Category: Writing

This is in the nature of a catch-up and reminder post.

A.  Order your signed and/or personalized copy of Alliance of Equals:  Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis is now accepting pre-orders for signed and/or personalized copies of Lee and Miller’s 19th Liaden Universe® novel, Alliance of Equals, which will be published in July.  There is a deadline for pre-ordering personalized books (where “personalized” means the authors, in addition to their signatures, write something specifically requested by the person buying the book).  That deadline is June 1.  Here’s your link.

B. Liaden Universe® Store at OffWorld Design:  Coffee mugs, denim shirts, t-shirts, polos!  New colors and items have been added, just in time for spring!  Here’s your link.

C. The eARC of Alliance of Equals is now on sale at Baen.com.  Here’s your link.

D. For those who have read Alliance and want to talk about it, there’s a spoiler discussion here.

Author Requests Assistance

Related to Point Number C, above:   The page proofs for Alliance of Equals landed here at the Confusion Factory.  It is apparent that the original manuscript was, ah, copy-edited with a very light hand.  So!  If you have the eARC, and notice errors, or things that seem like errors, please drop me a note at rolanniATkorvalDOTcom.  I will need chapter, page number and some of the text surrounding the error, so that I can find it.  Everyone assisting with this project will be thanked on the Acknowledgements Page in Alliance.  This is a matter of some little urgency, since the corrected pages need to be back at Baen Galactic Headquarters on April 12, which means they must leave Maine no later than April 11.

In other news, and in addition to proofing Alliance, Steve and I are still working on The Gathering Edge, which is due realsoonnow, and!  we have a short story due on May 15.

We’ll be writer guests of honor at RavenCon, in Williamsburg, Virginia, April 29-May 1, which con kicks off a summer of travel, including attending the Maine Democratic Convention as delegates for our town, the weekend we return from RavenCon; attending BaltiCon as returning guests of honor for their Fiftieth Anniversary Bash; doing a mini-book tour in support of Alliance, and! traveling to Wichita, and Kansas City.

Our full schedule, insofar as it is presently known, can be found here.

Thanks for listening, for reading, and for all that you do.  Here, have a picture of Trooper and Belle, ignoring each other.

So, I’m doodling along with the page proofs for Alliance of Equals, which has a nice, long turnaround time of three weeks from time of receipt.  For which I am truly grateful, because that gives us time to Pay Really Good Attention to the script and not have to Push On! despite one’s brain hurting, and eyes crossing, because Deadline.

So far (I’ve just finished page 79, or seven chapters, or 22%), it’s been pretty clean, but there have been some really strange copy editing decisions made, which has prompted me to keep the submission copy of Alliance open on the screen, so I can double-check stuff, and put it back the way it ought to be, when needed.

One of the strangest decisions was the treatment of master trader in a situation where Shan is trying to decide from which melant’i he ought to approach a knotty social problem.  Ought he to come the father? Or ought he speak as master trader?

The copy editor in the above case decided to put master trader in. . .quotes.  Mind you, they didn’t likewise put father in quotes, which would have been just as wrong but at least consistent.  But. . .

Shan does not think of himself as “master trader.”  Putting master trader in quotes in that particular instance Completely Negates melant’i, as we’ve built it and refined it over 19 novels and lots of short stories.  Shan thinks of himself as Shan.  Shan has various life roles assigned to him — father, master trader, master pilot, brother, lifemate, thodelm — and so on.  These roles, to a Liaden, are real, they are, in a peculiar and important way, living.  Liadens are, according to their own culture, not one, but many, and this is codified (as distinct from, say, US culture, where we are many, but we pretend that we’re not).

Having Shan think of the “master trader” in the instance above is so wrong, that I actually felt a little nauseous, seeing it there.

It’s fixed now, but — phew.  Close one.

Moving onward now to making some spaghetti sauce — we have fresh tomatoes, we have chopped fresh garlic, we have — wait for it — mushrooms (mmmmm, mushrooms).  Man, this is going to be primo spaghetti sauce.

After lunch, it’s back to The Gathering Edge.

How’s your weekend going?

The question is:  how much world building do you do before starting a new series or tangent? I’m working on my first novel and keep finding I have to backtrack to explain assumptions.

There are a couple of things going on in this question, so I’ll deal with the easiest one first:  It’s Perfectly OK to have to go back and fix/add stuff in/to your story.  We all do it.  We all get stuff wrong in the first draft.  That’s why most of us (I have had conversations with writers who say they write perfectly and never redraft.  Perhaps they do.) do multiple, or rolling, drafts.

As to how much world building I/we do before starting a new series…my first inclination is to say, “None; the characters tell me what I need to know, when I need to know it.”

While that’s true, it’s probably not true enough.  There are certain basic decisions you need to make before you start writing a story.

You should know what kind of story you’re writing:  romance, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, literary, &c, &c.  Knowing your genre will narrow what kind of world you’re allowed to play in.  Yes, there are crossovers.  The Liaden stories cross genres six ways from Thursday, but they are rooted in the traditions of science fiction.

Now, this business with the characters telling me/us what we need to know?  That’s true.  But the reason it’s true is that Steve and I tend to “meet” the characters who will be living in any particular story first.  That’s How We Do It.  Other writers think about the world/society first, and then they think about what kind of people would live in that world, and what kind of trouble they’d get into, what their assumptions are about their world, and if they’re right, wrong, or yes.

One of my favorite stories about world building comes from Janet Kagan.  She’d determined to write Hellspark, a book about language, and how it shapes society, thought, and prejudice; about what sentience looks like.  She worked hard on the kinesics of the various characters and cultures, kinesics being a plot-point, and she worked hard on her main character, Tocohl, who was a master linguist able to get around in multiple cultures because of her mastery of language and body language.  She wanted, particularly, for none of the cultures depicted in Hellspark to be “ours.”

And she was just about to hand the book in when she realized something.

In her book about alien kinesics?

The master linguist nodded.

Well, she tore the book apart to find and fix each of those incidences.  As one would, of course.

Now, that’s not the story of a failure — the error was caught in time.

But it is a cautionary tale to all of us, to think about what we’re doing in the world and society we’re building, and to question the easy answers that come from our assumptions and a lifetime of experience in what we like to call the real world.

Ask yourself:  What would a kid who lives in a closed environment where germs and dirt would cause a lot of problems, cuss by?  Might he use, mud, or dirt?  Supposing this closed environment that must be kept clean — how is that done?  Who does it?  What’s it called, the clean-up run?  It’s a basic task, keeping the ship clean, a survival task — is it therefore high-value?  Is the Garbage Man the ranking crewman, revered for keeping the ship spotless and the crew alive?  Or is Stinks a low-level task relegated to the junior-most?  It could go either way, right?  Just because we don’t happen to revere sanitation workers in so-called real life doesn’t mean that’s Natural Order.

Once you’ve made your choice — be consistent.  Pay attention.  Daydream about what your choices mean, down the story-road, what interesting developments might spring from them.

. . .but you can do most of that while you’re writing, see?  So long as you remember that going back and “fixing” things is a natural part of the process of storytelling.

. . .hope that helps.

. . .that you now need something to have been in that box, the contents of which you detailed. . .

. . .two books ago.

*bangs head on desk*

So, this is where I’ll be today — at the bookshelf standing desk overlooking the foggy, foggy trees, going through the Threads — each of those folders is a thread — combining clean-up with lexicon-building, and also identifying snap-on points.

Why, yes, that is quite a bit to have to hold in one’s head at once.  This is why I’ve turned off FB and Twitter and all the various news thingies that are so shiny and distractive.

Yes, the window is open. Yes, I still live in Maine.  It’s like 41F/5C out there this morning, and looking to rocket into the 50s/10s.

See you later.

This morning I write to you replete with a breakfast of Steve’s wonderful French toast dressed with dark maple syrup, a side of bacon, and several cups of coffee.  On the schedule today is finishing the laundry, changing the bedclothes, and, of course, working on The Gathering Edge.  Steve and I were brainstorming some ideas last night, and over breakfast, and we’ve got direction and energy.  I have a couple of scenes to write and braid in early on the backbone, so that’s what I’ll be concentrating on today.  Steve, who was lead writer on the story we handed in last week, is now coming back to the book and will be building us some more backbone.

Sounds like we know what we’re doing, doesn’t it?

Honestly, in broad measure, we do know what we’re doing, having done it so often.  On the other hand, there is the truism — every book is different.  Every book is different, even books written in a long series, or set within a created universe, or books with continuing characters.  After all, if the author’s doing it right, the characters will be growing, the universe will be evolving, and the author will be bringing their own new experiences, growth, and insights to the work.

Which brings me to yesterday’s tweet from James S.A. Corey:  Series writers: Be aware that some people will be angry you aren’t writing the same book over and over again. Ignore them.

. . .which both reflects my experience and is sound advice.  I’ll add that series writers also need to learn to  ignore the people who perhaps have not read their work, but see many novels written in the same universe, and therefore know that the author is simply writing the same book over and over and over again, and are therefore dismissible as artists and, occasionally, as human beings.

Which brings me to my next link in this Sunday Salad:  an article in the New York Review of Books by Tim Parks, in which he makes the argument that the only writers who can afford to experiment with, or grow, their art are those who are already known to be important/bestsellers (there’s a reason for that slash, there — read the article).  Midlist folks, argues Parks, are required by the field to play it safe, and produce the same old, same old, because one mistake — one “failed” book — can mean the end of  a career, whereas the guys at the top get unlimited Get Out of Jail Free cards.  Here’s your link.

To an extent, I disagree with Parks’ argument; I think that the act of writing is a risk of itself.  However, I do realize that, for career novelists, putting food on the table means that the book has got to earn out, and that the next one is under contract — which produces some constraints.

OTOH, we’ve been writing in a universe of our own devising for darn near 30 years, and taken what risks we wished.  We’re certainly not at the top of the Literary Ladder, but it may be that our continued ability to write what we want stems from the fact that we found our audience, that it is sufficiently large to give us a buffer against the necessity to always write it safe.  Or, yanno, our imaginations could be so limited that even our daring stuff is considered the same old, same old.

 Lastly — a local film critic and commentator has recently published his first book, and he describes his experience here.

. . .and that’s what I’ve got today, if I’m going to do the laundry, and write those pages.

Somebody please remind me that I need to do a post about my advice for growing one’s audience in This Digital Age, if I don’t get to it in the next day or two.

I hope everybody has a pleasant and relaxing Sunday.

I think Sprite’s outgrowing her basket: