writing

Plotting and planning

The thing I find hardest about writing is plot (or possibly structure, or possibly both); so this year my main aim is to get better at constructing a story which hangs together well, especially at novel length.

Historically I’ve tended to just get on and write, and then fix everything in editing; but that means that editing can wind up looking like a full rewrite, by the time I’ve corrected the structural issues that result (for me) from writing that way, and fixed up all the gaping plot holes. I do really love the thing that happens when I’m getting words down onto the screen at speed and letting my brain carry me away; but I’m also fed up with a first draft that looks quite so unformed.

So I’ve been reading a lot about plot and story structure (best book so far: John Yorke’s Into The Woods, though ‘best’ here may just mean ‘fits best with my brain’, and trying to use all of it to write an outline for my next project, which involves London and dragons and too many secrets. After an initial flaily period it’s starting to come together, and I’m looking forward to getting cracking on the writing. But I’m determined to sort out the holes I can still see first, this time, rather than putting them out of mind and ‘just writing’. So it might be another few days yet.

writing

Furthest Tales of the City

Look what arrived in the post for me!

Furthest Tales of the City

Stories by some splendid writers including me:

Furthest Tales of the City contents

I haven’t read it yet as it only arrived yesterday, but am greatly looking forward to it. Some of the titles look especially interesting, but I may have to start with Helen Angove’s story.

(Buy it here from the publishers, Obverse Books, in paperback or ebook form.)

writing

Iris on Mars

Current writing news: Iris Wildthyme of Mars (in which I have a story) is now out from Obverse Press in ebook form and available for preorder (pub date 30 Sept) in dead tree form. The cover art is awesome.

Iris Wildthyme of Mars FrontCover

I haven’t read my copy yet (I am in the throes of a Dorothy L. Sayers re-read; previous evidence suggests that it is useless even trying to extract myself before I reach the end) but am greatly looking forward to it. There are plenty of fine authors in there.

Philip Purser-Hallard, the editor, is also editor of another new Obverse collection, Tales of the Great Detectives (ebook or dead tree pre-order (30 Sept again)). So you might do well to read that one too (as I will be doing) (dammit, I need to read faster).

writing

And another one

Hurrah, another story out.

http://www.fictionmagazines.com/shop/realm-issues/new-realm-vol-02-08/

(Only just realised this, despite having looked before, due to their website being a bit counter-intuitive.)

In other news, I have begun revising the novel I’m working on at the moment. It is a bit like trying to put together a really big jigsaw puzzle in several dimensions, when you keep discovering that some of the pieces are missing, and other pieces that aren’t missing are actually from another puzzle altogether.

writing

Stories out, and sitting in fields

I have a couple of stories out in various places right now, should you be interested:

  • “The Loyal Dragon” in kids’ (age range 9-17) SFF magazine FrostFire Worlds (May 2014 issue). It has a dragon in it! (I have a long-term fondness for dragons.) Only available in print, and I suspect UK shipping will be expensive.
  • “Breaking Free” in Outposts of Beyond (July 2014 issue, also print only). This is set in the same world as my story ‘Blocking’ (published in Strange Bedfellows).
  • And forthcoming sometime soon in New Realms, “A Gift of Memory”, about gifts, trust, and mistakes made and forgotten.

In other news, I spent much of the last couple of weeks camping in fields. Firstly with a bunch of unschooling types down in Dorset (just me and Leon). Which was lovely, apart from the bit where Leon came down with a stomach bug. (In a tent. Not fun.) Still, at least the weather was good.

Then there was Glastonbury! For the 12th time for me (since 1997) and the 2nd for Leon. The weather was not so good there (intermittent rain, but I’ve certainly been there in much worse conditions) but the festival was as ever fantastic regardless of a bit of mud and damp. Leon was particularly keen on the Kidzfield, and on Shangri-Heaven early on Sunday night, where there were angels with bubbles and lots of running around space. Photos here.

Uncategorised

Review: The Goblin Emperor

The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison, has been on my to-read list for a while. This is partly due to seeing generally positive things about it in many places, and partly because Katherine Addison was previously known as Sarah Monette. Sarah Monette wrote Melusine, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed, but by the time I discovered this, the remaining three novels in the series were annoyingly out of print.* The Goblin Emperor finally got bumped up to the top of the list after reading this review by Justin Landon, which mentioned both that it’s a work of genius, and, more importantly, that the protagonist, Maia, is actually nice.

As Landon observes, good-person protagonists are an increasing rarity in spec-fic. One of the other books I read recently was God’s War (Bel Dame Apocrypha #1), by Kameron Hurley. It too, in a different way, is an excellent book, but it’s a grim read, and protagonist Nyx is a long way from any descriptor like “nice” or “good”. I freely admit that I prefer my reading matter a bit on the positive side, and recently that seems to have been in short supply.

Anyway. I started out on The Goblin Emperor, and I fell in love, ooh, about three pages in. Maybe two. I galloped greedily and joyously through the first 3/4 of it, and then I slowed way down in the despairing knowledge that it was going to run out, and there are no sequels or anything (yet? please let it be ‘yet’). Then I did come to the end, and I stared thoughtfully at my Kindle, and then I hit the “go to start” button and I read it all over again. I managed not to read it a third time after that, but it was a close-run thing.

For a more thorough review, try Strange Horizons or The Book Smugglers or Tor (spoiler: they all loved it too). But what did I love about it? I loved the detailed world-building (airships and court politics and social structures and all the rest of it), and the gradual reveal of new parts and new aspects to existing parts. It’s beautifully handled, with confusion created and resolved at just the right rate. I loved Maia, the protagonist. (I really loved Maia.) He is, as Landon said, genuinely a good person. Not a perfect person; but someone trying to do their best, trying to do good in the world. I loved the racial and gender politics; again, beautifully and lightly handled. I loved the court politics and the wonderfully-observed government structures. I loved the interpersonal relationships. I also loved that it didn’t go for the “race to the grim” option; bad things happen, but they don’t feel gratuitous, and they don’t feel like the author is trying to demonstrate how TOUGH they are**.

Above everything else, I loved the feel of it; as several of the reviewers above mention, it is a warm, satisfying book that left me feeling better about the world.

I cannot recommend this highly enough, if you’re remotely into fantasy. And I really, desperately hope that there’s a sequel. In the meantime, I might just have to read it again.

* After reading this book, I now finally have them all on their way second-hand.
** I have this beef with quite a few recent spec-fic novels.

activism, writing

Pamphlets, folios, and zines

On a wall at the Bishopsgate Institute today, while visiting the London Radical Bookfair, I saw a quote from Voltaire:

“Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It is the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.”

Inside the hall, folios (albeit only single-volume) were piled high on booksellers’ tables. Weighty, academic books with lots of long words. Now, I have nothing against academic books with long words (I no longer buy them, because I don’t read them*, but I have nothing against them), but Voltaire, I think, had a point. Rare is the currently-unconvinced individual whose mind will be changed by this stuff. I suppose attendees at the London Radical Bookfair are likely to be the already-converted, so perhaps the booksellers simply know their market. But I’m their market too (aren’t I?) and I wasn’t buying.

Where, too, was the fiction? Long or short. Perhaps I am biased in my faith that stories can change the world; but if they can, no one here was doing much to try that out.

(Honourable exception: the Letterbox Library, who stock kids’ books but no adult. And I did see a bit of poetry. I even bought some, along with something which claims to be a mixture of local history, folklore, and weird fiction, partly because I liked what I read of it, and partly out of relief that it was there at all.)

Upstairs were the zines. Plenty of pamphlets here; beautiful ones, too. And yet — what happened to the words? I’m sure zines used to have a mixture: plenty of just-word stuff, some half-and-half, some comic-style graphical storytelling, some straight art. Everything I saw on Saturday was heavy on the graphics end of things. Gorgeous, but word-light. Which is fine (if not my thing), but still — where have the words gone?

Online, possibly. Maybe words are better suited to screens; maybe artists have more incentive to create physical objects with their art. It seems faintly unsatisfying to me – why shouldn’t writers** want or get to create physical things too? Do the readers of plain words just not want physical things? Or is this the reflection of the ebook era?

After all, when it comes to getting the word out there, online has the edge, no question. If Voltaire were writing now, his pamphlets would be blogs. Perhaps, then, that is the explanation. The pamphlets and words and even the fiction live online, and it is the art and the long, deeply academic works that still need a physical form. Maybe that is a good thing, or at any rate not a bad one; maybe it is neither good nor bad, but just a thing.

And yet, I do wish that I’d been able to come away with my bag full of short stories and long ones and pamphlet-sized calls to action.

* The first anarchist bookfair I went to was in San Francisco, in 1999. I bought a compendium of the zine Temp Slave, and a book of anarchist essays. Temp Slave is dog-eared at the corners, and undoubtedly affected my attitude to the world of work; the anarchist essays remain unread.
** Non-artist writers, I mean, who do not also want to draw.

writing

Iris Wildthyme of Mars

The author list for “Iris Wildthyme of Mars” (ed Philip Purser-Hallard), due out this summer from Obverse Books, was announced this week, and I am on it!

Iris is a splendid character to write, and I enjoyed putting the story together. (Writing for me often feels like that; like locking pieces of idea into one another to create a finished structure. I may be influenced in this notion by time recently spent with Duplo blocks.) It even has a permaculture genesis…

I’m looking forward to reading the other stories (I’ve already read a first draft of one of them, and it was great; and I’m familiar with previous work from several of the other authors), and to the book coming out. Watch this space, and so on.

writing

Strange Bedfellows

The anthology Strange Bedfellows, from Bundoran Press, is on sale now (wherever books are sold, and also specifically direct from the publisher or from Amazon UK). My story Blocking features it.

It’s an anthology of specifically political SF, from a broad range of political perspectives. My story concerns spacefaring anarchists (as may not be terribly surprising to anyone who is familiar with my political biases), and the making of decisions, personal and collective. There’s a review of the book as a whole over on Black Gate. I’ve been reading the rest of the stories (not quite all done yet as my author copy only arrived recently) and it’s a thought-provoking read all round.>