Kat Dancing

Via matociquala, the writing meme.

Novel words written: 89,000

64,806 on Harmony, 24,194 on Journey, as of this morning, though with luck we'll get another 2k in before the end of the year. But still. Everyone else has, like, hundreds of thousands. I'm such a lightweight.

Best day: Would appear to be a day when I wrote 5,550 words. Of course, the day after that I wrote 5,525. I got a little excited about Harmony's endgame.

Worst day: The days on which I got nothing done at all. And they were too many. Real life is such a bitch.

Novels completed: Harmony Station.

Novels revised: ditto.

Novels published/sold: None. *sighs sadly*

Novel submissions: Just the one; I'm still waiting to hear back from Most Wanted Agent on Harmony, but what with the holidays I figure it'll be well into the new year before I hear back.

Novels rejected: None. See above. Hey, that's a positive, right? Right?

Short story words written: Um, none. I don't do shorts. They make my muse sad.

Notes, outline, and synopsis words written: Um... err... well, my outliner program thingy says I have 4K worth of outline written this year. And I have a 500 word synopsis. Notes? Who knows? They're on this paper stuff mostly, and I can't find the wordcount function on the silly things....

Blog words written: ...tell you what, you go count, and then get back to me on that.

Nonfiction articles published: Three: Writing Hooks, Not Crooks and Who Is Mary Sue? for Vision, and the What Do You Do With a First Draft Novel? for the SF Workshop. Oh, four: I also wrote an article on my parents' trip to Italy that's getting published in the next Slow Foods newsletter, which is kinda cool.

... and that's it, really. It makes me simultaneously proud (because not everyone has written this much, really) and sad (because so many people have written so much more, and I meant to get so much more done) to see it written down like this. Ah, well.

Goals for 2006:

Draft the Babel series: at the moment that's A Journey in Twilight, A Ship to the Dawn, When the Dream Wakes, and the untitled finale bit, and God knows how many books I'll divide it into, that depends on whether I decide it's YA or not. I keep changing my mind. At any rate, I reckon it'll be about 200K by the end, although that and everything else is subject to change without notice.

Plan and begin drafting the untitled, vaguely conceptualized new story, hereby working-titled the Beastie Story.

Keep sending Harmony to agents and publishers until someone accepts it or I run out of addresses.

Remain sane. (Mmm. Crunchy sane brains.)


Writing Progress:

24,194 / 50,000 (48.4%)

Today's Progress: 1,300 today; 500 yesterday; 800 before that. Rounded off 'cause I can't be buggered checking again.
Comments: The battle scene was fun. I wanted LOTR soundtrack, but we didn't have any, so I put on Zion from the second Matrix movie and made do. And lo, there was blood.

Today, on the other hand, was KMFDM all the way, but I'm not sure it's nearly as good. Also, I think maybe my pacifist nature is showing. It's not exactly an upbeat battle scene.

Snips: "We won?"

"Look to the gates," Aridan said, and Timmain looked to see the city gates broken and bent back. He looked around at the heaps of dead, man and beast, at Aridan with his arm across his belly, at the blood soaking into the burned ground.

"This," he said haltingly, "this is what winning looks like?"

Miss Snark said nice things about my synopsis. This makes me far happier than it probably should, but with the same synopsis out on submission for six weeks with no reply, I'm taking positive reinforcement where I can get it.

In the meantime I'm back on writing, which had to get put off for most of the month due to Incipient Insanity. I don't think I mentioned at any point that Dan and I sent cheese as a Christmas gift to one of our favorite webcartoonists. He retaliated by raving about it on his frontpage, complete with link. The results - well, I'll let our webpage stats speak for themselves:





This translated to several days of retail hell, in which we shipped a gazillion packages and swore about it. In retrospect it's a good thing and we're thankful for it. God knows we needed the business.

All the same, I'm looking glad it's the end of the holidays and I have time to write again.

Writing Progress:

21,495 / 50,000 (43.0%)

Today's Progress: 1,344 words.
Comments: I've figured out that if I write 800 words a day - leaving two weeks of No Writing as wiggle room - I will be done this series by the middle of 2006. Woo-hoo. Well, worth aiming for, anyhow.
Snips: Oddly enough, this kind of talk does not make you popular:

"I have lived with the Tel. They carry their obsidian in their hearts, and you could sooner break stone with bread than their spirits. They will fight you until they die." There was a pause, and Devalen's voice changed, became pleading. "My king, they are blasphemers, they have burned the Green. Leave them to suffer the gods' punishment and starve. But do not try to take this city. It will bring you only pain."

Holly Lisle just linked to a very frightening essay on public schools, which I largely agree with, though I should point out at this juncture that my parents began homeschooling me in the seventh grade, and that the only reoccurring nightmare I had as a child was the one where I did something really, really bad, and they made me go back. My attitude towards public school is not perhaps the most objective.

She also asked how we became readers, and if applicable writers. I was big on stories from very early on - my family still can recite parts of The Scrawny Tawny Lion, and I suspect I was taught to read mostly to spare them the endless requests for story. My own personal memory of the epiphany moment, though, was when I was seven and my mother handed me McCaffery's Dragonsinger and said, "Here. You'll like this."

For much of the rest of my childhood and teenage years people were yelling at me to put that book down while they spoke to me.

Writing was more drawn-out. I can remember being - four? five? - and lining my toys up to tell them stories; I have tapes of myself telling stories to my brother, mostly Pern fanfic, and I used to concoct elaborate make-believe games for us to play (unfortunately, with only two roles to fill, it tended to be Queen and Loyal Subject. There were a great many revolts of the peasantry.) One epiphany was in fifth grade when our teacher had us write a short story and a poem for class. She made a great fuss over mine, and I realized that hey, if I wrote all this stuff down then people would be really impressed and make fusses! I was (hell, still am) a terrible attention whore, and a great deal of poetry and unfinished stories resulted.

A second epiphany came when I was twelve or so and read a collection of LeGuin's essays on writing called The Language of the Night and realized that writing could be more than simply a yell for attention: it could be art, truth, self-expression, a voice, a means of growing. A great deal of finished but very dull and pretentious stories resulted, but I was getting closer.

And finally, when I was twenty, I hit on the real and final reason to write: I had to do something with these damned stories, because my subconscious clearly wasn't going to stop making them, and maybe if I wrote them down and got them right the voices would shut up and leave me in peace.

Well, it kinda works. They're quieter now. I don't run into so many walls.

Looking back, though, there is a real trend there, and that trend is my parents. I was always encouraged to read and to think about what I'd read. Unlike many of the writers I knew, I was encouraged to write: my parents came from hippie backgrounds, and though they never forced artistic accomplishment on us the way some parents from that era did, when I showed a leaning that way they praised me rather than dismissing it as "impractical." They never raised my hopes either - both had known enough aspiring artists to guess I wasn't going to make a million bucks writing - but it was always "what kind of job can you take that will leave you space for writing?" (or, if I was working for them as I am now, "are we leaving you enough space for writing?") and never "when are you going to get a real job?"

I'm not really all that independent. I'm not a natural rebel. Without that support, I suspect I'd have stayed a lifelong unsatisfied daydreamer.

School... never did much for me either way. I had supportive teachers, but I had far more teachers who simply didn't care and one who actively sabotaged my ego. I always liked learning, and I suspect I learned more reading the textbooks on my own than I ever did from them; certainly I learned more homeschooled than I did in public school. And don't even get me started on my "peer group". The use of peer pressure to encourage conformity and discourage thinking is the one big thing I think the author of that essay missed out on.

I doubt - for all that I agree with the essay - that it will do much good, not because of government or society, but because of parents.I've heard too many parents counting out loud the days until their kids go back to school to think they'd welcome a change that meant spending more time with the kids. Publically funded school has done good things - like letting both parents work when that was needed to keep the income coming - but it's also allowed a lot of people who didn't really want kids to dump them in free daycare until they're eighteen. It's going to take a far greater shift in public opinion and social structures than the essay suggests to go back to the good old days.

There's some really interesting discussion going on right now about What Science Fiction Is. nihilistic_kid says one thing, truepenny another, Ted Chiang another, and matociquala says it doesn't matter. I will hereby add my own unpublished and uninformed musings on the topic.

The first thing I want to do, before tackling the difference between the science fiction genre and the fantasy genre, is to define genre. A genre is a marketing category.

This is not something we like to talk about much, any more than the literary fiction folks like to admit that their categorization does not mean that they are the next James Joyce, but rather that they are best sold to people who like to think they're reading the next James Joyce. We like to think of speculative fiction as something greater. But let's face it: science fiction and fantasy are convenient labels slapped on books to describe the market demographic the publishers think will want to read the book. That the publishers occasionally drop acid first does not invalidate the basic definition. Science fiction is defined by the reader.

So to define science fiction and fantasy, we have to ask: what specific thing does this market demographic want that causes them to buy anything labeled "science fiction" or "fantasy"?

Well, they want an escape.

This is another thing we don't like to talk about. Escapism is such a dirty little word, one that our English teachers kept throwing at us (along with James Joyce. Ew.) But let's admit it: most of the people reading speculative fiction - or any type of fiction - are trying to escape from reality. As Tolkien once said, of course fiction is escapist: is it not the duty of the captured soldier to escape?* We try to escape reality because it's grinding us down, making us loose sight of the larger picture that fiction gives us; some of us will take that larger picture back into the world with us and do good with it, others will use it to hide in so that they have the pretense of change without the actual effort. Doesn't matter. For the subject at hand, the goal is the same: escape.

Fantasy offers the more perfect escape. It is never-never land, where you could be a princess and your boss probably got et by a dragon years ago... and where anything could happen, and good is really good, and evil is really evil. This is probably why fantasy sells better than science fiction, and why fantasy (in the form of folk tales) has been around far longer. The roots of fantasy run deep, right down into our bones, and the stories we read can pluck at those strings and make us shiver straight through. It's why the most powerful stories almost always contain an element of fantasy. It's also why there's so much crap fantasy around. Lotsa power = lotsa people flailing around trying to figure out how to use that power without sacrificing anything themselves. Just think of the bad writers as the two elder brothers.

Science fiction, on the other hand, is a relatively recent genre brought on by the relatively recent Western concept of progress. Suddenly the future became a place, a thing you could reach out to, journey toward, shape: and right alongside it came science fiction, the travelogue for the foreign country of Times To Come. The lure of science fiction is that it describes what could be, rather than never-never land. It could be real. Someday. Just how real it could be depends on how hard the writer works at fitting the unknown to the known and how much his reader base knows (which, in sf circles, is frequently a lot).

Science fiction reaches out and up: it wants the light. Fantasy reaches in and down: it faces the dark. Think of the one as a tree's branches and the other as a tree's roots. It's as good an analogy as any.

But both of these things are defined, not by us the writers, nor by the publishers, but by the readers, who do not know how to say what they want. "I don't like science fiction, it's nothing but a lot of machines," they say, meaning: there's too much light, it makes me feel stupid, I read fiction to get away from mean people who make me feel stupid. "I don't read fantasy, it's a bunch of kings and wars and rubbish," they say, meaning: it's too dark in here, it doesn't make sense that these things still have power over me, I read fiction to get away from things that don't make sense.

It is singularly pointless to argue with such people that science fiction isn't all machines or that fantasy isn't all kings and battles. The words that come from our mouths frequently have nothing to do with what we mean.

Readers are similarly shifty on what is science fiction and what is fantasy, because the definitions above are, in practice, very personal things. One person's "that could happen someday" is another's "that could never happen." And besides, there's plenty of speculative fiction that plays the field, so to speak. Some stories wear the clothes of the future over the bones of the fantastic: Ray Bradbury, for example, or Star Wars. Some stories go play in never-never land but take the light with them, like Charlie Stross's recent fantasies or any number of cheap D&D knockoffs. And then there's China Mieville's work, which is unquestionable fantasy structured in such a way that it appeals as much, if not more, to science fiction readers. This is speculative fiction. People will go on poking at the rules, looking for the bendy bits.

So does it matter at all what we write, when it's all a matter of market demographics and personal definitions?

Well, yes. If you're a writer and you think market demographics have no effect on your work, then I'd like a ticket to your never-never land. There's a perception among some writers that it's terribly low-class and avaricious to consider The Market when writing, and to an extent it's true. You can't let The Market write your book for you, even when you realize that The Market is just fancy talk for readers. But....

When I was a teenager, I read everything, and I mean everything. I read L. Ron Hubbard's atrocious trash, God help me. But there was a special class of books which I called Dent Books, because at a certain point they would upset me so badly that I threw them hard enough to dent the walls. Hubbard's books never got this treatment, because they were simply bad; the Dent Books were good, well-written books... but they got something wrong, horribly wrong, and because they were well-written their wrongness tainted the real thing and I had to throw them away hard and curl up and try to block the very existence of the book from my brain in an attempt to protect my old, real memory.**

You do not want to write Dent Books. Writing Dent Books means you have misunderstood something about your audience and what it wants, misunderstood it so badly that you neither miss it (as Hubbard did) nor honestly deconstruct it, but instead end up writing something called, perhaps, The Phantom Menace, that makes your audience wish to poke out their eyes with sharp sticks simply to preserve their old good memories.

Genre is important: not as marked territory for a Whose Writing Is Art pissing contest, but as a shared group of assumptions which must be either conformed to or challenged, but are ignored only at peril. If you are lucky, you will be reviled; if you are unlucky, you will simply be unpublished. Know your genre. Are you lighting a candle, or reaching into darkness? How much of each, and where? And why?



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*Disclaimer: Tolkien may or may not have said this. LeGuin says he did but cites not her sources. Well, who am I to argue with LeGuin?

**I perhaps took books a mite too seriously in my youth.