Technical Difficulties

Diana Wynne Jones famously deduced that the horses of Fantasyland are vegetative bicycles. Here are some ways that real horses are anything but:

1. Horses are very large animals. This is something that you can know in the abstract, as we all do, and still be taken aback by when interacting with an actual horse. Horses take up space. Their heads are massive chunks of bone. Even when they're being affectionate, they're still a good eight to ten times larger than a human being, and they are proportionately stronger.

My perspective on large dogs has completely changed after two years of dressage lessons.

1a. Corrollary: horses have very large, hard, heavy, inflexible feet. Obviously, if one steps on you, it's going to hurt. But even a glancing accidental blow is likely to leave bruises. As I was bringing Milo in the other night, my foot happened to get in the way of his. (See above re: horses take up a lot of space.) Entirely accidental on both sides. And I ended up with a welt on my heel where the edge of his hoof hit me.

2. Horses are, on average, thousand pound herbivores. This means their digestive systems have to keep on trucking pretty much constantly. Which is to say, they are poop machines. And you want them to be. A horse who isn't pooping regularly (by
which I mean several times a day) is a horse who is in trouble.

Also, and I'm sorry to burst the bubble of everyone who grew up with My Little Ponies*, horses fart. Noxiously. A lot.

3. Horses are also thousand pound prey animals. They do not think like human beings. They also do not think like cats or dogs. Even a very calm, sensible horse is going to spook, and he's going to spook at things that make no sense. Milo is in general unflappable, but he has spooked, for no apparent reason, at tree stumps, a wood pile, and an elderly VW. (He's also spooked at the barn cat, but I can kind of see his point there. She did emerge from under the bench quite suddenly, so we'll ignore the fact that she's at best 1/100th of his size.) He's also spooked at himself.

4. Horses are creatures with opinions. The are, for instance, herd animals. A solitary horse is an unhappy horse. They will try to follow each other pretty much automatically, which can be awkward for their riders. Take away their pasture mate(s), and they're going to be distressed. They're likely to call for their absent friends. (One of the horses at the barn screams.) And in general, if they don't like something, they will find a way to let you know.

5. A horse's primary means of interacting with the world is her mouth. (Hard, heavy, inflexible feet, remember?) Anything that isn't a threat is likely to be something that needs to be tasted. Also, horses are opportunistc and greedy (see above re: the needs of their digestive systems). Anything that can be tasted, will be tasted. And eaten if possible.

To sum up: horses have presence. They take up space in the world. They are intensely biological. They have opinions (often very inconvenient ones). And they have needs, both physical and emotional. They get bored. They get scared. They get lonely. They are the farthest thing from vegetative bicycles you can imagine.


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*Completely OT, but can I just say how utterly creeped out I am by how thin My Little Ponies have gotten? (Compare the first link, which is current MLP, to the second two, which are '80s MLP.) I mean, seriously, Hasbro, WTF? They're PONIES, not heroin-chic fashion models. FEED THEM.

So, it's NaNoWriMo again.

(For those of you who do not know, that's National Novel Writing Month.)

In her post about the recent NaNoWriMo kerfuffle, Mary Robinette Kowal, explaining the benefits NaNoWriMo provided to her, said, "When you are getting your legs, writing long form is really intimidating."

Now, I don't doubt for a moment that this is true for Mary. It's her post and she has no reason to lie. But I read that and I thought, Wait, what? Long form is EASY. It's short form that's scary like whoa.

And then it occurred to me that perhaps this was worth unpacking.

When I started writing (at the ripe old age of eleven), I started writing novels. Or, well, "novels," since I doubt any of my first efforts was any longer than what I'd think of as a short story or maybe a novelette today. But for me, at eleven, they were novels, and they were what I instantly and automatically gravitated to when I started trying to write. I knew the old chestnut about "if you want to break into publishing, you have to write short stories," so I tried, on and off through high school and college. (And then there was the most poisonous form rejection letter known to humankind, and I stopped like a lab rat hit with an electric shock.) But I never got the hang of it. Short stories were scary and hard and I didn't understand them. Novels, I just flung myself at; I started dozens, and every time one broke down, I just started another. I finished maybe three or four (using the word "novel" loosely, remember) before I started writing Mélusine, and got more than 50k into at least two others, but I never stopped trying, and I never had any fundamental doubt that I could do it. (Doing it well was a different question, but that's also a different post.)

I didn't go back to short stories until 2000, when I got handed the old chestnut about "breaking into publishing" again, this time by my then-agent. And, serendipitously, I met elisem and her jewelry. (I sometimes think my ability to write short stories is really all Elise's fault.) The first successful short story I wrote, in 2000, was "Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans' Day", from one of her necklaces. The second was "Bringing Helena Back," which is the first Booth story. And, of course, obviously, I've gone on from there, but I've always felt like my grip on the form was tenuous; I'm never sure why one short story works and the next one doesn't. They're still scary and hard, and I still don't understand them very well, even though I've published nearly forty of them.

NaNoWriMo doesn't work for me because I'm a competitive, literal-minded over-achiever, and if I focus on word count, then word count is all I will get, and the novel will be drivel. (See also, Why Corambis Was Six Months Late.) This does not mean that I think NaNoWriMo is a bad thing in and of itself--and honestly, I don't have any right or ability to judge whether it's good or bad for other people. It's just bad for me.

All I wanted to say, really, was that if you're a beginning writer and NaNoWriMo doesn't work for you, that doesn't mean you can't write a novel.

Learning how to write is a never-ending process of trial and error. You have to try things to find out if they work for you. If they do, that's great. If they don't, it's not a disaster. It just means you try something else. There is no "right" way to do it; it's all down to what works for you and what doesn't. And nobody but you can make that call.

You want to know what my problem is? I write literary fiction about two women meeting in a train station and exchanging their life stories, except one of the women is an automaton and the other is a giant clockwork dragon. That's my problem, right there.

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ETA: A clarification or two:

1. I actually meant that statement as a synecdoche for my career as a whole more than as a complaint about this particular story.

2. I haven't finished writing this story yet, much less exhausted all the possible paying markets for it.

So thank you for all the comments of support and interest. I do truly and deeply appreciate them. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

This post is me laying bare the gears of an early and somewhat unsuccessful Ellery Queen novel. In excruciating detail.

( Cut for everyone who does not care. Also, spoilers for Ellery Queen's THE FRENCH POWDER MYSTERY (1930), if that's an issue for you. )

We learn from this (since part of my reason for writing this incredibly long post is that I think my brain is trying to figure out something about plot and structure) (1) that keeping notes is not just for wimps. If you want to write an elaborate, intricate plot, you need to find ways to be sure you don't wrong-foot yourself or lose track of one or more elements as you go. And (2) that the more elaborate a series of actions, the more you need to be certain that they make sense from the character's side as well as from the author's. Occam's Razor does make a useful guide.

And now I'm going to take a bath and read some more Ellery Queen.

I'm working on a Booth story called "Thirdhop Scarp." (First line: 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.) I've been working on this one for a long time (at least four years) and I'm not done yet, but it occurred to me that it might be worth making a post about the process of writing this story.

It's a haunted house story. (I love haunted house stories, and even though I will never be Shirley Jackson, it was inevitable that I would try one sooner or later.) It's also a haunted house story with an incredibly complicated backstory, and one of the reasons it's taking me so long to write is that I'm having to figure out ways to get the backstory into the story proper through the medium of my first-person narrator.

It's also riffing off "The Residence at Westminster," which is an M. R. James story I mostly don't like very much, but that has a couple of things in it that lodged in my brain. Another reason that this story is taking so long to write is that the particular character in whom those things are personified is a difficult bastard to write. In fact, I keep getting him wrong and having to go back and try again.

But fundamentally, the problem with "Thirdhop Scarp" is that it's a very complicated story that was trying to masquerade as a much simpler story. I wrote the simple, surface version and hated it. Trunked it. Kept coming back and poking at it. Eventually realized that there wasn't enough space in the story for the story it needed to tell, and gutted it. I kept the beginning and the end and chunks of the middle* and started trying to carve out space to put the rest of the story in.

This has resulted in some progress, but also a great deal of confusion, and I finally admitted that I needed to write an outline. The old shape was gone, and I couldn't find the new shape with so many pieces missing. So I outlined the first thirty-five pages, paused to note some queries (e.g. Q: what is Myra trying to do? Is she trying to raise TZT or claim his power?), and then wrote PROGRESSION of EVENTS and started listing the things that needed to happen to get us from page 35 to the still intact climax floating around out there at 35 + N.

In the process of writing the PROGRESSION of EVENTS, I have discovered a couple of very useful things, one about the "Residence at Westminster" character and his ultimate fate, the other about the way my protagonist, poor bastard, is actually connected to the plot. One of the very difficult things about writing Booth stories is that my models (H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James) were writing before it was considered necessary for genre stories to bother with things like character arcs or protagonists. (I'm reading Clark Ashton Smith right now, who is, if anything, worse.) They had main characters and sometimes heroes, but almost never protagonists. Their characters, who are frequently no more than very sketchy "I"-holders with no actual personality, don't learn, don't grow, don't change at all--except for occasionally going mad. So when you go to remap the Jamesian/Lovecraftian story onto modern standards, you have a bit of a problem. You can handwave past it--"The Yellow Dressing Gown," for instance, has no particular character arc for anybody--and Booth's character arc in any given story is most likely to be self-revelation: the supernatural shenanigans force him to confront something about himself or to recognize something of himself in the characters to whom the plot is actually happening. Or his character arc is the very simple one of him going from a state of passive non-involvement to trying to do something to help ("Wait for Me" is a good example there). Since Booth's character is such that he does have to fight that battle with himself every time, I can get a fair amount of mileage out of that.

But I still have to find ways to connect him to the story, to make him more than just the viewpoint character. And what's particularly pleasing in this case is that the connection--Booth's presence makes the house's spectral manifestations more active--is (1) organic, rising out of something we already know to be true about him, (2) becomes a plot point instantly, as the antagonist wants to use that for her own ends, which therefore means that the rising action, rather than being arbitrary, is directly related to my protagonist's presence in the story, and (3) makes him a mirror to the "Residence at Westminster" character--which in turn makes the events of the story connect back to Booth's own psychomachia.

(Yes, I do intellectualize my own process this much. S.O.P.)

There are still things I'm not sure what to do with--principally, a number of secondary characters who need either to justify their existence or get the hell off the island--but the story has a shape, and the denseness and richness of that story has bled from the occurrences at and history of Thirdhop Scarp back into my protagonist. Which means I may yet be able to make this story greater than the sum of its parts.


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*I would rather fiddle and rejigger a paragraph to make it fit in a new context than write a new paragraph.

Inspiration vs. craftsmanship. Five minutes. Go.

( cut for length )

Obviously, this is my opinion. If you disagree with me, I will not think less of you.

Thank you to everyone who has commented on my last couple posts about being stuck with sympathy and support. I appreciate it very very much, and it does help--if not exactly with the problem at hand, then definitely with my attitude toward it.

A couple people have suggested externalizing the voices (which, I should add in case you are becoming concerned about my sanity, are not literal voices; they're sock puppets for the dialogues I have with myself, which is a pretty much constant feature of the inside of my head), and I thought I should point out, for those who are interested, that I already do that, from time to time. And it is helpful, if only because it lets me make fun of myself. But this suggestion also reminded me--as apparently I needed--that I do better as a writer with a certain amount of ongoing meta-dialogue, and that's been pretty much shut down for the past few months.

It feels like the punchline to a joke: "The good news is, I've started talking to myself again." But hey. Whatever works. And I may have figured out how to fix one of the stories that has been most frustrating for me, because I finally asked myself the right question about the split between the main character and the protagonist.

Socratic dialogue is not my favorite pedagogical technique, but sometimes it really is the only game in town.

1. The new bread pans work very nicely. They're a little shorter (length-wise rather than depth-wise) than my old ones, so I get these very tall majestic loaves. They do, however, definitely need greasing, at least around the top.

2. Also, the new bread pans are deep red. My bread mixing bowl is golden-yellow. Our counters are bright blue (so not our choice). As I said to matociquala yesterday, I feel like I've wandered into some trendy yupster magazine article on baking your own bread.

3. Stuff I'm working on right now, at least hypothetically: (1) A Reckoning of Men: matociquala lobbed the ball back and it's awesomely cool, but I have to figure out how to play it. (2) Shadow Unit: "Hope Is Stronger Than Love," which gave me something this morning which should be OMG TEH CREEPY if I can make it work. (3) "Doc Holliday Makes A Deal": I hope this will consent to be a short story, but otherwise it's the first chapter of Doc Holliday, Demon Hunter.

4. Saturday night of Penguicon, mirrorthaw and I were flipping channels (we don't have cable, so this is a sort of weird special occasion thing when we stay in hotels) and we found a college women's fast-pitch softball game, Tennessee vs. Alabama, and Tennessee was getting shellacked. mirrorthaw can confirm that I turned into the most geeked out, fangirliest fangirl EVAR, because OMG there are women playing sports on my TV. I'm totally the same way about women's basketball, even though basketball is not a sport that does much for me, so IMAGINE MY GEEKITUDE. And not only was it women playing baseball (under the generous definition of baseball, yes), but, unlike with women's basketball, these were not women built like supermodels. This is totally not a slam against the women who play basketball, but their sport selects for women who are tall and willowy and thus fit right in with the cultural image of what sort of women you see on your TV. Fast-pitch softball does not select for tall and willowy; from the evidence of the Tennessee and Alabama teams, it selects for women who are short and stocky and strong. Women who are built like me. I can't even explain how awesome it was. I also loved the breakdown of the dichotomized performance of female gender roles: these are athletes, visibly powerful women (Alabama hit several home runs while we were watching), wearing softball uniforms (and Tennessee with that terrible orange, too), and they've got the black bars under their eyes to cut the glare, and yet the Tennessee pitchers have all done their hair the same way, with the French braid along one side and the pale blue bow at the back, and I love the way that they're doing both, that they can be serious athletes and yet still make choices about their gender performance--they can code themselves along a spectrum of femininities*--and they can by god play their sport and mean it.

5. I want to say thank you publicly to Penguicon's concom and staff, who did a wonderful job this weekend--especially but not at all exclusively Yanni Kuznia, who was running the literature track. Thank you all very much!

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*pitselly objected to my using the butch/femme dichotomy/continuum to talk about this, but the suggested replacement of masculine/feminine is wrong, because it implies that there's only one way to perform femininity, and that is NOT AT ALL what I mean. It also implies that the women who didn't go for the braids and pale blue bows were being, or trying to be, like male athletes, and that is equally not what I mean. They're all women athletes, and what I love is the fact that they have a variety of gender performances without being stigmatized as quote-unquote masculine (those girls are just trying to pretend they're men) or stigmatized the opposite way as quote-unquote feminine (those girls, they can't cope with a real man's game). And there isn't a lot of vocabulary to talk about that.

janni has a wonderful writing contest on her blog. And you can win a copy of her new novel, Thief Eyes.

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Catherynne M. Valente (a.k.a. yuki_onna, she of the Hugo Best Novel nomination, the Norton nomination, the Lambda nomination . . .) is now fiction and poetry editor of Apex Magazine. They'll be open to submissions again in June.

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I'm working on this next chunk of A Reckoning of Men and also a Storytellers Unplugged post (since my slot is tomorrow and I missed last month) about Tombstone. It's kind of weird; I woke up this morning and (a.) I wanted to write and (b.) I had ideas. I brushed my teeth and took my pills and fed the cats with the background music in my head mostly being the wolf book.

I can't write very much in my head before I have to write it down; my memory doesn't retain long chunks of anything (this would be why I am one of the few Shakespeareans you will ever meet who cannot recite great wodges of Teh Bard off the cuff; I can't even manage an entire sonnet). But when things are going well (which they have not been for the past couple months), I will wander around wrestling with a sentence or two, maybe as much as an exchange of dialogue. Cleaning litter boxes is great for this, which frequently means I have to make cryptic notes to myself before I climb into bed. Because in the morning, I will remember that I had a good idea, but I will not remember what the idea was, and I hate that feeling with the burning fury of a thousand fiery suns.

So, yeah. It's spring outside; the daffodils are blooming, the apple tree is budding, and the rose bushes are starting to unfurl new green leaves. And it seems to be spring in here, too.

1. I still have this cold.

2. However, yesterday I was feeling grungy but not unbearably subhuman, so all the books from the auction are in the mail. (Megan, the manuscript stories are going to have to wait until I get a new toner cartridge, because I owe you better print-quality than I can currently provide.)

3. I have plane tickets for CupcakeCon.

4. I am told that the Publishers Weekly review of Jonathan Strahan's Best SF/Fantasy of 2009 praises "Mongoose" for its "humor amid life-and-death peril."

5. And last night on Twitter, cristalia and I started hashing out a manifesto for Gromitpunk:

@leahbobet (a.k.a. cristalia): Oh hello there, THE WRONG BOOK.
@pennyvixen (a.k.a. truepenny): It's very like the Wrong Trousers, only generally with less penguin.
@leahbobet: And less Wensleydale. :(
@pennyvixen: And no Gromit. ... although, come to think of it, ALL my books have that problem.
@leahbobet: Time to write the Gromitpunk manifesto.
@pennyvixen: oh GOD yes.
@leahbobet: OTOH, a year and four months later, I just found why that first sentence is wrong... *g*
@pennyvixen: Gromitpunk is all about embracing the Zen of one's writing process, goddammit.
@leahbobet: Y'know, it kind of is. Wallace and Gromit ARE the writing process: make up crazy outsized shit, and then Gromit makes it work.
@pennyvixen: Yeah. Wallace takes all the credit and Gromit just sighs and makes another pot of tea.
@leahbobet: 'Zactly!
@pennyvixen: Gromitpunk is also all about tea.
@leahbobet: And dairyfat, and pies.

(If you're curious about The Wrong Book and its new first sentence, look over here.)

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Survey says, not too shabby.