First, fictionstuff: I did a whole lot of planning and wrote 854 words of a new story this week.
Second: what’s cool about this spider are the tiny dots on its ass, though I was also quite happy it consented to be relocated to the great outdoors from our bedroom, rather than squashed.
Kelly and I have decided to do an overnight run to Victoria in the not too distant, so I can get some training for the mentoring gig–group facilitation skills basically.
I was supposed to do this in June but then a different commitment reared its rather alluring head, beckoning us to Osoyoos. Which makes two trips in June, because we are also going to the Locus Awards.
We are restricting ourselves to weekend jaunts because our travel focus (and vacation days, and travel savings) is all about big trip to Sicily at the end of the year. The three mini-jaunts will all be really fun, though. I’ve barely spent any time in Victoria since 2000 or so, I love love love the South Okanagan and the reason we’re going to the Locus Awards Ceremony again is that it was a really terrific experience last year.
The get out of towniness of it all will also provide a good break from the mighty routine. It has been especially nose-to-grindstone here lately; I got out with Barb on Mother’s Day, and am keeping up with Italian class, but have otherwise been pretty cloistered. Which is something I plan to work on, any minute now.
In the meantime, Okanagan Grapes!
So many of my students are very ambitious. Ten lectures, a pile of writing assignments and a workshop simply aren’t enough for them. And one thing that happens frequently in my courses is that someone will ask me about a topic, in one class, that I’ve written a lecture for, in another. So I make some of that material available here.
Recent Essays & FAQ responses:
Writer FAQ: Should I revise my manuscript to make it more marketable?
Teaching writing is like… the car metaphor essay.
And because one car metaphor deserves another, the spark plugs of fiction.
Older material:
Qualities of prose: a list of things I look for when I’m judging the line-by-line writing in a manuscript.
Eye Bookisms: Being a technical article on the overuse of eye-related imagery and action.
Revision, from Macro to Micro. This is a tech writers’ technique that can work nicely on fiction.
Not all drafts are created equal: a few thoughts on qualitative grading.
The Science-Magic Continuum
Setting the Stage (setting in speculative fiction)
A Question of Character
Plot – What’s the Problem?
Revision and Marketing.
What Makes a Book Good?
Blackmail in fiction.
Like a lot of writers, I often feel I should read more. Which is ridiculous, in a way: I read research books and novels and mountains of student fiction. But there’s always more, and I want to keep up with my friends’ books, and learn all of history evar, except the parts that bore me stiff.
So I review. This makes me responsible to others for the reading, and I’ve always had the good fortune to review for editors who give me a lot of latitude to pick books I expect to like heartily, or even love. (I have no interest in reading bad books or panning same.) I get a deadline and a free copy and a financial carrot for pushing something I’d do anyway to the top of the pile. Ideally, everyone wins.
In recent weeks this strategy has led to my reviewing Lyda Morehouse’s wonderful AngelLINK prequel, Resurrection Code and M.K. Hobson’s delectable bustlepunk romance-romp The Hidden Goddess. Now I’m onto a delightful and surprising mystery, by Wayne Arthurson, Fall from Grace
Still. I should read more, dammitall. And when I’m reading fiction I think I should be reading research stuff, and when I’m deep in a history book I think about how I write novels and should read them. And someone gave me that book out of the goodness of their heart, and I asked for that one as a birthday present… oh, I know it’s ridiculous. Shut up, inner voice, and all that.
But this month I’ve taken that fortune-cookie advice I mentioned awhile ago, by way of a discussion of characterization and revision, to heart. (It’s the one that goes, roughly: “if you want something you’ve never had, you have to try something you’ve never done.”)
I’ve never ever been one to read more than one book at a time. I’ve always been a serially monogamous reader; I’ve met people who claim to have three, four, even five books on the go and goggled at those individuals like wondrous marvels of nature, like chameleons or sperm whales or Venus flytraps. Now I’m making an effort to go poly: to have one novel and one non-fiction book happening at once. So, along with the Arthurson, I’m poking my way through American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century
Normally when I catch myself shoulding, I do try to go for more of a “Shut up, inner voice!” type of strategy. But fictional and factual texts satisfy related but different parts of my brain. I feel not only happier but healthier when I’m reading history or science or political theory, just as I do when I eat a delicious and thoroughly wholesome meal: I feel smarter, sharper, enriched by the experience. A fine novel, on the other hand, adds to happiness too, and it certainly doesn’t make me feel dumb. But the experience falls more in line with a hot bath, a good massage… there’s something sensual about it. Both are recreational and both are work, but non-fiction is meat and an invigorating hike, I think, while fiction is tropical fruit and sun on a beach.
My hope is that by reading a little of both, on an almost daily basis, my overall intake of books will go up. Since I track my reading so closely, I’ll be able to tell you how it goes, once January is here.
I had good light a few days ago when some of the neighbors stayed out past dawn and went for a ramble on Woodland Drive.
photo by Kristy Boyce
The Color of Paradox
The Cage