Bricklaying: slow start to a new novel (Ship’s Heart)

Posted on May 6, 2014 by epbeaumont

Some writing is like flying: an exhilarating natural process that nonetheless feels like pure magic.

Some writing proceeds at walking pace, like a conversation.

And some writing is work: writing down one sentence after another, like laying bricks. It’s not so much that any individual piece is that heavy; what tires one is the repeated effort.

The next novel is well-launched now. In the last few days, I have written almost 4200 words for this month’s novel project, Ship’s Heart. My Tuesday write-in with Becca Patterson is helping the process along. Nothing like Positive Peer Pressure to make you do the work and not slack off even if allergies are making you feel less than motivated.

Here’s the current opening:

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.

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Spring at last!

Posted on May 5, 2014 by epbeaumont

And it’s finally acting like spring here, which means actually sweating when I run for the bus, sniffling from all the tree pollen (very romantic season if you’re a tree), and listening to the birds getting lively outside the window even earlier than before.

It’s also the season of Grand Plans, and I’m struggling with the re-start on a number of projects that got set aside due to the demands of the former day job. I’m full time now as a writer, so that means writing — though for anyone who’s every tried this, you learn fast that Bidniz (as we call it in Tejas) eats way more hours of the day than tippity-tap on the keyboard. But hey, that’s any job.

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Weekend Writing Warriors: Sunday 4 May 2014 (Character Interview: Inside the Jump)

Posted on May 4, 2014 by epbeaumont

I am still absorbing the shock of seeing Jehen again after fifteen years, as long as Martisset yr Astok the Elder served as a starship captain. He retired to pursue clan-politics, which are the politics of Karis and the Inhabited Worlds, and to pursue his scholarly interest in botany. Jehen is only a decade and a half into a lifetime commission or commitment — or sentence.

Martisset the Elder, who’s very old now — old enough to have retired yet again, to scholarly seclusion in his part of the Astok clan-compound on the Great Islands of the Inland Sea — first found that fascination with plant-life not in the bounty of his home-world, but aboard a Ship.

Oh yes, that’s another distinction I should make clear to you: planet-siders, as the Captains and Crew call them, speak of starships. Those aboard them speak of Ships, and the Ship’s-Heart, the ruling intelligence that presides over a council of Artificial Intelligences. A Ship is an ecosystem: parsimonious, elegant, and deeply fragile. Many layers of quarantine separate Planet-Side from Aboard-Ship.

***

Character interview with the archaeologist and Expedition Chief, Martisset yr Astok, from NaNo 2013, Inside the Jump. Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

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Writing in Community: the mirror of friends, and the backward glance

Posted on May 3, 2014 by epbeaumont

Two weeks ago, I learned about a writing grant opportunity, with about a week to put together an application. I struggled, but I didn’t make the deadline. The project that most needed outside help was also the project that was most ambitious and least formed.

Tonight, I worked with one of my younger colleagues on a similar application. Everything that I “should” have known when I was working on mine, I said aloud, and watched it work for him.

One particularly illuminating moment: we talked about a piece of writing he had done, and he went back and pulled the manuscript from his files and read it and said, “Wow! This is really good! I’d forgotten.”

We’re busy, all of us, often much too busy, and when we go to put together the resume or the curriculum vitae or the bibliography, we forget that we did that stuff, and we forget that it was good. The backward glance, and the conversations with friends and colleagues, let us recollect and recognize ourselves.

After all, we have no idea what we look like when we’re not looking in the mirror.

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Goals: Beginning Again

Posted on May 3, 2014 by epbeaumont

Last night my colleague Becca Patterson and I attended a reading for graduating MFA students at Hamline University in St. Paul. I had the pleasure of hearing a piece that I’d read in an early draft, recognizable still but with all the awkward bits burned away, and found myself drawn in. “Tell me a story,” we say, in the act of opening the book. A great reading takes it back another step, to the origin of our squiggles on paper: a semicircle of listeners, and a storyteller.

We were well entertained, and left hungry for more.

Those graduating writers began their training at Hamline the year that I finished my first completed NaNo novel, The Shape-Shifter’s Tale. In between, they and I did the thing that writers do to learn their craft: we wrote, and we read, and we gave our writing over to expert readers, to see how it read to them.

That’s all.

The room was full of the elation of the finish line, and it showed in the pride of the mentors who introduced the readers. There are many roads to the goal, and the real writer is always beginning again.

Afterward, Becca and I did the thing that writers do when they’re fired up: we got our stuff and went to my house and closed the evening with a write-in. Becca continued work on an ongoing project, and I leaped into the ocean of a new one. Last night, I wrote the opening scenes of Ship’s Heart, the story that precedes Inside the Jump. It’s quite a transition, going from writing characters on the verge of forty to the same characters at age six. It felt awkward, and impossible, and I wrote anyway.

This morning I reread it, and it’s not totally awful. Beginnings are slow, I have to remind myself. I’m on the next leg of the marathon, and no matter how triumphantly I finished the last part, beginning again is awkward.

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May Day post: Citizen of Utopia (from The Reincarnations of Miss Anne)

Posted on May 1, 2014 by epbeaumont

It’s a dream, of course: the Customs stop where you declare your goods, your self, your intentions, your history, your citizenship, your blood and bone.  What are your intentions, what you seek, where you seek it, whence you come and why.

Vera looks out the window for the exit to Utopia; where do you change for that bus?

It’s real, of course. She has the canvas shopping bags with her, and the book she took out of the library; she’s propping More’s Utopia on top of three pounds of dry lentils and rice, and they had chocolate bars on sale so she bought two of those, and there’s a quarter-pound of catnip, which will provide Crabcakes with a good several months’ entertainment.  Outside, the waves pound and swell throwing spray against the windows of the bus.  You don’t open the windows when you’re riding the bus across the North  Atlantic Highway.  There’s the motorized roar and the background roar of the sea.  There’s the greyed-out horizon, and the signs for the upcoming exits, Iceland coming up in a few hours and beyond that Denmark and Norway.

It’s a dream, of course, because in real life there is no highway across the empty waters, over and past the sea-roads trodden by Vikings, by slavers and by pirates who called themselves explorers.  There is no road that passes over the ghost road of the Middle Passage, there is no exit for the West Indies or for Ireland.

It’s real, because the book says there is such a place. The bus slows, as the clouds clear and an improbably blue sky breaks overhead, a baroque Mediterranean heaven.

The Utopian consul steps on board to look at her papers and to ask her the purpose of her visit.

What is the answer to that question?

Because I was curious.  Because I’ve been dreaming this place for years, and I think I may well hold dual citizenship.  The passport is stamped in my heart, the hopes I’ve entertained for years, the motto from the Great Seal of that imaginary republic: “It doesn’t have to be like this.”  For contingency will absolve us, the notion that other paths run parallel to ours, possible worlds that we might enter if only we acted differently. 

The Angel of History, blown backward toward the future by the wind from heaven, turns her stone face to Vera and nods. The dark-haired woman from her recurring dream steps forward, in electric blue tunic and dark-blue drawstring trousers, her loose top belted with a tool belt. She has carpenters’ tools in there, and bonesetters’ gear.

“In Utopia,” she says, “people still fall and break things: sometimes even their hearts, but it’s bones that break, not worlds. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s the best we can manage.”

Unlike this shoddy dystopia from which I’d like to defect, which some pretend is the best of all possible worlds.  You know the joke, of course.  

The Utopian consul says, “You’re one of ours.”

 

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Weekend Writing Warriors: Sunday 27 April 2014 (Character Interview: Inside the Jump)

Posted on April 27, 2014 by epbeaumont

Once I would have said I wanted “freedom” — the freedom to range, to explore, to soar as high as I liked — but I wouldn’t have said that, because freedom was the atmosphere in which I swam. Once I would have said, “knowledge, to know everything” and I did say that once, as a child, and Yuki-Iskri smiled and said, “The universe is big.”

I was six or seven then, and I replied that I’d want to know everything anyway. I looked at the night sky and my mind was large enough to compass that sight, so I thought that knowing the details of it shouldn’t present an insuperable difficulty.

I hadn’t learned my limits. I would have told you at nineteen that I looked forward to finding them — except that it wasn’t in the sky that I found them but on the ground, and some of it was merely that I was free and others were not, which is to say that I was a different sort of cog in the machinery.

I think I had the sense that studying the past would free me. If it was far enough back, nobody cared. In present tense, people told all sorts of comforting lies.

***

Character interview with the archaeologist and Expedition Chief, Martisset yr Astok, from NaNo 2013, Inside the Jump. Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

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Goals: On Getting the Groove Back (Part 1)

Posted on April 22, 2014 by epbeaumont

Now something over three weeks into my full-time work as a self-employed writer, I’ve spent a good part of my time setting up:

Reading software manuals (Aeon Timeline and Scrivener, of which more later) and thinking about how to use their features to solve problems on my extant writing projects. Revision isn’t just tweaking commas; I have to check the architecture both for soundness and for beauty, and the timeline for consistency.

Creating easy-to-use tracking forms for writing, editing, beta-reading, research, and other business activity. I’m using Google Forms, and so far I’ve created and tested an Hourly Consulting form and a Work Log form. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about how I work and just how many projects are in play (25 of my own, and 10-15 each — past and present — for many of my colleagues for whom I beta-read).

Reviewing past projects. I found out rather late about a writing grant and decided to go out for it. The Reincarnations of Miss Anne, my most ambitious and least realized active project, was the logical choice. I’d been saying that I wanted to scout the locations as well as research from books; with help from a good friend with a car, I pulled the research archive boxes (three of them!) from storage and commenced to knock together an application.

I didn’t make that deadline. Continue reading →

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Weekend Writing Warriors: Sunday 20 April 2014 (Character Interview: Inside the Jump)

Posted on April 19, 2014 by epbeaumont

I never explained our ways to anyone else until I went away to the Academy (“the Academy at Karis” as it is known in the Inhabited Worlds). Then I met Jehen and her half-sister Yasmin and half-brother Ferenc, which changed my life.

And theirs, not necessarily in a good way. But that’s a story for another day.

Until we meet the wider world, we think “our ways” are “the way.” You learn the geography of each of the Inhabited Worlds, and the spatio-temporal fabric of Ordinary Space and the Jumps, but in spite of the mathematics of relativity there’s the quiet bone-deep assumption that Karis is the true center. Other folk have peculiarities, not your own. 

And your own family, of course, is ordinary.

***

Character interview with the archaeologist and Expedition Chief, Martisset yr Astok, from NaNo 2013, Inside the Jump. Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

As I’ve been posting excerpts from character interviews, it’s become clear that every one of these characters has a story. Currently I am plotting Ship’s Heart, whose events take place 15-20 years earlier than Inside the Jump, an action-adventure romance featuring Hernan and Taryn from Inside the Jump, and various short stories in this universe.

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Weekend Writing Warriors: Sunday 13 April 2014 (Character Interview: Inside the Jump)

Posted on April 13, 2014 by epbeaumont

My best friend — what a childish notion. I am very much older and wiser than anyone who would ask such a thing. I am one of a court; I remember those soirees and airship-parties when I was a student at the Academy (the grubbers are always cadets, but many of us are merely students, for we have choices other than the much-vaunted Road of the Stars).

There were always rivals, and any bond was more an alliance than a friendship. I saw naifs devastated by the first betrayal, but then they were naifs no more, or they did not survive in that circle.

Temn stood above it all, smiling with his beautiful ageless face. Let me be clear; he is not my friend. My ideal, my passion, the force that drives me, even after all these years, but not my friend. I could no more imagine confiding the secrets of my soul — not that I have any — to him than … to the Sarronny grubber with whom I was infatuated years ago.

***

Character interview with the interstellar diplomat Iric Desnaray yr Astok, from NaNo 2013, Inside the Jump. Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

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