Books

If Jane Austen Wrote Fantasy

I’ve been on a Jane Austen kick lately — not just reading Austen (though I have, since one of my friends started a Jane Austen book club), but reading biographies and things about that era. The one thing her books are missing is magic, and I’ve recently discovered a series that takes care of that. Well, with books like you might imagine Jane Austen might have written if she’d been writing fantasy, not those mash-ups like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

The first book in the series is Sorcerer to the Crown, by Zen Cho. A young man has recently taken the role of Royal Sorcerer after the death of the previous one, his mentor, and he’s got a number of crises on his hands. For one thing, the other sorcerers aren’t too keen on him, given that he’s an African former slave bought, freed, and adopted by his mentor, and they’re just looking for an excuse to strip him of his office. For another thing, amounts of magic in England have slowed to a trickle, and if he can’t figure out and resolve the problem, that will give his enemies ammunition against him. And then there are the magical assassination attempts. Things get even crazier when he goes to speak at a girls’ school and realizes that the conventional wisdom about women being incapable of handling magic is all wrong. The school is supposed to be teaching girls how to suppress their magic so it won’t harm them, but there are some powerful magicians there — especially one girl who’s sort of a teacher, sort of household staff, the orphaned daughter of a friend of the headmistress. She’s powerful enough that she has to be taught. But insisting on teaching women isn’t going to make him any more popular. Meanwhile, she’s just starting to uncover her own startling legacy and doesn’t have a lot of interest in boring lessons. She does, however, want to find a husband who can support her endeavors.

This is such a fun book that I’d recommend to fans of Jane Austen or those who loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It’s written in a very Austen-like style. The characters fairly jump off the page. The dialogue is witty and vivid and at times is laugh-out-loud funny. There’s action, magical battles, drawing room intrigue, and a dash of romance. The second book in the series was in my goody bag at the Nebulas Conference, so I found the first book, and I’m about to break my rule about not reading a series back-to-back since this is exactly the sort of thing I’m in the mood for.

In other news, I’ll be taking a break from blogging next week because I’m volunteering for Vacation Bible School, and that will eat up my mornings. See you the week after that!

writing life

Breaking Out of the Bubble

I spent most of yesterday feeling stuck, which usually means there’s a problem with what I’m working on. I’m trying to follow my outline, but the outline is the wrong way to go. After an afternoon trying to outline a scene, I gave up and did something else, then last night I sat down and listed the plot points that need to happen between now and the end.

And then I got sidetracked in the middle with a what if that turns out to probably be the key to the book. So now I have to replot, but that’s good. I’m actually going to be mean to my heroine, which I need to do, but I always have a hard time doing. I’m not a “put your characters in a tree, set the tree on fire, and throw rocks at them” kind of writer. I’m not even a “think of the worst thing that can happen, then make it happen” person. Though this plot development comes close. We’ll see how it works.

In the meantime, I’m pondering promotional stuff I might do. I’ve seen the statistics and demographics for YouTube and am pondering doing something with that. My degree is in broadcast news, so that’s definitely in my skill set. I haven’t really thought that it would be a good venue for promoting books, since if you’re watching YouTube, you’re not reading, but book content seems to be huge there. I’d need to figure out what to do with it. Maybe writing advice, talking about the background ideas for my books, some book reviews.

I suspect that the core YouTube audience doesn’t overlap with the core blog readership (which is kind of the point), but does anyone have any thoughts? Do you seek out authors on YouTube? I know I’d prefer to read something than watch a video, but maybe I’m not the kind of person I’m trying to reach here.

Then there’s podcasting. Again, I’d rather read something than listen to it, but I know there are people who use this for commuting or exercising. I used to love doing radio features (the kind of thing they do on NPR), so I could possibly have fun with that.

I’m just trying to find a way to break out of my bubble. My books are well-received. People who read them seem to like them. But very few people seem to have heard of me, and everything I do for promotion only seems to reach the same people who’ve already heard of me. I think if more people discovered my books, great things could happen. I just don’t know how to reach those more people. I’m particularly invisible in the fantasy world, and going to conventions doesn’t seem to have helped much. I don’t know what else to do to make a name there.

writing life

Inside the Mind of a Writer

Today I give you a glimpse into the strange mind of a writer.

Last night, I had a vivid and weirdly specific dream in which I was house/pet sitting for some friends while they were on vacation. Their cat, Yuki, had an odd fascination with one of the kitchen cabinets. She’d sit in front of it and yowl sadly, and if I ever opened that cabinet to get something, she’d crawl inside and look around. I thought it was sweet and funny that she was missing her people but thought that they’d gone into the cabinet when they went away. Then one day she came into the kitchen carrying a sheet of lined notebook paper, and she stuck the paper through the pull handle on the cabinet. I looked at it, and written on it in a childish scrawl in pencil was “Yuki (heart) you.” I wasn’t sure if the cat had managed to learn to write or if maybe she’d managed to get out of the house and some neighborhood kid had written it. Either way, it was a little astonishing that the cat had actually left a written note for her owners.

When I woke up from this dream in the middle of the night, my first thought after “that was weird” was “there’s got to be a story in there.” I ended up staying awake for some time as I worked out how it was sort of a reverse Narnia thing, with Yuki being from another world and coming through a portal that came out in a kitchen cabinet in our world. The people in that house didn’t know where she came from and just thought they’d been “adopted” by a cat. For a while, she enjoyed being treated like a goddess, but she was getting homesick. She thought that the absence of her captors would be the perfect opportunity for her to escape. They never allowed her in the kitchen cabinet, but the petsitter wasn’t as quick. Except, alas, the portal was closed and she couldn’t get back, so she left a sad note in tribute to her lost people.

Maybe the petsitter figures out that something’s up and helps her get a portal open to go back, then has to make up some story about the cat running away while she was petsitting.

And after all this middle of the night brainstorming, I overslept.

I’m not sure what triggered this dream. The subject of petsitters did come up in a conversation with friends last night, but we weren’t talking about cats, and I’d never be able to petsit for a cat if I had to stay in the house because I end up coming down with bronchitis if I spend the night in a home with a cat. And I really don’t know how I came up with the cat’s name.

I will have to add this to the idea file. Probably not for a whole novel, but it might make a cute short story.

Thoughts Into Words

I’ve been having a weird writing week in which thoughts are flying furiously, but they’re not translating into words. I can see the scenes playing out or feel what’s going on with my characters, but then I sit at the computer and the words don’t come out through my fingers. Maybe this means I need to do brainstorming instead, just capture all those thoughts without trying to put them into narrative.

Unfortunately, this is happening for other writing I need to do, including e-mails. Just trying to translate ideas into words for a blog post has been a challenge. I’m normally a very verbal person. Words are how I express myself, so it’s weird to have all these ideas swirling around in my head and not have a way to get them out.

I think some of it may be a case of spring fever, since we had a weird front come through Sunday and now it feels like spring again. I’m enjoying having the windows open and a cool breeze coming through. It makes me want to read and nap and just listen to the birds singing. I know the summer weather will return eventually, alas.

Thinking really is an important part of writing, so maybe I just need to get all these thoughts processed, and then I can turn them into a story.

Books

Questioning Sense and Sensibility

I recently re-read Sense and Sensibility (I’m in a Jane Austen book club, and that’s our next book), and as much as I love dear Jane, I had some serious issues with this book.

I’ve always kind of thought that Elinor and Colonel Brandon would have been a better match than Brandon and Marianne, but I thought that was mostly because of the movie, since Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman have played a couple elsewhere. I was really surprised on this re-read to find that the impression is even stronger in the book. In fact, I got the impression that Jane (we’re professional peers, so we’re on a first-name basis) kind of felt that way, too.

All the other characters seem to think Col. Brandon and Elinor are an item, especially after the truth comes out about Edward’s engagement. People are always assuming they’ll end up together, and Elinor has to keep correcting them. There’s even this whole bit where Mrs. Jennings overhears part of their conversation about him giving a living to Edward and misinterprets it to think he was proposing to her, with it taking some effort to untangle the confusion. There are far more scenes of Elinor and Brandon interacting than there are of Brandon and Marianne or Elinor and Edward. There’s even a line about how Brandon talks to Elinor and looks at Marianne. Jane really seems to like writing their relationship and their interactions. All the evidence cited for him being in love with Marianne is really just evidence that he’s a good and decent man, not anything specific to his feelings for Marianne. It’s more that their mother thinks he’d be good for Marianne than that there’s any real affinity between them. If I didn’t know the outcome, I would have assumed for much of the book that the happy ending would be Elinor realizing that Edward’s a bit of a twit and Brandon getting over his infatuation with Marianne and realizing that Elinor’s right there and far more stable and sensible.

Which makes me wonder about Jane’s process. Was she a plotter? Did she plan out the book with the outcome she wanted, but then the characters kept trying to go their own way and she fought it through the whole book before forcing them into the outcome she wanted at the end? Or, since she was often a rather caustic satirist, was it all deliberate? Was she making some kind of point rather than being sincere about this being the best outcome for the characters?

And Edward really is a bit of a twit. You don’t notice so much in the movie because he’s Hugh Grant, and Emma Thompson’s screenplay expands his role and makes him far more charming (and in the more recent TV version he’s Dan Stevens, and the screenplay has him doing manly stuff like chopping wood), but he’s a rather dull, lifeless character in the book. Even Jane doesn’t seem that interested in him because she keeps him almost entirely offstage. He’s someone they talk about, but he’s seldom actually there, and even when he is there, he doesn’t do much.

I know the whole deal with his secret engagement is a cultural issue that’s hard for us to understand. In that era, he really would have been considered brave and honorable for sticking to an engagement even after he realized he wasn’t really in love with the woman and even in the face of family disapproval, while we think he’s a wimp for not being able to break it off. But there’s still plenty about his behavior to raise eyebrows about. In the book, when he’s explaining himself to Elinor at the end, he even makes excuses, saying he never would have become engaged if his sister’s brother had given him a job after he finished school and before he went to Oxford because then he’d have been distracted and he’d have forgotten his infatuation. So, it’s someone else’s fault for not giving him a job, rather than his own fault for not finding a job and for taking a gap year to be idle rather than going straight on to Oxford or doing something worthwhile? And then there’s the fact that he’s attentive enough to Elinor that everyone who observes them assumes they’re as good as engaged while he’s actually engaged to someone else. That’s actually worse than Willoughby, who isn’t attached while he’s involved with Marianne. Not to mention that he strung his engagement along for four years rather than facing his mother about it. And this is the guy the heroine ends up with? (In the book, he’s not nearly as attractive as Hugh Grant or Dan Stevens, either.)

That’s what makes me wonder if there’s some satire going on. Are we supposed to think everything worked out right, or are we supposed to be smirking about all the things that are silly about society to lead to this outcome?

This is possibly the least timeless of Austen’s novels because there’s no good way to update the main plot. You can do the flighty emotional sister and the calm, rational one, but the Edward and Elinor plot doesn’t work in a modern setting. The key things are that he’s in a relationship he can’t get out of honorably even though he wishes he could because he’d rather be with Elinor and that this relationship is a secret, so Elinor has to suffer heartbreak in silence while her sister is having histrionics and acting as though she’s the only one ever to have her heart broken. In today’s world, Edward would have just given Lucy the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech and broken up when he wised up. You’d probably have to make them actually be married, so that ending the relationship is much more serious, but then there’s the secret part. You’d have to contrive a reason for them to have to keep their marriage a secret so that Elinor can’t even tell her sister that she’s heartbroken and can never be with the man she loves. If you move it into the modern world, Edward becomes almost as bad a villain as Willoughby since he’s leading on one woman while involved with another woman he has no plans to split up with, and about the only reasons I can think of for him maintaining a relationship he doesn’t want and keeping it secret involve money, which doesn’t make him look good (then again, that’s why he’s keeping it secret in the book, since he knows he’ll be disinherited if his mother knows).

It might be fun to do an update that fixes all these things. Have both Elinor and Brandon wise up and end up together.

writing

A Hard Day’s Work

I’m trying something new with the book I’m working on: present-tense narration. It’s pretty common in YA, and people were talking about that at the conference I went to last month. I thought I’d at least see how it reads that way, and I was surprised by what a difference it made. It made everything a lot more immediate and forced me to tighten up a lot. So I guess that’s how this book is going to be.

It takes some getting used to writing that way. I’m still working on changing the parts that are already written, so I don’t know what it will be like composing. I’ll need to brainstorm the parts that lie ahead because the story seems to be shifting subtly in another direction than I originally planned.

But that’s a good sign because it means the story has almost become a living entity, taking on a life of its own. I’ve also reached the point when I almost resent having to do something else other than work on it.

I will have some research ahead of me, as I need to invent a sport that’s played using unicorns — something like polo but using the unique features of unicorns. I’ve discovered all sorts of interesting events while researching this. There’s polo, of course, which had its origins as a training exercise for cavalry (which is what this sport will be, too). There’s polocrosse, which is lacrosse played on horseback. There’s horseball, which is kind of like basketball played on horseback. And there’s a whole category of events that fit under the umbrella of “tent pegging.” There’s tent pegging itself, in which riders try to spear a small target with a lance while riding at full gallop (supposedly with origins in trying to damage an enemy’s camp while they’re asleep by pulling up their tent pegs, but apparently this is disputed), and then there are variations that resemble jousting training exercises, like spearing a ring with a lance or hitting a target with a lance. I think my sport will involve rings, with both rider and unicorn having to spear rings with lance/horn, or perhaps trying to get a ring around the opponents’ unicorns’ horns.

Sometimes it astonishes me that this is my job. “Whew, it was a hard day at work. I had to make up a unicorn sport.”

TV

Good Omens

My plan to read mostly off my to-be-read pile so I can clear it out might be somewhat thwarted, since I just watched the Amazon series of Good Omens, and now I want to re-read the book (and then rewatch the series). It’s been long enough since I last read it that it wasn’t so familiar that the series clashed with my own mental images, but it’s familiar enough that I recognized certain scenes and even lines.

There were a few things that clashed enough with my mental images to bother me a little (like Anathema being American), but for the most part, it worked for me. They had to update some of it because it was written in the 90s and the world has changed a lot, but those updates made it even more relevant to our world.

Biggest unintentional laugh: Apparently, no one involved with the production has ever seen a US Air Force base. I guess none of the real ones would let them film there and they couldn’t find even a decommissioned one (I’d have thought there might be one or two of those in the UK).

But otherwise, I think it struck a nice balance between being faithful to the book and translating it to a new medium. The casting was excellent. It’s funny and makes you think. (Sometimes I think the funny things are most likely to make you think, even though people often think drama is more serious and thought-provoking.)

I think I may hold off on the re-read/re-watch. Maybe later this summer or early fall. It could be a good reward for finishing a project.

Which means I have to finish a project, I guess. Back to work!

Books

The Leaning Tower of Books

I’ve been working on an ongoing project to get my house in order, and a big part of that is dealing with my books. I have a lot of books. So many books. I purged my bookcases of the books I know I’m not going to want to read again, so there’s a little space there. The real problem is the rather epic To Be Read pile.

Most of these are books I get at conferences. When I first started going to writing conferences, I was so excited to get a bag stuffed with books at registration. Then there were the booksignings where the publishers gave away books. There were books set out on the seats at the banquets and luncheons. Free books!

Except I found I was less likely to read the free books. They weren’t necessarily books I’d have chosen for myself. I did occasionally find a new author and would go on to read the rest of their books (the whole point of them giving away the freebies), but otherwise those books sat there. It didn’t help that most of these were from romance conferences, and I finally admitted to myself that while I like a good love story, I don’t really like romance novels all that much. However, I don’t seem to do much better in other genres. I got an advance copy of A Game of Thrones at, oddly enough, one of the romance conferences and didn’t finish reading it until after the series was on TV. I have books from the Nebulas and the World Fantasy Convention from more than a decade ago that I haven’t gotten around to.

I’ve been purging the TBR stack, getting rid of everything I know I’m not likely to read. I’m trying to focus my reading on these books for the time being, just to get more of them out of the house. If I don’t get into a book, I’m letting myself get rid of it. One thing I’ve done to help matters is devote the small bookcase in my bedroom to the TBR pile. That means the books are right there and visible in the place where I’m likely to be reading, so I’m more likely to choose a book from there.

I did another purge yesterday and have the stash down to the small bookcase plus a few small boxes. As I remove a book from the bookcase, I’ll move one from the boxes.

I did find that there are a few books I bought in all that stash. I’m not sure why I haven’t gotten around to reading them. Some are books written by friends I bought to support them but that I might not have bought otherwise. Some are remainders, so they were cheap books that tempted me. A few seem to be things I bought when I had a bonus coupon at a bookstore or when I needed to buy something else to get free shipping on an order.

If I actually read all these books (rather than getting a few chapters in and deciding they’re not for me), at my current rate of reading I have enough books to last me at least three years — and that’s without getting new books or going to the library. And it doesn’t count the e-books I have on my tablet.

I’m being a lot more selective about the books I take home from conferences now, so the stack shouldn’t get much worse.

writing

Writing as Juggling Act

I spent most of yesterday re-reading what I’d written on the abandoned book, as well as my notes on the project. I found some notes about what I wanted to do in revision that I must have made before I put this project aside, but the weird thing is, I don’t remember making these notes. They’re in my handwriting, so I must have, and they’re even legible, so it’s not as though I was writing in my sleep, or anything like that.

The nice thing is, they’re good ideas. They somewhat alter the plot of the book, but that’s what I need to do right now. When I eliminate all the stuff that has to go, I’ll need more action and conflict to throw in to replace it.

Meanwhile, there are key character traits I seem to have forgotten about. They’re supposed to be a big issue for the heroine, but they fall away after the first chapter.

Sometimes writing is like juggling. You have a lot of balls to keep in the air — character traits, aspects of the world, interpersonal conflicts, big-picture conflicts, and all of that is for multiple characters. Remembering to use all these things can be difficult because when you focus on one thing, you forget that other thing until you get halfway through the book and realize that your heroine’s key character trait hasn’t made an appearance in the last few chapters because she’s been busy dealing with other things.

And then sometimes you surprise yourself and find things that you didn’t plan but that come together. In this book, I seem to have had an unconscious theme of proving yourself. The heroine’s issue is that she wants to prove that she can do something. One of the secondary characters is worried about proving himself worthy. And the villain is trying to show the world what he can do. His intentions aren’t actually evil. He’s just enough of a narcissist that it doesn’t occur to him that the things he’s doing so he’ll look like a great hero will actually harm a lot of innocent people. Now that I’m aware this is there, I can work with it on purpose.

writing

Getting to the Action

I took the week off from blogging last week because there was the holiday and then I went to visit my parents. Now I’m back to a “normal” work schedule, trying to get back to a regular routine after deadlines and travel.

It’s been more than a month since I even looked at the book I was working on before I had to switch gears and work on revisions. That made it pretty obvious the parts I needed to fix. I already had a feeling what the problem would be when I listened to my playlist/soundtrack for this book as I drove back from my parents’ house and realized that the first half of it was songs relating to the opening of the book. It’s nearly a two-hour drive, and I’d barely reached anything representing the main action by the time I got home.

Sure enough, when I was re-reading it this morning I saw that the story didn’t really kick in until about chapter five or six (aside from the inciting incident at the end of chapter one — there was way too much transition from there to the main action). At first, the scenes that seemed unnecessary didn’t look that long, just a few paragraphs, and those also worked for worldbuilding. Then I did a word count and realized that we were talking about a couple of pages each time (for my first draft, I don’t have it set up to show me pages). And the worldbuilding was for the part of the world the heroine’s leaving, so it was all unnecessary for the reader understanding the story.

So, the first thing to do on this round is cut all that stuff. Then I need to figure out what really needs to be happening to move the story forward. I love the part of the world the heroine’s from and I wouldn’t mind living there, but that’s not what the story’s about. It’s about her leaving that comfort zone and going to a place that’s more challenging to her. I can always write short pieces set in her home area later, but that’s not what this book is about.