Monday, Avec Subtext

Recently, I was hanging out in my Discord server and someone asked, “How much thought do you give to the subtext of your novels? (With the knowledge that ~75% of people are there for a plot and won’t pick up on the subtext)”? Which was super interesting and I typed up a long reply, but the question’s been bouncing around in my head since.

I don’t think most people are reading for plot. I think most people are reading for an experience, an exercise in empathy; plot is often a component of that, and characterization is a very important overriding factor as well. But subtext, hmm. My answer boiled down to, “I don’t think about it at all in the zero and first draft. If there’s subtext, I only recognize it in revision–and most of the time the editor sees it, I don’t.”

A story is a living, breathing organic thing for me. In the zero and first draft my concern is only getting the damn thing out whole and undamaged as possible. Any subtext happens almost despite the writer; the story itself chooses what it’s about and its undercurrents. This is not an abdication of responsibility, just a feature of how creativity often works; many’s the time an editor has said, “I love how you put in X as a theme/subtext,” and I’ll go all shifty-eyed and reply, “Yes, haha, absolutely!” before digging frantically in a former draft to find out what the hell.

When I write, I’m concerned almost entirely with just getting the damn thing finished in as undamaged a fashion as possible, getting myself out of the way so the story can come through. Anything else is the Muse’s concern and purview, not mine.

Now, in revision, once I’m alerted to themes or subtexts (which is part of the advantages and services an effective editor provides), I made decisions about highlighting or redirecting, accentuating or burying. And of course, other writers no doubt have different processes; I’m sure there are those who naturally think about and handle the subtext as they’re drafting or even while outlining. So this is not a one-size-fits-all answer by any means, and if you have a different experience while building your own stories, awesome! Go with it. Do what works for you. That’s the entire point.

Moving on! The time change (Daylight Savings, for the curious) is highly unpleasant, as usual. There is a persistent myth that it was instituted for agricultural reasons, like summer vacations in American public schooling, but that just ain’t so. Factory owners wanted to squeeze more productivity out of their caged employees, so the time change was instituted, and proved a little profitable so there’s a great deal of resistance to scrapping the whole thing. It’s all about control and a few more cents squeezed from workers, like so much else. It’s deeply unpleasant and the sooner it’s abolished the better.

…I could also be cranky because the caffeine hasn’t hit yet and there’s a whole lot to do today. That’s a distinct possibility.

Said coffee has been finished but Boxnoggin hasn’t stirred from his first daily nap yet. He was thrilled to have dinner “early” yesterday, even though he’s largely a social eater and sometimes refuses his kibble unless someone will sit at the table and pretend to be snacking as well. Of all our dogs he’s the one who handles the time change best–though he does start lobbying for dinner an hour before the official moment–more out of duty than anything else, I think. He appears utterly convinced the humans will forget to eat if not reminded by their faithful canine supervisor.

Of course, going outside for his first bathroom break happened in predawn darkness, which meant Deathwish BunBun appeared in the ferns along the back fence, giving me a filthy look for invading what he considers as his domain. Amazingly, Boxnoggin was too concerned with peeing and getting back inside to the warm bed to even notice the snackable bit of rodentia nearby, a mercy I am devoutly grateful for.

I love this dog; also, “smart” and “observant” are two deeply inaccurate descriptors for him. He is loving, committed, sometimes cunning, goofy, and energetic, and it’s enough.

Onward to Monday. I’m in a bit of a mood, and unwilling to sugarcoat much if at all today. It’s oddly liberating, like trimming my own hair–another thing which happened this weekend, and it went as well as can be expected. The split ends are gone, I can throw it in a braid for sleep or exercise, and when it warms up a little more the bees will be able to hitch a ride. More doesn’t really concern me at this point.

I’ve got subtexting to do, after all.

Almost Daffodils


Walkies have grown a little stressful since Boxnoggin is in the phase of recovery wherein he would really like to Do Something Foolish to Reinjure Himself, For He Is Feeling Ever So Much Better. Keeping him tightly-yet-gently reined is a constant endeavour. Plus, it’s been uncharacteristically warm so several plants are attempting to get a head start on spring; this is both heartening and deeply disturbing. I keep telling them perhaps a little caution is called for in these times of climate change and general trashfire everywhere.

The cherry trees are not yet causing me woe, for once, so maybe they understand. I don’t worry too much about the snowdrops, since it’s right there in their name. But the magnolias, the roses, the hyacinths, and the daffodils are driving me to distraction–like these fellows, not quite bloomed but certainly past the point of no return. I am heartened by their cheerfulness but also full of nail-biting tension, hoping against hope we won’t have a plunge in temperatures to blight early risers.

They are hopeful creatures, daffodils. Let us devoutly pray ’tis warranted.

Also, it’s a first of the month, and that means the Monthly Sales page is updated–including a sale on an entire series later in March. (Remember to check the dates!)

See you Monday, my dears.

Leap Day Bitch Break

Selene

I turned my alarm clock off for yesterday and today, and boy howdy was it ever the right choice. Insomnia hasn’t been biting as hard as it used to, but a night and a half of it is a danger sign I’m not going to disregard. Plus, today’s February 29, which only rolls around every four years.

When a bitch needs a goddamn break, a leap year’s extra day will work as well as any other. I’m only going to work on things which please me today, and that might mean fanfic. It certainly won’t mean anything I have to strain over. Oh, and also in honor of leap day, Selene is $2.99USD in ebook through these retailers (it doesn’t go on sale often, but I heard the pleas of my Danny Valentine fans…), Rose & Thunder is $3.99USD through these ones, HOOD‘s Season One is $1.99USD through these, and The Complete Roadtrip Z (all four seasons) is deeply discounted to $9.99USD in ebook here. There are other sales in March and April, but since this is a frabjous day I went all out scheduling these.

We’ve had hours of rain and it looks like the trend will continue through the weekend, which pleases me to no end. Of course I’ll be physically miserable halfway through my morning run, but that’s more than balanced by the joy of getting home, slithering into a warm shower, and drawing dry socks over my lower paws. I have officially reached the age where good socks are a blessing, a luxury, and damn near a courtship gift.

You may have also noticed the site looks subtly different; there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to get rid of certain plugins and services provided by companies who have drunk deep the “AI” Flavr-Aid. No more Google, thank you very much–I am weighing even turning off Analytics–and I’ve done a lot of work over the past few days to make sure I can switch away from the Jetpack plugin wholesale if Automattic tries scraping sites where it’s installed. To be strictly honest I don’t think the latter will happen, but I’m not leaving any openings. “AI” and “machine learning” enthusiasts have proved themselves so rancid and exploitative they will never be welcome in my house, world without end, amen.

It’s a huge goddamn grift and I’m tired of it. Even the faintest whiff of that nonsense is enough to turn me away entirely.

On the bright side, my coffee tastes exceptionally fine this damp grey morn. I mean, the first hit of caffeine is always a blessed event, but sometimes the stars align and one receives a superlative jolt. Perhaps some of it has to do with also getting a decent night’s rest after a week of uneasy-at-best toss-turn, or the fact that the Muse has turned away from certain types of input and is back to history books. The latter is a profound relief. I’m not me when I’m not writing, and I’m even less me when I can only get a quarter-hour’s worth of uninterrupted daily reading.

Boxnoggin will not enjoy beginning our walkies in these conditions, but he’ll like skipping them even less. I suppose I’d better finish this marvelous set of espresso shots and amble for the toaster.

Give yourself a wee bit of a break today if you can, my beloveds. You’ve earned it.

Ivy and Horizons

Even in winter, life is everywhere.

It’s too warm for February. (Thanks, climate change!) At least we’ve had some icepocalypse to cut down on summer’s insect population, and the cherries aren’t blooming yet. Even the one down the street which usually wakes up first–giving me no end of worry, I might add, the poor thing’s going to gamble wrong one of these years–is still blissfully asleep. But that doesn’t mean nothing’s happening.

For example, the ivy-banks are full of berries. The blooms were active far later in fall than anything else, and on sunny days late bees clustered them with zest. They’ve swollen through the worst winter has to offer, and I’m not sure what precisely eats them but something must be overjoyed at the snack.

Ivy’s a terrible plant in this part of the world, and can choke entire hillsides if allowed. Yet for obvious reasons I feel a sort of kinship with something thriving despite every effort to kill it. I also saw a dandelion in the backyard t’other day, while waiting for Boxnoggin to decide which part of the turf to christen. A tiny yellow sun saying hello, good afternoon, fuck you to the world; many are the yards in this neighborhood where such a thing would call for a sudden vengeful application of weed-n-feed. But the older I get, the more I want to just… let things live, if they’re not hurting anyone.

Still going to prune any ivy so it doesn’t kill the Venerable Fir, though. There’s letting things live, and then there’s being foolish with a vine which can kill a tree that will in turn absolutely take out two whole houses if it comes down during a hard wind. I’m broadening my horizons, not being stupid. (Granted the line is a little blurry some days…)

See you next week, my dears.

Practice in Patience

A while ago I added user-agent blocking to my site’s firewall in order to discourage “AI” content theft. Since I did so, there have been nearly 3k separate attempts by ChatGPT to steal from my site for their plagiarism machine, and a few hundred on the part of other theft machines. (Last year Neil Clarke put up this wonderfully informative post about protecting one’s website, and I regularly check for new user agents with a DuckDuckGo search.)

Of course, nasty little theft apologist shitheads will sniff that my blog is public, and if I didn’t want the content to be used I shouldn’t have put it here. I’m not even going to dignify that red, goalpost-moving herring with a response.

Anyway. In publishing news (so far as that goes), shifting my self-pub works to distribute at Kobo through Draft2Digital instead of directly has shown an appreciable bump in sales even in the few weeks since the change started. Part of this can be explained by a sharp swift poke making the algorithm notice something it had grown used to ignoring, and another component is D2D automagically rounding territorial prices to .49 and .99, which Kobo prioritises on the down-low but doesn’t give authors the tools to do without spending a lot of time fiddling around. The time investment in keeping track of exchange rates and going back every few months to tweak territorial prices–when I have direct evidence it can be done by a platform itself without fuss–is just too much, especially for an author who has a significant number of titles.

So I’ve been pleased by the results of the change, though I really, really wanted to list directly at Kobo–I am fond of keeping eggs in different baskets, as we all know–and gave them multiple years and chances to shape up. And please remember my experience may not be representative, I know other authors (mostly Canadian) who have wildly different benchmarks and success rates. Publishing is not a one-size-fits-all game.

Most of yesterday was taken up with administrivia like contract stuff, cleanup, formatting, and editor correspondence. It needed to be done and I’d had a couple good working days beforehand, so I’m not too behind the pitch. But I’d rather’ve been writing, as always. The first pitched battle in Highlands War (today’s subscription drop will see the beginning of the second season) needs tying up with the aftermath scene(s), the Sekrit Projekt is going to burn a king’s body, and the novella is airborne but needs another goose or two on the throttle to achieve cruising altitude.

And Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped!

Before all that, though, Boxnoggin is craving toast scraps and walkies. He forgot the Icepocalypse and having to basically stay indoors for a week less than 24hrs after the melt had progressed enough we could make it around the block, but still senses something is Not Quite Right and must do an awful lot of sniffing and christening every. single. bush. and. corner to make up for the enforced vacation. Being still caddywumpus from the entire thing myself, both because of the weather and entirely unrelated stress (I did feel like the world was mirroring my inner state for a while, yes indeedy), I understand…but I still wish he’d get a move on sometimes.

Ah well, it’s good practice in patience. I have never regarded myself as a patient being, though the kids say otherwise; the most I can say is that I have deliberately arranged my life to lengthen my fuse in some areas. While that’s great, it also seems to grant a shorter fuse in others, though at least I tend to disengage with a vengeance before I hit that point.

Small mercies, and now I must embark upon the rest of Thursday. At least it looks like a raw, grey, rainy day outside–my favourite kind. And the amount of work looming will keep me off the streets and out of trouble, just as soon as walkies and a run are dealt with.

Excelsior, and all that…

Catkin, Half-Drowned

Half-drowned, still protecting.

As the Icepocalypse faded we had a few days of soaking rain–really, Pacific Northwesterners need a thousand names for the different types of liquid precipitation we get–at relatively balmy temperatures. 50F is not usual for January, and several trees are putting out catkins or outright flowerbuds.

I’m not so worried about the camellias and that one cherry tree down the hill always goes earlier than anyone else. But I do whisper to the others–please, be reasonable. We could still get more ice, or worse. Try not to get too excited.

They’re not listening. I got this snap of a half-drowned little fellow, tousle-ragged, protecting tender new growth underneath. I hope they make it.

I hope we all do.

See you Monday.

Switchback, Lightning Rod

The Year of the Real continues. We’re not even out of January and I already have a form of psychological whiplash, though I’m trying to look at it like the Very Large Unpleasant Thing was a wicket to run through, or a struggling out of a chrysalis, or a phoenix burning down in order to burst into fresh flame–you get the idea. An uncomfortable necessity, a forging to make me stronger even if I would prefer something a little less, uh, red-hot and hammer-y.

My second husband had a theory of enlightenment–he had theories for everything, naturally, it was part of his charm and his downfall, but I digress. “There’s two paths,” he would say. “One switchbacks up the mountain, where you get the howling wind, the falling rocks, the avalanches, the lessons administered time and again. That’s how most poor motherfuckers do it.”

“Heard of that one,” I’d say. “What’s the other?” I rarely minded playing the straight man to his comedian. Part of my charm and downfall, I suppose.

“Well, the other starts in the parking lot. It’s a big lightning rod that goes straight up, all the way to the peak, and there’s a forest of warning signs around it saying DO NOT LICK.”

At that point, I’d repeat what I said the first time he ever expounded upon this theory in my presence. “That sounds more efficient. Where do I sign up?”

Ninety-nine percent of the time, that did him in. He’d laugh until tears streamed down his face, and I’d be pleased to have done my part. The one percent it didn’t was the first time, when he stopped and gazed at me for several seconds, brow furrowed, and finally said, “You know, that doesn’t surprise me at all, babe.” (And then began to laugh.) It was somewhat of a mystery to him, how I didn’t mind the pain all compressed into a few blinding instants if it got me up the goddamn mountain. I was equally mystified by his apparent pleasure in switchbacks and frostbite.

He was about the journey, I was about getting the bitch to Mount Doom. For a long while our relationship worked because of those contrasting commitments. It failed for other reasons, certainly, but I still remember the parts which didn’t rather fondly. And that image–the different ways to enlightenment–has stuck with me ever since.

Even people who leave one’s life change one somewhat. Getting older hopefully means putting uncomfortable changes in proper perspective, and thankfully that process gets easier once one has some Life Experience socked under the mattress. Which could be an argument for the switchblade route, I know.

But I’ve always been a lightning rod girl. So I’m choosing to view the recent unpleasantness as one of my trademark tongue-stuck-to-electrified-metal moments.

Of course the joke is really on both of us. Once the peak is reached, one gets a better view…and discovers that there’s an infinity of mountains, each higher than the last, each with a path (or two, or fifty) and a lightning rod festooned with warning signs in the parking lot. Sure, nirvana probably arrives once one gets rid of the mountains or realizes they’re all in one’s mind, et cetera, but I like learning new things even when the lesson is somewhat painful. And I already committed to sticking around until all other beings get through that particular door first, since the universe interests me and (more importantly) I’m not leaving anyone behind in this mess.

Not if I can help it. Enlightenment’s rather useless, after all, unless one helps others up the mountain–in whatever way they prefer. I do tend to discourage the lightning-rod method, but the sort of people who choose it aren’t the type to be discouraged by my warnings. (Guess how I know.)

So I hit the lightning again, pick myself up on the peak, shaking my head and frowning at the crisped bits in my hair. Stagger away from the pieces of chrysalis, my wings drying to catch the wind afresh. Sing while I scrape the ashen remnants of my old self into an egg of myrrh, and feel the fresh fire in my vitals. Shift my grip on the croquet mallet and eye the next wicket, not worrying about how far into the weeds I’ve been sent.

Pretty soon I’ll arrive in another parking lot, and I might take the switchback route next time…

…oh, hell, who am I kidding? We all know what I’m gonna do.

See you at the top, my beloveds.