teaser Tuesday, getting medieval on your asses

I decided to do something completely different today, because I am crazy like that: so here’s a piece from Song, the second book in my high fantasy series. (No, it’s not precisely a medieval fantasy, but it’s kind of sort of close to one, and how could I not use that fabulous Pulp Fiction phrase?)

Also, hey! I hijacked the amazing Kimmi Richardson’s blog today to talk about the joys of V-Day: head on over and check it out!

***

Away from the usual traffic of the halls and about to turn the final corner to the library door Kyali swam suddenly out of her thoughts, instantly wary, not knowing what had caught her attention. She paused, blind to anything but stone ahead and behind. There was an unidentifiable smell that made her nape prickle.

She slid her daggers quietly from their sheaths, and crouched to peer around the corner at a height no man would look to.

Nothing.

—No. Not nothing: there was a shadowy man-sized something slumped beside the library door. It boded very ill indeed, and a flush of panic raced up her spine as she remembered who should be inside those doors: Kinsey. Cursing the lack of windows, she stepped out and walked soft-footed toward the something until it acquired definite shape. It became Ludor, the prince’s bodyguard. She could guess it only by the hair, for his face was purple and badly distorted by swelling. A darkened scratch at his neck told the tale.

Horror crawled over her skin.

She kicked the library door open without another thought, rolled on a shoulder and up onto her feet. She got a blurred view of three figures, which was one too many, and set her feet with her breath already falling into pattern. There wasn’t time to decipher the scene. Someone went past her: wrong, she marked him, from clothes too new and a face unfamiliar, and she crouched and struck before the moment could rearrange itself around her presence, felt the grinding jolt in her palms as blades met bone. Kinsey’s assistant Corin was backing away, her hand curled over empty air. Kinsey himself stood clutching a letter-opener.

The body falling past her —it was falling now— jerked a few feet from the impact of her daggers and struck the stone floor with a very final-sounding thump.

A second, then, a very brief one, to remember how to breathe. The edges of the room were clear, but there were too many shelves to hide among. Her hands fisted.

Kyali edged toward the body, wary of tricks. One didn’t come too close to dead men. Sometimes they weren’t. But he rolled easily when she nudged a shoulder with her toe, revealing features she had never encountered, and the expected amount of blood. There were two holes at the hollow of his throat, source of much of the blood. A dagger hilt protruded low on his ribs. She looked at her own daggers, still in her hands and blood-slick, and recalled Corin’s fingers clutching the dusty sunlight.

“Well done,” Kyali murmured.

ZOMG, and foresight’s always 20-20

…well, you know, it is if you write novels.

Or I guess if you actually are clairvoyant, but since only one of these applies to me, I’m going with novel-writing.

I am, dear readers, almost at THE END, that beautiful, sunny home stretch where the birds sing, the wind blows softly, and the proverbial All Hell Breaks Loose, throwing your characters into the Big Stakes Climax and pelting them with every misbegotten plot bunny your brain came up with on the way to this point. Somewhere in here all the loose ends start becoming knots, and before you know it you’ve got an afghan.

Or something like that. I don’t know anything about knitting. Maybe I mean tapestry?

So anyway,  here I am grimly hacking my way through, adverbs and intensifiers flying every which way, and then it happens:

ZOMG! If I write this scene, then the falling action chapter will be missing one of the tie-ins that leans to potential-sequel-book! ZOMG! This moment will lead to a catastrophic revelation at the exact moment that characters A, D and F reach the life-or-death climax! ZOMG! When the hell did these two decide to get in on? ZOMG!!!

And so on.

I am my own comic book.

Nobody gets in my way like I do. So I’m going back to morning Write or Die sessions for the nonce: I may not always write useful things when I’m under threat of loud noises, blinky red screen and eventual deletion of words, but it does make the ZOMG! go away, at least for a little while.

I am finishing this book if it kills me.

blog structure-y update…

Just an FYI – I’m now putting something about my completed or almost-there projects on my blog!

(Yes, I am excited about this. Yes, I am a geek.)

Sooner or later I’ll probably have to get my own website, because I don’t think the free WordPress blogs were intended for this many pages and eventually it’ll start to look weird –but for now, voila!

My Projects has become My Books, and has a little more detail, plus links to my finished high fantasy SWORD and my almost-finished (SO very almost) urban fantasy WEAVE. (If that’s really what I end up calling it.) Both new pages have a short description, plus an excerpt. Check it out!

Wednesday randomness

Good morning, cruel world. I’d managed to convince myself that yesterday was Wednesday, so I woke up all prepared to be one day from Friday. Alas, alas. SO I thought I’d start the day out with a random list, because I am crazy like that.

1) I am drinking espresso. This is due to necessity, as I am out of soy milk and cappuccinos made only with water pretty much suck. I am very, very awake right now. I don’t think I’ve blinked in a few minutes here. 

Yes, this is kind of what my eyes look like right now, actually, minus the spoons.

2) This is a piece of awesome. My husband got me one for Christmas, and I am a very happy camper right now. It’s a little difficult to type coherently while it’s working, but I’ve made it happen. It’s all about commitment.

3) If you haven’t run across the genius that is How To Write Badly Well, scuttle on over there right this instant. Warning: it will make you snort beverages out of your nose. Try not to drink anything while you’re reading.

–Actually, the concept is almost as brilliant as the execution: giving earnest examples of what doing it very, very wrong looks like may be more effective than giving examples of what doing it very, very right looks like. (And by doing it I mean writing: I’m not espousing bad porn here.) Gods know there have been plenty of times I read something and thought: “Okay, that’s how not to do it. Check.”

4) I am almost done with my third book. Almost. Almost almost almost.

5) Um. I have to go to work now, actually. So there is no 5.

Happy Wednesday, peoples.

in retrospect: living up to the hype

That’s right, folks, it’s time for yet another How The Hell I Got Myself Into this installment. When you’re at a loss for interesting things to blog about (or just waiting for a situation to settle enough to form a complete opinion, as I currently am with the Macmillan-Amazon fiasco), you can always turn to that unfailing fallback, mining the most embarrassing moments of your past for entertainment. At least I won’t run out of material.

I am fourteen, a freshman in oversized tee shirts and torn jeans and worn out sneakers. My hair has finally settled, thank god, but the rest of me looks like it wants to be at the skater park. I have reclaimed HARRIET THE SPY, which was a favorite from fifth grade that is now favored even over my idol Stephen King.

It’s the notebook that did it, you see. How awesome was that notebook? Everybody wanted to read it.

I have my own now, inked all over with random designs that get me through the more boring classes. I mean, I have several, of course, that are actually for classes: but this one is for the short stories I write compulsively, and –now that I’ve reread HARRIET– for random observations about people that I make with flair and scowling fervor, prompting my friends to ask me what the hell I’m doing. I have always had a notebook like this, truth be told: but who knew that carrying it around publicly would make such a stir?

And here I am in the cafeteria on a study break, scribbling madly, knowing half the eyes at the table are on me– and also knowing that there is nothing really worthy of their interest in here, unless you like short stories, rhyming poetry, and irritated comparisons of certain teachers to various flora and fauna. This isn’t the lost notes of Deep Throat. It’s not even HARRIET THE SPY (which is just as well, I think sourly, considering how well that turned out for Harriet). It’s really not very much of anything.

Emily leans forward. So when do I get to read your notebook? she asks. There are mutters of agreement.

I smile, scribble, and try not to panic. This has worked a little better than I thought it would. I just thought it would be an nice image, writer with notebook, you know? Flipping back through with some desperation, I understand that I don’t really have anything worth reading in here. But I’ve scribbled so furiously (and publicly) for so many weeks that there’s no way anybody could believe otherwise.

At the end of the year, I say confidently. Surely that will be enough time to get rid of all the crap in here and come up with something interesting, I think. Also, they might forget.

Did they, you ask? No, of course not.

Did I follow through and edit myself into something worth reading? Um. Not exactly.

Did they find it quirky and interesting anyway, did we all have a good laugh about it, go out for ice cream, learn an important life lesson, and was my path as a writer cemented at the tender age of fourteen?

Oh hell no.

I think there might have been some painfully polite commentary before we all moved on to whatever else was 1000 times more interesting, and I put the notebook away, to be replaced with my usual method of using half my class notebooks for much the same purpose, but quietly.

Lessons learned: 1) revise, for the love of god, revise; and 2) hype only works if the product is worth the advertising.

breathers (and breathing)

15K left. Or so. Maybe. Could be 20, or 10, or 30, for all I know. Endings are easier for me in that I know, more or less, what’s going to happen, and I have, more or less, all the tools I need to take myself there: they’re harder for me because all the work I’ve put in so far is put to the test, and every word counts.

Well. Every word counts anyway; I know that. But this 10-15-20-30-whateverK feels like tiptoeing through a minefield. They’re all my mines, but some of them I don’t remember putting there, and I only want a select few to actually blow up, on my terms, and preferably not when I’m standing near them. Controlled demolition vs. oh-crap-did-you-hear-that? demolition.

(Okay, no more violent metaphors. Sorry. I’m still working on coffee #1.)

Anyway. I read this fabulous interview yesterday –the amazing and witty Hope101’s interview of Laura Kinsale, if you’re interested (and you should be, because it was a really, really great interview)– and one of Ms. Kinsale’s statements struck me:

“What I’ve found is that if I do force myself to write when the pitcher is empty, I go down blind alleys that just get harder and harder to push ahead.  Then I have to go back to where it was “working” and start over there.  There will always be some “good parts” in the blind alley that I don’t want to let go of, which makes it even harder to start over.  Overall not very pleasant or productive.  So what seems to work best for me is not to force myself to turn out pages on a schedule, but to keep the book and characters in my mind, to read other books, and listen for that little bell to ring that gives me a sentence or a scene I can start with and keep going.”

(It’s on page two, if you want to go hunting for it)

I do this All. The. Time.

We’re writers. We want to get published. For those of us messing around in particular genres –SF/F, for example, which is definitely where I fall– the ability to produce, and produce regularly, is a not-inconsiderable talent. Even unpublished and contractless, that pressure is still there unless you’ve done little to no research at all about this industry (or, I suppose, unless you’re a much more stable and balanced person than I am). You’ve probably come across at least a few blogs, or posts, or whatever, that paint the picture of a writer in the middle of one novel, editing another, and reviewing galleys on a third.

And if you’re anything like me your first thought upon reading an account of something like that was not Awesooooome! *fistpump*, but Sweet Cartwheeling Jesus, when do they sleep?

No, it’s not always like that (or, I hope, even often like that). But if you’re anything like me, you feel that pressure even though it’s not always like that, and even though you don’t yet have any contractual obligation to write, say, a book a year. I see numbers and scenarios like the above; I know a lot of writers who do, in fact, write that fast or faster; and I worry. Because I just don’t write that fast. Or, not as fast as I feel like I should. I can do a book a year, but it does in fact take the whole year. And I sit here, 20K-or-whatever from THE END, stressing myself out because I’m not going as fast as I think I should be. And you know, stress can be useful and productive, but as far as its influence on an occasionally delicate creative process? –well, not so much. Especially here, approaching THE END, where I’m already neurotic enough to fund the college educations of several psychologists’ children.

So the above-quoted statement is a helpful reminder for me: I’m not racing a clock. And pushing myself when maybe I really need to take a night off, or even (gulp) a week off, probably isn’t going to give me anything I’m actually going to want to keep.

It’s important to me to keep in mind that this is a job, or at least that if I want to get paid for it I’d be wise to treat it like one… but I often forget that it’s equally important to let my brain (and my fingers) have some time off to recharge.

~breathe~

teaser Tuesday, not handling the pain gracefully

Yes, dear readers, here I am again. I’ll have to take a break from these fairly soon, but as my last post suggests I am dragging myself, kicking and screaming, to THE END, and these kind of goose me into forward motion. So we’re back to Our Heroine, who does not handle pain with anything like grace.

***

“Hey.”

I looked up. I hadn’t even heard Bobby’s boots in the thin covering of snow.

“Hey,” I breathed. I wanted to say something clever, but wit was beyond me for the moment, hiding behind a curtain of red pain. I could smell my own blood in the cold air. It hurt enough to tie my stomach in queasy knots.

“I figured you’d show up here sooner or later.” Bobby crouched, a bulky flannel-clad silhouette with a rifle slung over one shoulder. The sight of the gun made me sick. Bile slid up the back of my throat.

“The fuck ‘r you wearing, girl?” he said, taking in my outfit.

“It’s the latest,” I said, having to force the words out around big gulps of nausea-tinged pain. “All the girls are wearing it. Gatekeeper chic.”

Bobby spat a charming stream of tobacco juice to the side. “I never know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s mutual, good buddy.”

There was no help coming from this direction. And I was damned if I was going to huddle on the ground and bleed like a damsel in distress while my asshole cousin watched. I put a hand out behind me and pressed into Big Rock until I felt like I could get my legs under me. The blood-scent was overpowering: I wondered that they couldn’t smell it at the house. “Can you sort of back up, Bobby? You’re in my way.”

He spat brown again, definitely a comment. It didn’t take much to figure out what sort of comment. “You’re out on your feet, Dari. We’re gonna have to take you to Burlington for sure. You’re dad’s gonna blow a gasket when he sees this.”

“Oh, fuck you, Bob.” Fury did what pride hadn’t pulled off. I staggered upright, leaning heavily on Big Rock, and looked my cousin in the eye. “Go on and tell him, then. Run along. Kiss ass and take names, right? Don’t be shy about it: somebody’s gotta be the suck-up in this little group, and it’s so fucking good of you to take one for the team, Bobby, I mean that.”

Pain put a fine edge in my voice. Jesus, getting shot looked so easy in the movies; you were supposed to grimace stoically, maybe make a small noise, and then get up and finish saving the day. There wasn’t much day-saving in my immediate future. I could barely move my fingers. It felt like my left arm was filling up with poison.

(not so) deep thoughts

So close. 20K left (I think: I don’t plan to hit a certain word count so much as I do certain plot points, so I usually end up going over and then revising to hit my approximately-100K-goal). Here I sit, eking my way toward THE END, knowing I’ve gone and waxed way too lyrical in the home stretch of this book  (I always do, for some reason), wondering if all these interesting revelations happening so close to the climax are even going to be a little bit relevant, wondering why my characters can’t just focus, damn it, and follow a decently drawn plotline instead of smacking one another around and/or spending too much time thinking about sex.

I feel like my high school chaperones must have felt trying to herd my senior class to the beach for the Last Class Trip: scowling at giggling herds of scantily dressed girls, knowing damned well at least a few of the rowdier guys must have come here the night before to bury six packs of Labats in the sand, wondering if those two kids out in the water still have their suits on, because it looks like maybe they don’t. I am the wet blanket, herding all my wayward charges onto the bus and insisting we not take the back roads home: the highway, thank you, driver, and you two in the back stop kissing right now! Detention for all of you if you’re not in your seats, facing forward, and not touching each other in thirty seconds! Stop singing!

Here I sit, looking for excuses not to end this, because much as I’ve bitched here, it’s been fun.

Maybe I should read it from the beginning; I think my voice changed halfway through.

No, idiot, you do that after you finish. That’s why we call them revisions.

But hold on, I think I missed a major plot point back in chapter three that’s becoming important now: if I don’t get that fleshed out nothing after chapter 16 will make sense!

Jackass, the whole point of revisions is to fix stuff like that AFTER you finish. Make a note and come back to it later. Sit! Write!

Look, I’m serious, if I don’t get this theme down NOW I will be a failure as a writer! People will LAUGH! Something might explode! World peace will never happen!

Oh my god, that’s it. You are not allowed another cappuccino until you get in at least 1000 words. Face forward! Stop playing footsie! You’re grounded!

And so on.

*sigh*

teaser Tuesday, more distraction

And here we are again. I’m making more slow progress on the WIP, but oh, the many shiny things waiting for me, how they sparkle. I swear it’s all I can do not to rub my hands and cackle over my Possibilities folder, which is where things sit until I’ve gotten them synopsised, outlined, and about 15K in, at which they get a working title and their own pretty folder.

This one started out as a writing exercise on AW, and went and grew itself a whole complicated plot while I wasn’t looking. Tricky things, ideas. They breed like rabbits.

***

She woke on her feet, to gunfire. Not the measured shots of a crazy picking off Hollywood elite in a crowded hall but a chaotic, rapid succession of explosions that ebbed and surged like a nightmare tide. Immediately her hands curled around the memory of an M4.

Something had just happened to her, something bad, and now this, which was worse.

“Oh shit,” Calyx said, looking down at the blood that had soaked through her shirt.

A mortar round went off. She staggered, more out of habit than because the shockwave knocked her back. Her ears rang. Somewhere in the fog men were bellowing orders, screaming in pain, swearing: it was Kuwait all over again, and her shoulders twisted up in a helpless shudder, because she knew those screams at gut-level and she couldn’t see a thing.

Until the horse came up beside her, that was.

Calyx let out a curse of her own. It was a monstrous black shadow of a horse, its eyes bottomless pools of darkness. It looked at her and there was no time to wonder what it was doing there: her skin broke out in a mad prickle of goosebumps and then she was astride, her legs wrapped around those huge heaving ribs, with no memory of getting there. There was a heaviness at her shoulders, and when the horse moved –oh god how it moved, like a silken thunder– whatever it was on her back caught the wind and dragged at it, so she had to clutch a double handful of thick mane just to stay on.

They pounded out of the gray and the sour sting of gunpowder hit her nose. Men ducked and dodged in the haze, shooting, dashing forward. She remembered that part too– remembered all of it, suddenly, in an unwelcome rush: the terror and the crazy, pulse-pounding rage that came with it, the gun kicking back against her again and again, the scent of blood on sand. Mike Sanders and Billy Johnson underfoot, just so much debris in the trench, bled out before the medics could get to them.

She was in hell. This had to be hell, except if it was hell, why wasn’t she back in Kuwait? This was some other place, too gray, less sandy.

Up ahead of her, a soldier got to his feet. None of the rest of them appeared to notice her, but this one looked her right in the eye, with his face so coated in dust it was impossible to tell his age. The horse came to a stop, pitching her forward. Bullets whined around them. Calyx pushed herself upright. The kid was leaking blood from more than one hole in his desert-issue fatigues, and his eyes had a look she’d learned to watch for back in her own tour, desperation and distance all at once. An on-the-way-out look.

She wondered if she could get him up on the horse, get him somewhere to be patched up. As she was thinking this the horse stepped forward, and there was another one of those moments where the movement seemed to happen without her making any effort. She reached down and touched his shoulder. He was putting out heat like a small furnace. Guys did that sometimes toward the end, if they were still trying to fight, like their bodies just threw off all the safeties and went for broke. Her palm burned.

“Go ahead now,” Calyx said, with no idea where the words came from.

He dropped like a stone, dead before his head hit the dirt.

help for Haiti

I won’t bother to describe it, since the news and the images of this disaster have already made their way all over the world.

I’m just going to borrow a great list compiled by fellow writer Rebecca Burrell. And add that it’s as easy as texting: send a text message that just says “HAITI” to 90999 and your phone will be charged for $10.00 that will go to the Red Cross’s Haiti relief efforts.

Help in any way you can, folks.

Action Against Hunger http://www.actionagainsthunger.org/where-we-work/haiti
American Red Cross http://www.redcross.org /
American Jewish World Service http://ajws.org /
AmeriCares http://www.americares.org/newsroom/news/deadly-earthqua…
Beyond Borders http://www.beyondborders.net/index.php
CARE http://www.care.org /
Catholic Relief Services http://crs.org /
Childcare Worldwide http://www.childcareworldwide.org /
Direct Relief International http://www.directrelief.org/EmergencyResponse/2010/Eart…
Doctors Without Borders http://doctorswithoutborders.org/news/allcontent.cfm?id…
Feed My Starving Children http://www.fmsc.org/Page.aspx?pid=398
Friends of WFP http://www.friendsofwfp.org/site/c.hrKJIXPFIqE/b.502697…
Haitian Health Foundation http://www.haitianhealthfoundation.org /
Hope for Haiti http://www.hopeforhaiti.com /
International Medical Corps http://www.imcworldwide.org/Page.aspx?pid=183
International Relief Teams http://www.irteams.org/index.htm
Medical Teams International http://www.medicalteams.org/sf/Home.aspx
Meds and Food for Kids http://mfkhaiti.org /
Mercy Corps http://www.mercycorps.org /
Operation USA http://www.opusa.org /
Oxfam http://www.oxfamamerica.org /
Partners in Health http://www.pih.org/home.html
Samaritan’s Purse http://www.samaritanspurse.org /
Save the Children http://www.savethechildren.org /
UNICEF http://www.unicefusa.org/haitiquake
World Concern http://www.worldconcern.org /
World Vision http://www.worldvision.org /
Yele Haiti http://www.yele.org /