Current writing notebook with its higher-tech friends at the Tuesday write-in (Your Mom’s Basement, White Bear Lake MN)
Notebook and pen. I started writing in pen long before they officially let us handle that deadliest of weapons, so most of my juvenilia are written in ball-point pen in composition books. This is old school, and it’s also evergreen. Continue reading
The first of the Muse of Research interviews, with Lev Mirov (@thelionmachine on Twitter), has been published on the Skiffy and Fanty Show. Go check it out! This is the short version, 1000 words or so. An extended version will appear on this blog in about a week. Lev is one of my Twitter colleagues and an accomplished poet, medievalist, and cook.
Upcoming on Writer Tech:
Due to health issues and other deadlines, I missed this Monday’s “Love in the Time of Starships.” It will go up next Monday.
More schedule notes:
Concept cover by Glass Knife Press.
There’s a lot of advice out there saying not to use second person, ever. Like any absolute rule, it’s wrong.
Decades after reading it, I still remember the chapter about arrest and detention in the first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s GuLAG Archipelago. It’s written in second person, and the effect is to plunge you into a brutal and inescapable situation.
I notice that I switch into second person for scenes of extreme stress and dissociation. No, this is not happening to ‘me’ or ‘him’ or ‘her’ or ‘they’; it’s happening to some unspecified ‘you.’
Interactive fiction uses ‘you’ for the same reason that Solzhenitsyn chose it in his nonfiction narrative; it’s ‘you, yes, you’ who’s in the story.
Does it work? It all depends on the writer’s skill. Just because it’s been done poorly (cheesy ‘choose your adventure’ books or bad role-playing games) doesn’t mean that you should avoid it. For that matter, ‘choose your adventure’ and role-playing games, like any literary form, can be cheesy or transcendent. Dismissing an entire form as crap is as lazy-minded now as it was for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics who ranted about the evils of novel-reading, or (a bit later on) the dissipation of ragtime, movies, jazz, rock-n-roll, selfies, or video games.
***
Excerpt from forthcoming From Fanfiction to Original Fiction (Vera Rozalsky with E. P. Beaumont)
Mattei Light-foot had passed his adulthood rites and been selected for the draft to the Academy at Karis, when he died of a skull fracture in one of the maintenance corridors abutting the ill-fated Dome Seven, only a week before the supply ship arrived.
Ill-luck, all the adults said. Jehen listened, less than elbow-high as she was, as the conversation went on over her head. No, the funeral would take place with all good form, and the festival for the arriving ship likewise.
After all, it wasn’t the first time that point of protocol had been tested.
They had lost one and gained another. A Ship’s Captain was coming home to them, forty-seven years after she left for the Academy in the youth-draft.
Mattei was laid out on the bier, with his festival regalia draped over him.
***
The opening lines of my work-in-progress novel Ship’s Heart, the prequel to Inside the Jump. Jehen, the main character of Inside the Jump, is six years old.
Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.
Cover design by Glass Knife Press Technical Services.
Four centuries ago, for a variety of reasons, I took the literal mask. It is not useless ornament; its communication leads keep me in constant touch with what I must know. Just now the embedded AIs are unscrolling for me the great briefing library.
While I may be formidable, I am only one man, and those who are my hands and feet and heads elsewhere in the world have been about their business these centuries.
One face of that is the war with the Outposts. Yes, it is difficult to escape there, but when a rebel manages it, they take with them all sorts of lore; things are shared freely there so what each knows becomes common knowledge. They do not understand the Secret nor do they practice it. I don’t mean the Great Secret of physical immortality; I mean the Secret as way of life.
***
Excerpt from “Last Days of the Immortal,” in Tales from the Inhabited Worlds.
Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.
The Writer Tech series began as a series of on-line and off-line conversations with colleagues about things that worked for their writing practice. There are two obvious faces to this: technique (what we do and how we do it) and technology (the tools we use).
In conversation with my colleague Thelonius Legend and the great folks of #BlackWritersChat, I realized that there’s a third face: industrial espionage. Reviewing as a writer and interviewing fellow writers, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m learning from their moves.
At time of writing, there are five Love in the Time of Starships reviews in the queue, and at least that many Muse of Research interview inquiries out. So, given that these nonfiction activities are well launched, I’m moving on to work on Writer Tech. This will include three different series:
Writer Tech posts will go up toward the end of the week, to give readers/writers some food for thought heading into the weekend.
This month I had to adjust a couple of timelines, particularly the ones for beta reading. I had hoped to get a nonfiction project and a novel to beta readers for 1 March, which did not work out. That timeline has been moved to 15 March, with stern notes-to-self to get all these things on the calendar daily, dangit.
On the other hand, conversations on Twitter with colleagues near and far have led to some really awesome opportunities:
Well, as I peruse the above, I realize that I have actually gotten stuff done. In addition:
Probably enough to be getting on with, for a bit at least. 🙂
This week’s review was delayed because I had far too much to say. I’ve fallen decisively in love with both of the novels I am reviewing, so the technical challenge was to steer between two extremes: “inarticulate flail and squee in direction of beloved works” versus “thesis-length disquisition.”
The mystery and me
My personal relationship to the mystery form has changed over the years. As a kid, I didn’t like surprises. I grew up moving every year and a half on average, and those dislocations were announced with very little advance notice. On one memorable occasion, my father learned that the plant that supplied what he sold had blown up the night before, which kind of changed plans.
Mystery stories depend on a fair bit of suspense; I loved reading them, but I could only take so much before I got the problem established and then skipped to the end to see what happened. Then I read backward from there to see how it was proven. Only as an adult in a relatively stable living situation did I join (even provisionally) the readers who didn’t want to know up front how it ended.
Kid-me read like a mathematician, starting from the initial setup of the problem, proceeding to what-is-to-be-shown, then getting from point A to point B by making the case. Yet one more reason I loved geometry and logic: they mirrored my childhood reading habits.
Mysteries are my brain candy. They create worlds where we understand by the end how things actually played out, and who did it. As an adult, I like the not-known and the guessing, and with the years I have developed a taste for two other forms that depend on surprise: humor and horror. So paradoxically, my favorite mysteries leave something unresolved.
The fascination of mystery structure in a series is how much will be wrapped up by the end, how much will be solved in the course of the story, and what questions will never be answered.
A cozy mystery with occasional explosions
Sunstruck is an urban fantasy / cozy mystery set in Spokane, Washington, and the first act of a series; Ancillary Sword is space opera (but really, it’s a cozy mystery with occasional explosions), and the second act of a trilogy. Both stories play with mystery subplots, equal parts ‘whodunit’, ‘who is WHO’, ‘howdunit’ and ‘zomg, there are yet more disturbing details unaccounted for.’ Continue reading
Cover design by Glass Knife Press Technical Services.
I am Temn yr Astok, and at this late date it does not matter who my parents were, or who sponsored their marriage. I am the Astok great-clan, pure and simple, except for a few rivalrous upstarts.
There are days I envy the Immortal of T-7, who can order assassinations at will. Our ancestors went through a period where that was customary, and then the practice was banned. Karis is nominally a republic, though the great-clans are the more important pieces on the board.
Not as important as they ought to be, but that is another story. That takes us out beyond Karis, where I have now sent my faithful emissary, Iric Desnaray yr Astok. I created him, and he has the wit to know it, and obeys me.
***
Excerpt from “Notes for the Memoirs of the First Galactic Emperor,” in Tales from the Inhabited Worlds.
Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.
Veronica Scott’s work ranges from paranormal romances set in ancient Egypt to action-adventure space operas (Mission to Mahjundar, Wreck of the Nebula Dream, Escape from Zulaire). I first met her on Six Sentence Sunday; we have continued our acquaintance on Weekend Writing Warriors.
Her romantic leads are capable and daring with complementary skill sets and attraction that slow-burns to sizzling conclusion, generally with things exploding in the background. Because nothing builds romantic tension like explosions!
She tweets about her nonfictional inspirations (including history, archaeology, astronomy) upcoming work, and feline Muses at @vscottheauthor.
This interview was conducted by e-mail with follow-up by Google chat. We had a far-ranging conversation and look forward to more!
E. P. Beaumont 