Around 7800 words since I posted to this thread on November 11. The novel as a whole is at around 73000 words; it was about 55000 words when I resumed work on it on November 2. I think I'm pretty near the ending, 3-5k words left perhaps, but there are scenes I skipped earlier that I need to go back and fill in, plus the aforementioned plot and worldbuilding inconsistencies that will necessitate major restructuring on second draft.
Around 2800 words today, and about 6000 words since I last posted in this thread on Sunday.
Nicole @98: Most of Molly Case's comments on NaNoWriMo are beside the point, but from what I've heard in various other places, I suspect that this:
There is no market for 50,000 word novels. No real publisher will look at a novel that short, but it is too long to be published as a novella. It is pretty much the most useless length of story someone could train themselves to tell.
may not be entirely wrong; at least I have the impression that the 30k to 60k word range is hard for a new writer with no track record to sell in, most first magazine fiction sales being short stories or occasionally novelettes, and most first novels being rather longer than the NaNoWriMo 50k. Nearly all the novellas I see in the digest magazines, and the novellas and short novels published in book form by small presses (more rarely by major publishers), seem to be by more experienced writers who've already built an audience with shorter or longer work. Would Teresa or Patrick or any of the other publishing professionals care to comment on this?
Michael Roberts @425: I don't think anyone has mentioned Charlotte Brontë yet. I'd strongly recommend Jane Eyre, and Villette a bit less strongly.
Michael Roberts @425: I don't think anyone has mentioned Charlotte Brontë yet. I'd strongly recommend Jane Eyre, and Villette a bit less strongly.
4200 words added in the last few days to a novel I started just over two years ago. It was 55500 words so far when I last worked on it a month ago. I'm reasonably sanguine about bringing it to a halfway decent ending by the end of the month, though it's going to require major restructuring in the second draft; I kept changing my mind about the villain's identity, motivations, and methods for the first few thousand words, and there are many inconsistencies to be fixed.
Joel Polowin @20: I haven't yet read Bone Dance, though I've heard it recommended.
B. Durbin @30: That sounds familiar. It's probably "Willie" by Madeleine E. Robins, F&SF December 1992. My copy is packed up somewhere so I can't confirm all the details you mentioned, though.
As soon as I posted that comment I thought of an example Patrick's post itself should have reminded me of: Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. It's the best of Cory's works I've read so far, and one of my favorite recent urban fantasies; it's set in a much nearer future than Halting State, probaby in our past by now, but it's got the mix of cutting-edge-present/near-future technology and characters from a magical background that I was thinking of.
Zander @4: It's been some years since I read Frankenstein but I tend to agree with your reading. Most of all of the bad consequences follow on Frankenstein's abandonment of his creature, not on creating it per se.
I thought I had something to say about near-future sf, but putting it into words is proving difficult. More later perhaps.
I have one question, though: most fantasy is either set in alternate worlds unconnected to our own, or alternate worlds similar to our own but with magic as part of their history, or set in the present or the recent past with magic intruding into our world or people from our world wandering into another magical world. But it seems as though there ought also to be near-future fantasy, with science-fictional elements based on what's going on *now* when the author writes and what seems as though it could plausibly happen in the near future interacting in interesting ways with the intrusion of magic into our world or people from our world into magic. I can't think of many examples offhand; Galveston by Sean Stewart comes close, and various elfpunk works from the 1990s whose titles elude me are sort of what I'm thinking of but not quite. The elfpunk stuff seems to me (though I haven't read much of it) to be mixing urban fantasy elements with cyberpunk, when cyberpunk was already an established genre, a conventional near-future that was becoming less and less likely to be realized. The ideal near-future fantasy I'm thinking of would simultaneously have original thinky bits about where we are now and where we might be headed soon, like Halting State or Rainbows End, and liminal or fantasy stuff going on as well.
A tricky aspect of such genre-bending would be fairly incluing the reader sufficiently early as to what kind of story it's going to be; introducing both the magical and sf'nal elements early on in ways that don't confuse them, or confuse the reader only insofar as the viewpoint character is (hopefully temporarily) confused...
Or not. Cluelessly unreliable narrators are fun, but I expect they get exponentially more difficult to write if you're working in a less-established genre or violating genre conventions as well as narrative conventions, because the reader can have fewer safe assumptions about how the world works by which to correct the narrator's honest mistakes and deliberate lies.
Shalanna Collins @85:
I've had several people, including some who aren't kin to me or close friends, make favorable comments on some of my stories; so I know I'm doing something right at least some of the time even though most or all of what I'm writing isn't quite salable to paying markets yet. But I still have days, sometimes more days than not, when I feel like what I'm writing isn't working, that it's going to need major rewrites before it's worth showing to beta readers if it's salvageable at all. That correlates fairly strongly with times when I find writing difficult, more of a chore than enjoyable; but I don't know if it correlates in any objective way to how good the writing actually is. And there are also times when I write easily and enjoy the writing, but later re-read what I've written and decide that it's nowhere near good enough to submit to a paying market or even show to a beta reader. Again, I don't have a way of knowing if that feeling correlates strongly to how other people would think of it; I don't send something to a friend to beta-read until it's already in second or third draft, as good as I can make it without having some feedback.
"Dreck" is not in the productive part of my vocabulary, so I don't describe my worst writing in that term, but the term "worthless" doesn't seem inappropriate for some of it, if it's regarded as a product and not as part of a process. That is, some of the stuff I've written is bad enough that seems to probably be neither worth someone else's time to read, nor my own time to revise; the only value it had, if any, was in the process of writing it, if that practice made me better at some aspect of writing, or if I got enjoyment from writing it, or both. That is, the process of writing it may have had worth, but the product of writing is as far as I can tell worthless.
The worst samples of my writing in gjâ-zym-byn are potentially valuable for documenting the development of the language, even if of zero literary worth; but I doubt my worst writing in English has any significant value of that kind.
I'm not doing NaNoWriMo per se, though I'm thinking I'll try to finish one of my unfinished novellas or novels by the end of November, and try to stay in the habit of writing something, even if only a few lines, every day.
In October I did LoCoWriMo along with a few other conlangers. I managed to meet my page count goal for the month, although the story is nowhere near finished. This is the first time I've worked with this kind of deadline/goal, in any language, and I found myself several times writing uneventful day-in-the-life-of-my-characters stuff because I wasn't sure what should be happening next in terms of actual plot but wanted to get my two pages down for the day.
How does an artist get started doing book cover illustration work, bringing their work to the attention of publishers' art directors and so forth? I've an artist friend who is looking to try to start making some income, eventually maybe making his living, from illustration work, but isn't sure where to start it as a business.
Does anyone have advice about researching police procedure? -- specific books or websites on the subject, for instance? Googling turns up Police Procedure and Investigation: A Guide for Writers, by Lee Lofland, and said author's website with a few articles that look generally interesting but don't (as far as I can tell so far) address my specific questions. I reckon I'll buy said book when I have some money to spare, unless someone has a better suggestion.
In particular:
1. If police are responding to a 911 call, & find the door of the house locked; no one answers the door when they announce themselves but they hear muffled shouting from somewhere inside -- they're going to break down the door at that point, right?
2. If, having broken down the door, they find no one upstairs, and investigating sounds from the basement they find no one there but a tunnel entrance in a wall of the basement -- would they investigate the tunnel right away (these being the first 1-2 cops on the scene) or wait for reinforcements to arrive? Would the answer change if they were shot at when they first started to descend the basement stairs? I'm figuring they probably wouldn't go down the tunnel until they have backup -- but the story would get a lot more interesting if I can find an excuse for one or both of those first couple of patrolmen on the scene to charge down the tunnel at once. Possibly one of them is new & inexperienced & impulsive, or has been around a while but has a reputation for violating procedure at times...?
---
On species-uniqueness of pet names: About 20 years ago my brother and I had two cats named Snoopy and Woodstock. When we visited our cousins whose cat had just had these and other kittens, we found one sleeping on top of the large basket the other kittens were sleeping in at whiles; at some other point early in our acquaintance with them, another kitten was sleeping on top of the first-mentioned. Thus the names.
Tim Walters @387: yes, exactly.
---
I tried to help my nephew and niece find suitable posts -- and it took a good deal of trying. But no good deed goes unpunished.
She wasn't at all beautiful; and he wouldn't have fallen in love with her for her cleverness if I hadn't given her such detailed instructions about how to arrange for my death. He made her a fair husband, as husbands go, and she told such beautiful lies about him after he was gone -- well, he couldn't have had a better legend if I'd made it myself. But I'm still here, and it will be some time before my son is old enough to wield the sword I trusted her with.
Carol Kimball @332: sounds kind of like Gur Uvtu Cynpr ol Wnzrf Oenapu Pnoryy, gubhtu Sybevna vf nobhg gra jura ur svefg fnj Zryvbe -- be znlor nabgure ergryyvat bs "Fyrrcvat Ornhgl".
Bruce Cohen @333: Gur Fgnef zl Qrfgvangvba ol Nyserq Orfgre? Haven't read it recently, but what I remember of the plot seems to fit.
Gary Shannon, the guy mainly responsible for the Kalusa project a couple of years ago, has started a new collaborative constructed language project: TAK. It's similar to Kalusa in that it starts out with a small set of words and sentences, and then people are invited to read what's there and contribute new words and sentences, gradually expanding and modifying the language. It differs from Kalusa in that the meta-discussion in the forum is supposed to be all in TAK, so the initial bootstrap language (whose words and grammatical rules are meant to be gradually replaced) already has words for e.g. "grammar" and "phonology".
People have mentioned some of Edgard Pangborn's other novels; his The Judgement of Eve is also post-apocalyptic, and quite good, though not as good as A Mirror for Observers.
Tim Powers' Dinner at Deviant's Palace is set long-after-apocalypse. Haven't read it in way too long, so don't remember much detail about it.
JJ Fozz @35: I think we discussed M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud here recently, possibly on the last open thread or the last but one. A purple cloud of poison gas is emitted by a volcano, IIRC, and kills almost everyone on earth. The narrator, the only survivor as far as he knows for most of the book, is the only survivor of a north polar expedition.
Vernor Vinge's Marooned In Realtime might fit. Something mysterious disappeared all the humans alive as of a certain date (early 22d century IIRC), and the only people left after that were those who had time-traveled into the future (one-way) and skipped past that event. They keep jumping into the future farther and farther trying to join up with each other and re-found a new civilization. It's a sequel to The Peace War, good but not as good as Marooned In Realtime, where the one-way time-travel was invented.
Joel Polowin @477: I think T.H. White said essentially the same thing, maybe in a terser and more quotable way, also in one of his nonfiction books. England Have My Bones maybe? (Much of that book is about his learning to fly.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 16 |
| 2008 | 41 |
| 2007 | 30 |
| 2006 | 9 |
| 2005 | 4 |
| 2004 | 2 |
Total: 102 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jim Henry:
Show all comments by Jim Henry.