Swan Tower

I've been scarce around here because I'm head-down in the third book of the Memoirs, but I do feel compelled to brag a little bit more. :-)

The big thing is the Sword and Laser podcast (also posted here), which gives a brief but glowing review of A Natural History of Dragons. Why is this a big thing? Well, apart from the fact that they'll be interviewing me soon, check out the URL on that first link. They're partnered with BoingBoing, which means that for a little while yesterday, their review was posted on the front page of BoingBoing.

I don't know what that did to my sales, but I bet it was pretty good. ^_^

And then you've got Mary Robinette Kowal saying exceedingly nice things over on Book Smugglers, and Liz Bourke singled it out as one of her favorite books of the year, and so did Juliet Kincaid, and y'all, this is so totally the best thing I could have when we're nine days from the solstice and I'm in the Middle of the Book and everything is conspiring to make me have no energy and just want to sleeeeeeeeep. (Well, that and caffeine. Of which I have some in the fridge.)

Now if you'll pardon me, I have to go chop a character's hand off.

(No, I'm not telling you whose.)

alecaustin and I had a long conversation today about how fiction sometimes needs to have depiction of horrible things, and the fine line between "necessary horrible" and "voyeuristic horrible," and the way that readers have sometimes been conditioned toward voyeurism regarding horrible things (see: the problem of depicting rape), and so on. And he got me wondering what I would consider to be the worst violence I've inflicted on a character of mine.

Off the top of my head, I decided it was the stuff that happens to Seniade in drafts of what eventually became Dancing the Warrior. It isn't actually the most damaging violence -- she doesn't die of it -- but it's horrible because it's being done to her by a sadist, and she knows it, and she accepts it because she think it's what she needs to do. Plus I dwell on the details of it, the step-by-step process and the pain that follows, which I don't generally do otherwise. I called it "borderline torture" in that conversation, and only leave it at "borderline" because Sen could walk away at any time.

For all that, though -- as I told alecaustin -- it bothers me less than, say, the plague stuff I wrote for In Ashes Lie. Partly because Sen volunteers for it, but partly because most of us are desensitized to violence. And then that made me realize that what I find "worst" about the DtW stuff isn't the physical suffering after all, but the psychological: what's going on inside Sen's head. (Which is why it's the drafts, not the final version, that are the worst. One of them -- not so much a draft as an exercise -- is a pure, unadulterated inner monologue.)

And then I started thinking, you know, that might be why I tend to prefer torturing my characters psychologically, rather than physically. Because it bothers me a lot more. <g>

I've known for a long time that I'm a sucker for suffering and angst. It only works if you get me to really care about the character first; angst in an unlikeable or boring character will just make me roll my eyes. And it has to be the right kind of suffering; my taste tends toward the operatic end of the spectrum, rather than the grinding, day-to-day banality of things like "how will I find the money for rent this month." But if you hit the right notes, on a character I'm invested in? I will eat it up with a spoon.

I can't say it's fun, exactly. "Magnetic" would be more apt. The next-to-last scene of the film The Wind That Shakes the Barley is excruciating to watch; something truly horrible happens, and there's no resolution afterward to let me feel it's All Okay Now. But it's an amazing scene. (One which I didn't see until after A Star Shall Fall was over and done with -- but if you want to know what psychological note I was aiming for near the end of that book, watch the movie. Or, y'know, watch it just because it's a bloody brilliant piece of work from Cillian Murphy. It's streaming on Netflix, and worth it for the ending alone.) I can't look away from such things, and they stay with me long after they're over.

Really, it's cathartic. And yet -- why do I enjoy the experience? Why am I so often a sucker for drama over comedy? And what determines what kind of suffering I'll enjoy, versus what will just depress me? I'm still working on the answers to that. So I'm curious to know how others feel about this kind of thing. Do you like angst, and if so, what kinds, under what circumstances? Which kinds of suffering bother you more, and which are you desensitized to? What can you bear to write, versus read, versus watch?

I'm hoping your answers will help me understand what's going on in my own head. :-)

Dear Dead Rick,

I'm sorry I'm a horrible person.

Tomorrow morning kurayami_hime will read this and say, "You're not sorry at all," and she'll kind of be right -- but I have to say it anyway. Because one of your levers is more like a giant knife sticking out of your heart, and sometimes I just have to give it a good twist.

Sorry.

If it's any comfort, I suspect you have some RIGHTEOUS FURY OF REVENGE scenes coming up later in the book. It's got that feel in my head, even if I don't know the specifics yet. I hope that helps.


Love and apologies,
A mean, mean person

Tonight, for writing purposes, I have been googling information on what happens when you smoke opium.

This goes onto a list including items like "once looked up how to transport firearms to Hungary" and "published a story in an anthology called Glorifying Terrorism" that I'm pretty sure have me on an FBI watch list somewhere. Writers: we're suspicious types, always curious about how to commit crimes.

These days I tend not to set an alarm for myself, which means I get to wake up gradually and naturally, rather than being catapulted out of sleep.

During this process, my brain randomly wanders along various topics, which often include bits of writing. And sometimes it offers up interesting ideas.

But there's "interesting," and then there's "ooh! i know! vivisection!"

. . . it's even worse because that's a good idea for its context. Kind of perfect, actually. But brain, please to be waiting on the vivisection-related suggestions until I'm more awake? Please?

This story is coming out slooooowly. I'm not sure whether that's because it's a murder mystery (plot-wise; the setting is fantasy), and I've never written one of those before, or because I'm essentially taking two characters my brain assigns to different stories and trying to make them be in scenes together. Maybe this is why all my youthful fanfic involved original characters interacting with the casts of stories I'd read; I don't seem to do well at the crossover thing. Hell, my brain had an instantaneous meltdown when I tried to imagine Ree talking to Nicholas after returning from Arcadia, and that was after all the Memento characters had already shown up in the Changeling game, thus establishing the bridge for me.

But! Making two characters have a conversation where they're talking about entirely different things, and neither one of them realizes it? That's fun.

(Actually, one of them just realized it, in the last few hundred words I wrote. What I need to decide is when the pov character will figure it out.)

Murder mysteries, man. They're hard. I suspect this one would go easier if I'd started from a base of "here's how the victim died and why," but instead I'm struggling to make that be not a macguffin for the investigation, which is the real reason I'm writing this story. We'll see how that goes. This is one of those "permission granted to write a crappy draft" situations, though not nearly to the extent that "Chrysalis" was. I just need to write my way through before I can go back and make it tidy.

Unfortunately, I've about hit the end of the scenes where I knew what I was doing, and now have a vast howling wilderness between me and the end, which is the other part I know. Must figure out what to fill that with.

But not tonight. I've done 1,325 tonight; that's respectable enough that I can stop.

Over 4K words today (all of the London Go Boom variety), and over 8K of revision. We're nearing the home stretch.

This book feels more raw to me than Midnight Never Come, in a way I find hard to describe. It's not simply that I think I'm being meaner to my characters -- though that's part of it. (I think Irrith is the only viewpoint character I haven't done anything horrible to. I wonder if I can fix that before the end?) Partly it's that I think the politics are less polished; whether it's a genuine difference of time period or a result of the rough edges being worn off the Elizabethan era, the seventeenth century just feels messier, with more sharp corners sticking out. And I'm really going all-out on the explosions, which no doubt contributes in its own way.

Raw. That's the only word I can find for it.

112K of book at present, with two days of Fire yet to be added.