Tag Archives: reading

On the Docket

I’m sure there’s folks who do just fine with one project at a time, and I love that for them. And for you, if you’re one of those folks. But for myself, in writing as with my knitting, I like to refer to myself as monogamous+. It’s the subscription version, you see.

I will have one main project that I work on like 80% of the time, and then I have something else that fills another need that I keep kicking around for times when the main project isn’t appropriate.

So I am working on Stephen West’s Painting Bricks shawl right now, but I also have a Celestarium that I only work on at knitting group, and a plain sock that is my walking-around knitting.

I’m re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo, but it’s a heckin’ chonker, so I also have an audiobook of Windburn, and a digital ARC of Corvus and the Broken God*.

I’m drafting the fourth Stone and Sky book, and that’s my laptop writing, the important one, the one that absorbs most of my time. But it’s also some pretty heavy intellectual and creative work right now, since it contains both the new main couple, and, as necessary for the over-arching plot, POVs from the main characters of the previous three books. Each couple has a bonus minor conflict and resolution, and there’s the whole rest of the plot. So it’s a lot. Just hit 70k words, and things are picking up, but I’ve still got a lot to wrap up, so it’s Work to write right now.

Now, I’m really excited about it, I’m motivated to finish it, and I put at least an hour into it a day, which is between 400 and 1200 words, depending on how much choreography is happening in those words.

But, being Important Writing for the Big Screen, similar to the way one does not make major purchases such as airline tickets from their phone, Stone & Sky 4 is confined to the laptop, which is a bit of a problem for me.

I’m trying to manage my scrolling habit, you see. So I downloaded Novelist** on my phone, and that’s where I’m writing the Bookbinder’s Guild Book 1***. It will be a trilogy. I’m not sure that it prevents me from scrolling, but I do manage an additional 500 to 2000 words a day on it, depending on how long the gremlin wants to stay in the bath. I’m fantastically excited about it, I’ve shared some early chapters with some folks and I have at least one person in my DMs, white-knuckling their phone for more.

However, it’s gaslamp fantasy****, which requires considerably more worldbuilding than hidden-world paranormal does, so I do take frequent breaks to figure out things like what the days of the week are called and why. Did I name them after gods? Of course. Did I then have to build a pantheon? Of course. Does doing that necessarily define what’s important in this society? Naturally. It was a two-day detour.

The remaining gaps are filled by the ideas doc, highlights of which include, but are not limited to, a Romeo & Juliet romance about two people who can only meet at dawn and twilight; Stuart Little, witch hunter, who goes to a support group for people who’ve been turned into animals; a coven of urban witches who use fiber arts to fight mental illness; and a romantic thriller about a second-chance romance between a couple rebuilding their relationship after hardship.

Will any of these see the light of day? No idea, but when The Bookbinder’s Guild becomes Big Screen Writing because I’m done with Stone & Sky, maybe I’ll pick the three I’m the most excited about and let the internet decide.

Recent Writing

“So,” Tony frowned at the floor. “You don’t hate me?”

“Nope.” She shook her head. “Never did. I don’t really hate anybody, I just have Resting Bitch Whole Body, so people make some assumptions.”

Next time let’s talk about coffee.

Do good, friends.

*Which is stellar, by the way, I closed out the bar reading it the other night.

**Not a sponsor, but I’m not opposed. HMU, Novelist.

***Think The Count of Monte Cristo meets Divine Rivals. Something that has always bothered me about TCoMC adaptations is that they skip the middle part, the part where Edmond investigates his arrest and imprisonment, and rewards those who tried to help him. This is the part that turns him into the Count, and it always, always, gets skipped. Hence the trilogy. Book 1 is a heist with a slowburn romantic subplot because I can’t not. Book 2 is a detective book with romantic conflict. Book 3 is another, more vengeful heist, and contains the HEA. Romance beats distributed among all three books. I’d do it as one, but unless Stone & Sky succeeds beyond my wildest dreams, there’s no way anyone is publishing a 1200 page book.

****Gaslamp fantasy is industrial, as opposed to classic fantasy, which is medieval.

Building Characters

See, I have already lied to you, but you knew that because you’re very astute.

I don’t build characters, I discover them.

I have been playing D&D and TTRPGs for my entire life. I’m not exaggerating; my parents met at a D&D game, I don’t remember not having dice in the house, and I mispronounced “Paladin”* until my mother had a meltdown over hearing my siblings and I say “puh-LAY-din” when I was twelve.

That game was my first exposure to storytelling. Before I had Animorphs and Sabriel and Alanna the Lioness, I had Gary Gygax, Ed Greenwood, and Peter Adkison.

And I loved making characters. I had binders of characters**, the vast majority of whom never got to see a table.

I got a truly disproportionate number of hours of entertainment out of rolling their stats and writing out their backstories, and imagining them in situations and how they would respond.

So what happened? How did the little girl who built meticulous characters with thousands of words of backstory turn into the taller-than-average NB who throws vague silhouette’s into situations to see how they turn out?

Maybe you’ve had this issue, if you play TTRPGs. Or maybe you’ve had this issue, if you’re a writer. But somehow, no matter how thorough I was, those characterizations never survived contact with the table. Not once did someone remain how I’d built them.

They went different ways, not always slowly morphing into the same person****, but they never turned out to be the person I intended for them to be when I wrote them.

Being a person who takes direction well*****, I took the prevailing advice from my community — which consisted of the only D&D game in my microscopic home town, populated by men in their 30s who also primarily played self-inserts — and I wrote Even More Backstory ™. It got to the point where I was basically writing novellas for each and every characters.

And you know what? It didn’t help.

None of the other advice helped, either. Interviews, wounds, fears, coping mechanisms, it didn’t matter what I made before I put them on the table, it all went out the window as soon as I pulled the character sheet out of its protective plastic sheath.

And then, the first time I went to college******, I took an improv class.

We did all the things, the “Yes, and,” discussion, “Things from a hat” and every other game you’ve seen played on Whose Line is It Anyway?.******* I had the privilege of watching some truly, profoundly talented folks act, and listen to them discuss and dissect scenes and reactions. Doc would stop scenes mid-flow to talk to the actors and to the class about what happened, let people think through or talk about why they made particular decisions, and discuss the effects of those decisions on the audience and the direction of the scene.

I loved it. It was like watching Behind the Scenes footage.

Now, I’m not great at live improv, and I never was. I do okay among casuals, but I’m under no illusions that I could be any level of professional.

But the D&D table has so much less pressure than a stage. Those people have already agreed to do weird stuff for fun, they’re not expecting, nay, demanding, entertainment from me.

And my characters got so much better.

I learned to build characters backwards, to make a decision in the moment, and to incorporate that into the future, rather than deliberately reaching into the character’s past for reasons and justification. To let inconsistencies ride, and examine them with curiosity, looking for differences that might explain why things are different in this situation than they were in the last one.

I don’t build characters. I discover them.

Like an archeologist, or a nature documentarian, I feel like I’m following my characters around, making observations about them and trying to build that into a cohesive picture. “Oh, the barbarian is illiterate, but knows that her friends are following her and she will be deviating from the planned path. How does she communicate this to them?”

In the moment, chalk with an arrow and a little doodle of the landmark she was going towards.

But then what does that tell us about her? She bothered to communicate it at all, so she’s team-oriented. She respects her party enough to try to share that information. She’s not patient enough to just wait for them. All of that informs future decisions, and the character remains cohesive, despite not knowing her favorite color or how she’d respond if offered life-changing wealth.

When I start a book, I have no idea who my characters are. I give them a name, and I chuck them into a situation, and I watch them and see what they do.

There are some rules to this that I’ve found give me the best results, but they’re vague and formless. Stuff like, Someone in the scene has to react differently from the majority. And, If a reaction will cause conflict, then someone has to do that thing. But even these are kind of vibes-based.

Now, does this mean that the characters I was writing at the beginning of the book are a bit bland? YES. Yes, it does. But since nothing is inconsistent, that’s simple to fix in the first pass edit, which I do right after typing END********. I know the prevailing advice is to let the draft rest, but you gotta do what works for you, and I need to homogenize the characterization while it’s all fresh in my brain. I also go through and add any description that I missed in the rough draft. Then I let it rest and convince myself that it’s crap so that when I open it again I can safely reassure myself that actually, it’s not that bad.

Recent Writing

“And what, exactly,” Aubrey whispered, “is the difference between saying ‘I’m fine’ and saying ‘I’ll be fine in a minute when I have a chance to come to terms with the fact that I’m not dead’? Seems pretty close to me.”

Wayne shook his head slowly, eyes closed in dramatic disapproval. “The honest one is also saying ‘I’m vulnerable right now.'”

Next time, let’s talk about smut.

Do good, friends.

*It’s PAL-uh-din, in case you were wondering. Or at least it is in standard American vernacular. I make no claims to understand British or Australian pronunciations; I know which side of the Alumin(i)um Line I live on.

**Mostly women***, but not all.

***This is a joke for those of us who survived the 2012 American Presidential Election. Don’t worry about it, it’s not a load-bearing joke.

****I’m not going to pretend that a significant chunk of my characters weren’t self-inserts with weird eyes and unnatural hair colors, but that was a phase that went from the ages of 13 to 22, and I got better.

*****This is also a lie. Good catch.

******I have made eight attempts at college, and have zero degrees. I’m starting to think that formal education just isn’t for me.

*******Punctuation nerds, tell me how I’m doing here, if I haven’t already scared you off with my concerning level of footnotes.

********Also a lie. I type END, crack open a frosty ginger beer, and then I make a copy of the rough draft doc and start the first pass edit.

Audiobooks and Reading

When I was maybe ten years old, my siblings and I went on a road trip. Naturally, we were not driving, the oldest of us being eleven. To pass the time, my dad put in an audiobook of The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey. It was on cassette tapes* from a squeaky plastic clamshell from the library, if you were looking to carbon date my age.

Obviously, this was not a democratic decision.

Now, I haven’t revisited this particular recording of The White Dragon, perhaps there have been other, better audiobook recordings done since then, but this particular one was the most boring thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life, for all ten minutes that I listened to it before falling asleep.

Which was a real shame, because it was about dragons, and, being ten, I really should have been more interested in it, because dragons are dope as hell.

Since that time, I decided that audiobooks weren’t for me. They were boring and would put me to sleep. This was reinforced by my partner’s love of audiobooks, which I also found very boring, and not just because he exclusively listens to Travis Baldree.**

My brilliant, childhood conclusion about the place of audiobooks in my life went unexamined until February of this very year, when I realized that I could not drive my gremlin around so they’d go to sleep, and read a book at the same time.*** I understand that this should have been obvious and that I was slow to come to this conclusion; if you think less of me for this, I can only assume that you don’t have children, and I love that for you. Please enjoy your complimentary consecutive REM cycles.

So I downloaded Libby because I’ll be damned if I have to share an Audible account with someone who thinks that Gideon the Ninth has very little worldbuilding.****

My very first audiobook that I picked out, as an adult, was To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods, by Molly X Chang, narrated by Natalie Naudus. And you know what? I had a grand time with it. Sadly, the sequel doesn’t come out until 2027, but I’ll lurk.

Next was Starling House (Alix E. Harrow, also narr. by Natalie Naudus), and you know what? Turns out I only don’t like audiobooks if I don’t care about the book. I just looked at my stats right now, to write this post, and I listened to Starling House across three sessions. It’s a twelve hour book.

I’ve had some duds since then,***** but broadly speaking, audiobooks have entirely replaced physical books as my primary form of reading and I’m totally okay with that, because it lets me nurse my crush on Moira Quirk in peace.

I’ve seen a lot of folks on the interwebs defend audiobooks as legitimate reading, but I’ve never heard anyone say otherwise. Did I just enter the social media space at the wrong time to experience the anti-audio crusades? Let me know.

I will say, though, that there’s a lot to be said for what a good narrator can bring to the reading experience. I can’t say I’d have had as much fun with Gideon the Ninth if I’d been reading it (though now I would give my left leg (above the knee) for a fancy, pretty copy because of how much I love it), because the amount of anatomy that is in that book can get a little heavy and technical, and having to actually run my actual eyeballs across the actual words might have been a bit much for my delicate constitution. It would also have been highly unsanitary.

Every time you add a person to the creative process, it has an impact on the end product, and I think that’s just delightful. I have the privilege of knowing more than my fair share of actors******, which means that I’ve seen quite a few iterations of the same plays, and each and every time, I find them enchanting. The fingerprints of the whole team are all over the final production and there’s something really magical about the synthesis of good professionals who all love the work.

And I guess that’s the dream isn’t it? To be on such a team? It’s my dream, at any rate.

Recent Writing

Wayne laughed. “Because [witches are] not ‘normal people,’ whatever that is, and because you learn real quick that if you’re not honest with yourself, you’re going to have big-ass problems, so you ask the dumb questions and the silly questions and the questions that sound the same as the other questions but you’re not sure you understood the answer, because all the answers reveal something, and the way you take the answers reveals something, and all of that makes you better.”

“That’s a lot of work.”

“Witchery is when we look at reality and say, ‘no, I can do better.’ That’s a lot of work.”

Next time I’ll talk about waiting.

Do good, friends.

*Cassette tapes are a form of audio preservation where plastic is stretched very thin, and then a sound is projected at it, and the trauma of this experience is such that when you run the thin plastic across a very fine brush, it will repeat that sound until the plastic is worn through from the stress and breaks.

**Mr. Baldree is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but listening to snippets of various properties narrated by the same man has lead me to the conclusion that there is a Travis Baldree Extended Universe that includes Cradle, Beware of Chicken, and Legends and Lattes, among others, and I did not find any of this particularly interesting or easy to follow.

***I am aware that podcasts exist. Toddler podcasts are not especially good for my personal wakefulness, and Behind the Bastards is not appropriate fare for toddlers. While the gremlin does not, at this time, speak English, the last thing I need is for their first words to be “Doritos over Dictators.”

****We listen and we don’t judge. Personally, I think that progression fantasy is among the most boring things to exist, nobody’s perfect.

*****Assistant to the Villain… I DNFed at less than 1%. I’m sure the book is lovely, but it’ll have to wait until I can read it with my eyes.

******And I’m keeping them. They are my hoard, these actor friends of mine, and I do not share.