Saturday, and I'm garrulous.
Apr. 12th, 2008 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyToday, I am full of virtupitude. It is not yet noon, and I have already gone to the bank, the post office, the FedEx outpost, and the pet supply store, PLUS caught Quicken up to date and stared with opprobrium at the mmpb page proofs of The Mirador which the FedEx ninjas brought me.
If anybody's noticed a typo, please leave a comment.
Yesterday, the Post Office ninjas brought me a CueCat from LibraryThing. And I neutered it myself. Despite this amateur hardware hacking, it works like a dream. Expect my LibraryThing catalogue to expand by leaps and bounds.
(N.b., since I feel like I should say it somewhere: I don't use any of LibraryThing's more social functions. Just the books, ma'am.)
Books read recently:
The Order of the Death's Head
The Architect of Genocide
Flora Segunda
Disapproving Rabbits
Now We Are Sick
The Wee Free Men
Currently reading:
The Demon and the City
Talking to the Dead
The I Ching
So any number of people are talking about first novels (and Jay has a poll!), and I figure I can play along with that game.
Novel -3 (as in, I thought of it as a novel at the time, although it was probably something like 8,000 words max): The Pendant Quest. This is the one I wrote when I was twelve. It's the Belgariad with the serial numbers insufficiently filed off crossed with, um, A Little Princess. Which tells you exactly what I was reading when I was twelve. I finished it, submitted it to a local children's writing contest, and took second place.
Novel -2: High Priestess of the Timeless Gods (N.b., my complete suckitude at titles started young.) Same as -3 except substitute The Tombs of Atuan for the Belgariad and Dragonsong for A Little Princess. And I was fourteen.
Novel -1: Demon's Rat. This one is almost a real novel, about 40k. The adventures of a gigantic rat constructed by a trapped demon. There's also elves and minotaurs and Hell's voicemail system. It's completely cracktastic, but I feel relatively confident in saying that it's all mine.
Novel 0: The Fourth King. Urban fantasy. I wrote this novel my senior year of high school as, basically, an independent study. 97k. Here's where the unlikeable borderline sociopathic protagonist first shows up. Also the trauma and the angst. Also some rather unpleasant misogyny issues (two female characters, one of whom is the villain and the other of whom is a gold-plated bitch). I submitted this one to Tor and got a very nice rejection letter. Subsequently, I have discovered that not only do I hate all of the secondary characters, but also that the book does not work. It has bad parareality problems. "Write what you know" is problematic advice at best, but this one falls into the "don't write what you don't know" category. I didn't know the first thing about what I was writing about, and it shows. Excruciatingly. There are bits and pieces of it that actually seem to belong in a different book, and that book may get written someday. We'll see.
Novel 1: [Mélusine & The Virtu]. I've told this story before; my first two books started off as one book. That's the book that got me representation.
Novel 2: The Mirador. I wrote it while waiting for my eventual agent (who is not my current agent for reasons which, as Fraser says, do not need exploring at this juncture, because they're both complicated and actually not interesting--no drama here) to respond.
Novel 3: Mélusine. A year later, having gotten some nice rejections on Novel 1, my then-agent suggested I might want to take a look at it and see if there was anything I wanted to change. I started a white-page rewrite. Mélusine is longer than the original novel and has about half the material. This is the first novel I sold.
Novel 4: The Virtu. Ditto. I got the contract for the first two Doctrine of Labyrinths books while working on this one.
Novel 2 revisited: The Mirador got extensively revised after it sold, including an entire new subplot.
Novel 5: Corambis. First novel I wrote, ground up, after selling it. Which has been a learning experience and then some.
The foregoing is only talking about novels that actually got finished. There are several failed novels between -1 and 0, and at least one between 0 and 1. There are currently two half-finished novels, Cormorant Child and The Emperor of the Elflands, one of which is, so help me blue fuzzy thing, going to be Novel 6.
Also conspicuously absent from this discussion are my short stories, but I didn't start writing those successfully until after I'd finished Novel 1 anyway. I wanted to be a novelist from the get-go.
If anybody's noticed a typo, please leave a comment.
Yesterday, the Post Office ninjas brought me a CueCat from LibraryThing. And I neutered it myself. Despite this amateur hardware hacking, it works like a dream. Expect my LibraryThing catalogue to expand by leaps and bounds.
(N.b., since I feel like I should say it somewhere: I don't use any of LibraryThing's more social functions. Just the books, ma'am.)
Books read recently:
The Order of the Death's Head
The Architect of Genocide
Flora Segunda
Disapproving Rabbits
Now We Are Sick
The Wee Free Men
Currently reading:
The Demon and the City
Talking to the Dead
The I Ching
So any number of people are talking about first novels (and Jay has a poll!), and I figure I can play along with that game.
Novel -3 (as in, I thought of it as a novel at the time, although it was probably something like 8,000 words max): The Pendant Quest. This is the one I wrote when I was twelve. It's the Belgariad with the serial numbers insufficiently filed off crossed with, um, A Little Princess. Which tells you exactly what I was reading when I was twelve. I finished it, submitted it to a local children's writing contest, and took second place.
Novel -2: High Priestess of the Timeless Gods (N.b., my complete suckitude at titles started young.) Same as -3 except substitute The Tombs of Atuan for the Belgariad and Dragonsong for A Little Princess. And I was fourteen.
Novel -1: Demon's Rat. This one is almost a real novel, about 40k. The adventures of a gigantic rat constructed by a trapped demon. There's also elves and minotaurs and Hell's voicemail system. It's completely cracktastic, but I feel relatively confident in saying that it's all mine.
Novel 0: The Fourth King. Urban fantasy. I wrote this novel my senior year of high school as, basically, an independent study. 97k. Here's where the unlikeable borderline sociopathic protagonist first shows up. Also the trauma and the angst. Also some rather unpleasant misogyny issues (two female characters, one of whom is the villain and the other of whom is a gold-plated bitch). I submitted this one to Tor and got a very nice rejection letter. Subsequently, I have discovered that not only do I hate all of the secondary characters, but also that the book does not work. It has bad parareality problems. "Write what you know" is problematic advice at best, but this one falls into the "don't write what you don't know" category. I didn't know the first thing about what I was writing about, and it shows. Excruciatingly. There are bits and pieces of it that actually seem to belong in a different book, and that book may get written someday. We'll see.
Novel 1: [Mélusine & The Virtu]. I've told this story before; my first two books started off as one book. That's the book that got me representation.
Novel 2: The Mirador. I wrote it while waiting for my eventual agent (who is not my current agent for reasons which, as Fraser says, do not need exploring at this juncture, because they're both complicated and actually not interesting--no drama here) to respond.
Novel 3: Mélusine. A year later, having gotten some nice rejections on Novel 1, my then-agent suggested I might want to take a look at it and see if there was anything I wanted to change. I started a white-page rewrite. Mélusine is longer than the original novel and has about half the material. This is the first novel I sold.
Novel 4: The Virtu. Ditto. I got the contract for the first two Doctrine of Labyrinths books while working on this one.
Novel 2 revisited: The Mirador got extensively revised after it sold, including an entire new subplot.
Novel 5: Corambis. First novel I wrote, ground up, after selling it. Which has been a learning experience and then some.
The foregoing is only talking about novels that actually got finished. There are several failed novels between -1 and 0, and at least one between 0 and 1. There are currently two half-finished novels, Cormorant Child and The Emperor of the Elflands, one of which is, so help me blue fuzzy thing, going to be Novel 6.
Also conspicuously absent from this discussion are my short stories, but I didn't start writing those successfully until after I'd finished Novel 1 anyway. I wanted to be a novelist from the get-go.
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On Revison
Date: 2008-04-12 06:00 pm (UTC)When you write a novel length work do you revise chapter by chapter for content? As opposed to looking at the novel as a whole and seeing what parts you left out?
That's a bit unclear... when you revise do you revise scene by scene or look at your book as a whole and cut out bits you don't think fit?
Re: On Revison
Date: 2008-04-12 06:09 pm (UTC)(I know, that's not terribly helpful.)
My first revision pass always consists of reading through the book again, so that would be the scene by scene part. But I do also try to get enough distance from the thing to look at it as a whole. I tend to be much more a tree person than a forest person, so that part is hard for me.
Is that answering the question you asked?
Re: On Revison
Date: 2008-04-12 06:14 pm (UTC)Thanks
Re: On Revison
Date: 2008-04-12 06:16 pm (UTC)Re: On Revison
Date: 2008-04-12 06:18 pm (UTC)Re: On Revison
Date: 2008-04-12 06:37 pm (UTC)A reverse outline is where you take something you've already written (as, for example, a novel) and make an outline of it. So the beginning of Mélusine would look like:
I. Mildmay tells story of Silas Altamont
II. Felix quarrels with Robert and is exposed as a former prostitute
III. Mildmay meets Ginevra
And so on. And of course you can include as much or as little detail as you need.
It's very helpful if you're trying to look at overall structure. (I saved myself more than once when I was trying to work out the chronology of The Mirador and how the various plotlines intersected.) It also functions nicely as a crib sheet if you're trying to keep in your head how one scene relates to the book as a whole.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 06:07 pm (UTC)So, a girl who doesn't fit into her family's fisher hold and dreams of something better finds a nest of baby elder gods and goes on to win acceptance and friendship in a creepy temple? I would buy that.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 06:10 pm (UTC)Girl raised as priestess to creepy elder gods rebels (justifiably, since she's about to be sacrificed) with the help of a dragon and flies off to find acceptance and friendship somewhere else.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 06:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 06:15 pm (UTC)I need to finish my "teenage girl runs away with an escaped shoggoth" story, too.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 07:00 pm (UTC)I'd read it.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 07:06 pm (UTC)Demon's Rat sounds interesting.
hmm
Date: 2008-04-12 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 09:29 pm (UTC)And of course, with the right gadgetry, one could consult one's catalogue while standing in the bookstore. The mind reels.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-12 11:02 pm (UTC)I can already consult the catalogue whilst standing in the bookstore now that I've figured out how to upload the Access db to my PDA; but I could easily do the same thing with LT -- just export and upload a tab-delimited text file or something.
Hmmm. I can't tell whether I really want to do this or I just like the idea of having a cat-shaped barcode scanner. *g*
no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 02:52 am (UTC)Must look this up, now. That title deserves an unusually good book.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 07:59 am (UTC)It's not a typo, and we're not sure that it's something that can be changed at the mmpg page proof level. You may already know about it, in fact.
Regardless, there seems to be an inconsistency in when Mildmay says he got the black ribbon from Mehitabel for his hair. Compare The Virtu, p249 with The Mirador, p139.
It's not important, but you did ask.
Perri and Richard
no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 06:07 pm (UTC)And I would definitely read those old books.
i love your published work but..
Date: 2008-04-13 07:03 pm (UTC)Re: i love your published work but..
Date: 2008-04-13 08:04 pm (UTC)