also makes me want to see an alternate universe novel where greedy candle manufacturers and horse-drawn carriage makers rule the world. Because judging by the list of stifled inventions, it's an entirely possible scenario.

Reading an okay novel: finish or fling?

2011-04-06T19:13:00.000-07:00

Some people finish the book they're reading no matter what. Some people, if they aren't thrilled with the book after a few chapters, will slog onward hoping that the story gets better. Personally, I don't get this mindset at all. I'm sure the determined type of reader sees a lot more finished stories than I do, but I just don't believe in spending my time on an experience I'm not enjoying. Why should I when there are so many choices? My time is valuable. Trying to push through a book I'm not into just makes me think of all the things I'd rather be doing.

Maybe it's an issue of where the books come from? If I'm reading a borrowed or freely distributed story, there's no pressure to get my money's worth. Whereas I can see wanting to keep reading if you're hoping this brand new $25 hardcover wasn't a waste of money. I only buy a new book if I'm confident I'm going to follow through and finish it. No offense to other authors, but neither my time nor my money are unlimited. That sort of thinking might account for part of it.

But even with the restrictions of time and money, I think finishing vs. flinging is mostly a matter of taste. As individual as genre preference, or liking the feel of paperbacks better than ereaders. There's no quantifying any of it, really. Sometimes we can't even say for sure what we like or dislike -- we just know it when it's in our hands.

I just try to remember all this when my ratio of books read to books abandoned gets too depressing. Boy, have I been striking out lately. This was much less depressing when I wasn't keeping track of my reading habits.

Reviving my NaNoWriMo draft

2011-04-01T19:13:00.000-07:00

Rhythm second draft: 22 699
Local instrument of the day: The tonebox, a four-sided metal instrument like a cowbell with no clapper. Played by tapping one's claws/nails on it.

Rhythm draft? What's this? Did I rename the novel containing Rue and Felixi and the wolf attacks? No, it's-- Well, I'll just tell it in narrative form, how's that.

One 4 AM last week, I was curled up with fluffy comforters and my dragon-print pillow, drifting cozily toward sleep, when my brain gave me a shake.
"Nghwhaaaaaaat," I metaphorically grumbled.
"Hey," brain said. "The NaNo novel. Let's just remove the weak parts!"
I wrote that down on one of the index cards I keep in my nightstand. Then I muttered some rude things about my own stupid synaptic patterns and burrowed back into bed.

Later that day, when I was rested and caffienated, I opened up my completed draft from National Novel Writing Month 2009, the story called Rhythm. Some of it was just silly goofing off that I never meant to use in a real Aligare story -- such as the gratuitous ninja invasion scene. Some of it was a teenage choosing-one's-path plot that I hated my own execution of. Aster, a young weaver with a stifling burden of family expectation, came off really mopey and overwrought. And the ending plot twist was visible from space. After NaNoWriMo '09, I wasn't sure what to do with this mess and I avoided rereading it (except for those dramatic readings of the ninja invasion scene meant to make other writers giggle).

But last week, looking at Rhythm with fresh eyes, I noticed that all the romance-type scenes between Llarez and Aster seemed okay. Rhythm wasn't one muddled mess of a draft -- it was one fairly solid draft of a 30 000-ish word story arc, tangled together with a much weaker story I hated. Ah, now I saw what my semi-conscious brain was enthusing about. If I just removed the story arc I wasn't happy with, all I'd have left was the interspecies romance. Tweak the characters, add some new supporting elements and I could have a solid novella.

It was then that I realized I don't have to care about word count. Not from a marketing and publication standpoint, anyway. As a self-publisher of ebooks, I can produce works of any damn word count I please and adjust the price accordingly. Llarez and Aster's story doesn't seem to fit well as a standard-length novel? That's okay. I don't have to force it. All that matters is a solid story.

And so, I'm going to put a little work into Rhythm and see if I can get it looking solid. I hope I can, and even if I can't, it'll be a learning experience.

Interview with Dawn Embers

2011-03-26T23:13:00.000-07:00

To go along with her review of Remedy, Dawn Embers invited me for an interview. Check out my thoughts on writing process at Dawn's blog.

Other links of interest:
200-year-old love letter found inside a chair
Hibernating bears deemed a "metabolic marvel"
Pet bird pestering the cat

Where invented societies get their food from

2011-03-24T17:48:00.000-07:00

Render first draft: 23 018 words. Finally working again after a nasty throat bug.

Scarcity of supplies is turning out to be a big part of the Render story. Farming is labour-intensive on the mountainside. The steep location makes cart delivery impractical, and korvi are not the huge type of dragons who can airlift supplies in quantity. Once wolf attacks make foraging a dangerous activity, food supply becomes a pointed issue.

I like seeing this sort of thing in stories. When the developed world is so used to packaged meat and megamart snacks, it's easy to forget what's involved in moving supplies around -- or producing those supplies in the first place. City-dwelling people in our world might never see the farm their potatoes came from, or meet the farmer who raised their beef. Some people complain that fresh tomatoes are relatively expensive in winter -- forgetting that one hundred years ago, our families were limited to seasonal foods and stockpiled preserves. And quick -- what is your breakfast cereal made of? Sometimes we're not even sure which type of grain it is, never mind where that particular grain plant was grown and harvested.

Of course, as a chef-trained foodie, this is a major issue for me. I designed the Aligare world so that there's a sense of low-tech immediacy, a great likelihood that the main characters' neighbours grew and prepared this food with their own hands. I think fantasy literature is well suited to an obvious food supply system. Each grower and supplier and cook is a minor character, another visible support beam that makes the structure seem more plausible.

So while hashing out Render's famine issue, I don't want to have someone ship food in from elsewhere. That's too easy. To a modern Earth reader, it's probably downright mundane. I'm not sure what kind of complications there'll be to explain a lack of outside relief, but I want to address the food supply problem at its root. That's only fair to the farmers.

Animal intelligence: what does it mean for the future?

2011-03-20T20:37:00.001-07:00

To speak with aliens, this article suggests, learn to speak with dolphins.

Dolphins have large, sophisticated brains, elaborately developed in the areas linked to higher-order thinking. They have a complex social structure, form alliances, share duties and display personalities. Put a mirror in their tank and they can recognize themselves, indicating a sense of self.

I can believe that dolphins understand personal identity. I had a chance to swim with a dolphin, while on vacation a few years ago. That dolphin glided between the twenty-ish tourists in her enclosure, looking at everyone's faces in a deliberate, curious way. Sizing up these new people, it seemed like. She was particularly interested in me -- maybe because of my shiny glasses, maybe because I said hello to her as she approached. Maybe for some other reason I can't fathom. (The trainer told us this dolphin's human-given name, and I've always felt bad for forgetting it.)

Humans have a pretty poor track record of acknowledging the "other". It was long held that humans are the only beings superior enough to use tools -- then we noticed birds, apes, dolphins, elephants, otters and octopi doing it, too. Crows have even modified human-provided tools -- without watching anyone else do it first. Dogs have shown surprising memory, grammar and reasoning skills. Whales use patterned calls that might actually be names. And those dolphins I was talking about? Science theorizes that dolphins were intelligent long before human ancestors were. And yet, most humans comfortably believe that everything other than a human is just a dumb animal. Even within our own species (and humans do like to point out our perceived superiority), it was long believed that humans of different skin colours or social systems were inferior. We're still working on treating all Homo sapiens as valid beings, never mind any of the animals we share this planet with.

On top of these discoveries, humans have found evidence of alien life. If we're just figuring out that dolphins are comparable to humans, what would happen if a spaceship landed today and something came out that didn't match human ideals at all? If a mollusk being emerged, flickered some colours across its bioluminescent skin and extended a tentacle to touch our U.N. leaders, well, I just can't see the majority of humans reacting very well. That thing's not a homonid! Its face doesn't look like our faces! It doesn't even speak real words! It probably wants to kill us -- after all, just look at it, it's not like us in the slightest.

Humans are just beginning to open our minds. We have a very long way to go in understanding what intelligence is and where to find it. When we're sure that intelligence isn't just a measure of our human-made yardsticks, I think we'll be a much better, fairer species. I read all these biology articles as a source of hope.

The crafts continue

2011-03-16T20:31:00.001-07:00

Render first draft: 22 445 words

Yyyyeah, I didn't do much writing this week. I had a sudden yen for physical art, so I've been working on the Remedy display piece. Convention season is fast approaching, after all! I've been spending my free time working with paper and flour goo, building Peregrine and Rose's physical forms.

That's an LED light embedded in Rose's hand, wired to a battery in the base of the piece. It'll light up a small crystal in the finished piece. Now I'm working on general smoothing and fleshing out -- shaping Peregrine's dragon face, making a little Tillian model to perch on Peregrine's outstretched arm, that sort of thing. It's cool to see my characters taking shape in a literal way!

Getting back into Render

2011-03-11T16:27:00.000-08:00

Render first draft: 22 059 words
My general thoughts: "Oooooh. Horror-y."

The Render draft sat at about 20 000 words when I left it alone to focus on Remedy. That was eight months ago. Now, I'm getting back into a daily routine of writing new material about Rue and her poor, wolf-menaced village.

Although this is the fifth(ish) novel draft I've started, it's a daunting experience every time. After so many nice, comfortable revision runs where I know what I'm working with, it's easy to miss Remedy. But there's a freedom in the rough draft work that I always warm up to. I'm just slapping down sketches and framework and base coats at this point. Don't know what the point of this scene is yet? No problem! I'll probably discover the point later! I just put down a few sentences of mediocre writing to remind myself what I was trying to do, and I move on. As long as I hit the significant points in my plot outline, it's all good.

I'm not sure yet how Render, story of Aligare, is going to end. I'll be relieved when I know more. But until then, it should be interesting to see what comes out of my typing fingers.

Links of the week

2011-03-05T18:42:00.001-08:00

Just a few cool things I've come across lately:

-Text To Speech. It makes an animated avatar say whatever you type in, which is a cool way to hear a (somewhat robotic) person say all those fantasy terms you've been making up.
-Ponies by Kij Johnson and Chris Buzelli. Creepy, disturbing social commentary: now with more candy-coloured horse creatures.
Evidence of humans keeping companion foxes. This is from 16 000 years ago, before any previously recognized domestic animals.
-How to make Futurama-inspired treats. I tried the Poppler recipe, they're pretty tasty!

... Also, a cat attempting to maul a watermelon.

Fiction begins with real life

2011-03-02T10:01:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school, there was a talent-type show in the auditorium. The student council performed a skit, I did one of my stand-up comedy routines, and one guy rapped.

Now, this rapping guy was notorious around the school. He was the type who thought he was cooler than he actually was, and thought he had more buddies than he did, and tried to wear a gangster image that fit him like a cheap Halloween mask. He didn't spend high school crammed into a locker or anything but his name was certainly a punchline.

So this guy got up on stage and began his rap. He made a decent rapper -- he used cliched images and spat them pretty well -- but that wasn't the issue. It was the sheer fact that he was on a stage in front of the whole school, nonchalantly wearing this persona that everyone made fun of. It was a firing range. Some kids booed, and a few threw fruit, paper wads and whatever else their school bags could provide.

As a sandwich came flying at his head, the rapper stopped his performance and caught it. He was done rapping. Even he could tell it wasn't going so well. But he stood there and took a bite of that sandwich. The tables had turned -- the rapper had a free sandwich and the thrower was presumably missing some of his lunch. I saw it as a turnabout, anyway -- or maybe even a victory -- even though the rapper walked off the stage with people still heckling. That classy sandwich catch raised my respect for the rapper considerably. Hey, if you can manage that level of aplomb, then do whatever you want and let the haters hate.

I'm thinking of this story because at work the other day, the rapping guy was my customer. I'm not sure if he remembered me as the stand-up comedy chick -- or as anything else, for that matter. All I did was take his order and carry out his food. I didn't see a reason to bring up events from eight years ago, because it's not like I know him as a person. I know him for that inspiring scene he made. By catching a sandwich, he lodged a scene in my head, one pinned in place with the kind of character tropes and morals I associate with books and TV shows and video games, not real life.

But inspiring things happen, and they're lent meaning when we think about them. Characters walk among us. There's potential fiction everywhere.

Fantasy is more than just heroes and heels

2011-02-26T15:08:00.000-08:00

What have I been watching lately in the blogosphere? Ah, just that kerfluffle over Leo Grin's nihilistic fantasy article. There have been lots of manifestos about what the moral ideal of fantasy is.

Personally, I lean toward the classic fantasy side of the issue. For all my quibbles with old literary norms, I much prefer a world where people can be happy and fulfill their goals and overcome the odds. That's what I want to read when I'm looking to forget the stress of this world. When I pick up a fantasy book and find it full of grim, negative events and emotions, I quickly lose interest. I just have a hard time caring that some treacherous duke hates the corrupt king and is plotting against him. Fantasy is for escaping this mundane world; I don't want to escape to a depressing place full of moral degenerates any more than I want to book my vacation in a war zone.

I guess my world of Aligare turned out so positive because I was trying to deconstruct nihilism. I hate the thought that depressing, traumatic events are synonymous with realism and maturity. They're part of reality, but are people seriously suggesting that a story is only realistic and adult if it's full of disillusionment, murder and rape? Is that the true measure of a mature person? I'm not sure what that suggests about the scholars and ambassadors and negotiators of our world, but I don't think it's good. And what the neutral-ish folks who hold doors open for others and fudge the numbers on their taxes? Are they too boring to exist in a fantastic world? Even though boredom is a real emotion? Come on now, folks, do we want realism or don't we?

This is a subjective issue. There's no way to weigh heroism and cynicism to see which is more valuable, and besides, some authorities reject the entire fantasy genre as worthless. Morality is relative. Enjoyment is up to millions of individual palates. I pretty much just wish there were more variety in fiction -- less emphasis on either following the norms or trying to kill them. It's possible to move in more than two directions, especially when a fantastic world makes wings a plausible choice. And why speculate at all if we're not interested in exploring?

The Pokemon world's suggestion of ecosystem

2011-02-20T17:58:00.000-08:00

Many people know Pokemon only as marketable cartoon animals. True as that description is, it's not the whole story. The series creator, Satoshi Tajiri, was inspired by insect collecting and battling. Pokemon designs are inspired by Earth life large and small, even though Mr. Tajiri himself hasn't designed the creatures for years now. The series has kept his idea that no living thing is too lowly to be interesting.

This site covers some of the more obscure Pokemon inspirations. George Hutcheon also wrote some articles on Pokemon origins. For every obvious cat, dog or cow analogue, there's a Pokemon based on a less-loved life form. Lots of scavenging animals, eerie deep-sea fish, ancient crustaceans and creepy parasites. And there are also whimsical Pokemon that don't relate themselves to our world's life in any concrete way.

I think the variety is what's really interesting. The Pokemon design team draws a lot of inspiration from Earth life -- which can be as surprising and alien as anything from a fictional world. But they also design things that exist just because. Shape-shifting kitchen appliances and flying magnets and animate piles of toxic sludge. All of these creatures are a legitimate part of their world. However hodgepodge the world's origins are, everything works and lives together. I'm not sure I'd believe it if all Pokemon were similar-sized cats, dogs and weird machine-animals, but the fish and bugs lend credibility. There's some semblance of a food chain. Maybe this really is a working fantasy ecosystem, I think, even if it seems bizarre by our standards. It's stated that the Pokemon has many mysteries humans have yet to unravel, not unlike the less famed creatures on Earth. It's an interesting case study in balancing real and unreal.

Remedy: available now!

2011-02-16T18:26:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to announce that Remedy, a story of Aligare, is now available as an ebook!

Peregrine, a deaf and aging avian, wishes he could set Tillian free. He needs his keen-eared adoptive daughter to relay the world to him. But when plague strikes a neighbouring village, there is no time for a gradual lifestyle change. Peregrine must fly for supplies on weakened wings and Tillian must nurse critically ill strangers -- separating the two for the first time in Tillian's life.

You can preview and buy the Remedy story on Smashwords (although you'll need to log in to buy the full version). It'll be available on Amazon as of March 1st.

For more information on the Aligare world, visit my website. It has information on the sentient species, and some examples of their local folklore.

... I'm so excited. This is exciting!

Reaction to Mercedes Lackey's recent fail

2011-02-10T16:51:00.000-08:00

I haven't personally read any of Mercedes Lackey's works (although they're on my very long list of books to thumb through and consider). But I couldn't help overhearing blogsphere talk of Lackey's unfortunate recent stance on transgendered people.

It's always terrible to see people treated clumsily in writing. Especially a group like transgendered people, who don't get well-written characters representing them very often. But what really bothers me is this line of Lackey's statement:

[I]n a modern or sf context, a transgendered person could solve the situation with surgery, genetic modification, body-swap, or whatever. Those options are not available to a fantasy author."

What a load. Everything is available to a fantasy author. Arguably moreso than sci-fi authors, because magic needs less research than hard science. Regardless of plot device, the entire point of speculative fiction is to explore things that are difficult, improbable or impossible on mundane modern Earth. Maybe the author can't figure out how to make an idea work; maybe the marketing department vetoes the idea and the author still needs the money; maybe there's simple intolerance involved, but it's certainly not the whole fantasy genre's fault. The only time something is impossible in fantasy literature is when the author has given up trying. Or refused to try altogether.

Fantasy, in my opinion, should be everything we can imagine and then some. It should be incredible places, and people we learn to like, and options we hadn't thought of before. Fantasy shouldn't be a little fenced-in yard where you can ride a dragon but god forbid you do something weird. I think we can do much better than that.

Open minds make for better people. That goes for our world or any other.

Remedy is done!

2011-02-07T20:20:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass inputting: Complete!
Final wordcount: 96 300

Finally, it's over! I still have ebook formatting to do, but I'm done with the actual Remedy writing. It's as solid as I think I can make it right now. Remedy will be up for download within the month, with the exact date depending on formatting and website creation and such.

I'm excited to release this thing for public consumption and get working on the next book. So excited, you guys. I feel like I've learned a lot, so the next story of Aligare shouldn't take four years.

I'll be figuring out ebook formatting if anyone needs me. The presence of a step called "nuke" sounds encouraging.

Love list for Remedy

2011-01-30T20:19:00.001-08:00

Remedy final pass inputting: 124 pages out of 141. Nngh, so close!

Pisces Muse, my writing group buddy and instigator of NaNoWriMo cheerleading, linked me to this love list idea. She also said she'd like to see a love list for Remedy. Hmm, well! Remedy is almost complete but let's see, what have I held close during the last few years ...

long grass rustled by wind
crystals
a dragon feeling his age
jingling metal jewelry
air's presence
hoof-shaped shoes
powerful weasel jaws cracking nuts, not bone
reinventing the self
sarongs
expectations
finding someone you platonically click with
job as identity
name as identity
hot drinks in clay cups
problems where no one is to blame
feathers sliding together like scales
bottled lightning
the snap of picked herb stems
dust
fishleather wrappers with snack food inside
ash-covered embers
unspoken responsibility
flicking tails
the shape of a thumb
watching another's suffering
time as a possession
thatch homes
shades of green
kindness
guilt
powerful, unseen beings
whispering
acceptance

I don't tend to think about Remedy as such a snowglobe of idea bits, but I do love the details and the sensory things, and the general feel of a world distinct from our own. Maybe when I resume working on the Render first draft, I'll start a love list for it. Sounds like a good way to stay focused.

What's in a dinosaur's name?

2011-01-26T21:09:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass inputting: 118 of 141 pages
Latest realization: Did I subconsciously name those minor characters after a Star Trek character? Because their names are a pretty interesting coincidence. Hmm.

So, a new little species of raptor has been discovered. Eodromaeus combines two of my great loves: ecological niche negotiations, and name significance.

Because I don't know about anyone else, but I look at that name translation ("dawn runner") and wonder who decided to name it that. If I were sitting over some exciting new fossils, wondering what to name this ancient critter, I'd be thinking, "Gosh, Heidi, I dunno. Dawn runner is a bit much, don't you think?" If a fantasy novel had reptilian animals called dawn runners, I'd question whether anyone actually thinks like that while naming an animal.

But apparently, someone actually was thinking that way while naming an animal. I wish the article explained the paleontologists' reasoning for giving this creature its name. The fossils were found in an area of Greece known as the Valle de la Luna ("Valley of the Moon"), but there must have been some reason these little dinosaurs were named specifically for the dawn. Dawn of some new human understanding, maybe? I hope I can Google the answer eventually.

What's going on

2011-01-20T19:31:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass inputting: 110 pages out of 141

Now that I'm in the final third of the story, I find that Remedy tweaking is taking a lot of mental energy. I'm trying to make sure that all the little referenced things get closure and that everyone's developmental arcs are at the angles I want them. Currently taking a few days to let my brain rest.

On the productive side, I decided that this series is called Aligare (from the Latin term alligare, meaning "bind together"). The Remedy characters aren't aware of this term and it'll never come up in-verse. I just wanted a succinct name for this fantastic world and the loosely related novels I'll be writing within it.

My file of Aligare legends is coming along nicely, too. I have the creation myth almost hashed out and it's longer than I thought -- probably because I think it's interesting when human cultures have long, detailed stories about their god-beings' lives.

So, in summary, Remedy is a many-headed hydra rampaging through my month of January, with the hours and days screaming as they flee for their lives. This is the mental image I'll grin over, until and after I get back to working on Remedy proper.

Landscape as a mother

2011-01-16T19:32:00.001-08:00

Remedy final pass inputting: 108 pages out of 141
Font finally chosen for Remedy cover: Black Chancery

Worldcon 2009 lodged a lot of interesting points in my head. One is from a panel of folks who discussed landscape's role in fiction (and I really wish I remembered who those folks were). From time to time, I like to ponder their metaphor that landscape is a mother.

The gist is that everyone comes from a place and that place shapes its inhabitants, the same way everyone comes from a mother and we're all influenced by our upbringing. Everyone's life is affected in some way by the place they come from. They might learn habits, such as how to deal with terrain or weather. They might think fondly of their childhood home after moving away -- or they might resent the place they used to live. They'll have a default idea of what surroundings are supposed to look like and what to watch out for. Ignoring the landscape is ignoring where we come from, literally as well as figuratively.

The Worldcon panel brought this up as an advisory to writers, urging them to involve the landscape of a story so that characters aren't just talking heads in generic rooms. I don't recall whether landscape was defined as just natural geography, or whether man-made landscapes counted. I guess they blend sometimes, like when a building is made of local wood and minerals, or when local holidays honour the changing seasons. If people come from the mother landscape, then the creations of those people are basically grandchildren.

It's easy to forget the natural landscape, in our modern world where anything can happen if you invest enough money. People can import materials without knowing or caring about the place those materials came from. Paving and blasting and landscaping can make a place whatever we want it to be. We can change our home life but we can't retroactively change our roots, I guess. However long ago it happened, however we feel about it, we all still come from somewhere.

Origin of the term "adventurer"

2011-01-12T17:41:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass inputting: Gonna reach 100 pages tonight if I have to chain myself to a chair
Least helpful revision note so far: "[use a more] togethery adjective"

When I write, I spend a lot of time cross-referencing the nuances of words. Mostly with the Macbook's dictionary/thesaurus function, which gives a nice rundown of a word's linguistic and social origins. Sometimes a word's connotations surprise me -- like when I found that adventurer can have negative implications.

Adventurer comes from the French term adventurier, meaning "venture upon". It originally meant "gambler", but became associated with mercenary soldiers, swashbucklers and all manner of wandering rogues who sought out shady situations.

Nowadays, when we think of adventure, we tend to think of some rousing quest with a positive motivation. We think of going out, seeing the world and having an exhilarating time, which is typically considered a good influence on a person. Does this mean we English-speakers are more open-minded than we used to be? Maybe less concerned with keeping our heads down and not causing a scene? Maybe less afraid of the unconventional?

I can't imagine disapproving of adventurers. But then, I'm always looking for the next unusual new thing to get my fingerprints all over, so of course I think we should take chances and be unusual. It's good to know where the term adventurer came from, even if it's like finding old skeletons.

What to wield, what to wield

2011-01-05T20:55:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass inputting: 67 out of 141 pages
Commissioned cover art: Delightful!
Title fonts considered: About a million

I haven't talked about video games in forever. Let's talk about video games! Heck yeah, video games!

RPG video games have a wide range of character archetypes and a wider range of weapons to wield. Swords, spears, knives, guns, maces, whips, frying pans, umbrellas, books, and stylish ladies' handbags can all be used to beat up the dark overlord. (Really quirky games will have you, say, read a hardcover dictionary at an enemy soldier and somehow injure them. Because smacking hir with the dictionary would be way too obvious.)

But out of all the weapons a virtual warrior can wield, I like the fighters who don't equip anything we think of as a weapon object. Martial arts experts, monks, bare-handed fighters, whatever you call them. Sometimes they can channel their fighting spirit into magic-like blasts, or sometimes they're limited to relatively normal punching and kicking. Either way, these folks can put on leather gloves or ordinary shoes, go up against an opponent with a broadsword, and win.

Sure, half the fun of fantasy is giving the characters a cool bladed thing to swing around. But I like the significance of a character going into battle with only their body at their disposal. There's a scene in Final Fantasy 8 where the heroes have been captured by enemy forces and, stripped of their weapons, they think they can't defeat their captors -- until the martial artist, Zell, points out that he can do plenty of damage with just his fists. Zell is a high-energy, high-spirited character, and I don't think there's any better way to show that than by making him a weapon in and of himself.

As far as natural fighters, I'll take a dragon/giant bird/other "monster" over a human whenever I can. But that's a different-coloured horse. When we're talking about humanoids, I'll gladly face a six-winged demon god with a video game character's little clenched fists. Because it's just crazy and passionate enough to work.

It takes HOW long to edit?

2011-01-01T16:50:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass inputting: 50 out of 141 pages

Welp, it's a new year and today is my self-appointed Book Day. I'm, ah, not finished editing Remedy into one cohesive file.

In retrospect, the holidays are a pretty terrible time to set as a home stretch in my writing plans. And I underestimated how many times I had written "fix this [chunk of implied worldbuilding]" in my paper edits. Maybe I just hoped this copyediting beast wouldn't be so hard to take down if I shrank it down with the power of my mind.

Well, today I'll still make a checklist of book publication steps to be taken in the next month-ish. Finishing the novel edits will be on the list, that's all. I have a few more seasonal days off work, so I'll make sure to use them productively.

Moral of the story: Words are like ants -- easy to squish one at a time, but formidable in large numbers.

Links of general worldbuilderly interest

2010-12-26T20:56:00.000-08:00

The holiday season is great and all, but since everyone is on hiatus from blogging, I find there's less daily content to read (while sitting around digesting turkey and cookies and alcoholic everything). So I figured now's a good time for a random assortment of links! Here's some stuff I've found interesting in the last year or so.

Stereomood, a music-streaming site. I've been using the Sleepy category as unobtrusive background sound while writing.
Salt in the history of medicine. Sort of icky, but makes great worldbuilding fodder.
If Galileo Had Known Cognitive Psychology, They Wouldn't Have Locked Him Up A disseration of how to not make people's brains explode with new information.
Crocodile evolution. I like mentally doodling dragon wings onto all those ancient creatures.
Putting clothes on a horse. Because nothing ruins a fantasy author's cred faster than obvious horse-related ignorance.
Foreign Accent Syndrome: because head-trauma-related amnesia is so clichéd.
Author quotes. Accomplished people have apparently commented on everything in the universe.
And because it just feels wrong to share a bunch of links without including a cute animal video, here's a little turtle versus a cat.

Buckling down to the last of the copyediting

2010-12-21T15:38:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass editing: Chapter 23

I'm in bed right now, surrounded by Remedy pages with colourful scribbles on them. I've got a gigantic glass of raspberry-banana smoothie and a helpful cat who holds down papers with her butt. This editing isn't done yet and I haven't even started inputting the changes. I'm sick of saying, "Still working on it," so I'm staying put and making myself work.

There's an approaching mark on my calendar -- "B-day" scrawled into the January 1st, 2011 box. No, it's not anyone's birthday. It's Book Day, the day I'm going to reevaluate things. It was originally meant to be the day I stopped querying agents and editors for this particular project, but of course, I've done a lot of rethinking since I promised myself that. So on January 1st, I want Remedy to be essentially ready for self-publishing. Tweaked, tightened, ready for ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) and ebook formatting. I'll spend Book Day making a checklist of production-related things I still need to do for this complete manuscript. I think I can make the deadline with a little self-discipline and a little holiday vacation time.

... Also cookies. I'm only going to get up for some seasonal cookies to go with this smoothie. Working brains need fuel, you know!

Judge not, lest we be ridiculous

2010-12-16T12:28:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass editing: Chapter 21. Almost done!
Character making me smile at the moment: Wend the mouthy hermit

I was writing this blog post when my laptop cord died. I must've frightened the poor thing.

Anyway.

Between Amazon's latest batch of censorship and the genre vs. literary kerfluffle stirred up by Edward Docx, I've been reading a lot of reactionary blog responses lately.

It's kind of amazing to me that people put so much time and effort into judging others. I can only imagine it's because of our old tribal instincts, telling us to throw rocks at anything unusual (because unusual is Not One Of Us, therefore it's a threat). Or maybe because of the societal pressure to "carry on" traditional ways and tastes. Our view of the future is muddied because we view it through the present, and the present is smeared with the past.

Amazon is a business and they can sell -- or not sell -- whatever they please. But lately they've been retroactively removing books containing controversial ideas, in a back-alley way that raises my eyebrows, at any rate. It's an approach -- "Let's quietly ban a few scapegoat users and hope this whole problem goes away" -- that's disconcertingly common among large network-type websites. Well, on the Internet, people have many different opinions and they freely talk with one another. Hiding your motives and snuffing content only gives them alarming subject matter to talk about. Remove one head and the hydra grows more.

I hope those incest romance authors find another viable way to sell their fiction. Just because it's a topic that puts most people off doesn't mean all incest romances are morally bankrupt trash. Moldy blue cheese puts a lot of people off, too -- does that mean it should be outlawed because it's clearly revolting and everyone who likes the taste of blue cheese is sick? How can you even say, "X is always wrong/worthless/disgusting" if you have anything resembling an open mind?

I also hope that genre and literary fans will quit sniping at each other someday. Telling someone that they have poor taste in books won't make them say, "Gosh, you're right. Please tell me what I should be liking." There's really no advantage to attacking someone else's tastes. And there's enough room for everyone to write and read what they like, especially with this technological revolution thing that can store books as a bit of electronic data -- no finite physical shelves required.

All in all, I'm kind of amazed at these recent whirlwinds of condemnation, but I'm not really surprised. We live in a society where a black man leads the U.S.A., but Liar got a whitewashed cover because black people supposedly don't sell. While humanity comes to terms with this relatively recent "acceptance" thing, there'll be a lot of bugs to work out.

Putting my work to the 69 and 99 page tests

2010-12-09T18:22:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass editing: Hoping to finish Chapter 16 before bed
Pen colours used so far: Green, purple and turquoise

Which is the better test of a novel, the 69 test or the 99 test? Who knows, so I figured I'd put Remedy to both tests.

Page 69 is where Rose tells a well-known legend to a village child as part of oral tradition. This particular legend explains gripthia -- which is a highly contagious bacterial illness, but in a land without germ theory, it's perceived as a mysterious, cruel demon-beast. A brief excerpt:

"Every time our kind tried to build a home or grow food, the demon rent their work apart with its claws. A few brave souls stood before it and asked why, but the demon struck them down without an answer. It laughed and laughed as our people ran."
Clover stared. Maybe she wondered why strong korvi hadn't protected their friends; Rose had wondered that, at a similar age.

This part has some coded information about how the sickness is treated, but it's mostly there to show the ideologies of the Remedy world. Aemets are pacifistic, korvi are not, and both races live in a culture where violence is seen as frightening extremism. It gives a good taste of how the Remedy world works, but as far as first impressons go, this legend is probably a tad simplistic for some people's tastes. An expositionary fairy tale is an expositionary fairy tale.

Page 99, on the other hand, is where Peregrine declares that he's leaving Tillian behind so she can help nurse gripthia victims. Since this is like a blind man saying, "Here, take my guide dog -- you clearly need her more than I do", Tillian and Rose politely freak out.

Their pleading voices sank claws into his heart; Peregrine stood no chance against girls' wide eyes and he never had.
“Listen.” He folded his arms. “I'm not about to carry you away when your hands are needed here. And if I stayed, it'd be a waste of wings. We both ought to do what we can. For everyone's sake.”
Tillian stared wetly. She shuffled a step closer. “Will you be all right? By yourself, I mean?”
“I'll manage.”
“You just need to pay enough attention.”
“I know.”

This scene is actually a great snapshot of the central characters' relationship and conflict. Peregrine and Tillian are good people who care about each other -- the problem is that they have different ideas of what the Right Thing To Do is, and sometimes helping out is easier said than done.

I'm fairly pleased with these 69 and 99 page rules of thumb, actually. Both pick a point where the story should be well under way and showing its true colours. I can't wait to try these tests out in a bookstore sometime.

What I learned while holding a milk snake

2010-12-05T19:43:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass editing: On Chapter 12

I was recently asked about volunteer experience, which got me thinking about my days at the local science center. It's been a while, but I think that work really set me up for a lot.

At the tender, squishy age of thirteen, I started volunteering in the animal exhibition section, which specializes in animals native to northern Ontario, Canada. The work was mostly unglamorous -- cleaning mouse cages and draining aquariums -- but once I had a bit of experience, I got to take competency tests and start doing presentations with the animals. Visitors would ask to see a turtle or a flying squirrel up close and I'd take one out, demonstrate how to touch it, and recite some interesting trivia. I did that for about four years before heading off to paying work.

It's kind of crazy, now that I think about it. I'm sure holding a six-foot-long black rat snake while doing a spur-of-the-moment public speaking show is a lot of people's idea of hell.

Actually, my favourite animals to work with were the snakes. Partly because the snakes themselves were very tame -- most of them would actually become calm when held, because they had learned that humans hands are warm and comfy. The other half of the enjoyment was educating adult visitors. My upbringing had an open-minded, "respect living things" tone, but a lot of people have this mental image of snakes as scary, slimy, vicious monsters. Visitors would often nervously ask to see a snake just to humour their curious children, since their own parents reacted to the sight of a snake by grabbing a shovel and killing it. But I guess a teenage girl holding a very relaxed snake was pretty convincing, safety-wise. They'd touch the smooth scales overlaying hard muscle, and listen to how snakes fit into the ecosystem, and visibly change the way they thought about these animals. They left with the exciting feeling that snakes are actually pretty cool.

It was a feeling of sharing with the world something that I thought was awesome. It was opening minds and peeling away old, hidebound beliefs, one person at a time. The visitors' questions got answered and the mouse cages got cleaned, and all in all, I think it was well worth my time.

Finishing touches on the worldbuilding

2010-12-01T19:13:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass editing: Chapter 9's up on the carving block

There are a bunch of little things I've been meaning to do with the Remedyverse. Like determine whether these overly chill people bother keeping track of time longer than a year (but more recent than legend times). Or figure out the exact look of the dragons' clothing so that I can make passing reference to it. Stuff that has never been a primary plotting/prose/characterization concern, but would be nice to have in the finished story.

Except that while chasing the impossible querying dream, it never seemed like the right time to worry about the tiny worldbuilding elements. Being finished seemed immeasurably far away. Yes, yes, agents and editors tell you not to query until the manuscript is "perfect" but that's a subjective judgement at best. I (hypothetically) wouldn't have been finished until a team of professionals agreed that I was finished and marketable.

Whereas now, working on my own guidelines, I'm suddenly aware that this last revision pass is the only chance I'll have to make things the way I want them to be. I certainly don't plan on pulling a launched e-book down to add my worldbuilding trinkets to it. The time is now. And because this stuff actually feels like it matters now, I'm asking myself, "Hey, so, do they have a base four unit of time used similarly to our century?" and I'm getting answers. I think the 48-year period elden will help weed out some of the placeholder references to a long time.

I need to decide on a series title, too. Time for another game of musical chairs with Latin roots!

Environmental limitations on animal size

2010-11-27T23:20:00.000-08:00

Remedy final pass editing: In progress ...

Blog? Huh? Oh, my blog, yes, of course.

So, in the sciencey news recently, an article on mammals reaching their peak size after the dinosaurs went extinct. Some extinct mammalian critters weighed as much as 17 000 kilograms (about 17 tons).

Life, when given the chance, spreads out to fill niches. Something might as well eat leaves from the very tops of trees and if all the titanosaurs are gone, well, the rodent-sized things have an opportunity to move up in the world, literally and figuratively. And as always, I'm trying to figure out what this has to do with dragons.

Even if you figure out things like how a mountain-sized dragon moves and metabolizes, its enormous existence brings its world into question. Animals in our world seem to be limited by land area and temperature. So maybe fantasy worlds have better climates, or different-sized planets. Maybe magic factors in, so that these places have a whole other layer of resources to draw from. If fantasy worlds have such powerful beings in them, I'm thinking that they're just more fertile places for life to draw from.

Ultimately, I'm okay with "there are dragons because dragons are awesome" logic. But if anyone ever publishes a dry textbook detailing how the larger dragons evolved in a given ecological climate, I'd probably buy one.

Goal!

2010-11-21T18:57:00.001-08:00

Remedy rewrite total wordcount: 95 413
Rewrite days elapsed: 90
Average words per day: 1 060

In the small hours of the morning, surrounded by delirious NaNoWriMo participants, I got through the last chapters of Remedy. It's always nice to get to the end of an editing bout and see Peregrine's warmly snarky closing remark. (Hmm, slight wordcount increase with this editing pass. Interesting.)

So, all that's left is a final read-through on printed pages. On paper, it'll be easier to see phrases that don't seem book-like, after all. It'll also be a good chance to jot down notes and make sure my story bible is up-to-date. Cluttered as I tend to be with my intellectual housekeeping.

After this last touch-up proofreading, I'll see about some beta readers to double-check everything. This work has a rapidly approaching goal and it feels pretty awesome.

Striking some poses

2010-11-17T13:23:00.001-08:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 85 671 words
Rewrite days elapsed: 85
Times Syril has been interrupted from a babbling spree: 4

My earlier estimate of a-week-or-ten-days was a bit optimistic. But I had a great editing day today! Three chapters down. I'll try to work like that more often.

I'm also preparing things for my marketing. I hope to get around to lots of conventions and other social events. Fortunately, I've been to enough of those to know what makes a good display. A few books and papers on a table won't do, oh, no. That looks boring. Posters are nice, but often a bit flat, figuratively as well as literally. What a good convention table needs is something unusual and eye-catching.

So I'm making a display piece featuring the main characters of Remedy. Here's the paper machè base I have so far.

Peregrine (wingless at the moment) is roughed out first because he's the largest. Tillian will be added much later, sitting on Peregrine's arm or shoulder. And if I can find the right electrical whatsits, I hope to have Rose holding an actual glowing stone of some sort. Figuring out the characters' exact stances and proportions is turning out to be a fun challenge.

That writerful time of year

2010-11-13T20:04:00.000-08:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 76 510 words
Rewrite days elapsed: 82
Latest worldbuilding dilemma: When a green-skinned insect/mammal hybrid can't breathe, what colour does their skin turn? No, what exact colour? I must know.

This November, I'm working on my ordinary slow-written novel and supporting my NaNo-writing friends. It's fun to sit beside a bunch of high-energy NaNo participants, laughing and speculating. It's also fun to tell them that if they write a cumulative 10k words in the next two hours, I'll perform a cheer for them.

Yes, I made my "NaNo cheerleader" role literal. I made pom-poms out of shredded plastic bags, and wrote a custom cheer about novella victory. That night, the NaNo participants wrote not 10k words, but 12k, and I performed their reward in a tiny meeting room in the library. It was good wholesome fun that delighted new and old friends, so I think it matched very well with the spirit of this whole month.

Maybe I'll write a NaNoWriMo draft next year. I'll probably decide that on the night of October 31st, 2011. But whenever this big, loud, positive writing party rolls through town, I'm happy to tag along.

Putting a little spice in it

2010-11-08T15:57:00.000-08:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 72 853 words
Rewrite days elapsed: 77
Instances of characters saying they'd "wager" something will happen: 7

Most of the characters in Remedy are fairly straight-forward people. But the characters I enjoy most are the secondary ones with sassy attitudes and goofy mannerisms. Much as I believe in the whole story, I can't help liking the little moments of fun.

Such as any moment where Breeli gets to speak freely. Siriana Breeli, call her Breeli, is a little sentient weasel with a great big mouth. She uses a lot of local turns of phrase: "strike it with sticks" as an expression of frustration, "thunder in thimbles" to describe her energetic children, "wouldn't know it from a horse pie" to claim that she's not an expert in a subject. I love making up analogies and sayings, and putting them in the mouth of a really dynamic character makes the writing fun. Especially when Breeli pep-talks other characters. Nothing colours a scene like some good-natured, motivational sass.

The scene I'm editing right now features Breeli telling a well-known legend and peppering it with her own commentary. It just makes me smile, this character casually making fun of her own world. It makes me wonder what Breeli would have to say about our world. I'd have to make up a lot of Remedyverse expressions for that.

Yes, I spend my free time watching octopi on Youtube

2010-11-03T18:45:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 63 639 words
Rewrite days elapsed: 72
Most mentioned cosmetic ingredient: Beeswax. It's the body of medicinal balm, as well as a featherstyling product for korvi.

I'll have to edit some more before bed. If I keep up decent work habits, I should be done this editing round in a week, maybe ten days. Arrangements are falling into place for copyediting assistance, cover art and other e-publishing-condusive things, so thinking about Remedy is pretty exciting for me right now.

Know what else fills me with glee and delight? Cephalopods! I just found this video of the Indonesian mimic octopus and I have to say, that is a fascinating animal. On top of the octopus family's well-known abilities (i.e. intelligence, defensive ink, squeezing through tiny holes), this octopus can shapeshift! It makes me realize that "shapeshifting" usually refers to a magical fictional ability to reform the entire body design like so much clay, whereas the mimic octopus's shapeshifting is very real. It's a clever technique, but you can see its skin stretching and its muscles flexing to hold that specific physical shape. Nice to know that real-world Earth can pull off magic tricks once in a while.

Chattiness in the library

2010-10-28T21:15:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 57 760 words
Rewrite days elapsed: 68
Last word I needed to check the linguistic roots of to make sure it wasn't too modern and potentially jarring: Glutinous

When I walked into the library today, I was greeted with an author reading in the front lobby. The presentation was nearly over, but I stuck around for the rest of Ray Robertson's Q&A anyway. By that point, the questions were mostly coming from fellow struggling writers asking about writing method.

I've heard it said that a published author is a minor celebrity. That definitely seemed like the case at this signing, with Mr. Robertson's public speaking confidence and the crowd of people chuckling at every joke and analogy. I have to wonder if that's why modern authors are encouraged to be social and self-promoting. When the author has a knack for it, interacting with the public is a great way of drawing people in and holding their focus, like the welcoming heat of a bonfire. It makes everyone more curious about what this person's writing has to say.

Yes, I thought -- while standing in the book purchase line, getting my ear talked off by a long-and-incoherent-storytelling attendee -- it's great to be able to watch a work's creator speak to hir audience. I'm always more inclined to support a work when I know its creator is a cool, intelligent person; it's always nice to meet someone like that, whether you're looking at their prose or their face.

What great, finished work actually means

2010-10-24T19:11:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 53 920 words
Rewrite days elapsed: 64
Latest distinctive measurement used: Eightmoment, which does what it says on the box and represents approximately eight minutes.

I've been thinking. A manuscript can be finished; it can also be a great manuscript. It would be nice if those conditons were directly synonymous, but they're actually more like a Venn diagram with varying amounts of overlap. A work can be finished and great -- sometimes, depending.

An author, editor or publisher can call a manuscript finished when it should still have work done. Calling a piece "finished" doesn't necessarily make it good, and doesn't even necessarily make it finished. The finish line is just a point where we decide to stop chasing that moving target. Getting 95% of people to agree is hard when we're talking about pizza toppings, never mind hundreds of thousands of consecutive words, so I can certainly see why the chase needs to end somewhere. Nobody's perfect. Our created objects can't be universally perfect, either.

And "great" doesn't mean "perfect", anyway, because "great" is an entirely subjective word. A manuscript can be great even when there's still work to be done, by showing great potential or having great elements to work with. It can even be great by current standards, only to age gracelessly and become mockery material a few years later. Commitment to greatness is a respectable goal but again, the chase needs to end somewhere. At least when mortal humans are the ones striving for greatness.

So, writers aren't working toward a clearly defined goal at all; it's more like we're trying to get as much positive overlap as possible. The goal is to have a work as finished and as great as we can feasibly manage, so that a large amount of people will agree that it's a worthwhile book. The unspecificity can be seriously frustrating sometimes, but it sure beats having to bow to one rigid definition of "finished" or "great". I'm all about that freedom stuff -- I don't know about anyone else.

In light of dragons

2010-10-20T18:53:00.001-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 49 163 words
Rewrite days elapsed: 60
Chapters so far: 14

I watched The Flight of Dragons for the first time in about eighteen years. This movie was part of my collection of childhood VHS tapes; it had old Bugs Bunny and Felix the Cat cartoons for company.

Wow, was it ever a great nostalgia trip to watch now. The Flight of Dragons has all the trappings of stereotypical sword and sorcery -- a dumb-but-noble knight, wizards made of pure plot device, lore and magical artifacts that come in handy at very specific times. But the story presents magic as a whimsical force that works Just Because, and magical people and beings therefore follow suit. Science is the logical force that can crush magic under its own nonsensicality. And science is inspired by magic: when a wizard uses a crystal ball to communicate halfway across the world, man wants to do that too, and he'll invent radio and television to make it happen. If either magic or science vanished forever, the world would be poorer for it. It's a theory that fits into real Earth history in interesting ways.

I think my entire view of fantasy was influenced by this movie. There's a scene where the dragon Smrgol explains dragon flight in fantasy-appropriate terms (eating fire-rock to make dragon fire), and the 20th century man Peter excitedly translates it all into scientific terms (limestone reacting with stomach acid to create flammable hydrogen, and with it, lift). At this point in the movie, I turned to my roommate and said, "This is where little Heidi learned to worldbuild". This is why I researched dinosaur and bird evolution to make my korvi race, even though they use fanciful "drop of bird in a cup full of lizard" analogies for themselves. Fantasy can do what it does for no particular reason, but it's better when it also makes a lot of sense, without one aspect destroying the other.

Now I'm tempted to dig up every movie I watched as a kid. There must be more nuanced lessons I'm not aware that I remember.

Excerpt time!

2010-10-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 46 245 words
Rewrite days elapsed: 55
Most recent meal while writing: Cinnamon toast, an apple and a glass of milk

I've reached the halfway point of Remedy (more or less)! No matter how long I've been doing this, it's still kind of amazing to think that I've gone through so many piled-up thousands of words. I think I should celebrate by posting an excerpt. It's been a while since I've done that.

So, here's a scene where Peregrine the deaf former-miner dragon has been seperated from his hearing assistant Tillian, and he's had a lousy day of trying to fly farther than he can handle. He's fallen into a bed far from home and begun to think of his lovely lifemate and their adopted family:

     Giala told him a legend once, he recalled, simply because the house had too much silence in it that night and her voice brightened the place considerably. It was a tale her house had passed down for as long as korvi had been full of fire. There had once been a snake, she said, who discovered a spark inside him. Small wonder that he did! He found it under mouse dinners and old bile and that stone he'd eaten that seemed like a fine idea at the time. But there it was under everything: a spark, red and welcoming. The snake didn't know what to do with it, so he hid it in a forest crevice and ...
     Peregrine's memory grew dusty toward the middle of the legend. The snake likely sought the gods' advice about it. Folk in legends met their deities in every street and field, and usually tripped over some Legend Creatures while they were at it.
     But anypace, the snake ended up getting rid of his own clutter and filling warm with Fyrian's fiery spirit. And since he was lighter and livelier, he took up dancing. So the ancestors said, anyway. Giala had told that tale in the fat-coloured light of candles, smirking her delight; her lap had been piled full of Zitan's downy-new kittens, watching her with sleep-clouded eyes.

     If legends would stop leering down at folk from their superior ancient times, Peregrine supposed he would like them better. That snake could have decided instead that mining was his calling; all the blazing spirit in the land wouldn't grant him strong arms. Great Fyrian must have bestowed luck on that dancing snake, as well as a few ripe words of advice. Peregrine couldn't remember that middle arc of the story, as much as he didn't care a plum for it.
     And delicious as lying down was, it made the aches pool in Peregrine, forming leaden puddles up and down his back. Sleep would take patience, too. All he wanted was furkind weight between his wingshoulders, warming the feeling away. If he could cough up his own stone, he thought through his grogginess, he could fly. He'd be carrying less weight. That would relieve his wings. And if he didn't have an earferrin, he would have to find something else to haul about.

What the heck I'm talking about

2010-10-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 40 293 words
Rewrite days elapsed: 50
Last sentence poked at: "His wings felt boneless and heavy but as long as he had fire -- one ember, one spark, a tattered scrap of dignity -- he would fly."

I recently visited a high school friend I don't see very often. He asked which book Remedy is -- because I mention "my book" a lot and apparently, to outsiders, it's hard to discern whether I mean my first book or the second book or some other thing. (Remedy is my second complete novel, for what it's worth. I'm keeping my first manuscript in case I need to paper-train a puppy.)

I guess I could refer to the books by title, but that seems a bit weird for casual daily use. Addressing my fictional, mental world by titles could start sounding like I'm talking about my imaginary friends. Well, okay, I am talking about my imaginary friends, but they have story arcs and thematic underpinnings so it's totally different.

There aren't a lot of ways to make novel writing understandable to the average non-writer. Wordcount explanations only go so far. The judgement of a creative product's merit is hard enough for me to navigate out after years of interested effort; it'd be like explaning advanced calculus to random acquaintances, except that math at least has concrete rules. If nebulous references to "my book" seem like work on one mysterious, convoluted construction project, well, I guess I'm okay with that. There are worse things to seem like.

Dipping into history

2010-10-07T21:01:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 33 488
Rewrite days elapsed: 46
Most used word so far, according to this word-mapping tool: Enough

I lost track of time for a bit and forgot to post or write or ...much of anything else. Hopefully Thanksgiving weekend will help me, with its invigorating turkey meal known for making people jump up and get to work!

What's on my mind right now? Well, I'm fascinated by the cultural origins of ketchup. Who'd have thought that simple tomato goo would have so much effort and social context behind it?

Something to savour

2010-09-30T23:10:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 30 026 words
Rewrite days elapsed: 39
Lipreading that hearing-impaired Peregrine has had to do this chapter: Lots

I live in a small city that isn't the most gastronomically diverse place around, let's put it that way. There's exactly one Thai restaurant: I used to work there, acting as an ambassador to Thai food and explaining that it's more than just blow-your-face-off spice.

Actually, introducing people to the food wasn't that hard most of the time. There was a lot of non-threatening beef and chicken and carrots and peppers and noodles on the menu, even if they were dressed with sauces the average white-skinned northern Ontarian has never heard of. The item I had to explain most was, of all things, the complimentary candies given out with the bills. They were brown hard candies with a tamarind flavour.

Tamarind comes from the pulpy flesh of a tree's seed pod, and it has a very distinctive sour taste. Those with talented palettes might recognize that Worchesterchire sauce has tamarind in it, but I would have been surprised if anyone made that connection offhand. No, the customers would usually put a complimentary candy in their mouth expecting coffee or chocolate flavour, and become uncomfortable enough at the weird sour taste to spit the candy back out. The only time they didn't spit it out was if I told them beforehand that it was tamarind candy -- then they were usually happy to eat this exotic new morsel.

Just knowing the flavour's name made the difference. Just knowing in advance that they were trying something new was enough to make the experience pleasant, even when I didn't elaborate on what the heck "tamarind" is. I was always amazed at how easy it was to change people's perception. I wish it were that easy to introduce people to everything new, not just sweets, but at least I know that it's just a matter of using the right words.

Progress report

2010-09-25T00:59:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 24 898
Rewrite days elapsed: 34
First local legend told onscreen: The tale of gripthia, the demon sickness that (barely) defeated Thia the healer

It's been a little more than a month since I met with in New York. And whenever I think of that meeting (and don't get distracted with fuzzy feelings of New-York-City-induced squee), I look at where I am now with the writing.

I'm just over one quarter of the way through Remedy: I'm pleased with the changes made and the prose tightened. Remedy reads more like a real novel now, although I'm obviously a biased judge of real-novelitude. I'm not sure whether the wordcount total will be affected by the editing process. I'm pruning sentences away, but I've also added a few scenes that may even things out.

I'm happy with how things are going. If all goes well at my day job and I can save some money, I'd like to self-publish sometime in 2011 and attend fantasy-friendly conventions to market myself. Why not? My book is too far outside the conventional box to seem like a good business venture to traditional publishing. Nonetheless, I'm quite sure that non-human enthusiasts exist, and I'd rather bleed and sweat myself than wait for someone else to create a mainstream niche for me. It's a risk and I'm okay with that. I hear young people are supposed to be crazy ambitious!

I wonder where I'll be next month. I hope I'll make better progress with the editing, but if I'm taking more day job shifts, I won't be too hard on myself. Walking in the right direction is good enough for me.

From where I sit

2010-09-19T21:50:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 21 922 words
Rewrite days elapsed: 29 days
Overly dramatic idioms in Syril's dialogue: 20

I live in the downtown of my city. It's a downtown with a really unfortunate lack of comfortable coffee shops and bistros to linger in, and after my writing haunt of five years closed recently, I've been having a hard time finding a replacement. So when I shoulder my laptop bag and head out the door to write, I've been going to the public library.

The atmosphere of a place is what helps me write. Somewhere with small throngs of people, and a little ambient shuffling noise -- minor distractions to make me feel that concentration is necessary. And at this time of year, libraries have plenty of other young folks buckling down to projects. I'm frequently mistaken for an academic student, anyway, so I might as well hang out with them.

Being in a place full of books doesn't feel as significant as I expected. I guess a library is a very appropriate place to write a novel. As long as I'm somewhere that the general public wanders through and leaves their fingerprints all over, that feels inspiring enough for me.

More changes crawling in

2010-09-14T22:44:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 17 281
Rewrite days elapsed: 24
Word that amuses me most (for no particular reason): Scuttle

My aemet race is loosely based on leafcutter ants. They're partially insectoid; they're matriarchal; they traditionally live in forest communities and cultivate crops. The major difference is that while a disturbed ant colony will rally and attack a threat, aemet reaction to a threat is more along the lines of fleeing gazelles.

I'm working in a brood system of raising small children. It always vaguely bothered me that I had aemets raising their children individually: I realized that a colony-focused people would be more likely to pool efforts to look after their offspring. That's what real social insects do, after all. I'm imagining a bustling corner of the village just out of sight of the main story action, ringed with protective thorn bushes nurtured by plantcasting magic. The brood area would be just close enough that aemet characters can strain their airsense and pick up the vibrations made by little active bodies. It explains why these family-oriented people don't have swarms of little minor characters in their scenes, distracting from the story.

Taking on the brood system idea reminds me of the way ants stumble across crumbs, pick them up, and carry them home for use. I guess I've chosen well, being inspired by some of the most successful creatures on Earth.

One character lighting up a world

2010-09-09T21:21:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 13 162 words in
Rewriting days elapsed: 20 days
Most recent etymological dilemma: What to call witch-hazel in a world where magic is completely normal.

I'm working on the Remedy chapter where Syril of Reyardine is introduced. This guy is one of my favourite characters. He's an excitable dragon salesman who spends the story flying errands for people; Syril is the one who delivers bad news, flails a bit for comic relief, and then flaps off to provide a "Meanwhile, elsewhere" scene.

And really, I'm glad I added those "Meanwhile, elsewhere" scenes. The original Remedy draft ran short, so I figured I'd take that goofy minor character Peregrine talked to a few times and see what he could bring to the table. It turns out that Syril's wandering influence let me look at farther-flung corners of the Remedy world. There are mages, hermits, farmers and plague victims who wouldn't exist at all if Syril didn't talk to them.

That, and Syril is a fun, high-energy character. Where anyone else would use ten words, Syril uses twenty-six words and a colourful metaphor. However much coffee I'll need to keep up, I'm glad to be working with this character again.

Cleaning my room might help ...

2010-09-04T20:50:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 9 688 words in
Rewriting days elapsed: 15 days
Onscreen funerals so far: 2 new ones!

I can't seem to find my series bible.

Or, rather, I can't seem to find my physical series bible, the pencil-smudged paper in a cheap three-ring binder. That's where I keep character notes, because I like to sketch the characters as well -- it helps me get a sense of who a developing character is when I can see their expression.

I've been working on Remedy for years now. I know the characters. There's not a lot of unreproducable information in the bible and the worst thing I'll have to do is make up new names for people's rarely-mentioned relatives. The more clinical worldbuilding (like medicinal plant useage and local ecology) is kept in well-backed-up files on my computer, so losing my series bible notes actually doesn't really bother me. I guess this makes me a seat-of-pants writer?

A few shiny accent pieces

2010-08-31T20:09:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 7 064
Rewriting days elapsed: 11
My favourite analogy thus far: "[Mammals] were such sensitive creatures, quivering all over with whiskers and hair, delicate like barely-set jelly."

The wordcount is low because I've been distracted writing website copy. Tomorrow, I'm going to march myself down to the library and get some novel work done.

Remedy's world is lit by the Great Gem, an enormous crystal that the two high gods suspend in the sky and fill with light magic. The slowly shifting colour of the light indicates what time of day it is. Characters spend enough time noticing the gemlight's hue that I'm trying out a new bit of worldbuilding, the chromepiece -- it's basically a hybrid of a sundial and some paint store comparison cards.

It's part of the cultural tweaks I'm adding, but it's also just a distinctive object. Half the fun of fictional cultures is looking at their inventions. It says something about the way those people solve problems, and it might just show what they consider important. Objects can be icons, too, and who doesn't like a little symbolism?

I considered taking Remedy in a steampunk direction, and I've decided against that. But steampunk hasn't cornered the market on shiny things!

Revision semantics

2010-08-26T19:25:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 6 758 words in
Rewriting days elapsed: 6
Off-handed references to food: 7

When I say this is a rewrite, I don't mean that I'm actually restructuring every single sentence in the book. I just started a new OpenOffice document to put the novel in. New bits are written and the majority of the old version is copy-and-pasted to fit. The whole thing will get a fresh coat of copyediting and I'll call it a ~~day~~ ~~year~~ rather lengthly endeavour.

Writing a "new" document this way makes it easier to change the story, I find. I'm not editing the manuscript I've been working so hard on, not exactly. It's still there in its same old filename. But it provides me the textual material to make a better version of the existing manuscript. I might as well try out some scene changes, if I have nothing really to lose.

And that self-trickery has been helping out a lot with the rewriting. It makes this a whim-fuelled experiment instead of another slog of an editing pass. It's just one more way to twist the muse's arm behind its back.

Why I'm rewriting Remedy for the squillionth time

2010-08-23T19:22:00.000-07:00

Remedy rewrite progress: 2 166 words in
Rewriting days elapsed: 3
Most overused word so far: Different

I've been thinking a lot about what I'm trying to do with Remedy, because I've been asked some good, hard questions about my work. The main question is why I want to write adult-oriented works about all non-human characters.

My simplest answer is, why not? I'm interested in non-human characters who are strongly distinct from humans (i.e., sapient lizards, not Tolkien elves). They stand out from all the human characters of literary history. They embody all the possibilities of speculative writing. They might even be able to blow things up at the flick of a claw -- awesomely -- while humans are still struggling to get the cap off the gasoline.

But fantastic beings are too often seen as "talking animals", or simplistic metaphors. Mice with toothpick-sized swords have their place, of course. Minotaurs' implications are classic. But I think there's a lot more a writer can do. Out of infinite planes of possible existance, I can't imagine that humans are a big deal absolutely everywhere. It seems small-minded to insist that nothing matters unless it caters to Homo sapiens.

By writing Remedy, I'm going exploring. I'm exploring new territory and enjoying it for what it is, without demanding that it relate itself to me. And while I'm on that path, I hope I'll convince others to follow me.

And now, an update

2010-08-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

Time to get back in the habit of posting. I'm not much good at strict routine, so we'll see how it goes.

For those of you just joining me, hi there! I'm Heidi C. Vlach. If you know me, it's probably as a chipper Canadian tourist who talks about her writing to anyone who'll listen. I'm at a fairly early stage of the publishing journey -- the part where I have seemingly endless story drafts and a metaphorical heap of rejection letters.

I haven't been posting on my authorblog lately because, well, I didn't feel like I had much to say. I'm still working on my writing. That's the long and short of it. It's amazing how a completed book has a lot of content within it, but it can be so hard to talk about that book while the ideas are still refining. But I'm currently returning from a trip to New York City (I'm actually posting this from the back of a Greyhound bus). The highlight was a consultation with the wonderful Rose Fox, and there were also a lot of sights seen and a lot of chance encounters with fascinating people. I feel like something high octane has been poured into my brain.

In the coming posts, I'll talk a little more about Remedy and what I'm trying to achieve with its human-free world. But I just thought I should wave hello to everybody, for the time being. I'm writing novels and I'm still alive!

The cats' very different meows

2010-06-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

My roommate and I got a cat a few months ago, a young animal shelter denizen we named Selphie. I hadn't had a cat for a while and I'm suddenly remembering a lot about their quirks.

Cats are so easily generalized. Everyone knows they're independant and vain and curious. But individual cats will casually knock over all the stereotypes. Selphie is the type of cat who loves meeting a new person because that's one more person to demand cuddles from. Her moments of feline disdain are rare and, frankly, hilarious because she forgets so quickly what she was feeling distainful about. She thinks lettuce is a treat and stares hopefully at me while I eat salad. The cat has more depth than just being a cat -- and that's where Selphie really gets her charm.

It's a good point to remember for fictional characters. Ever meet a cat owner who seizes the opportunity to tell you what their beloved Mittens did the other day? Or see two cat owners both trying to make the conversation about their own cat? Generalized stock characters don't do that. A walking, talking stereotype won't evoke a reaction like that. The quirks of the individual can make people truly love a character, person or pet.

It makes me wonder about the writer's relationship with their own characters. Some writers let the story spill out wherever it wants to, whereas some writers stick to careful plans. Is this like people's preference for willful cats or obedient dogs? I'd take this analogy further but then I'd need to factor in all pet preferences, and honestly, I'm not sure what chinchillas have to do with writing. All I know is that every living thing is an individual, and it's important for writers to remember that.

Pressing Start to set out

2010-05-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite stories, out of all media, is the story in the Nintendo game Pikmin. It's about Captain Olimar, a delivery man of an inch-tall alien race. He crash lands his space ship, and finds that the unknown planet he's landed on has a toxic atmosphere. Olimar has to gather his scattered ship parts and escape the planet before his thirty days of life support run out -- and fortunately, native plant-like creatures called Pikmin are willing to help him.

For the last fifteen years or so, video games have had enough processing power to tell complex stories. Pikmin's plotline, however, is strikingly simple. Olimar is just trying to fix his ship, with the help of some semi-sentient drones. Once the mission is complete, Olimar leaves the planet and gets to live, The End. No villains. No plot twists. It's a basic man-versus-nature story. Even Olimar's beloved wife and children -- whom he talks about frequently -- don't have names. It gives the sensation that Olimar is very much alone.

Except that if the player is witnessing all this and guiding Olimar through his ordeal, then the little guy isn't actually alone, is he? He doesn't state who his journal entries are meant for, but Olimar seems to be speaking to the player as much as documenting his own thoughts. He even explains the functions of all the Gamecube controller buttons, as though they're gadgets on his space suit. This is video gaming's great contribution to storytelling: the player is an invaluable part of the story, because they literally control when and whether events happen. The player's presence can't be ignored.

I think that's what keeps me coming back to video games, looking for characters and stories. Books have pre-determined endings that I just haven't read yet. Video games also have pre-programmed endings, but there's no flipping straight to the end or skimming the slow parts -- I need to take every step of the journey. Some games even have events and story endings that change, depending on the player's choices. Video games have a stronger sense that things are happening because you're there to participate. I can sit there in my pajamas and make a real difference in a far-off, fantastic world.

I end up considering this every time I help Captain Olimar escape that deadly planet and leave his tiny plant friends behind. I'm not sure whether the Pikmin story would work as a book or a movie. Even if it wouldn't, I think it's plenty powerful in its current format.

Fruitful negotiations

2010-04-29T18:03:00.000-07:00

I finally came to the conclusion, the other day, that my brain didn't like the new book I was trying to write.

Oh, my brain had plenty to say while I was brainstorming. Lots of excitement at the thought of a trapped miner and the breathless efforts to rescue him. All sorts of comments on the characters' deep-seated issues, and the ways those characters might get through their crises together. But a few thousand words into Reason, I had no interest in what was actually playing out in the prose.

It's a organic thing, the human mind. You can only push it against its will for so long. I debating taking my brain out to a restaurant as bribery (again), and then I sighed, and offered it some new terms. We were going to wait a late night when I was tired and my mental defences were pliable like used chewing gum. We would sit down with a nice, soothing hot beverage. And then my brain would start a new novel about whatever it wanted.

I figured I'd get something useable out of that midnight writing session. I didn't expect to get a thousand words of really tense, intriguing novel opening. The characters were made up on the spot, and they snap into place in the Remedy world. It looks like I'm going to be writing about Rue (who is named after a lucky plant and hates the superstitious pressure) solving the mystery of the increasingly frequent wolf attacks on her fellow villagers.

Well, I've learned my lesson! Leading my brain to water is no good if it knows of a fresher stream it would rather drink from. I think I'm going to name this new story Render. We'll see how it goes.

The right turn of praise

2010-04-15T20:10:00.000-07:00

I was serving tables the other day, and had an older gentleman as a customer. After asking some questions about the menu, and considering the options like he was matching them to the rest of his day, he picked a tempura dish he had never eaten before. That was great, because my favourite part of waitressing is talking people intro trying new foods. But the distinctive part came when I asked him how his meal was.

"Splendid," he said. That struck me as the perfect way to put it. Splendid is a word older people use for simple, delightful things. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to use the term if you're under 65 or wearing anything less dapper than tweed. I couldn't have expressed that man better if I was writing the encounter myself -- all it took to summarize him was one nuanced word.

I'm not sure which conclusion I want to draw from serving that man. There are plenty of authorly morals I could apply, but I think I'll stick with the simple joy of a perfectly used word. This experience might come in handy if I ever have a chipper older male character who needs something charming to say!

Darn gremlins are digging up my metaphor garden

2010-03-31T18:25:00.000-07:00

So, as this blog post opens, I'm squirmingly awaiting a freelance editor's evaluation of Remedy. Also giving Remedy another go-over. And I really think I get what people mean by typo gremlins.

Most of my typos are due to overworking. After I rearrange a sentence fifteen times, it starts sprouting extra suffixes -- mutating, if you will. I look at a grammar-mangling typo, recall a few beta versions of that sentence, and hum my understanding. Other mistakes just don't make sense, though. This sentence is the crowning epitome of its chapter! How didn't I notice the extra and?

Clearly, typo gremlins did it. Crafty little creatures who turn on my laptop while I sleep and cackle over the mistakes they're inserting. That's a much more entertaining explanation than my eye just skipping over my own erroneous keystrokes. Yep. Gremlins. Maybe they hang around a writer's house, like raccoons, just waiting for some novelwork to tear open. And I bet gremlins are just as cute as raccoons (in that watch-out-they-bite sort of way).

In any case, they're part of the natural fauna. I just get to spend some hunting the things down, which involves coffee. So I'm okay with it.

Picking my battles

2010-03-18T16:50:00.000-07:00

I haven't been getting much writing done lately. Mostly because I got sick, but getting a new Pokémon game hasn't helped, either.

For many, Pokémon are those weird cartoon things that geeks and children seem to love. For others, they're a beloved nostalgic pastime. I fall on the nostalgic side, since my teenage years were spent hunkered over a Gameboy. When I think of what set me down the path to writing, I don't think of a well-wrought book --I think of becoming a Pokémon master.

Which doesn't make a lot of sense, because the Pokemon world doesn't make a lot of sense either. Pokémon (short for Pocket Monsters) aren't really explained except as superpowered resident wildlife who live in tandem with humans. Some of them are as elusive and powerful as gods, but they'll still spar with a common squirrel-creature if their trainer asks them to. The Pokémon franchise retcons its own mythos whenever it feels like it, and is always sure that a ten-year-old can earn a six-digit living by wandering around battling Pokémon against each other. (For what it's worth, the cockfighting analogy is downplayed: Pokemon are portrayed as competitive creatures who like to test their strength against each other, and humans who treat their charges poorly are always the villain characters.) The worldbuilding is piecemeal at best, but the spirit of the games never changes: Pokémon tells you that you can do anything.

The most common plot of the games is that you can become a champion if you work hard. A kid from some podunk town, with the help of his beloved pet of a species analogous to a pigeon, can become Pokémon Champion someday. And unlike a lot of fantasy epics, there's no skimming over the extensive training. That kid will have to prove himself to every Pokémon trainer he comes across, by strategizing on thousands of seperate occasions. It's a massive undertaking that comes one duel at a time. You can win, Pokémon whispers in your ear as you play. It's going to be hard, but you can win. Keep trying. And sure enough, your scrappy little bug or fish grows one level stronger.

Sounds a lot like writing, doesn't it? Becoming a talented writer requires grinding out words every day, inching closer to that wonderful manuscript you're imagining, slowly honing your skills. And you're never really defeated until you stop trying. That's what filled my head while I started making original characters. Even though Pokémon games can be big corny timesinks, they have a fighting spirit that I'm glad I grew up with. It probably did me some good.

Kraken open new possibilities

2010-02-28T20:26:00.000-08:00

I'm getting some freelance editing help for Remedy, and prodding away at the new story, Reason. What's on my mind right now? Squid.

Yep. Squid, octopi, and the cephalopod genus in general. Often thought of as creepy monsters of the deep, or else as rubbery, tasty food. But according to the scientific articles I've been finding online, there's a lot of potential in these critters. The veined octopus carries coconut shells around as armour. Humboldt squid can communicate with their body colouration, the better to coordinate their hunting efforts. Cephalopods as a whole show a remarkable level of intelligence.

It's something we take for granted; humans are the smart ones; great apes and birds are the animals that make occasional, charming use of a tool. Now, here are invertebrates -- squishy mollusks -- that can solve puzzles and use tools. It's not much right now, but I can't imagine our ape-like ancestors were very impressive when they first figured out that pointy objects make things die.

What could prompt squid to ascend to sentience? What could they accomplish in a few million years? These questions give me chills to think about. I don't think cephalopods can be discounted just because they can't use fire, or because of other cornerstones of human development. There's surely more than one road to this particular destination.

Armoured octopi and smart squid are on my worldbuilding list, in my junk drawer of ideas I might use someday. If a story like Sheena 5 is proof, these creatures could be much more than appetizers.

Setting out once again

2010-02-14T14:57:00.000-08:00

Well, I think I've done as much as I can do on Remedy, for the time being. Until and unless some publishing industry person advises me on how to make it better, I need to write something else.

I can see how people lose themselves in one manuscript, polishing it with some impossible perfection in mind, editing and revising for years. It's a comfortable routine. You work with the same characters and scenarios, and you know what to expect every day that you sit down to write. It's easy to tell yourself that the manuscript is still worth your time, just like you don't want to acknowledge that your comfortable old jeans are getting pretty threadbare.

It's fun to brainstorm ideas for future novels, but I find there's a leap of faith needed to actually start writing another novel. There's no way to know that a new premise will work for you -- not until you're a few thousand words in, at least. It might all be a waste of time. Which is the threat novel writers always face; it's just hard to ignore when you're not distracted by that rich world inside your head.

The new idea I'm working on will be set in the same world as Remedy, with the same array of non-human sentients. I have another deaf miner character to follow around, and another man-versus-nature conflict to spur his character relationships onward. This story doesn't have a title yet, but it'll probably follow the same naming pattern as Remedy and Rhythm (because I'm surely not wearing out my R key fast enough). Sometime soon, I'll just sit down at my favourite coffee shop, order a big, encouraging piece of cake, and go for it.