novel madness

Lightning, Once, Enough

Rolled out of bed to find that the Moka pot had been prepped on the stove for me, and one of my children (who had kindly set that up for their poor caffeine-dependent mother) was absolutely bursting to tell me all the news. Apparently that plagiarist Somerton is back at it with a fresh empathy-free nopology1, testing the waters to gain some engagement dollars from hatewatchers; I am continually amazed at the rinse-and-repeat cycles granted certain shameless narcissists.

Yesterday was a bit of a wash. I got a lot of administrivia handled, including things that couldn’t be done on the weekend, but that bled off the force I needed to get certain other things moving along. As a result, the writing part of the day felt like clawing my way out of Sarlaac pit. Both the serial and the Sekrit Projekt are chonky bois2 and being past the point of shiny-and-new makes for a lot of current to swim against, even without the Sisyphean emotional labor on the Sekrit. I want to add a third project to make them jealous, but so much of my energy is spent pushing against the resistance of previous damage there’s not a single leftover erg. Maybe that’ll change when edits for Chained Knight drop and I take time to do revisions on that book and Gamble.

At the very least I’ll be using different mental muscles. Sometimes that’s as good as a rest.

The promo experiment over the weekend went well, too. There’ll be a second experiment next month, and if that goes well I’ll consider recommending the particular promo platform to others. I was amused (and touched) so many folk decided any book capable of garnering that particular “fuck God” review was worth picking up for four bucks and giving a whirl; thank you all. I hope you like it.

I wrote Moon’s Knight during lockdown, in something of a fugue state. And I wasn’t going to publish it, but the howls of protest from my beta readers–who received an early draft on the theory that it might help them escape their own stress during that time–convinced me otherwise. There are whole passages I got to revision on and thought, whoever wrote this sounds like me, makes the choices I would…but I have no memory of this place. It was a very Gandalf set of moments, and I was quite jumpy looking for the Balrog.3

Chained Knight will be out later this year–I already have the cover, it’s a real beaut–and maybe I’ll write the third Tale of the Underdark next winter. I know precisely what happens and how it closes the circle. Of course, these books are variations on a theme rather than a proper series, as I’ve said before. If Moorcock could do it with a certain albino Melnibonean, why can’t I with a riff on something else? It’s the sort of project I wouldn’t be able to do without self-publishing technology and the experience garnered over the last couple decades, so at least I can feel good about that. Even if nobody ends up liking these books, I’ll be happy.

Of course, the response to Moon’s Knight has been overwhelmingly positive, notwithstanding that one hilarious “fuck God” review. Which, again, was absolutely priceless promo, the likes of which I might not ever see again. Ah well, hit by lightning once is enough. The amusement itself is worth the price of admission.

Today is for a meeting of clan-lords during which a certain sellsword receives what is, to her, very bad news, and a scene during which two prisoners somewhat bond over their fate. It’s the latter I’m looking forward to most, since it presents a chance to invert quite a few tropes. Turning such things inside out pleases me mightily, and honestly I doubted I’d get to ever write this particular scene. There have been many dark nights of the soul lately, only a few shafts of random light poking through to accentuate just how hopeless I’ve been feeling.

Quite frankly, it’s been awful. Maybe some of that is breaking up, though. Hand over hand, clinging to a rope made of stories, I keep climbing–and throwing out ropes of my own for others in different pits. It’s a life’s work and as I get older it seems more and more inevitable; I was always going to end up here, and I largely don’t mind. Weaving a net to keep others from the abyss keeps me occupied enough to struggle upward another few handholds.

And now it’s time for breakfast. Boxnoggin was an absolute fur-covered brat during yesterday’s walkies. He’s simply in that part of recovery, which means I need to be even more vigilant about making sure he doesn’t re-injure himself–a thankless task, to be sure, but a necessary one. I just heard him shake his collar as I typed that last sentence, so off I go.

Happy Tuesday, my beloveds. Let’s keep hauling ourselves upward.

For Different Elves

We’re on the downward half of the week, and I’m very close to the point where everything is funny again. That’s the stage right before I crawl into the cave for shelter and only reappear once a book is finished; considering there’s 50k (at least) left to write on the serial and way more than that on the Sekrit Projekt this does not bode well. Of course, it could be the urge to retreat into fictional worlds and never come back out, since there’s so much truly heinous shit going down outside.

I’m sure some Internet Rando will sneer that escapism doesn’t help anything, but I have ol’ JRRT on my side. Tolkien drew an explicit line (in an interview) between escapism in fiction and the duty for a prisoner of war to attempt escape in any way possible; I think about that a lot. I also think about his insistence, in at least one famous letter, that he was creating a mythic sandbox he desperately wanted other people to play in.

That last bit helps with the hatemail I’m starting to see now. I knew it was only a matter of time before some neckbeard or another got mad about me getting my girl cooties all over “Real” Epic Fantasy™, by which they inevitably mean White Male Power Trips. It was so expected as to be hilarious, actually arriving a little bit later than I thought it would. So far the dudes seem really upset that the protagonist isn’t the Valkyrie analogue in the book, that said Valkyrie isn’t banging one of the werewolves, and that the actual protagonist prefers sewing, negotiation, and peace to just about anything else.

They’re going to be real mad when the third book hits.

Those bemoaning the fact that the writing is dense, the language is sometimes archaic, and the narrative moves in ways they didn’t expect were also anticipated; I was asked several times to water the language and the complexity down, and largely refused. I will be precisely as recondite and playful as I wish in this particular trilogy. I’m not writing for those who cannot handle or suss out implications, or those who claim confusion when a character thinks one thing but says another. (It’s called lying. Shockingly, both real and fictional people are capable of it.)

No, I have created this for different elves, as the divine Austen might mutter.

The good news is, Boxnoggin’s completely fine. Indeed the dog’s only problem now is my insistence that he not scrabble-run crazily down the hall or engage in calisthenics all over the living room furniture to reinjure himself. He is most annoyed at the short, very easy daily rambles, too, even though I allow double the usual generous allotment of sniffing time. Fortunately the weather has been filthy enough to keep other dogs inside most mornings, which means he does not exert himself proving his chivalry by acting a damnfool and needing close harness-hobbling. Plus he gets to sprawl on a heated bed for the majority of the day, which does him a great deal of good and will probably cut recovery time down a bit. Small mercies.

The Muse is demanding a steady diet of manga and Donnie Yen movies at the moment. I have no idea, I just give her what she wants. Personally I’d prefer to go back to the stack of history books waiting at my bedside, but she’s voracious and I need her kept happy. Plus there’s the Gamble revision looming, and one for Chained Knight when the editor sends it back. I’m considering a Roadtrip Z series sale next month, too, but that’s a whole lot of setup and I’m not sure I have the hand free to juggle it.

There are also some reader questions hanging fire; I really ought to do a post from the mailbag soon-ish. I do read everything sent, my darlings, I just don’t have a lot of time to respond. It’s either reply to all your lovely missives or write the books you all want, and only one of those pays my bills. I do what I can, yet am perpetually behind the eight-ball, so to speak.

In any case the morning mist is lifting, the coffee is down to dregs, and I should gnaw some toast before the ramble and shamble, the first for Boxnoggin and the second for my silly mental and physical health. There’s an army to get moving in the serial, and actual flying monkeys to unleash in the Sekrit Projekt. I have been looking forward to the latter for weeksnow and have a shot at getting to actually write it today, which provides me with a great deal of anticipatory glee.

Best to get started, then. Excelsior, and all that…

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…

Incremental, Nonetheless

I’m pretty chuffed that A Flame in the North made LitHub’s list of February’s best SFF books. It’s in some stellar company, and I am thoroughly amazed. I am also nervous as hell since release day is stalking ever closer; these books have had a very difficult road indeed. Oh! And for those asking, Black Land’s Bane is a trilogy, not a two-parter as Amazon is saying. Hopefully that error should be fixed soon.

We’re also back to more reasonable winter weather for this part of the world, for however long that lasts. Boxnoggin is annoyed–six years he’s been here, but the liquid sunshine still discommodes him. Poor thing. He’s currently pacing the hallway, lobbying for early walkies though he knows, he knows I have not yet finished my coffee.

I should do a “from the mailbag” post soon; I’m getting a lot of the same kinds of questions and can’t reply personally. I wish I could, but actually writing the books takes precedence.

In the good news column, the novella is off the ground (I got the robot donkey named Chicken punched last night) and the Sekrit Projekt did not need all 17k of its beginning scrapped, so at least there’s that. And I am nearing the end of the first pitched battle in Highlands War, which currently has our favorite sellsword thrown from her horse and into the carcass of a giant boar. (Because that’s just how this book rolls, naturally.) Today she’s going to struggle out of the mess of guts and meat, and have a clear shot at ending the war once and for all…

…but things are never that easy, especially for one of my characters. I’m looking forward to that bit of writing today, as well as perhaps a lyrical little meeting between almost-lovers in the Sekrit Projekt. There’s just a cornucopia of good stuff waiting for me once I get walkies out of the way, and maybe it’ll distract from the nerves over release day and the looming stress of living in a failing empire plus capitalist hellscape.

Maybe.

As I’ve typed this, flicking between screens and waiting for caffeine to hit the bloodstream, I’ve reached the chewy dregs of the morning coffee. Boxnoggin has settled, but his (rather adorable) ears are pricked and the instant I shift to stand up he will be accompanying me to the toaster–brekkie comes next in the ritual–and waiting for his toll of crust, then dancing in place as the habitual getting-prepped-for-walkies continues. I’ have to be extremely careful not to vary his morning routine too much, for upon that path lies an anxiety spike for the poor creature and nobody wants that. I’m glad to be consistent enough that Herr von Titzpunch can stamp his paws and look miffed when there’s a slight deviation; it’s far better than the anxiety spikes he used to display.

Progress is incremental, but welcome nonetheless. The firs are ink-shadows because the sky is lightening. Tuesday beckons.

I suppose I’d better get to that toast now…

Indignant Fire, Biting Back

I waxed rather indignant this past weekend, so my mentions are a bit of a mess. Reports of the deaths of books and writing are always highly exaggerated, world without end, amen. The recent successes by creatives and people doing the damn work pushing back against corporate and billionaire exploitation has the corps and billionaires running scared that a few of their profit percentage points might get shaved off. I’ll leave it at that.

The current reading is Pekka Hamalainen’s Lakota America, which is thought-provoking and very dense. I have a couple more of his books (someone got their dear old Mum a gift card recently) added to the TBR pile, which is teetering at a dangerous angle. The Muse wants nice chewy historical reading but she also wants a very specific type of action movie, and I cannot bifurcate like I used to. So maybe it’ll be movie weekends and wading through footnotes the rest of the time.

I woke up with a very specific Pink Floyd in my head; it’s past the winter solstice so maybe I could even listen to it outside the skull radio. However, it doesn’t feel like there’s enough sunlight. I mean, I live in the Pacific Northwest and am glad that it’s nearly always grey, but I can’t listen to the Floyd without some solar radiation. Maybe if there’s a yard work or burn day soon.

Speaking of which, we do have to lug out the firepit before the spring rains halt, mostly because there are Experiments in Combustion to be done. A while ago my writing partner and I were talking about wintergreen LifeSavers making a spark when you bite them (they do!) and the comments on a video we dug up led us to wonder about granulated coffee creamer as firestarting material. Initial experimentation says not really, it has to be airborne before one gets the very theatrical puff of flame. Though in fact, we only tried with a certain kind and it could have been sugar interfering with the effect.

I really should have found a place to get sample packets, then done testing for different flame capabilities, but there was only one certain kind we could get our hands on at short notice so we made do. It’ll just mean more fun later. I want to see if different flavors produce different colors as well; the Selkie doesn’t think so since that’s mostly a function of minerals. But we’ll see. (Science!)

That’s another reason writers will never go out of style. One of our hallmarks is endless curiosity about the world, and willingness to do “research” even if it might singe one’s eyebrows.

However, lighting things on fire will sadly have to wait for a little bit, as I’m up to said eyebrows in work. I want to get this first pitched battle put to bed, get another character agreeing to something despite her better instincts, and then there’s the robot donkey (named Chicken) in the novella to get upright and working–I was about to type manageable but that’s never going to happen. Plus Boxnoggin wants a long ramble and there’s my own silly corpse to move along at a shamble for a defined distance.

And there’s mounting nerves over the upcoming release to deal with as well. All in all, Monday’s biting early and I should get my molars involved in biting back.

…I just popped over into email in order to clear some correspondence that had to go out before 9am, so the week is beginning as it means to go on, I guess. Time to choke down some toast and get out the door.

Novel or Keyhole

This is the first time I’ve ever awakened with a Linkin Park song in my head, so…yeah. I mean, I usually have music playing in my head all the time, whether it’s earthly or otherwise, but that particular band’s never made an appearance before. (Yesterday it was Joesef, and that meant a good day. Today…well, let’s wait and see.)

It was so odd, in fact, that I rolled over and reached for an electronic device in order to find the goddamn track so I could put a name to it and go back to sleep. Unfortunately, while I was doing so my sunrise clock began to warm up, and I decided I might as well just stay awake. There’s a lot to do since I finished a bunch of fiddly faffing tasks yesterday–including figuring out the skeleton of the new novella, which may or may not end up anywhere but it’s fun to work on. (It has a robot donkey named Chicken, fa cry-eye, how could I not finish it?)

I like writing novels more than novellas or short stories, mostly because I’m better at long-term endurance efforts. For anything shorter than a novel, I generally have to have every part of the strike clear–including the return to the sheath–before my hand twitches for the hilt. A novel gives me time and space to explore the entire planet even if I crash with nothing; a novella or shorter means a sliptilting scream-race through broken, possibly enemy-infested territory with only my wits and possibly a stick for company.

I can do it, sure. I can even do it well. But do I prefer it? Not so much.

Still, some stories are too small, intense, or delicate for the novel treatment. Those are overwhelmingly what I call “keyholes”–pieces where the scope is extremely constrained and I only have a small slice of the action. Most of the time I have to fight my natural urge to stretch, extend, and add more. Every story is an entire universe unto itself (or set in one) and I can get lost in the underpinnings if I’m not careful. Readers tend to like that about my work (except for the few who get angry that I didn’t add more or answer their particular personal questions), as it provides the feeling of solidity and heft so often necessary for complete immersion.

How does one tell if a story is a novel or a keyhole? It varies. Sometimes I’m only after a particular vibe, sometimes there are wordcount constraints and I need to pick the one path through an infinity of thickets to provide something that particular size. (This is generally how I make short stories.) After a while I began to sense about how long a story wants to be within the first scene or so, or sometimes even during the initial stage of gathering influences and letting the damn thing bubble in my head. The experience gained by finishing multiple works–not to mention having exponentially more unfinished bits in the compost heap–gives me a sort of spidey-sense in that regard.

There really is no shortcut. One needs enough experience as a writer to figure out one’s own process and preferences. Then it becomes a matter of gaming oneself, as most if not all adulthood turns out to be. Of course, every so often a short story will fall out of my head (like Jolene, Jolene, still unsold but ah well) for no other reason than it wanted to be born, or a novella will present itself at my garden gate in response to the urge to gift a friend something nice (like Fool’s Assassin, which I may yet bring out for your delectation). In the end, each story only teaches one how to write itself, and one has to start almost from scratch on the next one. Sure, some of the processes and habits carry over, but not the other tools.

This is part of the reason why LLMs/”AI” will never be able to give readers what they crave. There’s simply too many lightning-fast intuitive choices to be made at each step of the process, and the acts of distinction are too excruciatingly personal to each complex human artist. But that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.

Today will include a weighty stakes-raising council in one book, the beginning of a pitched battle in another, and if I can get the first two scenes of the novella off the ground I’ll call it a good effort. Plus there’s the weekly/monthly subscription drop to get sorted as well. I don’t like to do those too far in advance, given how things change at a moment’s notice around here. But at least there’s plenty in the cannon for both the serial and everyone else.

January’s finally over (it’s been years) and I’m hopeful time will start to be a little less out of joint. Regardless, the work still has to get done–and Boxnoggin is beginning to stir, sensing that I just downed the coffee-dregs and will be shambling towards brekkie in a hot minute. Round and round and round she goes…

…and where I’ll stop nobody knows.

Almost to Laughter

I’m almost at the point where I break out in laughter. (Almost.) Generally, once I start laughing I’m okay, and it would be a nice improvement.

Anyway! Things are ramping up for the release of A Flame in the North. The series has had an extraordinarily difficult birth–almost as nervewracking as Afterwar, wherein everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. And there’s a whole lot of work to catch up on, from juggling three books (I’m back to three, hallelujah) to updating book pages to scheduling releases to thinking about covers for a few different things and and and…you get the idea. Just putting my head down and plodding through is the name of the game, I guess.

The weather is finally cooperating. No more freezing rain coating every surface with slippery clear death–it was pretty, especially when the sun broke through for a few moments and dipped the entire world in glaze, but I’d just as soon not do that ever again. Instead, the firs are dripping and when it’s not actively raining mist hangs in a gentle haze over their dark swords, especially at dawn. I love that mist; it’s like a soft filter on the world. It’s not so quiet as during Recent Icepocalypse, but even the hum of traffic seems friendly today. The wind has veered, bringing the ratcheting and occasional blaring of the trains late last night, which half-woke me and I thought, wind’s changed, we’re past the worst.

Gods grant it be so.

I’m still reading The Stand, just reaching the failed appendectomy interlaced with Fran’s “diary”, so it’s about halfway or so. I think what I wanted most was the description of things falling apart, which I did in my own way for Roadtrip Z, and it’s like lancing a boil to a certain degree. (For obvious recent-historical reasons.) Some of it holds up astonishingly well, but what really struck me in this reread (so far) was Larry Underwood “coming out the other side”. King really shines when it comes to describing a personality fraying under the load of awful soul-killing stress.

Yesterday was amazingly productive, between Highlands War–Past Me acted up in the notes, so Present Me put in a vagina dentata joke because I can–and the second Cain’s Wife, which doesn’t have a name yet but is trying to gel under Kaskadia Blues. I also made the best chili of my life, which was a grand achievement I look forward to repeating, and after dinner stole some time for a Sekrit Projekt.

Sometimes protecting the work means shrouding it in secrecy, covering tender shoots so a killing frost can’t interfere.

I must be heading for a spike in some fashion, since every sentence I write has to be redone four times. I’m doing a lot of editing in my head, which generally means I’ve reached the end of a plateau, writing-craft-wise, and am about to make some sort of advance. New skills are being bolted onto the bicycle or old ones updated, I can’t quite tell yet, and the change in balance and speed means I’m wobbling a little. Still, it’s an encouraging sign.

Yep, the sooner I get to the “it’s all absurd, let’s laugh” part of the whole thing, the better. I almost can’t wait for the internal snap and the resultant cascade of giggles. I suppose that’s my own fraying, but it’s better than some other coping mechanisms I could name–or have employed, frankly.

Boxnoggin’s glad to be back in the routine of walkies, and I hadn’t realized just how much those rambles help me get things put together for a day’s work. I suppose I should thank him, maybe by letting him stay nose-down in something rancid for a little longer than I’m comfortable with. Dogs do dog things, yes, but they also don’t make very good choices sometimes, necessitating a “please do not eat that, good gods, let’s move on.”

If only all problems were so simply solved. Tuesday awaits, my dears, let us embark upon it.