America is, and has always been, a messy, complicated place.  The late 1800’s were not only no exception, they were everything that epitomizes the United States.  M.K. Hobson, my friend Mary, has caught the zeitgeist of that era.  In The Native Star, Emily Edwards is a witch in a Sierra Nevada lumber town.  If one could call Lone Pine a town, which a self-respecting New York City warlock, in this case Dreadnaught Stanton, certainly wouldn’t unless he were under extreme duress.  Magic in the United States is just as messy and complicated as everything else in a youthful country bent on proving and improving itself.

In her need to correct a wrong she’s done, Emily marches into the world outside of Lone Pine with common sense, decency, and folk magic as weapons.  The decency and common sense may even keep her from throttling Dreadnought Stanton before they reach New York.

I confess, I had the good fortune to read this book in its early stages.  I enjoyed the heck out of it.  Reading it again was wonderful.  Mary handles the niceties, and the not-so-niceties, of the Gilded Age with a deft touch.  Magic is as much a resource as oil or lumber.  Like any necessary resource, it’s tangled up in the racism, sexism, politics and bigotry of the period.  When magic goes wrong in the world of The Native Star, it goes wrong in a fashion as ugly as strip mining and clear cutting.  All those elements are present, but Mary doesn’t let the book go dark.  The reader is never without a smile.  Emily and Dreadnought’s continuous sniping at one another made me grin.  From a Nevada mine collapse to attempted eye-gouging with a hair stick, Emily delights me.

Yay, Mary!  Very well done!

Tags: books, bustlepunk, reading, review
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Today I noticed a particularly unlikely source of quotes that apply to Bone Orchard… or maybe it’s particularly likely give Oscar Wilde’s viciously funny commentary on the strictures of Victorian society.  Today’s selections come from An Ideal Husband -

“I did not sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price. ”

“Lord Goring: Extraordinary thing about the lower classes in England – they are always losing their relations.
Phipps: Yes, my lord! They are extremely fortunate in that respect.”

“I never smoke. My dressmaker wouldn’t like it, and a woman’s first duty is to her dressmaker, isn’t it? What the second duty is, no one has as yet discovered.”

Tags: Bone Orchard, quotes, ramble
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People tell lies about writing.  Writers lie to themselves sometimes, or sometimes people tell us lies about our work.  We get over these lies with help from our friends and mentors.  Sometimes we have to get over the same lies repeatedly.  What in the hell am I talking about?  Below are the first two lies that leaped into my head, that I’ve heard professionals tell me over and over are lies.

Writing isn’t a physically strenuous career…

LIE.  This should be an obvious one, though the strains on your body aren’t of the football or construction kinds.  By now probably everyone with a computer has heard of Repetitive Strain Injury, of which Carpal Tunnel is probably the most famous.  There are a whole host of them, and they’re all nasty.  Focusing on a monitor glaring at the same distance all day is bad for your eyes.  Sitting still in a chair all day is generally not good for your body.  After a while our bodies will tell us about the strains in hateful ways.

Read up on ergonomics and apply it to your writing everywhere we reasonably can.  Particularly true in my case, where nerves in my arms and hands remind me almost daily that they’re screwed up.  Do not break your body if you can possibly avoid it.

Along with ‘sit down and write’, many professionals have said, is a need to find some form of exercise and DO it.  Sounds fabulous and easy.  If we don’t have this as part of our life, shoehorning it in can be a challenge. I struggle with this one.  I stopped horseback riding years ago.  Right in the wake of that, I ended up with a series of open-body surgeries that put me in bed for weeks at a time.  Now, getting my butt up to exercise takes some motivation because I stopped exercising.  I’m supposed to ‘Just Do It’?  Are you freaking kidding me?  I need a reason to do it, because I have just piles of reasons not to exercise.  I don’t feel too good today, and maybe I’m sore from trying to exercise once already this week, and I’m way behind on (task du jour) so I don’t have time today… whine grumble, bitch moan.  Words to live by from Jenny Gibbons to her husband – “But babe!  You need to do cardio!  You don’t want the zombies to catch you!”  Those excuses back there?  The ones dressed up as reasons not to get off your butt?  They’re the zombies, and they’re coming to get you.

I need to be inspired to write…

LIE.  Evil, evil lie.  If we seriously think a Special Snowflake Fairy is going to make us into writers all of whose work is birthed only in the Flow of Artistic Inspiration, we need a slapping.  A brisk stinging slap the first few times.  Further infractions qualify the writer for a ‘clue x 4′ to the back of the head.  Writing when we’re not inspired may well result in a page full of crap, but in the immortal words of Kath Nyborg - “We can edit crap.  It’s impossible to edit a blank page.”

Realize that no one ever has to see our crap but us, and we can edit it.  So face the fear of writing crap, take up the implement of your choice, and bloodily chop this lie to bits every time it crops up.  Like fixing the first lie (or like fighting zombies, come to think of it), this is not as easy as it sounds.  There’s a gajillion ways to get over this, and I sure don’t know them all.  Here are two I’ve used.

If you have no idea where the plot is going, and you’re looking out at a directionless sea, and you have no friends to go to lunch and plot with, there’s always the most dreaded advice I’ve heard a professional give to me.  “Just write a (expletive deleted) synopsis.  It’s not going to kill you.”  It didn’t kill me.  In this case it took me to the gasping edge of death by boredom… and hey, wait… where did I get bored again?  Oh!  Right around there!  So what’d be more evil there…  Go to the beginning and just make a list of what happened in the story so far.  It’s distressingly mechanical.  It has NOTHING to do with inspiration, but sometimes it helps to get some distance on a project so that you can see where you’re actually going with it.

If you have some idea of where a plot is going, you can just recognize that the next bit’s going to feel like slogging through the Sea of Crap, pull up your hip-waders, and head in the general direction of that far off shore ‘The End’.  Try to find as many hummocks of decent ground as you can along the way.  You might have to double back a lot to find the right direction.  You’ll probably have to come back once you’ve blazed a trail to ‘The End’ and cut out stretches of crap and replace them as needed with better stuff.  You might very well find the Flow of Inspiration again, hidden below the surface somewhere along the way.  You darn sure won’t find it unless you wade in.

I’m sure I’ll think of some more lies that professionals have, over the years, told me were lies.  I’m sure I still tell some to myself, because I’m not perfect.  What are some of the lies about writing that you’ve fallen victim to?  How do you try to fix them?

Tags: process, writing
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I feel a little weird posting this, because I think people probably all know in the business, but not everyone reads all blogs.  Sometimes a situation blows right by me without my noticing it.  Not all the blogs I read are on my sidebar here, either.  That said, I will punt straight to the blog post that first caught my attention so hard that my neck popped with the double take…

Genreville by Rose Fox at Publisher’s Weekly posted about a problem at Night Shade Books.

I don’t happen to follow the blogs of the authors involved, but I zipped my way right over to read them.  The first Genreville post was followed in short order by both an official statement from Night Shade and a statement from SFWA on their action regarding Night Shade.

I’m heartened to see Night Shade’s apology, and that their encouragements to their authors included notifying SFWA.  I hope like crazy that Night Shade pulls out of this debacle.  They’ve done great books, and it would be sad for readers and writers to see any other outcome.  Kudos to SFWA for their action.

I am not a member of SFWA, the authors involved don’t know me from a lamp post, and I have no affiliation with Night Shade nor with Genreville.   Full details of SFWA’s grievance process are here.

Tags: publishing, sfwa
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The northwestern United States are blessed to have a rich pool of authors working in them. Every year the Endeavor Award gives a thousand dollars to a writer for work originating in the northwest. The books are read and scored seven times by random readers, and then the highest and lowest score are discarded, and an average is reached. The highest scoring five books are sent to a panel of professionals to judge. It’s their job – and it’s an excruciating one – is to read the five finalist books and pick the winner.

The finalists for 2010 are:

City Without End by Kay Kenyon, Pyr Books
Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight by Cat Rambo, Paper Golem Press
Hunting Ground by Patricia Briggs, Ace Books
Mind Over Ship by David Marusek, Tor Books
Push of the Sky by Camille Alexa, Hadley Rille Books

This year the judges are:
Robin Wayne Bailey
Laura Anne Gilman
Madeleine Robins

Judges, you have your work cut out for you! Congratulations to the finalists. Just getting to the finals is a truly amazing feat of writing.

Tags: books, Endeavor, publishing
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Steampunk typewriters? Aren’t typewriters already steampunk? Well yes, but what they really need is a MONITOR. This was a fun idea.

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As I’ve explained to a host of doctors and physical therapists over the years, my desktop work station really is ergonomic. Like, I’ve measured with a ruler and a protractor (seriously – my son marked the angles of my arm at the elbow on paper, and I borrowed his school protractor to measure) and had the numbers assessed. I can work here quite comfortably for a fairly solid chunk of time (solid for me. Your mileage will vary). Go me! So now… in the words of the song from ‘Dick Tracy’… I want more!

I’d really like to be able to take this show on the road. To coffee shops, to friends’ houses, etc, and be able to get solid amounts of work done. I have a rather elderly laptop, and a spare plug-in ergonomic keyboard that I can use, but it’s a weird lot of luggage to tote about. It’s not a ‘oh, look, I’m early to this appointment maybe I’ll pop into the coffee shop’ kind of set up. The keyboard alone is bigger than most laptops.

This is significantly better than not being able to write at ALL, which is a possibility that I’ve looked down the barrel of more than once. It’s a big old caliber barrel, too. I still have days where I don’t consider myself able to drive safely. These days usually coincide with a lot of whining and self-pity. It’s just not pretty.

Solution the First – I’m only able to write on computer at home.

Solution the Second – I’ve found ergonomic travel keyboards (Goldtouch makes it, and they have a travel laptop stand also)… which at least breaks down into smaller parts that can all go in one backpack. This is not an inexpensive solution, but I’m going to try a similar keyboard this weekend. That’s what birthdays and Christmas (/Yule/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah) are for, right?

Solution the Third – Well, heck. I don’t have a third solution. Do any of you have a third option I haven’t considered?

[edited for a heck of a lotta hecks!]

Update!  Sadly, solution the second doesn’t work out, as it has no ‘palm rest’, and I need that feature to avoid ‘sharps’ in my elbows.

Tags: arms, netbook, travel, writing
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At last year’s World Fantasy Con, I had the good fortune to hear Ken Scholes read his work.  One of the questions asked was  “What books are you currently reading?”  Ken’s reply was that, in his case, writing used the same brain muscles that reading did and since he was deep in a writing process he wasn’t really reading anything at that moment.  I was intrigued by that answer, heard the ring of potential Truth there, and started to pay more attention to what I read.

Everyone who’s a writer in a serious way will tell you – if you want to write, you need to read.  This is true.  When I’m not neck-deep in romancing a manuscript, I read voraciously.  Lately, I’m almost always neck-deep in writing, so I’m not as currently well-read as I’d like.

When I’m actively working on a manuscript, I make time to read works by friends (a way big enough pile that I’m always behind anyhow) and sometimes reread favorite books.  I can pick up those, read one page, or ten, put the book down and go back on my merry way until I have another ten minutes.  If I start up reading a NEW story?  Six will get you ten it’s start to finish, baby, and if I get four hours of sleep and feed my family around the edges it’s a great day.  I have to block out ‘works by friends’ time, because otherwise not much of my own writing gets done.

Then there’s research fiction I read while writing.  It’s usually in the narrow spectrum of what I’m writing.  What the hell is research fiction?  Well, while I worked on Bone Orchard (written in between surgeries and the nerve condition in my arms/hands), I tended to read books like ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley, and books by Edith Wharton and Anthony Trollope.  They’re ‘research fiction’.  In those cases they were books I’d read before, but I needed to be thoroughly reacquainted with Gothic (in the classical sense) and Victorian writing and I chose books whose tones had commonality with what I was writing.

Then there’s reading for research of facts.  For my current project, I read Her Majesty’s Spymaster, by Stephen Budiansky, which was a fun read, because I find Francis Walsingham in all his type-A hyper-intelligent fanatic Protestant anti-glory to be fascinating.  Then there’s some nice light stuff like ‘The Revolt of the Netherlands 1555 – 1608‘.  ‘Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England‘.  ‘The Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century‘.  Sometimes research reading is Really.  Not.  Interesting.  Unless you’re me, and sometimes not riveting even if you are me; and if you are, would you fold that load of laundry?  Thanks.  Four books here, out of about three dozen quite dense historical reference works and I’m trying to get hold of more even as I move forward in my writing this manuscript.

For me, it’s not necessarily about how many cycles I have to devote to reading vs. writing.  Quite a lot more sharply it seems to be reading time vs. writing time.  If you don’t read, you probably won’t learn to write really well.  If you don’t do the keyboard time, you don’t get anything written.  The time I spend reading, I’m most often reading toward my writing.

Writing vs. Reading.  If you do both, how much of each?

Tags: process, reading, writing
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If you enjoy classical music, you’ll like this. If you don’t like classical music, this might help change your mind!

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My spectacular friend, M.K. Hobson, has the trailer out for her first book. I had the privileged to read it in rough, and it was just as spectacular as she is even then!

Tags: books
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