State of the Mole
Feb. 3rd, 2010 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennySo.
The Goblin Emperor is safely Someone Else's Problem for a while, and I have no idea of what novel I'm going to write next (except, of course, for A Reckoning of Men with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala, but we're not doing that until she's cleared at least some of the carnage off her decks*). Partly this is because The Goblin Emperor is a standalone. Partly this is because Cormorant Child, the novel which would be next up if writing was a purely rational, efficiency-oriented profession, has a lot of the same thematic issues and concerns as The Goblin Emperor, and I want a break from the problem of kingship. (Honestly, who do I think I am? W. Shakespeare?) Also, Cormorant Child still won't tell me what its shiny sfnal set-piece in Chapter Two is, and I think that means that there's something back there that isn't quite done yet. Collaboration between two authors is much easier than collaboration between an author's conscious and subconscious. Unlike my subconscious, Bear uses her words.)
I'm okay with everything on the novel board being TBA. Because it means I've got something for which I have been yearning for at least a year and a half: time to write short stories.
I wrote three and a half short stories last year (using the term "year" pretty loosely, as I can't actually recall whether Bear and I wrote "Mongoose in 2009 or technically 2008). "White Charles," "After the Dragon," "On Faith" (Shadow Unit 3.00), and "Mongoose." Now, my finished-to-published ratio there is looking pretty awesome, but, however gratifying to my ego, that's not actually my point. My point is that I wrote three and a half short stories last year, and that's a woefully sparse output.
I have two finished short stories which won't sell, "Coyote Gets His Own Back" (my beloved zombie coyote story) and "Imposters" (a Ghoul Hunters story), and two which sold in 2006 (to two different markets) and have yet to see the light of day. But essentially, along with having barely any new output in the past couple years, I have no backlog, either. In one sense, this is good, as it means all those stories from the (halcyon) days (of yore) when I had fifteen circulating at once have either sold or been trunked, but it makes me feel like I'm not doing my job right.
ERGO, my goal for this next chunk of 2010 is to write some damn short stories. And to aid me in this endeavor, well, I think we need a list:
1. "Hope Is Stronger Than Love," Shadow Unit: Everyone had had to bring a brown-bag lunch.
Comments: Although this episode isn't scheduled to air for two years and two days, it's also the only short-fiction obligation I have at the moment, and also it seems to want to talk to me (2100 words since I finished TGE on Sunday). So it's the first thing I want to do.
2. Booth stories
(a.) "Thirdhop Scarp": The current owner of Thirdhop Scarp claims that the name is a contraction of "third hope," but this is etymologically dubious in the extreme; still improbable but far more likely is the local explanation: that if you fall off the escarpment, you reach the bottom in three hops.
(b.) "The Mercy Seat" (no, this cannot be its real title, but it is a story about the electric chair): The terrible irony in Katharine Blood's name became apparent in her death.
(c.) "To Die for Moonlight": I cut off her head before I buried her.
(d.) "The Moon Key": Queen Titania was dead.
(e.) "The Bone Jesus": There had been a bit of difficulty at the university.
Comments: (2a) is seriously almost done, if I could just figure out how to string the bits together into a coherent story.
The benefits of this meme immediately become apparent, as I begin to wonder whether (2c) and (2d) might not be the same story.
(2e) is not a Booth story per se, but it is clear to me that it belongs in Booth's universe.
3. "Hollywood and Vine: A Still Life with Wolves": Wolves prowl the Sunset Strip. You can tell them by the way their eyes reflect the street lights.
4. "The Werewolf Laura Stiles": Callum pushed back from his desk violently, as if physical distance could get him farther away from the collection of mistakes currently masquerading as the English 201 midterm.
Comments: I have complete drafts of both (3) and (4), but feel that there's something wrong with both of them, like I was trying to describe an oliphaunt and only got as close as the elephants in Dumbo. If I can screw my courage to the sticking point and actually look at either of them again, possibly I can figure out what happened.
5. untitled: The windship Pellucid heeled over, her sails filling as they caught the wind called the Mariah, one of the winds that blew so steadily across the Abandon that they had been mapped more than a century before: the Mariah, the Medusa, and the Mother of Angels, which had another name among windship crews.
Comments: This was going to be for John Joseph Adams, who asked me for a wizard story, but I've already flubbed the deadline. Sorry, JJA; I suck. I still want to write it, though.
6. Ghoul Hunters
(a.) "Under Babylon": Mick Sharpton's howl of outrage--"oh fuck no!"--was clearly audible in the junior agents' office.
(b.) "The Brides of Nyarlathotep": The Renault case refused to break. Snapshots of the victims had gone up on the corkboard in the briefing room, one by one, and most of the agents in the Bureau of Paranormal Investigations' southeast hub could recite their names by heart: Lydia Renault, age 27; Mary Anne Sumner, age 24; Dale Kelton, age 25; Joella Barber, age 24. And they were waiting, sick and helpless, for number five.
(c.) "Crossing Styx": Think of it as a vacation," Jamie suggested. Mick's reply was physically impossible, but very creative.
Comments: I don't know. I want to write more stories about Mick & Jamie (whom you can meet, if you haven't already, in "A Night in Electric Squidland"), but it may be that I need to write Blue Lace Agate before I can do anything else--and Blue Lace Agate belongs in the long fiction list, which I am not talking about today.
7. "The Tale of Two Dead Mice": Once upon a time, there were two dead mice, white and small and sleek.
Comments: This is obviously a response to Bear's Bone and Jewel Creatures--and I have absolutely no problem with that if the damn thing would grow a story around Morphine and Aigre-doux, the two dead mice, and their nemesis, the dread Isabeau, a dead cat with diamond eyes.
8. "(Un)fallen": The pain is intense, sharp, and localizes itself gradually, as Vij comes closer to consciousness, into a throbbing knot on the back of ser skull, just behind ser left ear. Se reaches to touch it, groans as that wakes a whole new set of pains through ser left shoulder and arm, and only then wonders why se is corporeal at all.
Comments: Another one for which I've got a draft, but there's something wrong. Not the SAME wrong as (3) and (4), but wrong. In this case, I think there's something missing, but I still don't know what it is.
9. "The Queen in Winter": There were five queens in the creche. Beulah, Pauline, Camille, Thelma, and Katrina. Beulah was the favorite, and one night after the nurses had gone to bed, the others ganged up on her. There were only four queens after that. ("The Queen in Winter")
10. "The Queen of Liverpool": The Mistral Freighter D35-692N-C, Queen of Liverpool, had been grounded for thirty years, since the successful implementation of Chen and Tiedemann's q-curve drive had made her and all her sisters obsolete.
11. "The Skyscrapers of Bianch'Elen": Long ago, in a world none of them can remember, the vampires were taught to dance.
12. untitled: The crime-scene tape was gone from the basketball court.
13. untitled: The woman in my office had been dead for five days when I found her. The smell was unbearable, but the ghost was worse.
14. untitled: "What are you doing, sister-wife?"
15. untitled: On [date], in the former asteroid-city of [name], in what appears to have been a pleasure garden, five bodies were discovered: one woman, two men, and two children.
Comments: (9)-(15) are all airy nothings which, thus far, are refusing to accept local habitations and names. And, yes, each and every one of them is driving me nuts.
16. "Dragons of Earth and Sky": no first line yet
Comments: I've got the earrings, meteorite and dinosaur bone. Now I need the dragons.
And now, having laid this all out, I'm off to take the Elder Saucepan to the ophthalmologist. Perhaps all the driving (45 minutes each way) will help this roiled muddle clarify.
Hey. A girl can hope.
---
*A writing career is like a pirate ship. Discuss.
The Goblin Emperor is safely Someone Else's Problem for a while, and I have no idea of what novel I'm going to write next (except, of course, for A Reckoning of Men with
matociquala, but we're not doing that until she's cleared at least some of the carnage off her decks*). Partly this is because The Goblin Emperor is a standalone. Partly this is because Cormorant Child, the novel which would be next up if writing was a purely rational, efficiency-oriented profession, has a lot of the same thematic issues and concerns as The Goblin Emperor, and I want a break from the problem of kingship. (Honestly, who do I think I am? W. Shakespeare?) Also, Cormorant Child still won't tell me what its shiny sfnal set-piece in Chapter Two is, and I think that means that there's something back there that isn't quite done yet. Collaboration between two authors is much easier than collaboration between an author's conscious and subconscious. Unlike my subconscious, Bear uses her words.)I'm okay with everything on the novel board being TBA. Because it means I've got something for which I have been yearning for at least a year and a half: time to write short stories.
I wrote three and a half short stories last year (using the term "year" pretty loosely, as I can't actually recall whether Bear and I wrote "Mongoose in 2009 or technically 2008). "White Charles," "After the Dragon," "On Faith" (Shadow Unit 3.00), and "Mongoose." Now, my finished-to-published ratio there is looking pretty awesome, but, however gratifying to my ego, that's not actually my point. My point is that I wrote three and a half short stories last year, and that's a woefully sparse output.
I have two finished short stories which won't sell, "Coyote Gets His Own Back" (my beloved zombie coyote story) and "Imposters" (a Ghoul Hunters story), and two which sold in 2006 (to two different markets) and have yet to see the light of day. But essentially, along with having barely any new output in the past couple years, I have no backlog, either. In one sense, this is good, as it means all those stories from the (halcyon) days (of yore) when I had fifteen circulating at once have either sold or been trunked, but it makes me feel like I'm not doing my job right.
ERGO, my goal for this next chunk of 2010 is to write some damn short stories. And to aid me in this endeavor, well, I think we need a list:
1. "Hope Is Stronger Than Love," Shadow Unit: Everyone had had to bring a brown-bag lunch.
Comments: Although this episode isn't scheduled to air for two years and two days, it's also the only short-fiction obligation I have at the moment, and also it seems to want to talk to me (2100 words since I finished TGE on Sunday). So it's the first thing I want to do.
2. Booth stories
(a.) "Thirdhop Scarp": The current owner of Thirdhop Scarp claims that the name is a contraction of "third hope," but this is etymologically dubious in the extreme; still improbable but far more likely is the local explanation: that if you fall off the escarpment, you reach the bottom in three hops.
(b.) "The Mercy Seat" (no, this cannot be its real title, but it is a story about the electric chair): The terrible irony in Katharine Blood's name became apparent in her death.
(c.) "To Die for Moonlight": I cut off her head before I buried her.
(d.) "The Moon Key": Queen Titania was dead.
(e.) "The Bone Jesus": There had been a bit of difficulty at the university.
Comments: (2a) is seriously almost done, if I could just figure out how to string the bits together into a coherent story.
The benefits of this meme immediately become apparent, as I begin to wonder whether (2c) and (2d) might not be the same story.
(2e) is not a Booth story per se, but it is clear to me that it belongs in Booth's universe.
3. "Hollywood and Vine: A Still Life with Wolves": Wolves prowl the Sunset Strip. You can tell them by the way their eyes reflect the street lights.
4. "The Werewolf Laura Stiles": Callum pushed back from his desk violently, as if physical distance could get him farther away from the collection of mistakes currently masquerading as the English 201 midterm.
Comments: I have complete drafts of both (3) and (4), but feel that there's something wrong with both of them, like I was trying to describe an oliphaunt and only got as close as the elephants in Dumbo. If I can screw my courage to the sticking point and actually look at either of them again, possibly I can figure out what happened.
5. untitled: The windship Pellucid heeled over, her sails filling as they caught the wind called the Mariah, one of the winds that blew so steadily across the Abandon that they had been mapped more than a century before: the Mariah, the Medusa, and the Mother of Angels, which had another name among windship crews.
Comments: This was going to be for John Joseph Adams, who asked me for a wizard story, but I've already flubbed the deadline. Sorry, JJA; I suck. I still want to write it, though.
6. Ghoul Hunters
(a.) "Under Babylon": Mick Sharpton's howl of outrage--"oh fuck no!"--was clearly audible in the junior agents' office.
(b.) "The Brides of Nyarlathotep": The Renault case refused to break. Snapshots of the victims had gone up on the corkboard in the briefing room, one by one, and most of the agents in the Bureau of Paranormal Investigations' southeast hub could recite their names by heart: Lydia Renault, age 27; Mary Anne Sumner, age 24; Dale Kelton, age 25; Joella Barber, age 24. And they were waiting, sick and helpless, for number five.
(c.) "Crossing Styx": Think of it as a vacation," Jamie suggested. Mick's reply was physically impossible, but very creative.
Comments: I don't know. I want to write more stories about Mick & Jamie (whom you can meet, if you haven't already, in "A Night in Electric Squidland"), but it may be that I need to write Blue Lace Agate before I can do anything else--and Blue Lace Agate belongs in the long fiction list, which I am not talking about today.
7. "The Tale of Two Dead Mice": Once upon a time, there were two dead mice, white and small and sleek.
Comments: This is obviously a response to Bear's Bone and Jewel Creatures--and I have absolutely no problem with that if the damn thing would grow a story around Morphine and Aigre-doux, the two dead mice, and their nemesis, the dread Isabeau, a dead cat with diamond eyes.
8. "(Un)fallen": The pain is intense, sharp, and localizes itself gradually, as Vij comes closer to consciousness, into a throbbing knot on the back of ser skull, just behind ser left ear. Se reaches to touch it, groans as that wakes a whole new set of pains through ser left shoulder and arm, and only then wonders why se is corporeal at all.
Comments: Another one for which I've got a draft, but there's something wrong. Not the SAME wrong as (3) and (4), but wrong. In this case, I think there's something missing, but I still don't know what it is.
9. "The Queen in Winter": There were five queens in the creche. Beulah, Pauline, Camille, Thelma, and Katrina. Beulah was the favorite, and one night after the nurses had gone to bed, the others ganged up on her. There were only four queens after that. ("The Queen in Winter")
10. "The Queen of Liverpool": The Mistral Freighter D35-692N-C, Queen of Liverpool, had been grounded for thirty years, since the successful implementation of Chen and Tiedemann's q-curve drive had made her and all her sisters obsolete.
11. "The Skyscrapers of Bianch'Elen": Long ago, in a world none of them can remember, the vampires were taught to dance.
12. untitled: The crime-scene tape was gone from the basketball court.
13. untitled: The woman in my office had been dead for five days when I found her. The smell was unbearable, but the ghost was worse.
14. untitled: "What are you doing, sister-wife?"
15. untitled: On [date], in the former asteroid-city of [name], in what appears to have been a pleasure garden, five bodies were discovered: one woman, two men, and two children.
Comments: (9)-(15) are all airy nothings which, thus far, are refusing to accept local habitations and names. And, yes, each and every one of them is driving me nuts.
16. "Dragons of Earth and Sky": no first line yet
Comments: I've got the earrings, meteorite and dinosaur bone. Now I need the dragons.
And now, having laid this all out, I'm off to take the Elder Saucepan to the ophthalmologist. Perhaps all the driving (45 minutes each way) will help this roiled muddle clarify.
Hey. A girl can hope.
---
*A writing career is like a pirate ship. Discuss.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 08:52 pm (UTC)This is all under control.
(I suddenly want an Illya icon that says something like "kicking ass (and taking names)")
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 09:12 pm (UTC)(aaaaaaaahahahahahahaha! I slay me. But seriously, that sounds like a super fun thing I would read with glee.)
Sixes a and c tie for best first line, so I'm automatically intrigued by the universe, too.
In sum, you are a very brave author with very big eyes, to take on this to-do list.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 09:15 pm (UTC)I very much sympathize. I have a standalone novel I really want to write, The Iron Rose, but I'm going to need a break from royal politics after I finish the Victorian Onyx Court book, and probably some more time to get over PTSD from In Ashes Lie -- which, like TIR and your two, is about the problem of kingship. (Or queenship, as the case may be.)
On the other hand, it does mean I have another reason to look forward to reading TGE; I'm curious to see what you have to say on the topic.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 09:48 pm (UTC)Ahem. Sorry. What I mean is, yes, please do what is best for your sanity here.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 10:57 pm (UTC)ETA: Not, of course, that patriarchal cultures cannot have queens, as a quick look at the history of England (for example) will demonstrate. But there are no empresses in their own right in the history of the Elflands.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-07 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-07 11:17 pm (UTC)And I, of course, was thinking of Shakespeare, in reference to whom it is always discussed as the Problem of Kingship. One could certainly make a New Historicist argument that it ought to be sovereignty there as well, what with all the reigning queens littering the landscape, but, well, it isn't.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-07 11:21 pm (UTC)One of the things I find the most fascinating about sixteenth-century Europe is the way that, for a whole confluence of reasons, the landscape was littered with reigning queens and female Heirs Possible and the occasional woman (Diane de Poitiers) who may not have had a crown but you couldn't tell it to look at her. I don't know of any other time period when there were so many of them at once.
*A writing career is like a pirate ship. Discuss.
Date: 2010-02-03 09:22 pm (UTC)(On shipboard, at least the victims have the excuse of seeing them in action only during attacks, where the captain really did control it all.)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 09:48 pm (UTC)There are worse things, but still, I do enjoy this kind of post more than the dearth of them on my own lj would indicate, and I thought I'd say.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 03:48 pm (UTC)Also, the windship story sounds facinating, as does "The Tale of Two Dead Mice." For some reason, Aigre-doux sounds like the perfect name for a dead mouse. :-)
~Megan
no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 10:44 pm (UTC)*whimpers*
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 11:38 pm (UTC)Also, it's ivory, and not bone, but have a picture (http://www.langantiques.com/category/90/4/item/90-1-1511/).
no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 02:54 am (UTC)Ahahahahahahaha. Oh lordy. ::wipes eyes::
no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 04:00 am (UTC)This sounds intriguing....
Forgive me for asking, but when will Goblin Emperor be published
Date: 2010-02-04 05:54 am (UTC)Just wondering when I should look for Goblin Emperor in the shelves.
Thanks,
a fan
Re: Forgive me for asking, but when will Goblin Emperor be published
Date: 2010-02-04 07:26 pm (UTC)And be assured that I will be making LOUD ANNOUNCEMENTS when I have firm data.
Elder saucepan?
Date: 2010-02-04 04:57 pm (UTC)Since I have my own Aged Beastie, this is apparently the thing I just can't help but comment on.
the grrly grrl
Re: Elder saucepan?
Date: 2010-02-04 07:25 pm (UTC)(Also, that's not the wrong part of the post at all. *g* )
Re: Elder saucepan?
Date: 2010-02-09 04:40 pm (UTC)the grrly grrl
no subject
Date: 2010-02-05 03:24 am (UTC)