between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Progress: Thursday, December 27, 2007

The duellist of Alusind


Words today: 351
Words total: 1,100

I did some on the 25th, too, but didn't track that.

Reason for stopping: quota
Exercise: some jogging
Darling du jour: if they don't suck, that's the best that can be hoped for.

Tyop du jour: N/A
Words MS Word doesn't know: chairleg
Research: code duello
Mean things: Recent violent bereavement.

Books in progress: textbooks, Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece, Tobias Bucknell, Crystal Rain

The glamour: about 700 words of essay, spending A Lot of money on plane tickets.

So sleepy now.

Attended job interview.
Wrote 1.2K words on Duellist.
Did (some) (necessary) laundry.
Karate.

It doesn't seem a lot for the amount of time it took up.

I can has better time management skillz nao, plz?

#1

I need to go somewhere with trees. Maybe Glendalough. Two nights in a hostel midweek shouldn't be impossible, don't you think?

#2

Monday my exam results come back. Witness, if you please, my nail-chewing agony of anticipation.

This is not sarcasm.

#3

I have discovered a fatal flaw in the book.

It lacks stakes. Tension. Fraughtness. All those little compelling things.

In short, my characters are having it too easy.

Ground-up rewrite will be necessary. But first, I write the next 20K words, get some idea of the spine of the book - because the plot is not going to change, it's just going to mean something different - and decide whether I have the balls to write the lesbian love affair.

So to speak.

#4

And today, for joy, I get to go to my cousin's 21st. We have nothing in common, and I'm an anti-social introverted lump at the best of times, so this is going to be work.

#5

I wonder if I could afford to go to the World Fantasy Con in 2008?

Progress Wednesday 27 June

The duellist of Alusind

New words: 1,098
Words total: 19,300
Reasons for stopping: quota, the approach of Thursday
Refreshment: Water, strawberry chocolate.
Exercise: About two, three miles round trip on the bike.

( bike rambling )


Darling du jour: She called his name from the front step and tossed [the pendant] to him, the iron light of overcast morning glittering from the silver as it fell.

Typo du jour: N/A
Words Word doesn't know: afield

Books in progress: Mark van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East.

#

Books 95-98, Fiction 90-93.

90. Nina Kiriki Hoffman, The Silent Strength of Stones.

Hoffman's books, from what I've read of them so far, are strangely gentle. This is no exception. Nick, the son of a motel owner at Sauterelle Lake, entertains himself by spying on holiday-makers at the lake. When he discovers a strange family staying nearby, things become interesting. A wolf in the woods, people who can do magic, the bittersweet resolution of an old family rift...

It's a kind book, and a hopeful one. I don't like it as much as The Thread That Binds the Bones or Spirits That Walk in Shadow, but it's quiet, and contained, and lovely.

91. Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites.

This is urban fantasy with a - what's the Americanism? ah, yes - kickass female heroine. But not, thankfully, urban-fantasy-with-kickass-female-heroine of the legion of wish-fulfillment vampire sex books. The heroine, Kate, is capable and capably violent - perhaps a little too capable, all in all, but I don't read urban fantasy for the realism. When her guardian is murdered, she becomes involved in tracking down the killer.

Andrews is fortunately inovative in her world-building. Vampires are pretty much mindless without a necromantic handler; magic and technology work at alternating intervals, and the structure of the world's response to supernatural threats is quite believeable.

A good book, decently crunchy light reading.

92. Tanya Huff, Smoke and Ashes

Another urban fantasy. Huff does good storytelling in the latest book focusing on Tony Foster, half-trained wizard and now Trainee Assistant Director on a syndicated vampire detective television show. There's a Demonic Convergence happening in Vancouver, and Tony, along with vampire Henry Fitzroy, is humanity's first line of defence.

Good stuff.

93. Elizabeth Bear, New Amsterdam.

I'm a little in awe of this book. Or, to tell the truth, I'm quite a bit in awe.

It's a mosaic novel, a series of stories following wampyr and Great Detective Sebastien de Ulloa, and Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett, in a late nineteenth century world where magic works and the American colonies never gained their independence. It's complex and marvellous, full of fraught relationships and weighted silences, and Bear's prose, is, as usual, richly luminous.

Also, it has airships. What's not to love?

#

There's a line from "Lumière", the concluding novella of New Amsterdam, that set me to thinking. Of his means of sustenance, the wampyr Sebastien acknowledges that

The blood was only a metaphor. [pg 216 of the hardback]

That line, to my mind, sums up everything about the vampire that is other. The vampire as the creature of the night, the vampire as predator and seducer, monster and lover and nightmare and dream.

A lot of writers defang the vampire. Make them easy, safe, understandable. The need for blood becomes an odd dietary requirement. The fangs, the undeath, they become mechanistic. Bloodless, almost.

But the vampire is the archetype, one of the faces humanity puts to the unknowable dark. And the blood is only the metaphor.

Because vampires aren't about the blood.

They're about what the blood means.

And the meaning of blood is rarely safe.

Progress Tuesday 26 June

The duellist of Alusind

Words today: 1,021
Words total: 18,200
Reasons for stopping: quota. Also, tired.
Refreshment: Lots of water.
Exercise: Gym.

Darling du jour: Not exactly a darling. This paragraph took me an inordinately long time to write, and I'm still not happy with it.

"You're certain." Not a question. Cray's fingers might be trembling, a muscle twitching in her cheek, her face flushed with the false energy of firedew, but her jaw was firm, and the firelight darkened the hazel of her eyes to austere brown. The old, bitter ache of fondness tightened Jolay's throat. "It will take three months, at least, for any letter of mine to reach her majesty."

No. Not happy. But it'll do for now.

Typo du jour: converstation
Words Word doesn't know: N/A

Mean things: Urf. Trying to write a Serious Conversation without over-emoting or taking all the emotion out of it? Is not as simple as Some People make it look.

Books in progress: Mark van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East.


I read a lot, yesterday. Three books is a lot. And I will have things to say about them.

But not right now.

Progress, Sunday 24 June

The duellist of Alusind

Words today: 1,030
Words total: 17,230
Reasons for stopping: Quota and then some. Also, sleepy.
Refreshment: Water. Also chocolate.
Exercise: walking.

The rain stopped, and amazingly, the sun came out. And stayed out, at least long enough for me to walk down the town and back. It must be dog-walking season, because I saw at least two dozen mutts of various colours, sizes and pedigrees being walked by their owners.

Wet dogs? Do not smell like roses, not by any length of the imagination.

Darling du jour: Nothing that stands out.

Typo du jour: N/A
Words Word doesn't know: bedframe, magics, tremulae, unmortared, marklord

Mean things: wounds, exhaustion, imprisonment.
Research (aka the usefulness of Google): 17th century women's fashions.
Things I would've been sorry to miss: The Captains Jack

Books in progress: Marc van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East.

I added the third POV today. So I guess we'll see how that works out.

They're quite odd characters, really. There's Santander, the duellist and (former) sorcerer who left her homeland on foot of old scandal to come to the city of Alusind, where sorcery in any form but that sanctioned by the city's rulers is forbidden on pain of death; Jolay, the - spy, I suppose I should call her - who followed Santander out of friendship. And Hilary, a nobleman's daughter who's just got herself kidnapped by eavesdropping on the plot to hold a coup.

So far I'm actually having fun. Hopefully this state will last.

#

Tomorrow is a Reading Day. The best bookshop in the city has ordered Books! In! for me! and they've arrived. I doubt if words will happen if I combine gym and a trip into Dublin.

In fact, I might just end up coming home and falling over to watch a DVD.

Progress, Saturday 23 June

The duellist of Alusind

Words today: 1,073
Words total: 16,150
Reasons for stopping: I've been at this since six pm Saturday, and since it's technically Sunday now, I think I get a break. Besides, I'm on target for my personal goal of 16,700 words by Sunday evening.
Refreshment: There was chocolate. And Lucozade. And salami. Healthy diet was not happening today.
Exercise: walking.

Darling du jour: nothing stands out above the common run of suck.

Typo du jour: N/A
Words Word doesn't know: spasmed, unlooped, crowsfeet, swordhanger, beltpouch, damnit

Mean things: Suppurating wounds, exhaustion.
Research (aka the usefulness of Google): locks, bed linen through history, oil lamps, men's fashions 1550-1600, topaz.

Books in progress: Mark van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East.

So, I was walking down along the beach - it's been a grey day, intermittently rainy, but the air down by the railway embankment and on the shore smells like nothing on earth - when a significant chunk of plot dropped into my head. I'll probably need a third POV, but I'm cautiously optimistic for now.

#

It's really quite amazing how much gets done when I can sit down and work for six hours straight.

#

Some mucking around with a short story occured this morning. It wants to be a ghost story. I've never written a ghost story. This could be interesting.

Progress Friday 22 June

The duellist of Alusind

Words today: 1,472
Words total: 15,000. Much less anaemic!
Reasons for stopping: I can has sleep now?
Refreshment: Water, prepackaged chicken kiev, three slices of Lindt chocolate.
Exercise: There was gym today. Much gym.

Darling du jour:

"A delicate matter," said the chatelaine consideringly, when, after the appropriate introductions and commonplaces, Jolay broached the subject she had come for. "Particularly given the party concerned."

"Reputations always are."

Typo du jour: at the guard for at the gate
Words Word doesn't know: unspooled, armsmen, stablehand

Mean things: These characters are all so polite today. They drank tea and ask edmannerly questions.
Research (aka the usefulness of Google): 17th century fashions, some generalities about the inter-relationship of the Victorian serving classes.

( Book rambling )

Books in progress: Mark van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East

Books read:

Books 93-94, Fiction 88-89: Now with new added spoilers

( 88. Lilith Saintcrow, 'Hunter, Healer' )

( 89. John Scalzi, 'The Sagan Diary' )

The duellist of Alusind is pushing up to 13.5K.

Slow progress: I've just written a fight in a graveyard with a not-a-zombie, and presently believe I need to start introducing the politics. Which is going to be iffy, since I as yet have no POVs in situations where politics would be commonplaces of discussion.

Good news: the college newspaper, the University Record - the arts and culture editor for next year has pretty solidly confirmed he'll let me do a novel review column next year.

12,000 students. 1,200 staff. Journalism-type portfolio credit.

I am restraining myself from many exclamation marks(!). Yes, I'm that thrilled.

What books are coming out in September, October, November and December (and January, February, March and April 2008) which university students should be subjected to my opinions about?

I should maybe make a list?

...at least, not until it's over.

The zombie apocalypse completely passed me by. It appears that all the good stuff was being posted to LJ well after I'd packed it in for the night. It's odd, you know, to realise that if anything big really did happen across the Atlantic, the odds are good that it'd be well and truly over before I ever heard of it, due to me not watching the television at all except at gunpoint, and checking the BBC website only every month or so unless I'm actually looking for something in particular.

This headline amused me no end, though, when I checked the Beeb today.

#

Blustery day today. Wet, windy. Pretty miserable to be out and about in, actually. So of course, I biked to the supermarket twice and walked down a third time (catfood!), thus making more trips to get shopping today than I have in the last three days.

Good news for the get-myself-back-in-fitness project, at least.

#

Writing isn't going so great. I have the 'I suck' malady, and with the laptop out of service and AWOL, I'm finding the desktop really uncomfortable to write at for any length of time. I may need to adjust the keyboard shelf and get one of those ergonomic wrist-rest thingies. I've been writing by hand, and accumulated probably 2.6K in the last four days, but now I need to type it up.

I miss my laptop.

#

So in the last five or six weeks, I've watched the first three seasons of Farscape and the first three seasons of Stargate SG-1, more TV than I've consumed in the last six months. And I've been having regular, vivid, in-colour-with-narrative dreams.

(Last night's one, for example, had an overthrown king, an untrustworthy counselor or two, a small band of companions, a menace from tunnels beneath the earth, labyrinthine citadels, night attacks in a harbour, an exodus, and death-or-glory stands. In freakin' Technicolour. With a narrative that actually made a certain amount of sense. Strange, no?)

These phenomena may not be unconnected. I should probably conduct further experiments, don't you think?