I was all geared up to do Nano this year - of sorts. I was going to write a novel, but it probably wasn’t going to be 50,000 words. I didn’t know how many words it was going to be, and I wasn’t going to track it. Because that number, when you come down to it, is a nonsense way of judging whether you’re “done” yet.

I read this post by Jason Black on Plot to Punctuation who gave a great argument against using word count as a daily goal. The little number at the bottom of the screen (or wherever) takes far more of your focus than the words you’re churning out to increase it, and tempts you to stop when you’re on a roll, just because you’ve reached today’s number, or keep pushing when all you’re doing is padding or waffling because you still have another 200 words to go.

I find when I give myself wordcount goals, that rapidly becomes the case. And because my first drafts of anything tend to be absolute-bare-bones, super-condensed story, I fight the urge to pad out my story when the wordcount’s a little low despite my being halfway through already.

When you consider that, especially for self-publishing, story-length really doesn’t even matter anymore, it seems fairly idiotic for me to focus so much on wordcount when it hinders me in so many ways. 

Black has a great solution that I really wish I’d thought of earlier. He’s ignoring wordcount, and focussing instead on scenes.

It makes so much sense. Instead of having some fairly arbitrary counter distracting you, you judge your progress by how much of the story you’ve completed. You know instinctively how far through the scene you are. Scenes invite you to finish them, it’s a much more natural, unobtrusive goal. You’re not tracking a number while you write, you’re just writing this scene.

Scenes in my novels range from 2000 to 5000 words. I can write a scene - or most of one, if it’s a long one - in a day’s writing, before and after work. And serendipitously enough, my novel broke down into exactly thirty scenes. So my great plan was: one scene a day (accepting that they’d be bare-bones scenes. I go back on a second pass and fill in the description and detail and everything else before I consider the draft ‘finished’).

I was due back from Paris the morning of the 1st (oh, yeah, I went to Paris. Again. Did I mention that? Pics in later posts. Luxembourg is beautiful.). That gave me, somewhat optimistically, a full day to write a scene. Allowing for jetlag, I still had several full free days before I had to go back to work. If I missed the first day, I could make up for it later.

I didn’t account for Qantas. I didn’t account for a three-hour delay on the euro-star. I didn’t account for jetlag to be coupled with illness, sunburn and my fridge breaking down, so that my brain was too scattered to even think about story until possibly last night. Well, Friday night. Because I write these in advance. Sorry.

So, a week late, I could still start and make the ‘spirit’ of Nano. I looked at my story-plot, all neat and organised in Scrivener. Then I realised that, while I’d plotted out my story, I’d skimped on the worldbuilding. Again.

Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that spending time ‘worldbuilding’ outside of actually writing the novel or just daydreaming was a form of procrastination. Actually writing down the story bible was procrastination, and should be avoided.

Now, this is nonsense - I’ve even written about how important your story bible is, especially for series. But there was a little opinion in my head telling me I should just be writing the novel, not wasting time faffing about the edges making decisions on what plant to include near the desert. I’m a very impatient person, and I wanted the book done now now now. I wanted to be selling it already, and moving onto the next ones. I have way too many ideas, and not enough brains to channel them.

But there are no shortcuts, here. So - no Nano for me this year, not even to try out my snazzy new notion (though I will be trying it, once my planning’s done. Just not in Nano.). But for anyone else who tends to write their first drafts in ‘story shorthand’ - try aiming for scenes instead of numbers, and see how well those goals work for you.

 

 

Take a fairytale, myth or story you know well. Alice in Wonderland, Prometheus, Cinderella, etc.

Take a genre/setting you've never written about. Cyberpunk. Steampunk. Space Opera. Bromance. Western. You can see where this is going. Preferably, pick something that is as unlike the story you've chosen as possible, because it'll force you to be creative instead of filling in the blanks.

You guessed it - write tab A in slot B. Hopefully, if they're different enough, having to fit the story into the genre/setting rules will mean things have to change - it stops being cinderella and turns into a story with cinderella-esque themes or tropes. 

Have fun.

 

This weekend I cooked my first steak in my new place. Just as I was about to take the steak from the pan, the smoke alarms in the kitchen and the two rooms adjoining the kitchen sounded off. Mad scramble between preserving dinner and preserving eardrums aside (man those things are loud), I was rather taken by the idea of an earsplitting alarm to tell you that your steak is done.

So, the writing exercise: your own version of a steak alarm - take an everyday invention (like the smoke alarm) and twist it sideways. You can make it as useful or comical as you like. Now write a story utilising your invention.

One step further - what are the farreaching implications of your invention? For example, if earsplitting alarms are used to notify people of dinner, how would we communicate more important information, such as (for example) your house is on fire?

 

I read and adored Friedman's Coldfire trilogy a few years ago - a blend of science and fantasy, with brilliant worldbuilding, vivid, rich and fascinating characters, and brilliant writing and description. A while ago, I picked up her second trilogy, starting with A Feast of Souls, and was, frankly, disappointed. Her main character was irritating, unlikable and not in the least bith sympathetic, and while I was curious enough about the ending to finish the book, I certainly wasn't on the lookout for its siblings. However, the second book arrived as a gift, so here goes:

In a world where the price of magic is life itself, a group of seemingly immortal sorcerers appears to have cheated the system. But only one man knows the true origin of their power, or understands the true cost.

Now Kamala - born to poverty and abuse, the first woman to claim a Magister's power - will seek her rightful place among these mages, and lay siege to their secrets. The monk Salvator will claim his father's throne, and test his faith against a legendary darkness. The beautiful Siderea Aminestas, consort to Magisters, will be offered the thing she desires most - at the cost of her human soul. And an ancient Evil thought long-destroyed begins to stir anew, corrupting kings, shattering alliances and ultimately threatening to unweave the very fabric of human civilisation.

A mystical bloodline was cultivated to withstand this darkness, and its power must be wakened. But this will demand sacrifice of its warriors - and corruption is rife.

 It's an improvement on the first book of the series, but falls well short of her first trilogy.

Our main protagonist, Kamala, starts to develop some humanity, but is still far too out of touch with her own feelings or the feelings of others to be believable. She struggles with anyone expressing gratitude towards her, or respecting her, and yet that's exaclty what she envies when she meets women who are treated as equals by men. She spends an entire book wondering at her own attraction to a man, after running through more or less that exact process in the first book.

In short, she's patchy and inconsistent, but admittedly less irritating and inhuman this time around. Other characters are most consistent, but not particularly more interesting. There are a few mysteries set up and some posed questions, but I was honstly struggling to care.

There are some really great ideas in here, particularly the 'true cost' of their defence, and indeed the whole set-up, but it's swamped out by scenes that are just frankly dull (I found myself skimming), characters who have little input and should have been amalgamated, and the occasional truly cringworthy description - it shattered like rotton silk. Rotten silk can shatter? News to me. I think that might be her word of the year - almost every time she used it (which was quite often) it was in conjuction with something that just wouldn't shatter. Ah well.

As before, I was still curious enough to finish the book, but I wouldn't be looking for the third one. When she brings out her next trilogy, I'll take a gander - there's still enough good faith from her Coldfire series that I'll forgive her one that's a little rough around the edges. But I'd steer clear of this lot, for now.

 

I have finally gotten back to my giant pile of Books To Be Read (which has now toppled over into two piles, because some friends have recently come to the epiphany that I both like books, and have an amazon wishlist). Not a book that was on my wishlist, but has definitely been on my 'have a look at that' list. In my head. Anyway:

Alren lives with his parents on their small farmstead, half a day's ride from the isolated hamlet of Tibbet's Brook. As dusk falls each evening, a mist rises from the ground promising death to any foolish enough to brave the coming darkness. For hungry demons materialise from the vapours to feed, and as the shadows lengthen, humanity is forced to take shelter behind magical wards and pray that their protection holds until the dawn. 

But when Arlen's world is shattered by the demon plague, he realises that it is fear, rather than the monsters, which truly cripples humanity. Only by conquering their own terror can they ever hope to defeat the demons. Now Arlen must risk leaving the safety of his wards to discover a different path and offer humanity a last, fleeting chance of survival.

The Painted Man is Brett's debut, but reads far more like it comes from a seasoned author. The characters and world are engaging and vivid, the story and pacing spot-on for both a discrete novel, and the first book in a trilogy. Brett avoids constructing a three-volume-novel, and instead gives us a satisfying read that piques out interest for the later books.

The qualms I have about the book are few, though some are a little troubling. One of the societies Brett created had a clear caste system and complete male dominance over women. They were a violent, proud people with a number of faults, and clearly not displayed in an altogether positive light. So far, not a problem - the issue comes, for me, when he introduces burkhas into the equation (though he doesn't say the word, it's bloody obvious what he means - black cloth that covers women completely from head to toe, and while they may wear beautiful silks and jewellery underneath, only their husbands will ever see that.). 

I take issue with this because the burkha is such a strong image of Islam that introducing it to this society does not help enrich its culture, but instead invites the reader to assume that Brett is really writing about his understanding of Islamic culture - and it is not a flattering portrayal that he gives us. Instead of allowing the impression of these people to form from Brett's words, we're inundated by our own ideas of what Islamic cultures are. In the current cultural climate, slapping this Islamic brand on an invented woman-subjegating, violent, proud and easily offended people seems sensationalist, manipulative, and frankly racist. Not only unnecessary, but detrimental to the book.

And it could have so easily been averted. Did the women's wrappings have to be black? What if they were coloured to identify their marital status, or their husband's caste status? Just that slight change to move it away from the Islamic stereotype.

Other than that, it's a strong book. The characters are a little less dimensional than I'd like - but packing three complete and (for the most part) separate character arcs into 540 pages means something has to go. The female characters are the weakest - Leesha seems largely to be a one-note song, while Arlen and Rojer have much more depth. I would also have liked to see more of Arlen's transition - he exits stage left as one character, and essentially re-emerges later as a completely different one. Which is a valid technique, but when he's ostensibly the main character whose every nuance we've been following for the past three hundred pages, I feel a little cheated.

But, that aside, it's a book that I'd highly recommend, if you haven't picked it up already. The other two in the series have already made it onto my wishlist, and I'm looking forward to the other book of his (not from this series) that's sitting (unfortuntely quite a way down) on my Books To Be Read pile.

There are a lot of other points of view on the process of worldbuilding. Since my brain is utterly beseiged by end-of-semester madness, I thought I'd share some with you.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

I think my post publishing dates have gone skewiff, here, but anyway.

What's for lunch?

We have settled convicts living mostly-underground on an iceworld gathering phosphorescent light and guarding their sun. They are, at some point, going to get hungry, and their local environment is not (necessarily) going to be especially forthcoming with edibles.

Typically, Earth'sfrozen areas aren't abundant with life; while some plant life may survive, almost no animal life stays there permanently - and the few that do are generally just hanging on until a warmer, more fertile period returns. Even with adaptations, (and especially considering some of the adaptations life here will need to survive the gamma rays) it's unlikely this planet is going to be teeming with life like a rainforest. So what can our inhabitants eat? 

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Where'd you lot come from?

Last week, our inhabitants became settlers from another world, which brought up a whole lot of new questions - namely, what the hell are you lot doing here, don't you know that thing's gonna blow soon?

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Meet the natives

Or rather, not natives.

As we've examined before, the life-expectancy of our star means that anyone who lives here either underwent fantastically rapid evolution, or moved in for reasons of their own.

Following up from previous links to Henry Baum's experience with the Kindle Nation (and the subsequent delisting thanks to Amazon's draconion price parity policy), Smashwords CEO Mark Coker ventures his thoughts on the impact of Amazon's enforcement of their policies. In essence, it works to Amazon's steep advantage, discouraging authors from even listing with other retailers lest said retailers drop the price below Amazon's, and works against authors' interests. Coker calls on Amazon to review their policy, but unfortunately fails to provide a reason that it would be in Amazon's interest to do so. Still an interesting read, though.

Still on Amazon, S. G. Royle has published a great guide on some of the tax and legal issues for foreign authors wanting to publish on Amazon (so many forms!), while Steve Saus examines some key factors to success in digital publishing, and another Steve from York Writers is rebutting Phillip Goldberg's article (Huffington Post) about what writers really need. Steve has some great points to make about the illusions of advances, and how they might not be such a healthy thing after all.

And on an unrelated note, some posts I enjoyed on the worldbuilding-vs-story issue that seems to crop up far too often in SF texts.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

I'm making fairly random decisions as I go about what to create and which way to take the world. That's part of the process, for me - just riding along, following the trail of each piece I create, being inspired by the previous ideas to build the next. That doesn't mean anything I decide is iron-cast - a better, more suitable or more interesting idea may well (and probably will) supercede it along the way. The important thing is to keep a hold of which things each decision influences, so I know that areas I need to rethink, should I change an idea.

I just discovered (well, last week, but I'd already written posts by then) a new blog called storyfix.com, maintained by one Larry Brooks. While I'll admit he pushes his 'how to write a novel' book a little too loudly for my taste, a lot of the posts I've been reading so far have been great. Two in particular on story structure present great visual aids for structuring your story. They're PDF's (and pretty large PDFs at that) but they're great visual conceptualisations of story structure, arcs, plot points and turns.

On a completely different note, Dan Wells had a great article on the inherent commercial difficulties in using dramatic, world-changing events in your story - that it means the world that readers fell in love with no longer exists, and can't (easily) be used for other tie-ins, merchandise, sequels or other fund-generating avenues.

And on a more humerous angle, Michael Stackpole has a great article about how much spammers seem to know about him, and (drumroll) there's a new Simon's Cat video out - whee! Also, love the concept behing Neil Gaiman's recent tweet: I dreamed that people from Wikipedia came round to your house to adjust reality if it differed from what they had online. Given some of the discussion pages I've read on wikipedia, my gut response is *shudder*.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Let there be light

So our world is ice, with heat and safe living areas forged from volcanic tubes and tunnels. Our people live mostly underground, venturing out only during the night when the sun's gamma rays are hidden.

Outside, they'll be able to see a little by the moonlight, most of the time. And they may even borrow a few tricks from the Egyptians, using mirrors to reflect moonlight down into the tunnels. That's not much light to see by, however.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

A short one today, because it's now that time of semester when my brain starts melting from answering student questions and resolving staff problems.

Heat

Our ice-world is volcanic, but it's still going to be uncomfortably cold to live on. While our inhabitants can huddle near volcanic vents and lava beds, heat is still going to be scarce - fire is difficult to create on an iceworld, and wood requires venturing up to the surface anyway, so our inhabitants are either going to have to have a technological adaptation to ward off the chill, or be physically adapted to deal with it.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Lay of the land

I don't know about you, but I'm rather sick of maths-y mathsness for the time being. So no more maths for the moment at least. We have an ice-cold world with a super-long year and three moons, and people are going to need to live somewhere.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

The sixty-fourth day of Fentebruary

 Our slightly-larger-than-earth ice planet rotates around its deadly start once every 120 years, while its three moons - a small dark, medium red and large white - loop around once every 426, 1150 and 5840 days respectively. We have four eclipses, occuring every 1380 days (dark-red), 7008 days (dark-white), 18396 days (red-white) and 22075 days (triple eclipse). That's earth-days, by the way - 24-hour rotations. We could change the day length (planetary rotation's more or less whatever you want it to be - it's dependant on how fast things were going when the planet was formed, and tidal locking stuff, so have at it. Anything up to about 96 hours is okay- after that, the temperature fluctutation between night and day gets too extreme. Also keep in mind the faster your rotation, the more volatile your weather.) but we've already got complicated things here, let's keep it simple.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Over the moon

Our bigger-and-heavier-than-Earth planet orbits around its deadly star every 120 years. That's a looong time to wait for Christmas - almost two generations. It'd be nice if they had something else to look at in the meantime.

Satellites are important to a planet's health and not just from a spiritual or aesthetic perspective of the inhabitants. Orbiting satellites help prevent tidal locking - a planet being stuck with the same side always facing its sun, the way the moon always faces the same side to earth. A planet that's tidally locked to a sun will fry on one side and freeze on the other, becoming rapidly uninhabitable. Satellites also help protect a planet from passing comets and asteroids, by influencing the gravitational pull or even providing a physical shield (if we're lucky).

With a solar year of 120 years, I'd like to add a couple of moons in there - it'll help break up that 120 years with varying kinds of eclipses and alignments. And besides, multiple moons is a great ingredient for inventing religions and cultures.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Planetary plans

So our planet is orbiting around our super-hot, super-short-lived, super-deadly blue star once ever 120 years, far enough out that it's largely made of ice. Or it would be, assuming there's water. There doesn't have to be. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

How big is this planet? What's the gravity like? Do we have huge creatures loping gracefully through a moon-like bound, or short, squalid inhabitants hugging the surface? Are there metals? How thick is the atmosphere?

Some of these are going to be decided for us by the fact that we're orbiting a blue star. Blue star radiation isn't just deadly to DNA, it also breaks molecular bonds in a process called photodissociation - blue stars steal your planet's free oxygen from its upper atmosphere. Without free oxygen, there's no life-as-we-know-it, no fire or civilised technology. So we're going to have to do something about that.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Starting with stars

I like blue stars, they're problematic. They're too hot, too big, too short-lived, and emit so much deadly-to-DNA UV radiation that they make the Australian hole in the ozone layer look like a giant lead umbrella. Problems are good - they force you to be creative with your solutions, give you opportunities for inventiveness and originality. Problems are the antidote to lazy worldbuilding.

Blue stars only live a few billion years - no where near enough time to get an intelligent life form off the ground. Consider that our planet's about four billion years old, and homo sapiens only started appearing, at the earliest, four hundred thousand years ago, it means anything smart enough to think about the sun in their sky isn't going to have the chance to do so for long. Even your longest-lived blue star will be threatening to go nova when your native species have just begun metaphorically crawling. Which means either we'll have a native species with a really big problem, or a some settlers for whom such a star was either ideal, or the best they could get. All three of those sound promising as starting points.

I wrote a while ago about breaking your own rules, where the audience isn't given the expectation for some crucial elements of your world or story. Here, however, I'm talking about an altogether sillier version - breaking rules that you have specifically enunciated to the reader.

Inspired once again by Doctor Who - the second half of the Weeping Angels. Amy, for retcon-reasons we won't go into, has to keep her eyes shut and navigate a forest with Angels in it. Angels are a perculiar kind of alien that, as explained by Ten in Blink, don't exist when they're being observed - as soon as they're seen by any living thing, they turn to stone. When Amy inevitably encounters the Angels, she has to 'walk as if she can see', to fool the Angels into thinking she can see them, so they won't kill her. When she (of course) gives her blindness away, the Angels attack.