Man-Paper

The Greater Seattle RWA chapter has a white elephant gift exchange every year at the holiday party. Unlike most such exchanges, we don't unwrap the gifts until the end, because the competition is all about the wrapping. It can be beautiful and elaborate, goofy, bawdy, or whatever, just as long as it's interesting. I'm not artistic enough to go the beautiful route, so I've established my own tradition of doing some kind of "why Susan writes the Regency era" collage, often heavy on Sean Bean as Sharpe or Ioan Gruffudd as Hornblower.


This year I decided to stick with that theme, but to look for handsome portraits actually from the period. I got some help from my other RWA chapter, the Beau Monde, and did some searching on my own. I ended up with a lot of military images, just 'cuz.




Mine wasn't the most popular gift at the party--I'm pretty sure the one with chains in place of ribbons got that honor! However, the Dead Guys, as my chaptermates kept calling them, were passed around several times during the course of the afternoon.

I also liked the gift I came home with--this riff on Harlequin Presents titles on a book-shaped tin.



Oh, and this post reveals that I've finally learned three Very Important Things: 1) how to take pictures with my new iPhone, 2) how to download said pictures, and 3) how to upload aforementioned pictures to my blog. I may be slow, but I get with the technological program eventually.

I think this is a minor corollary of Murphy's Law

Sometimes, no matter how accurate a historical novelist strives to be, she just cannot track down some detail or other. Such as, say, any kind of description of the appearance or character of a minor historical figure. Eventually, the aspiring novelist decides to make it up, or at least to extrapolate based on the thin evidence she can read between the lines when he makes an appearance in the biographies of the more prominent.

"Hm," thinks the writer. "He seems to be the one everyone else spoke to, even when they weren't speaking to each other. He had a long and apparently successful career as an ambassador, which would imply that he was, well, diplomatic. And he was the youngest of a large family. I bet he was mellow and easygoing."

Satisfied with her deduction, the writer pens two chapters wherein this mellow, unflappable man plays a large part. Throughout his scenes, our boy is calm and capable.

A few days later our writer stumbles across a line or two describing the gentleman in question in a biography of one of his more prominent relations. That calm, unflappable man? Actually, the family drama queen.

Well, I already knew I'd have some serious rewriting to do once NaNoWriMo is over...

NaNoWriMo. Sorta.

The writers among this blog's readership likely already know about NaNoWriMo. For the rest of you, that's National Novel Writing Month--a group exercise in madness, now in its tenth year, wherein people around the world try to draft novels of at least 50,000 words during the month of November.

I've been aware of NaNo for at least five years, but I haven't signed up for it before because technically you're supposed to start a new novel from scratch on November 1. I've never happened to finish a manuscript in September or October, hence no NaNo. I'm not the type to stop mid-draft on one book to work on another.

And I'm in mid-manuscript now--17,000 words into my rewrite of Invasion, a rewrite so radical I'm using maybe 10% of the scenes from the first draft, tops. So instead of using NaNo to write 50K words on a new story, I'm going to try to add that much to the WIP.

It's ambitious, and I may not get there. It also seems counterintuitive to everything I've learned of late about not pushing myself too hard or killing myself over artificial deadlines. And if I'm stressed beyond belief a week in, I can and will quit. I already know I can finish a manuscript; that won't change if NaNo turns out to be wrong for me.

But I want to try. I think I need to test myself a bit, get my competitive juices flowing. I want to see if I can find ways to write faster. Maybe close my browser window when I open Word, for starters. I can always make a note to go back later to check the OED to see if some word is an anachronism, or to look up the exact date of some event in my protagonist's backstory. Because, let's face it, I spend less time in the OED or on wikipedia than I do obsessively checking Gmail every time the new message indicator appears. And maybe I don't always have to wait till my daughter is asleep to write. Not that I want to give her less attention, but when she's playing happily and quietly or watching TV, why not write a few paragraphs? And why not use my lunch hour at work for something other than obsessively checking political blogs? (At least after Nov. 4!)

Above all, I want to plunge into the story and out of my own head games--the usual doubt demons I think most writers have to some degree or other. I want to write with passion. So on the stroke of midnight, I'm going to write a couple of pages before I go to bed. When I wake up, instead of spending an hour cycling through political blogs, I'll write some more. And we'll see how it goes from there...

Thoughts on my first two fencing lessons

My brother Jim, who's 13 years older than me, started West Point the same year I started kindergarten. He was a member of the Class of 1980, the first to include women, which fired my baby-feminist imagination. For several years there, I wanted to go to West Point, too.

At some point the Academy gave him a sword engraved with his name. As 20-somethings who move around a lot are wont to do, he left it with Mom and Dad. I used to get it down from the top shelf of the master bedroom closet, draw it, and carefully brandish it. I never played with it--I knew better than to treat it as a toy--but I loved it. I've yearned over swords ever since and toyed with the idea of taking a fencing class, someday when I have the time, after I've lost the extra weight I need to shed, etc.

This summer several friends convinced me that I shouldn't wait around for that perfect time. Salle Auriol is 15 minutes from my house, and beginner lessons are affordable and fit my schedule as long as I take a break from writers group and choir. So I signed up for the September class and had my first two lessons last week.

Tuesday was bliss. We had such a large group that they didn't even get to equipment and swords. It was all footwork and body position...and to my great surprise, I was almost good at it! I think of myself as a clumsy person, and I tend to struggle in dance or sport classes because I'm not a visual learner. In other words, I have trouble learning by watching a demonstration. Instead, I'm verbal and kinesthetic--tell me what to do, or, even better, tell me how it feels when I'm doing it right. But apparently my few years of skating and my bits and pieces of dance from high school musicals and the like stood me in good stead, because the footwork wasn't hard for me.

It was, however, challenging. I had to concentrate, and it was the toughest workout I'd had in a long time. But I loved it, and I even had a few of those moments that delight my history geek's soul. The instructor was explaining some of the history of the sport, how the similarities to ballet weren't a coincidence, because a few centuries ago young gentlemen would study at academies where fencing, dance, equitation, etc. were taught together as gentlemanly and soldierly arts. That was enough to fire my imagination. There I was, learning exactly what my more aristocratic characters would've learned as a normal part of their education. That 200-year gulf between the world I live in and the world I write suddenly seemed thin, insubstantial, something I could almost step through.

I drove home Tuesday loving fencing and trying to calculate how soon I could take up saber.

Thursday wasn't quite so delightful. We got our epees, and I discovered I wasn't half so natural at holding a sword as I am at advances, retreats, crossovers, and lunges. The instructor's assistants had to correct my grip and straighten my elbow not once, but twice. And that correct grip? Hurts. Makes me feel all weak and out of shape. Which, in point of fact, I am.

Next we put on our gear. Cue body image demons, because the slim, flat-chested gym bunny types had an easier time finding suitable equipment than buxom, overweight me. Geared up, we started work on the most basic attack--just stepping toward your sparring partner and poking him/her in the chest. Simple, right? Only I'm not sure I ever got it right, especially given the added challenge of being paired with a southpaw. (There are only two lefties in the class, one man and one woman, and since we went in gender-segregated groups to get set up with gear, we ended up with women paired with women, men with men.) To top it off, I don't think I've ever sweated so much in my life. My clothes were downright sodden in spots.

At the end of the lesson, I approached the instructors and asked if it was normal to be confused at this stage, and would we be going over what we'd learned that night again? They assured me that it was and we would, and I made a comment about feeling like the most clumsy one out there. They glanced among themselves, shook their heads, and the youngest one said, "Not even." Which made me feel a lot better. The senior instructor said there's always a few naturals, and they're the ones everyone notices and feels awkward beside, but that, basically, determination wins out. If you want to learn, you will. Funny, I hear that advice about succeeding as a writer all the time. Talent doesn't matter half as much as being stubborn enough not to give up...

With that in mind, I'm going to at least stick it out for the rest of the month. I invested in better shoes and more workout clothes. I'm going to take an outfit to change into so I won't have to drive home drenched. I don't know if I can work through my current clumsiness and my dislike of the gear to get back to that point of joy in movement and communion with history, but I'm going to give it a fair shot. Because Tuesday was wonderful, and if ever there was a sport made for my personality and passions, fencing is it.

400!

I just got to p. 400 on the manuscript of my WIP, and on the exact deadline I'd given myself! Woohoo! That's almost exactly 89,000 words by MS Word's count, FWIW.

So, my next goal is to finish my first draft by August 15. A little while back, when I hit p. 300, I hoped to have the manuscript submission-ready by Labor Day, but I've since realized that's unrealistic. This book needs SERIOUS editing to be the best I'm capable of making it. I've got research to do, I've got to make some decisions about the backstory of my alternate world set-up and how much of it to reveal, I need to make sure my protagonist actually has a character arc (right now I'm afraid he's every bit as resolute and heroic when we meet him on p. 3 as he is on p. 400, and that won't do), I need to fix the story logic of my main subplot, etc. I'm thinking that's more like 3 months' work than 3 weeks', so my new tentative goal for being really and truly DONE is 12/31. But I may revise that up or back by a month or two as I go along.

Still. 400 pages. I'm most of the way there. And I got my feedback forms today for the Pacific NW Writers Association Literary Contest (I'm one of the finalists in science fiction/fantasy). It's almost 100% positive. One of my judges wants me to concentrate on adding more description and sensory detail, which is a fair point. That's one of my weaknesses. But s/he also praised my story hook, admired my pacing and imagery, and said s/he looked forward to reading the entire book. The second judge seemed to love everything, and I'm gloating over comments like "A real cause. A real protagonist, super antagonists, wonderful game of 'what if?'"

They liked me, they really liked me! ::bounce bounce bounce::

My manuscript likes carrots!

There's a catchphrase on my primary internet community: "Bob likes carrots." It refers to how people in the besotted stage of a new relationship find a way to make EVERYTHING all about the beloved. So, if you're over the moon for your boyfriend Bob, and your friends are talking about carrot salad or the carrots in their garden, you butt into the conversation with a perky, "Bob likes carrots!" (This can be adapted to any obsession, not just a boyfriend or a girlfriend. If everything comes back to Torchwood or Aubrey/Maturin or The Daily Show for you, those can like carrots, too.)

Lately I find myself acting all "Bob likes carrots" over my work-in-progress. When I started this project, I decided I wouldn't talk about the details of my alternate universe scenario or my plot until the day it sells. (Please, publishing gods, let this one be the book that sells! I love these characters and want to write the rest of their series!) It's not that I'm afraid anyone would steal my idea outright. While there's plenty of plagiarism out there, I don't think people who are capable of writing epic historical fantasy sagas want to use someone else's idea--they have plenty of their own. However, I do think that it's possible that if I talked about all the details of my story all over the internet, some other writer might read about it on a blog comment, forget about it, and later have a similar idea because my idea put it in her subconscious. Far-fetched, but it could happen.

But my biggest reason for not telling all is that I think it's such a cool idea that I don't want to sort of spoil it by talking about it when it's incomplete and half-baked. I'd rather wait till I can say, "I'm writing about X, and the first book comes out in July 2011," or even, "My debut novel, which is about X, is now ready for preorder on Amazon!"

It's not that no one knows what I'm writing about. My critique partners know, as do a handful of other writers and friends I've asked for help and advice. My husband has been in on it since the beginning. Still, it's driving me crazy not to be able to talk about it everywhere. So my poor critique partners, especially The Other Susan, get an earful because they're the only ones who know all the details. And everyone else gets hints. "Bob likes carrots" hints. I will take any opportunity short of giving away the whole game to talk about my characters and their adventures. I caught myself babbling at my boss earlier this week about how some book she had in her office reminded me of my protagonist, and how he's just the coolest ever...and that's when I realized I'd turned into a Bob Likes Carrots writer.

I hope I haven't been boring everyone in earshot/blogshot to distraction. And I hope this book sells so I can talk about it properly.

The War of Art (Book #14)

I have yet to sell a book, but I've finished three manuscripts and am almost 50,000 words into a fourth. When I'm in the zone and in drafting mode, I can turn out 80 pages or more a month despite working full time, having a 3-year-old child, and only being able to squeeze an hour or so per day out of the calendar to write.

If it sounds like I'm bragging, I kind of am. This is what I want to do, more than anything. (Well, more than anything I want to start SELLING those manuscripts, but you know what I mean.) So I've fought pitched battles with my own laziness, procrastination, and fear of both success and failure and trained myself to sit down, day in and day out, whether I'm feeling all creative and inspired or not, and put words on the page. And there are few tougher adversaries than laziness, procrastination, and fear. Steven Pressfield labels them Resistance, and his book, The War of Art (2003), is about defeating it.

For the most part, I found the book an inspiring reminder of lessons already learned. I like his focus on professionalism, i.e. doing the work whether you're in the mood or not. Wait for the Muse, and she'll ignore you. Start writing without the Muse, and she'll eventually come to bless you. Pressfield quotes Somerset Maugham: "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp." I heard the same basic idea from Bernard Cornwell at a writers' conference, and it's stayed with me. He says there's no such thing as writer's block, and the day a nurse can call her hospital and say she can't come in to work because she has nurse's block and have that accepted as a valid excuse is the day we have a right to put on diva airs and not write simply because we're stuck or aren't in the mood.

Anyway, I'm with Pressfield when he talks about overcoming Resistance and writing like a pro even when you're not getting paid for your work yet. But he loses me when he starts getting all visionary and mystic about the Source of creativity, and how the ideas are Out There and we're just the channels. Um, no. Way too New Age and woo-woo for me. I get my share of blinding epiphanies and "aha!" moments, but it's my own brain that's doing it. I can get plenty of joy and even sense of the numinous out of being a storyteller, another link in a long chain going back to the bards of old and even to grandmothers and grandfathers around the fires in Paleolithic caves, without believing I'm nothing more than a channel for the muse.

Phrases you just can't use anymore...

So I'm working away on my manuscript. A colonel is flattering his commanding officer a bit, talking about the utter success of their most recent action.

He called it "a glorious battle."

In my mind's eye, my characters instantly morphed from humans in the elegant officers' uniforms of 200 years ago, developing ridged foreheads and growing long, long hair. Their discreet glasses of claret disappeared, replaced with great goblets of blood wine. My colonel's concern that the general would give him a stern tongue-lashing upon learning he allowed an important enemy leader to slip through his fingers became shame and terror that his fearsome commander would declare him without honor and kill him where he stood.

So. Humans cannot fight glorious battles. The very phrase transforms them into Klingons.

Are We Rome? (Book #92)

Fans of The Colbert Report will remember an episode from a couple months back where he dressed up in Americo-Roman armor (apparently a gift from a fan who makes handcrafted gear for reenactors) to interview Cullen Murphy, author of Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (2007).

Anyway, that's where I heard of this book, and I'm glad I picked it up. It's well-written, thought-provoking, and readily comprehensible without being simplistic. Murphy's answer to his titular question is "yes and no."

In a thousand specific ways, the answer is obviously no. In a handful of important ways, the answer is certainly yes. As societies, America and Rome are built on different premises. As people, Americans and Romans cherish different values. But Rome and America share certain dangerous traits--habits of mind and behavior. America and Rome also face similarly fraught circumstances, arising both from inside and from outside.

For more detail, read the book. At 200 pithy pages, it's well worth your time. Though it did give me a plot bunny for the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest that I have a feeling is going to stick with me and insist on becoming a novel. Which means I may end up investing a few years of my life in an idea that sprang from this book. But that's just me, the military history geek/writer woman.

Writing update

Apparently taking my protagonist horse shopping worked, because the writing went very well last night. I have a feeling I overdid the exposition, but that's what rewriting is for. At least the words flowed smoothly onto the page, and my hero felt fleshly (but not fleshy!) rather than wooden.

I think there's something about getting away from pure words and giving your imagination some visual or auditory cues to work with. Maybe I should try collaging as Jennifer Crusie recommends, or at the very least work on a soundtrack for the WIP. I had one for The Sergeant's Lady, and I swear it helped me write better and keep my characters' emotions to the fore, which is not one of my natural strengths.

Shopping with my protagonist

I've been struggling to get a grip on my protagonist's voice in my WIP. Lately I've had to restart every scene in his POV at least twice before it flows at all, and I'm still dissatisfied with the results. I like him, and he's a vivid presence in my mind. One of the voices in my head, if it comes to that. But for someone who can merrily debate with me the events of his era and mine, he's awfully hard to pin down on the page.

So today I decided to try something different. At the very end of the WIP, my protagonist acquires a horse that he'll keep for the remainder of the series. I had a vague picture of this beast in mind, but today my character and I did a little online horse shopping. I'd decided for various reasons that the horse should be a Barb. The character agitated for a Thoroughbred or an Irish hunter, but I shouted him down with story logic. Once I found a good site with images, I recommended this lovely light gray and this magnificent fellow. But my character wasn't buying it. He turned, to paraphrase a local-area mattress store commercial, picky about color. He wanted this bay. And I must say, man and steed will make a magnificent pair.

Now, off to my manuscript to see if my protagonist will be a more cooperative POV character now that I've promised him a horsie at the end if he'll just carry me through the story....