Category Archives: weird

Lightning Strikes: From Whence Inspiration?

Phatman - Lightning on the Columbia River (by-sa)

By Ian Boggs from Astoria, US (Lightning on the Columbia River) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Sure, sure. You make your own inspiration and all that. You sit, you write, you create. I get that. It’s 90% of the equation.

But what about those moments that are unplanned? I know I’m not the only writer out there that’s found profundity in hot showers or strains of music (in fact, most of the WIP fell into my brain during a shower). There seem to be situations where my brain is prone to wander unseen pathways, where I make connections in stories that, on normal writing days, just don’t seem to happen. No, I don’t believe in Muses, but there is some curious power in the workings of our brains when it comes to creating stories out of nothingness.

When I was writing Rock Revival, I plugged into music. Every day. Not just my favorite bands, but bands I’d never heard of. Music that was the music of my characters. Phoenix, The Black Keys, Mumford and Sons, the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Queen, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, Neko Case. That’s just a slice. Driving around, in particular, seemed to dislodge whatever scene I was struggling with and bring about new characters and situations I hadn’t planned, so long as the music was blasting.

((Now, this is a life of a panster, I realize. There are those writers out there who have the talent (and, yeah, probably the discipline) to write outlines and stick to it. But my first drafts tend to be my outlines. Which is probably why I love the hell out of editing so much. It’s polishing.))

For Watcher of the Skies, the inspiration has been less predictable. Life has been less predictable. Instead of walking around with a lightning rod like I was able to do with Rock Revival, I’ve had to rely on the random moments. It hasn’t been music, this time, at all, that’s moved me to moments of writing epiphany  Instead, it’s been during sleepless nights, moments of stillness when I can’t convince my brain to rest, when Joss and his friends come out to play. It’s almost like listening to whispers in the next room. Maybe that’s weird, but like I was saying in my post yesterday, it’s as close as I get to real magic.

So my question for you out there. Are you the lightning rod sort? Or do you wait for inspiration? Or do you just make it happen regardless of the situation? What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever gotten inspiration from? And for those of you with lives/jobs/kids/responsibilities, what do you do when it strikes at inopportune times?

ConTemporal Bound!

So, ConTemporal starts tomorrow! Before you go thinking how crazy-pants I am to go to a convention after having a baby so recently, keep in mind that I can actually walk to this one. No joke. It’s less than a mile from my house!

ConTemporal is a celebration of steampunk and other speculative fun times, and I’m really excited to be a panelist. More than anything, though, I’m looking forward to acting like a writer again for a while (at least the kind who isn’t practically attached to her little newborn). Not to mention, quite a few friends are going to be there, both from near and far. The delightful Cherie Priest is the Guest of Honor, which is worth the price of admission right there (to say nothing of the marvelous toast mistress, Lee Martindale).

If you’re in the area, come on by! If you’re looking for where I’ll be, here’s my schedule! I’m particularly excited about the Weird West panel, because I love the chance to geek out about steampunk cowboys… Chances are this is the only convention I’ll be doing this year, since it’s very unlikely I’ll be making it to Dragon*Con or other usual haunts (considering the baby, and all). So don’t miss out on the last chance to hear my random genre babble!

Friday – 5pm
Steampunk: Aesthetic or Genre?
Venetian {Lit}
What defines steampunk? Join our guests as they debate the influence of costuming, gadgets, ambiance, and story type on the steampunk world.
Moderator: Sara Harvey * Panelists: Natania Barron, Cherie Priest, JoSelle Vanderhooft

Saturday – 1pm
Salon: Natania Barron
Boardroom {Lit}
This intimate salon is limited to 10 people only so sign up early at Registration to reserve your seat! This is your chance to hear a bit about current work, snag that signature and get to know them without the press of fans all around you.
Panelists: Natania Barron

Saturday – 4pm
How to Handle Multiple-POV Stories
London I {Lit}
Having multiple point-of-view characters gives readers another window into the story. Each character has their own voice, their own way of viewing the events. The panelists discuss ways to successfully integrate multiple points of view into a work.
Moderator: Jana Oliver * Panelists: Natania Barron, Clay Griffith, Susan Griffith, Cherie Priest

Saturday – 6pm
Neo-Victoriana
Zurich {Lit}
Steampunk is largely focused on taking the Victorian era and twisting it a bit. Why does this appeal to so many people? What did the Victorians think the future would hold?
Moderator: Susan Griffith * Panelists: Natania Barron, Clay Griffith, Jana Oliver

Sunday — 11am
The Weird West
Venetian {Lit}
Westward Expansion during the Age of Steam opens a lot of doors for steampunk: tall tales, great historic deeds, and tweaks to history. What about this setting fascinates us?
Moderator: Lee Martindale * Panelists: Natania Barron, John Claude Bemis, David Drake, Cherie Priest

Updates in Nutshell. Or a Clam Shell.

I’ve been inexcusably quiet here the last few weeks, and no, it’s not because of NaNoWriMo. Again, real life and things got in the way of that. Let me tell you, there’s nothing I would have rather done than write a novel from scratch, revel in the joy of creation, and bask in the awesome of writing for the month of November. But life has a way of being a stinkypants sometimes, and that’s totally what happened. I won’t get into the details of the personal life stuff, but it comes down to the fact that I’ve been job hunting, working on GeekMom, doing the holiday thing, working on Crossed Genres, and using my extra time to catch up on some anthology submissions (and a sale) as well as edits for Pilgrim of the Sky. When I had less work to do, NaNo was far easier.

In addition, we just released the first issue of Crossed Genres edited by Jaym Gates and myself. A momentous occasion, to be sure, as I’ve never been an editor of such proportions before. I really enjoy the process of finding those stories that shine. I’m particularly fond of the steampunk/Chinese influenced world of Jaymee Goh’s story “Lunar Year’s End“, but the TOC is really strong all throughout. What other magazine brings you such a width and breadth of genres? It’s truly fun to be part of the Crossed Genres team, and we have lots in store for the months to come.

Also important to note, I decided to axe the original ending of the Pilgrim of the Sky in favor of something more… transcendental. The book now contains 100% more quahog and 100% sphinx. I will rework some of the 10K I chopped, including the climax scene, but my heroine needed more punch. And now she’s got it.

Meanwhile, I am doing my darndest to focus on Pilgrim and edits and publication and try not to let other issues in the publishing industry get to me. But it’s hard. My husband is always the first to remind me that I’ve made a huge amount of progress in the last few years, but I can’t let go of that annoying voice in the back of my head. The one that doubts. That tells me I’m really not terribly marketable (squids and exploding eyeballs and whatnot).

Then I tell myself to shut up. Because, in the end it doesn’t really matter, does it? It comes down to the fact that, hell or high water, I write. And writing will happen whether or not I’m marketable. Maybe one of the weird ass books I write will start a trend. Or maybe it won’t. It makes me happy. And that’s the most important part. *cue the strings*

Anyrot! The gears do keep on moving, and I am the machine. So tally-ho!

The Pits of Research

Technically it's a chasm.

I did it. I fell into the Pits of Research.

Don’t get me wrong. I love research. At a point in my life I wanted to be a professional researcher, i.e. a professor, so the hankering to discover new information is definitely strong with me.

However. There are good and bad ways to go about these things. I’ve been adding to and editing Pilgrim of the Sky, which, as I mentioned, has a lot to do with religion. Sort of. In the book, the premise revolves (haha, revolves…) around eight worlds. These worlds are all connected, are part of infinite worlds, yet still have similarities between them. The main character’s world is mostly ours. Now, on top of that, the book relies heavily on concepts of the reincarnation of divine beings and, well, divine beings in general. I won’t say too much because it would ruin some of the story, but our heroine gets involved with these quasi-divine, reincarnated people.

One of my goals in this edit was to branch out the various pantheons I include, away from Celtic and Norse to something more interesting. Now, I’ve spent a great deal of time over the last week sifting through research on every pantheon I can find. And it’s helpful.

But I was totally misguided.

The thing about having these eight worlds is a connection to but not a dependence upon each other. My mistake was leaning too heavily on research and not heavily enough on my own imagination, on the fantasy freedom I meant to explore in the first place.

Rule #1 for fantasy writers: research from the real world is great, and knowledge is power and all that jazz — however, relying too heavily on it can cloud your mind and slow you down. The most important thing for me, at this moment, was not mapping god to god across every known pantheon, but rather, just telling a good story and having some cool things happen. Which is what I’m doing at this juncture with my main character. I decided she needed some real testing. A gods’ gauntlet. But the thing is, the gauntlet isn’t in her world. Yet for some reason I spent hours this week reading up about the Mesopotamian and various Asian pantheons. Not that it won’t ever help me, or help me in another section of the book… I was just doing it all wrong. This is not the research you’re looking for, in other words.

Okay, so I lost a few days. It’s not the end of the world. Just be wary of research. As fun as it is, as thrilling as it can be, it can also blind you from your task at hand.

Anyway. Back to that gauntlet. Time to roll for initiative.

 

Official Pilgrim of the Sky Announcement from Candlemark & Gleam

I’m not terribly good at describing Pilgrim of the Sky. But thankfully, my publisher is! To get a better idea of what the book might be about, and what I’m currently immersed in edits with at the moment, consider the following from their announcement post:

How to describe this novel? Hm. That may be a tough one. It’s sort of…a world-hopping, reality-bending, art-historical, socio-religious steampunk odyssey. And that’s just for starters.

It takes place both in our world – in a corner of the world that I’m particularly familiar with and fond of, Western Massachussets – and in a number of other worlds, each of which has its own character and flavour. Natania has an unbelievable knack for description and imagery, and I can honestly say that the lush descriptions of Sixth World make me want to pack up and move there, just to get a taste of floating mansions, copper corsets, and electromagnetic horseless carriages in a refined pseudo-Victorian society that has some truly surprising twists to it.

But that’s only part of this novel. Pilgrim of the Sky also features murder, ambition, greed, multidimensional travel, and opiate abuse. You know, as you do.

That about says it, indeed.

New Places to Read My Stuff

Well, I’ve been a bit behind on stuff in general, and while I’m not yet entirely lucid (one might argue that I rarely am…) I thought I’d share two bits of very cool news.

First, you can now find my short story “The Monastery of the Seven Hands” in an anthology of dystopian fiction edited by Jason Sizemore entitled Dark Futures at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. Pretty nifty, eh? I’m a particular fan of that delightfully dystopian cover. The TOC is impressive to say the least, and I’m looking forward to reading all the pieces once I have my copy. Go forth, buy! I had this to say about the story when I announced the acceptance, and it still holds true: in a nutshell, the piece is about body-snatching monks in a dystopian future, living beneath a city called Abbassus. Very dark, very weird, and very fun to write.

Secondly, I just found out that my short story “Without a Light” is going to be in the first issue of the Brandon Bell/MBrane-SF new publication Fantastique Unfettered. Aside from having a very cool name, I really like the idea behind the magazine. In this day and age it’s wonderful to see new publications cropping up, especially those who really want to add something new to the genre. It’s especially nice that they are striving to pay pro rates, which you see less and less of these days.

And that’s the news from here. For now. :)

Weird Tales Uncanny Beauty Issue

Picture via Jeff VanderMeer's Flickr stream

I’ve been waiting to talk about this until it was official but, hey, look: official! And awesome. I had the privilege of coming up with a project together with Brigid Ashwood, a brilliant artist and fellow lover of speculative fiction. The piece in the upcoming issue is entitled “The Wakened Image” and it’s a look at some of the “made” women in mythology, taken from the Mabinogion and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Brigid helped me brainstorm the subject, and then I wrote a three-part poem in blank verse; Brigid provided some astonishingly beautiful pictures to accompany the text.

The issue isn’t available yet, but soon. I’ll keep you posted. I am so excited to share this piece, and definitely squeed a little seeing my name on the front of Weird Tales. Who wouldn’t? :)

Homesick for fiction.

Having finished the draft of Indigo & Ink, which has occupied the last seven months of my life, I’m now feeling a bit down in the dumps. You know, I really miss writing the book. After that last edit, I had a sense of finality, and while it was very thrilling, in some ways it also left me feeling a bit empty. This probably explains why when my friend Karen mentioned she’d read some of the first chapter, I about fell out of my chair in excitement.

Yes, writers are weird. If you hadn’t figured that out yet, you just haven’t met enough of us.

Anyway, I haven’t stopped writing, but nothing’s had that zing since finishing Indigo & Ink. Though I did hit a milestone. I wrote a short story in a respectably short amount of time without freaking out and hating it–and then I actually submitted it. I’ve been writing about 1.5 short stories a year lately, which is pretty pathetic in all honesty. And I can whine all I want about it simply not being my medium, but in actuality I think short stories are a hell of a lot harder to do well than novels. For me, anyway. To develop a character in under 6,000 words terrifies me. Which probably explains why I wrote The God Who Played, aforementioned short story, in first person.

Regardless, I have some thinking to do about what to write and when to write and how to write and all. I have surgery coming up next month, and Dragon*Con before that, so tossing myself headfirst into a novel is probably not the brightest ideas.

But then again, when have I ever been one to listen to reason? ;)

Draft One, Deeper Into the Murk

So, no longer Draft Zero, eh, Indigo & Ink? This is where things get interesting.

I’m not one of those people who can let a book draft sit for terribly long. Okay, wait, no. That’s a lie. I can let it sit plenty after I’ve edited the crap out of it, but otherwise it pokes at my consciousness for days until I fix what needs fixing. We can’t always be as disciplined as Stephen King, and if we all wrote the same the world would be boring (or… something?). When I finished Indigo & Ink, I was in the zone, so I decided to keep going.

The draft, at one point, was almost 125K, and that worried me. My goal was originally 120, and I’m hoping the very final one will be even a little slimmer. Words don’t matter so much as content, true, but a more slender book has a better chance. (And yes, 120K is slender to me!) At this moment it’s about 119,500 words, and is comprised of 50 chapters (I would say the chapters are that way because I planned them, but I didn’t; still, the symmetry nut in me is insanely glad to end in a nice, round number).

Editing this time around was quite curious. Because the book essentially has a novella folded into the mix (a bit like baking a good cake) I attacked it in two parts. I edited everyone else’s story, then went after Dev. Dev, as I’ve mentioned a thousand times, travels through eight hells in the course of the book. And I made a big choice. I changed all his hell chapters to the present tense. Most of the 5K that I lost was in those chapters, because they’re supposed to be terribly otherwordly and strange. I realized I couldn’t get Dev’s POV as close as the other characters, because the rules simply don’t apply. And for whatever reason, present tense can really add distance. I think it works. We’ll see what my beta readers have to say.

So, overall impressions now that the book is at this state:

Things I Love: I am very proud of the dialogue in this book. I only have a few characters who really go on at length, but the situation typically calls for it. The tension is palpable in the scenes they need to be, the language moves at a good pace, and it’s not burdened by too much description (which is an admitted problem of mine; I want to know the stitch pattern on the hem of a skirt, y’know?). I am also proud of the choice my heroine makes in the end. While the book has a sub-plot that verges on romance, I just couldn’t let it go too far. I let her do the talking.

Things I Loathed: Tropes, tropes, tropes. I’m writing fantasy. I am painfully aware. And there are some things I did because, well, it’s the genre. There’s one thing in particular that I’m still not entirely on board with but, well, it fits with the overall mythology of this world, and so… there it is. I can’t very well destroy all of the tropes (see the comment about the romance up there). Also, I feel that some of the political intrigue slacks a bit toward the end. But that’s probably because I had a hard time writing it. Also: the climax needs work, but I still need to think on it. We’ll see what the readers think.

Thinking About: The market. Worried that this isn’t terribly marketable. Telling myself it doesn’t matter, because if it’s written well someone will love it. Really, it’s a bit of epic fantasy mixed up with a dose of Lovecraft, a pinch of Dante, and a smattering of Mieville, set in an alternate world in a high Victorianesque setting. There are plenty of corsets, flying machines, and even some relations (if you know what I mean). All with a multi-POV narrative, and well, that squid I was talking about. (Doesn’t that sound like the perfect pitch paragraph…)

At any rate. What’s done is done. Now, it’s in the hands of those readers who will likely show me things I never noticed, and I can start the editing process all over again! :)

Draft Zero? Oh Yes!

Indigo & Ink is officially moving from Scrivener to Pages. What does that mean? Why, draft zero has been achieved! So I ended up more than my original plan, but hey. That’s what drafts are for, right? Unexpected things happen. I thought at one point I might not even get to 90k. But this book, well, it’s got a mind of its own.  Just like the Mother Squid.

Anyway, this book has been very important for me to finish for a number of reasons. Things haven’t been great on a lot of fronts, but this story needed to be told. And I did it. In spite of the crap that’s been going on. In spite of the instrument of my craft (my hands) being total crap, I didn’t let it get me down. I kept going. Yes, tooting my own horn here, but… I’m happy. So there. Lord knows I need a little confidence sometimes. (Don’t we all?) Not to mention the escape.

Now… into the pits of editing!