Outside Over There

The New Vanport Flood

2009-10-12T09:45:00.000-07:00

For interest's sake. Below is a piece I wrote back in 2006:

All that summer our neighborhood echoed with the sound of trucks. West of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and north of the Alameda Ridge, cranes were pulling down buildings; bulldozers tore out foundations and filled in basements. Dump trucks rumbled along all the major eastbound streets, carting salvaged building materials, utility poles, and giant coils of wire to the temporary housing camps that were springing up on high ground in Gresham and Troutdale. Other trucks carried rubble and fill away to the new dikes that were rising along the Willamette and Columbia.

Downtown would be saved, but the neighborhoods of North Portland were being sacrificed. Most of the families were gone already, either to the refugee camps in the East County or to relatives elsewhere in the country. Still, every day I saw groups of people clutching bundles of belongings, stumbling along the sidewalk, dazed and dislocated. It was like the aftermath of a disaster, before the disaster itself.

Meanwhile, as if to mock us, the Willamette lay shrunken between its banks in the sweltering summer heat. Drought gripped the Northwest; fires raged in the Cascade forests, smudging the sky to the east even as cement dust plumed up to the west.

One evening, driving along the bluffs above Swan Island, I looked up and felt my heart stop: The St. Johns Bridge was being dismantled. The massive suspension cables were gone already, the graceful steel towers were being torn apart—next, I guessed, they would tear up the solid piers that supported the towers. Iron and stone, too valuable to lose to the hungry waters.

Dry weather lingered into the fall. As the Southern Hemisphere heated up, an uneasy quiet settled over the city. The north quarter (Portland had had five quarters, once upon a time) had been levelled, and only dust clouds moved over the desolate rubble. Even the rats had forsaken the area for better cover and feeding grounds. Seawalls built from the wreckage of Kenton and Portsmouth homes and Interstate Avenue businesses snaked along the banks of the river downtown, diverging to protect the endpoints of the Broadway Bridge, then widening out to meet the 200-foot contour line.

The Antarctic ice cap melted and flew apart in chunks. Satellite images limned rapidly melting areas in angry red; the South Pole looked like a drunkard’s eyeball, bloodshot and rimmed with crimson. (The Arctic ice had been gradually thinning for many years, like a cataract forming in reverse.) Giant icebergs steamed away north, with icy rivers cascading down their flanks.

There was no fanfare. Silently and stealthily, the river rose, reclaiming its winter dimensions and then expanding over its banks. One morning I looked out from the bottom of Prescott Street, west across the rubbly flats, and saw it: water, gleaming darkly in the distance. It was salt, or at least brackish; it was the new mouth of the Willamette. The ocean had risen high enough to swallow the Willamette/Columbia confluence—Sauvie Island was underwater—the Willamette was no longer a tributary but a river in her own right. Everything downstream was now a vast estuary framed by new wetlands that had once been part of the Coast Range.

Portland is a busy saltwater port these days. The new coastline is too steep for good harborage, and forests of skeletal treetops line the shallows. US 101 is long gone, the new coastal towns reachable only from the interior, by old passes over the Coast Range from I-5. So it’s here they come to load and unload, the giant deep-water freighters. Their wakes lash the dead beaches west of Martin Luther King, at the feet of Prescott, Alberta, Killingsworth.

North Portland is gone, gone. It’s the Vanport flood come again, but this time it’s forever.

Here's the same piece, cut down to 350 words for the 350 Words page. The original was 600+.

All summer our neighborhood echoed with trucks. West of MLK, north of the Alameda Ridge, cranes pulled down buildings; bulldozers filled basements and foundations. Dump trucks rumbled away, carting rubble and fill, salvaged building materials, utility poles, giant wire coils. Seawalls built from wreckage of Kenton and Portsmouth homes and Interstate Avenue businesses snaked south, diverging to protect the Broadway Bridge, then out to the 200-foot contour.

Downtown would be saved; North Portland neighborhoods, sacrificed. Most families were gone already, to East County refugee camps or relatives inland. Yet every day, groups of dislocated people stumbled along the sidewalk, clutching bundles of belongings as though a disaster had already happened.

From the bluffs above Swan Island, I looked up and felt my heart stop. The St. Johns Bridge was gone. The graceful suspension cables and steel towers were just a memory against the sky. Even the massive piers were being uprooted.

Drought gripped Oregon; fires ravaged the Cascades, streaking the sky as cement dust darkened the air. The Willamette lay shrunken in sweltering summer heat. Uneasy quiet settled over Portland's leveled north quarter. Only dust stirred above desolate rubble, forsaken even by rats.

The Arctic ice had thinned to nothing, like a cataract in reverse. As fall heated the Southern Hemisphere, satellite images limned rapidly melting areas in red, turning the Antarctic into a drunkard’s blood-rimmed eyeball. Giant icebergs steamed north, sweating icy rivers.

With no fanfare the river rose, drowning its winter banks. From the bottom of Prescott Street, I looked west across rubbly flats and saw distant water gleaming. It was salt. The ocean had swallowed the confluence-- Sauvie Island was underwater-- the Willamette was no longer a tributary, but a river. Downstream was a vast estuary framed by wetlands that had been part of the Coast Range.

Portland is a saltwater port now. Treacherous forests of skeletal treetops line new coastlines. US 101 is long gone, coastal towns reachable only by passes west from I-5. Wakes of giant deep-water freighters lash dead beaches west of MLK.

North Portland is gone. It’s the Vanport flood, again and forever.

It amazes me how much I was able to cut without sacrificing anything I thought was really important. Not to say the piece is unchanged: the short version has a much different texture, it's less expressive, it's a bit rough and abrupt in places.

Rejection and submission

2009-09-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

Asimov's rejected Killing Time I thought it was a long shot given the length. I'm resubmiting KT to Damnation Books. If that doesn't pan out, I think I'm going to try selling it as an e-book.

No joy from F&SF

2009-07-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

but a fast response, which is nice. This weekend I'll try to get the manuscript out to Asimov's.

Recapping Drumheart and the use of outlines

2009-07-16T08:20:00.001-07:00

Had a conversation with some friends a couple days ago in which we shook our heads over the (apparently increasingly common) practice of writing novels without outlines. I suffered a twinge of conscience, as I didn't think I had a formal outline for Drumheart, so who was I to talk? Then I remembered this post and decided to go back and look at it.

I actually stuck to it pretty well. A couple of things changed: Akshadhen somehow became Akshedhen. I wrote "Nitsur lives as a slave with Akshadhen's family for several years", but it ended up only being about a year and a half. "Nitsur alerts Akshadhen and his father to the secret practices of the temple"-- not exactly, A. and father were out of the city at the time, but N. does alert the authorities and events proceed as described. (This is important, because it sets up A's father's arrest.) So N's section is relatively unchanged.

In M's section I wrote "Along the way, they acquire a motley group of companions: ... even a Kesset who had been stripped of his rights and condemned to slavery for crimes" There is such a character, but he ends up traveling with A. and friends rather than N. and M.

The order of events at the end of this section is substantially rearranged: M's fight with W. occurs closer to the time of their arrival, before the rains and the (re)appearance of A.

A's section is really only hinted at in the outline. Unsurprisingly, it's the part that changed the most in the writing and editing. I notice that there's no mention here of the Locust People having taken Ahon ken Tai.

Overall, I was pretty faithful to the outline as far as it went. What amazes me is what's not in the outline: the tangle of interlocking motivations and event consequences that moves the story forward. Like the Sun temple raids leading to the disorganization of the city, that causes it to fall pretty much without a struggle to the Locust People. The stuff from M's youth feeding forward into W's actions as senior priestess. A's struggles with his nascent status as an Old Man.

I don't remember, now, how much of this was in my head when I wrote the outline: I think actually a lot of it was already implicit. For instance, A's conversation with N. at the gate of Ahon ken Tai-- where he talks about his ambivalence toward the Old Man cult-- I wrote that years before the rest of this.

What can I conclude? I don't think I'd want to set out to write a novel without an outline that's at least this well developed. I see also that the early posts to this blog contained a fair amount of background material, character sketches and the like. All good stuff.

For comparison, I pretty much wrote Killing Time off a plot outline that I spoke to Todd shortly before I started writing; I never wrote it down anywhere but I had it in my head the whole time. Of course, KT took less than a month from start to finish, so it's not as if I had time to forget what I was doing.

In the Mail

2009-07-07T20:32:00.000-07:00

Killing Time went in the mail this afternoon, to F&SF. They say about an 8-week response time, so I should hear from them by mid-September or so.

Final edits

2009-06-14T18:36:00.000-07:00

and a thumbs-up from Steve Perry. Thanks, Steve.

Counting words per line and multiplying, I came up with about 18,300 words: OpenOffice's word counter gets 18,770. Make of it what you will.

It's a wrap

2009-06-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

So I finished the rough draft of Killing Time last night and put a few finishing touches on this morning. I'm still going to let it sit for a week and then go back and look-- but I truly don't think there'll be any substantial editing. It's an intense piece of prose.

It wasn't fun.

Less than a month from start to finish, and well over 3/4 of it in one weekend: Thursday evening, all day Friday, most of Saturday.

I'm going to send this one out to F&SF, if no joy there, Asimov's, then work my way through Duotrope's list of mags that take novella-length SF or fiction.

Progress report

2009-06-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

Well, I was right about the productivity and wrong about the intensity. I took yesterday off from work and spent most of the day writing. Same today. I'm cruising. Inshallah tonight or tomorrow, the first draft will be finished.

Then I won't look at it for at least a week.

Then editing. Of course I've done some as I went along.

I realized that not working on this was preventing from writing poetry. There's no way out but through. But God, I really, really didn't want this one...

Bad and Scary

2009-06-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

Killing Time is not like anything else I've ever written. It's a bad, scary, evil piece of shit. It's so easy to imagine how a person would go about manipulating other people, especially when they're already in the grasp of some overwhelming, irrational fervor.

I'm not, obviously, doing the intensive, words-per-day thing with this story. I've let whole weeks go by without writing more than a few paragraphs. I think I'm about to kick into a more productive mode and inshallah finish it up by the end of the month. But I'll never get up to anything like the 2000+ WPD I did on Drumheart.

There are a couple of reasons for that. One, the prose is much more intense, in fact more like poetry. That means I can't produce it nearly as fast. With simple expository prose, which is what Drumheart was mostly written in (there were a few spots of descriptive prose that rose above that level), the translation of idea to prose is pretty straightforward and tends to occur at a more-or-less fixed base rate. (It might be slower if I was tired, faster if I'd had extra coffee. But it seemed to me that those were physiological conditions independent of the creative process.)

The kind of prose I'm using for Killing Time takes longer to produce and requires a lot more... something per word. Energy. Creative effort. I want the text to come out spiky and brilliant, seductive yet uncomfortable to read. Disturbing. It's a matter of much more than just getting the idea across.

Overstylish? Maybe. But that's not uncharacteristic of clockpunk/steampunk/cyberpunk: always a very style-conscious genre, in a way that I think repudiated the style-neutral or even anti-style esthetic of earlier SF. Way back in the Campbell era, the Idea was the thing: niceties like plot and character development, let alone prose style, were actively denigrated. (There were exceptions, like the immortal Ray Bradbury, but Campbell's editorial influence pretty effectively marginalized newer writers with pretension to style. Look up Manly Wade Wellman's attempt to publish his novel about Leonardo da Vinci.)

New Wave authors like Zelazny, Delaney, and Davidson broke the style barrier, but the idea that style is important, that the form is part of the message, is still far from universally acknowledged in the field. Gene Wolfe and the aforementioned Bradbury (if you don't have Farewell Summer, the sequel to Dandelion Wine, go out and get it) are probably the pre-eminent (living) senior stylists around; John Crowley turns out amazing stuff; China Mieville and Jay Lake are some of the newer writers with style to burn and things to say.

(I guess that's what offends me the most about the Campbell philosophy, as a writer; the idea that there's a necessary trade-off between having things to say and saying them well. Put that way, it makes no sense at all.)

All of which is a long digression to keep me from mentioning the second reason Killing Time proceeds slowly.

I hate living inside that character's head. It scares me.

What to do with it? As I mentioned earlier, it's going to be an awkward length, probably unpublishable by normal means. I'm thinking seriously about selling it off my blog, for a fairly nominal amount, as a Word or pdf file. We'll see about that after I finish the damn thing.

A new ?

2009-05-18T07:55:00.000-07:00

? because I don't know how long it's going to be. Probably not novel-length, but long for a short story.

It falls into the genre Todd and I have been referring to as "clockpunk", which is a variant of steampunk but tends to be organized around the image of a clock, or clockwork. Good recent examples are The Clockwork Heart by Dru Pagliassotti and The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia. Also the ongoing series by Jay Lake which began with Mainspring and continued in Escapement.

Clockpunk has interesting antecedents. Steampunk began as a spin-off from cyberpunk, via books like Gibson and Sterling's Difference Engine and Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. Cyberpunk itself was born out of what was then called the "New Wave", which included authors like Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison. (Dick, by the way, may bear the distinction of having appeared as an important character in more novels written after his own death than any other writer: for the most recent example see Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory.)

Ellison, of course, was the author of "'Repent, Harlequin' said the Ticktockman", one of the classic anti-authoritarian works of the genre. But the imagery of the clock as enemy, the clock symbolizing the devouring, dehumanizing nature of industrial totalitarianism, goes back further than that: cf. Metropolis, both the novel by Thea von Harbou and the silent movie version by Fritz Lang, and Chaplin's immortal Modern Times.

The story I'm working on right now was mostly inspired by The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's fascinating account of the construction of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and of the life and times of America's first documented serial killer, known in Chicago as H. H. Holmes. If you haven't read it, you should: each of his narratives is fascinating in itself. I wrote about it on KFI some time back.

Addendum: Jay Lake kindly points out Zelazny's Jack of Shadows as a clockpunk precursor. An inexcusable omission on my part.

Queries

2008-11-15T13:39:00.000-08:00

So I've written query letters to four agents that Steve recommended. They'll go out in Monday's mail. If one of them bites, the next step would probably be to send sample chapters, and eventually the whole manuscript.

It'll take months, especially with the holidays coming up. That's OK. I seem to have a lot of fish to fry in the poetry world right now.

Next...

2008-11-09T12:17:00.000-08:00

So, no joy from the agent I sent Drumheart to: she says she liked the writing, the characters, and the concept, but didn't think there was enough dramatic tension. Said she would be willing to read it again if I rewrote it, but it didn't amount to "change this and this, and I'll back it".

My choices now are: rewrite and resend to her, look for another venue, or..? Steve suggested possibly writing the second book, shopping it around, and then seeing if there would be interest in a prequel.

Right now I think I'm going to do nothing for a while: sit on it, see how I feel after the first of the year. Partly because I'm pursuing a whole bunch of new stuff on the poetry side and I only have so much attention to spare. Partly because I know it'll be easier for me to look at starting a big project once the year turns. (Why in the world did they pick November as NaNoWriMo? Looking back, I don't know how the heck I ever made it through the month.)

Watch this space.

Brother's Keeper

2008-08-02T11:13:00.000-07:00

So Write Anything, which is the successor to Write Stuff, has posted another link to a Writer's Digest short story award winner. This story was a winner in the thriller/suspense category.

Here are their questions about it and my answers:

1. Explain the title. In what way is it suitable to the story?
The title may actually be ironic. Solomon saves the life of Evan, a man to whom he owes nothing personally. But his remarks afterward make clear that he's concerned that Evan's spectacular and gory murder would cause publicity that might lead to Solomon's unmasking as a Union agent. It's not possible to conclude that Solomon acted out of a feeling of responsibility for Evan as a "brother" or fellow man.

2. What is the predominant element in the story - plot, theme, character, setting?
Mostly character, although setting plays its part. This story would not work without the unique cultural matrix of American slavery and the Civil War.

3. What sort of conflict confronts the leading character or characters?
In Evan's case, the conflict (of which he's completely unaware) is between his philandering ways and the outrage of the community's men. Solomon lives with a myriad of conflicts, but I would guess the one that has the most impact on his daily life is the need to appear stupid, slow and ignorant, when in fact he is none of these things.

4. How is the conflict resolved?
Neither of these conflicts is really resolved. Evan's life is saved and his attackers disposed of by Solomon, but we can't believe that they were the only two who knew what was going on. If nothing else, Maybelle's father and aunt certainly know that she has been with Evan and may be pregnant by him. Retribution has only been postponed.

Solomon's situation has changed: Evan now knows that Solomon is not what he seems, and should be able to figure out that Solomon is a Union agent. As noted above, Evan really has no secret to keep any more. It's hard to see why Evan wouldn't simply turn Solomon in, except perhaps for gratitude's sake. Or, Solomon may decide that now is the time to leave town and try to get to Union territory. In any case, no resolution takes place inside the story.

5. How does the author handle characterization?
a. by description?
b. conversation of the characters?
c. actions of the characters?
d. combination of these methods?
For Evan and Solomon, primarily c. For the two attackers, a mix of b. and c.

6. What is the high point, or climax, of the story?
Solomon's rescue of Evan.

7. Does this story create any special mood?
Not particularly.

8. Is this story realistic or true to life? Explain your answers by giving examples.
I'm dubious that (a) Emile and Rafe won't have told anyone what they're up to (b) no-one will figure that both of the murdered men are family of women who've been sleeping with Evan. Too much of the plot is predicated on the idea that no-one knows what's going on-- which suggests to me that the author has never lived in a small town.

9. What is the general theme of the story? What is the underlying theme?
I would say the theme is the contrast between careless young Evan and responsible old Solomon. Evan gets himself (and various women) into trouble through sheer thoughtlessness, and almost pays with his life. Solomon voluntarily and knowingly enters into danger as a spy, for a cause he believes in: he accepts the risk. In every way, the two men are opposites.

10. Did you identify with any of the characters?
No; they're remote from me in time, place, and culture.

11. Does the story contain a single effect or impression for the reader? If so, what?
None that really strikes me.

12. Name one major personality trait of each leading character, and tell how the author makes the reader conscious of this trait.
In Evan's case, thoughtlessness, reflected in the statement "But Evan was young. And he enjoyed the delights of the flesh too much to pay any attention." Also reflected in the fact that we never see him considering the possible consequences, for himself or the women he sleeps with.

In Solomon's case, decisiveness. This is hidden in the early part of the story, but is revealed very dramatically in his rescue of Evan.

13. Does the story have a moral? If not, what do you think the purpose of the author was?
Difficult to say. As noted under question 1, any moral statement about caring for one's fellow-man, regardless of how they treat one, is undercut by Solomon's other motivation.

14. Did you like it? Why or why not?
I like it better than the previous winning story that was posted on Write Stuff.

As a thriller/suspense story, I have to say it falls flat. Except for the attack on Evan and the rescue by Solomon, the pacing is pretty slow, and the climax is frankly completely predictable.

Overall, I think it's a well-meaning story, though the execution leaves something to be desired. The author's rendering of Southern dialects, both black and white, is clumsy and unconvincing, and the white characters are rather offensive hillbilly stereotypes. This may have been done to strengthen the hero Solomon by contrast, but I'm afraid it ends up having the opposite effect.

15. Finally, why do you think this story placed in the top five in the Short Story competition?
It's impossible to answer this question without seeing the other contestants.

??

2008-06-09T15:44:00.001-07:00

All my old posts went to single-spaced. Weird.
Testing.
Testing.
Testing...
And I can't seem to fix it. What's up with that?

Sequels... maybe

2008-05-05T16:28:00.001-07:00

Iron Girl for sure. It looks like that one will take place mostly on the steppes. Featuring Tamishena and a tribe/clan of Iron Men... shamanism, ironwork, fighting arts. Tami is a partly-trained Dancer. There needs to be a Drummer with her.

I like Iron Girl, but will probably use a different title for sales: something with "Drum" in it. Maybe Drumming up Iron. Keep the "Drum" constant in the series.

Later: the Raft People story. Tentative working title, Worse Things Happen at Sea. Though it will probably end up being called Ocean Drums, or something like that. I may find a place there for some of the stuff I developed in "Riding the Sea Dragon"-- certainly the Indo/Fili culture will work with it.

Another step...

2008-05-02T12:28:00.000-07:00

XXX (I'm still withholding details) has asked to see the rest of the manuscript. We'll be printing and sending over the weekend.

Iron Girl

2008-03-23T20:28:00.000-07:00

I have some ideas for things that may happen in the next book, though none yet for what the main story thread is/are likely to be.

Given that Tamishena is the main character, the developing relations between the Delta and Ahon S. are likely to be important. I see an uneasy alliance, always strained over the issue of slavery. During the course of the novel, relations may break down completely.

Gidhambal is now a very old man, perhaps blind or in failing health. Tami will go visit him, though it's not entirely without risk to her. He doesn't recognize her, or mixes her up with his long-dead daughter when he's not entirely lucid.

Another thread: I think Tami will be one of the main players in the development of a true battlefield art that uses pasaörana'e principles. She of course is fostered by A. and S. and wants to go into the guard. The priestesses identify her talent and want to train her as a priestess or as a Dancer. N. and M. will be involved in this somehow. Tami will bridge the two in some way. Perhaps an attempt is made to kidnap/enslave her in Ahon S. Perhaps it's even successful, and she's forced to develop the art in order to survive. Perhaps she takes over an entire tribe of steppe nomads.

It's Just Not The Same

2008-03-23T18:05:00.000-07:00

I think I've figured out one of the reasons people are averse to rewriting. It's because it's much harder to access that flow state when you're rewriting (editing, polishing, call it what you will). And make no mistake, flow state is addictive. It's a high. It'll turn you into a junkie same as any other drug.

This has a couple of consequences. First, it means rewriting isn't fun. It's not necessarily harder work than the original writing, but it feels like much harder work because I'm not getting the high. When I write in flow state, I get up from the keyboard just as tired as when I don't write in flow state. But as long as I'm sitting there hammering away and pouring out words, I don't notice it.

Second, and I think this is behind a lot of the blather about spontaneity and freshness that people employ against revising: The writing I generate in flow state always seems better to me than the writing I generate at other times.

I'm not sure why that is. I suspect that when I reread such a piece of writing, I remember what it felt like: I actually get the high (in an attenuated form) all over again. Maybe a year from now, when those memories have faded, I'll reread Drumheart and that won't happen. In the meantime I have to take it on faith that the scenes I've struggled with, where I had to force out the words according to my best judgment rather than just letting them pour through my fingertips, can look like just as good writing to other people. 'Cause they sure don't look that good to me.

This is one of the reasons it's important to have other people read your MS. It's hard, at least it's hard for me, to look at Drumheart and figure out which are the "good" bits. To me the "good" bits are the ones that came easily. But, personal preferences aside, the fact that I worked harder on the other bits may actually translate into a higher quality of prose. At least, I have to take it on faith that that' spossible.

Officially an MS

2008-03-23T17:01:00.000-07:00

So I spent all day yesterday doing a final line edit, spellchecking, and rendering the MS into the format Steve P. gave me. Printed the first three chapters, a plot summary of the rest, and a cover letter, which will be shipped off tomorrow to XXX (I don't want to disclose anything until I hear back one way or another).

Now the waiting, rejection, resubmission, etc etc etc... Luckily I've been through all this with poetry already. The difference is mostly a matter of scale. (Case in point: the poem that recently got accepted in The Lyric went out last July. That's 9 months ago.)

I'll track events associated with the publication process here, but it's not gonna be anything like daily updates...

And the rewrite is off...

2008-03-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

to Steve P. for another look-over.

Added some more stuff to Part 3. It's better. Good enough? I don't know. I could tinker with it forever, but I feel like I'm at a point of diminishing returns.

Anyway I'm not going to mess with it until Steve gets back to me.

Update Mar 18: Steve approves the rewrite. (What would I do without him?) One more spellcheck and line-edit pass, and he's going to start helping me find an editor.

Rewrite finished

2008-03-11T20:26:00.000-07:00

at least for now. I'm going to let it sit for a bit, then look it over one last time, probably in a week or so, certainly before the end of the month. Make any last tweaks I need to-- but I really think it's there.

I've posted a new word count in the sidebar. NB: this word count includes words like CHAPTER 26. Also, I did this word count completely in Open Office's Word doc format, which gives slightly different results than the Google Docs word counts I was using back in Nov/Dec. So all numbers should be considered approximate.

Still, I've written a pretty good chunk of new stuff. It's almost all in Part III, which is where it was needed.

There will be a sequel

2008-03-03T16:00:00.000-08:00

though I have no idea when and very little idea of what's going into it.

Here's what I know so far: The main character will be a half-Kesset, half-Ta'arane girl who is the granddaughter of Gidhambal, the Iron Man of Ahon Sarkhamine who makes a brief appearance near the end of Drumheart. I'm expanding that section. It'll turn out that G's daughter had an affair with a slave in her husband's household. She's dead and the father was sold to the mines.

At G's request, A. takes the girl (legally a slave-- G. doesn't want her to grow up in Ahon Sarkhamine) away to the Delta. She'll grow up as a Drummer. She'll be the main character in the sequel, which I'm calling Iron Girl for the moment.

Iron Girl may incorporate some material that I originally developed for the short story "Fear the Dark", which has mostly been assimilated into the first part of Drumheart. Or maybe not. I have no idea right now.

Rewriting

2008-02-25T08:29:00.000-08:00

Thought it was worth a note.

I'm pretty much done with the first two sections. No real "rewriting", there: editing to smooth out the flow of prose, spellchecking (aargh, nightmare!), fixing a couple of minor continuity points. Very little new material, and nothing removed (a word here, a phrase there).

Part III is going to be a different story. In fact, when I'm done with it it'll be a quite different story.

I started on it last night. The first half of Part III sees mostly minor changes on the same order as Parts I and II. I may expand some of the sequences where Akshedhen and Co. are dodging Locusts all over the plain; it still feels to me like that whole part takes much less time than Part II, which is supposed to be contemporaneous. Besides, there's potentially some good action in there.

But it's the second half, after A. gets to the Delta, that's really going to need work. I have to redefine A's emotional trajectory, extract genuine repentance, and make his willing support of the Delta convincing. To that end, I think I'm going to expand his visit to Ahon Sarkhamine and present him with a real choice, not a premade one.

Insh'allah, by the end of March, I'll be done with the rewrite. Then I'll run it by Steve P. one more time, and then...

And for the next rewrite...

2008-01-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

Part III is going to take some rewriting. I let Akshedhen off way too easy; it's starting to bother my conscience. So, go back and put him through the mill. That will make it longer-- maybe not a whole lot longer, though.

Forgiveness? No. Atonement, maybe.

It's kind of inexcusable that I didn't deal with it at the time. I was tired, burned out, and it was emotionally difficult material. I should have either not pushed so hard, or taken a serious break. Chalk it up to the learning process; nothing's final yet anyway.

This is precisely the point of my post about aphorisms. Add another to the set: Haste makes waste.

Steve P. is already pushing for me to write it into a 2-book series. Probably someone will suggest the T-word. (Did you ever stop to wonder what the world would be like if LOTR had been published as a 4-book series?)

Excerpt: Old Man's Temple

2008-01-04T16:11:00.000-08:00

This is an excerpt from the novel I started in NaNoWriMo and finished just before Christmas. The novel's working title is Drumheart.

The sun's rays were nearly level, splashing the Blackwall with orange light. My house was silent and already dusty. I walked quickly through familiar rooms, averting my eyes from objects I had once treasured. I was under no illusions; even if I could clear my father and myself and Paltabas of involvement in Skadhrim's death and the Mother cult, even if I could find Nitsur and learn something important enough to impress Dithaktas, we would never own this house again.

Weapons. Armor. Clothes. Paltabas' riding gear, and some dresses in case she chose not to leave the city. It felt wrong to be in my sister's upstairs rooms alone, handling her clothes. I hadn't the heart to go into either of my parents' rooms. Sunset was fading from the walls as I left the house.

As I shut the door behind me, the giant gong rang out from the temple of the Boy.

I stood frozen for just a moment. Disaster. War. The Locust People!

I ran. All around me, shutters were swinging, doors banging open and shut. Men poured out into the street, some trying to struggle into armor while carrying weapons. I was surrounded by faces I knew, but stopped for none of them.

At Kaspell's house, Talikent and Paltabas were clinging together in the porch. Brentanas stood beside them, axe in hand. I dumped my packs on the floor and gasped, "Where's Kaspell?"

"At the temple," said Brentanas.

I dragged my riding armor out of the pack. "I have to go there too." Leather jacket sown with iron disks, short iron-studded chaps around the outsides of my thighs. Bow. Arrows. I was wearing my sword; I left the lances. Paltabas came and helped me. Her hands trembled, but her mouth was set firm. I snatched a kiss from her cheek and ran for the temple.

The plaza was full of groups of Boy soldiers standing about, talking loudly-- arguing loudly. No-one was moving. What was wrong here? "What are you doing?" I shouted. "Why aren't you on the walls? Where are the Old Men?"

Faces turned toward me, sheened with fear. "It's too late," someone said. "They're inside the gates. They were let in."

Over my heavy breathing, I could hear noise from the lower city. Screams. The pounding of hooves. I turned around; in the gathering darkness, flames were springing up near the west wall.

My head filled with light. "Kaspell!"

He came pushing through the crowd, sweat running down his face. "Akshedhen. I'm here."

"I'm going to get my parents," I told him.

Kaspell nodded and followed me up the steps of the Old Man's temple. The guard at the door was the same who had let me speak to my father earlier-- was it only earlier today? He looked at me and stepped back without a word, pushing the door open.

The entrance hall was dark. I drew my sword and walked forward. Kaspell moved out to my left, arrow on string. Beyond the hall, I could see wavering torchlight from the courtyard. There was some confused noise from out there: I thought I heard sobbing, some indistinct words... then the thunk of an axe biting into flesh and bone.

I broke into a run.

There was a crowd of Old Men in the courtyard. In the middle of it knelt a huddle of women, their hands bound behind their backs. Dithaktas was standing over a great block of wood, with an axe. The axe was dripping blood. His hands were dripping blood. Blood spattered his clothes. Thick streams of blood crawled this way and that over the stones of the courtyard. At Dithaktas' feet, women's faces stared sightlessly from a huge mound of black hair all sopping with blood. The stench of it choked me.

"Akshedhen Half-Old-Man! Is it your mother you've come to find?" Dithaktas laughed, a high keening sound, and kicked at the pile of heads, sending them tumbling. "Come and get her, boy. Come and get her!"

"Where is my father?" I shouted.

Dithaktas hissed and started toward me, axe raised. I went to meet him, but my feet dragged through the horrible mess on the pavement. It was like wading in mud. I was heavy. Dithaktas' will pressed down, slowing me to a crawl.

I heard the twang of a bowstring and Dithaktas stopped in his tracks, staring down at the fletching that had suddenly grown from his chest.

"Who wants to die next?" snarled Kaspell, nocking another arrow.

Dithaktas crumpled soundlessly. "Where is my father?" I shouted.

The crowd of Old Men shifted and I saw my father seated in a chair. No, tied to it. No-- His head rolled towards me, eyeless sockets above red-streaked cheekbones. "Akshedhen? Akshedhen?"

A knife flashed in the torchlight. Kaspell loosed again, just an instant too late; blood spurted from my father's throat even as the Old Man who killed him staggered, clutching at the arrow in his heart. I howled and ran forward. The Old Men bolted in all directions, but I was among them, laying about furiously. One went down under my sword, another, another. I heard shouting, the twang of Kaspell's bowstring, the clash of other swords against axes.

Then all the Old Men were gone, cut down or fled. A handful of Boy soldiers had joined me in the courtyard. I turned to them and said: "Ahon ken Taridh has fallen. Save your families if you can."

"Lord," pleaded a voice. "Lord, help us, please."

I'd forgotten the women. They were still bound and kneeling. Ajalē was among them; she came knee-walking across the bloody pavement towards me. "My lord, please! Please don't leave us for the Locusts!"

Kaspell had drawn his knife. I nodded. He passed among the women, cutting them free. I said to Ajalē: "Keep up if you can."

Away it goes

2008-01-03T11:39:00.001-08:00

First pass editing is officially done. Post-edit word count is 118,319. For reference, Todd looked it up for me: a standard paperback averages 250 words to the page, so we're talking approximately 470 pages.

I've sent copies of the rough draft to all of my alpha readers. Now to wait...

Started editing

2008-01-01T16:41:00.001-08:00

There's not as much to do as I thought, or else I'm just not seeing it. As Steve said, the first couple of chapters needed the most work.

Maybe only a few more days of this.

I'm getting irritated with Google docs format issues: It keeps inserting these extra blank lines that I can't get rid of and that propagate through the text. What's worse is, you don't see them online, but when you download the doc as Word, there they are and they cannot be removed by any normal editing. Bother. Also, downloading into Word sometimes resizes parts of the text. And you can insert page breaks into Google docs, but they apparently don't download either. And the paragraph indents look fine in Google docs, but in Word they turn out to be weirdly irregular.

The upshot is, I think I'm just going to have to download the rough draft as Word and fix all the formatting stuff by hand, and email it to my alpha readers instead of sharing the Google docs. That's so early-twenty-first-century. It's a pity, because the docs actually look fine online-- but if they want to download the docs either to read offline or to print out, I can't guarantee the results will be at all workable.

WPD Graph

2007-12-28T15:06:00.001-08:00

What use it is, I don't know. Maybe as evidence at my committal hearing.

Getting my head back

2007-12-26T08:15:00.001-08:00

So I finished the rough draft on the Solstice and rested through the weekend and Xmas Eve and Day. I feel more rested now than at any time in the last three months.

I never had any idea how tired writing could make me. Not that I didn't know it was hard work. But I had no idea how much life it could suck out of me. Luckily I seem to be recovering fast. I've even managed to write some more poetry.

Note to self: If I have a writing project of this length to do ever again, pace it slower and take more breaks. 2000+ WPD was sustainable for two months, but I wouldn't want to try to keep it up longer than that. Still, it was a good larval-mode, baptism-by-fire experience. And the product's not bad-- I think. I still have the editing to do.

Rough draft is done!

2007-12-22T07:33:00.000-08:00

Allahu Akbar.

Final word count: 117,418

I averaged 2053 WPD between Nov 1 and Dec 22. That's counting several days when I didn't write at all.

Now I'm going to put it away and not look at it for the next several days. Editing begins Jan 1. After the first editing pass, I'll probably post another word count. At this point, I think it'll get longer rather than shorter: my to-do list has stuff to add, and while I think there's some redundant verbiage and some dialogue that could be tighter, I don't think there's that much.

Thank you, God. It's been a long strange trip.

Reading other stuff

2007-12-21T22:31:00.000-08:00

I have one scene left to write. I know more or less what happens in it. I just have to find a reason to make it happen.

Weird stuff: I haven't read any fiction to speak of since about the middle of October. At first it was because I was speed-reading reference books and I didn't have time to read fiction. Then it was because I didn't want my prose to get "contaminated", so to speak, by anyone else's style. But earlier today I tried to read a chapter or two (of Jim Butcher's latest Alera book)... and I couldn't. I could not get my head around it.

But I find I can read comics. Apparently they live in a different part of my head. I re-read Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic (the original miniseries, not the mostly crappy stuff that came after). Damn, what an awesome comic that was. Vertigo should have never allowed anyone other than Charlie Vess to draw Titania. Ever. The page with Zatara (watch my dust) is still probably the best single comics page I have ever seen anywhere.

Today I re-read the one-shots from Sandman. The first one I picked up was "Calliope".

Oh. My. God.

It was pretty horrible when I first read it; this guy rapes and enslaves a person, even if she's not exactly "human", a sentient suffering being, for his own personal gain. It's much worse now... because now I see the writer's actions as a denial of God. As denying that his inspiration, all inspiration, comes ultimately from God. Thinking that he can go out and take it from somewhere else... Thinking that he's entitled to. As if inspiration were something that belonged to him.

All things belong to God.

I don't know if Gaiman intended it that way. But it's how I'm seeing it right now. I can't imagine what it must have been like for Gaiman, as a working writer, to write that story. I can barely stand to read it. Because there, but for the grace of God, go I...

So, what's it about?

2007-12-21T20:59:00.000-08:00

Thought I'd try the exercise Bobbe mentioned:

Drumheart is about the desperate importance of communication to being human, and to the survival of a small group of people in a world that is becoming ecologically and culturally hostile.

It's also about three cultures in collision and about a new form of magic that grows up out of the intersection of the three.

Stupid question

2007-12-20T15:31:00.000-08:00

Q: If you write all day and go to bed at a reasonable hour, say 11 PM, then get up about 11:30 and write some more and keep writing until almost 1 AM... which day's word count do the words belong to?

A: Get a LIFE.

A long weekend

2007-12-20T08:56:00.000-08:00

I'm taking tomorrow and Monday off from work, and then I have Tuesday off for Xmas. By then, the rough draft will be finished insh'allah. I think I probably have some 4000-6000 words to write.

Cheat

2007-12-19T21:38:00.000-08:00

So after all that fine talk, I did go back and write today. But only a little bit. Actually more than it looks like, because I destroyed a lot of words in the process of dovetailing the chunks of Akshedhen's part 3 and 4.

But it's all good now.

I have some more scenes to write but I know exactly where they fit and what they have to accomplish. I'm proud of the boy. He's come a long way since leaving home.

Think I may be writing through the weekend now. Likely going to break 120,000 words.

God Train

2007-12-19T16:38:00.001-08:00

Voluntary servitude. Profound captivity. Submitting to the ever-narrowing confines of the Possible. Each word entrains the next and slices yet a smaller pie-piece out of the peacock-feather fan of story. There's only one way out from here.

Things could have been different, if I'd thought of them before.

At the end of the tunnel I can leave the track, but to get through it I have to run on rails. That's how it is when you're riding the God Train. Why didn't I recognize it before?

New section titles

2007-12-19T13:07:00.000-08:00

DRUMSPEAKER
Captivity
Apprenticeship
Accommodation
Kanti
THE WINDING WALK
Spark of Sun
Pattern Magic
Signs of Drought
Coming Home
Signs of Flood
Walking Outward
OLD MAN'S SHADOW
Betrayal
Exile
Oaths
Allegiances
Storm Warning

Competing aphorisms

2007-12-19T12:21:00.000-08:00

I'm restating the problem I mentioned in the previous post, because I think it has some general utility. It can be framed as a conflict between two aphorisms:

Quality is better than quantity
Best is the enemy of good

Logically, these aphorisms are not in conflict. But when time pressure comes into play, they can be. Should I pour on words, not worry about producing quality prose, keep the WPD up and just push on through? That's pretty much the philosophy behind NaNoWriMo, for instance. Or should I take my time and do it right?

I think this is an area where it's critical for an writer to know her own strengths and weaknesses. For most people (and I hear this from pros: both Steve P. and Steve B. have made the point repeatedly), getting words down on paper is a real struggle; the big issue is the self-editing/self-censoring. Aphorism 2 definitely works as an antidote to that, and I think that makes NaNoWriMo a valuable exercise.

I think I've proved that that isn't my problem.

Anyone who can write over 3000 WPD for more than a week should probably pay more attention to aphorism 1. I do have a tendency to toss things off in a hurry and do slapdash work. The good news for me is that that problem is fixable: as long as I have something down, I can work on it, improve it, add to it when I do my editing. If I have nothing down on paper (silicon), I have nothing to work with.

It does mean that for me, the editing phase will be critical. And I know I need help with it. I can only edit my own prose up to a point.

Luckily (luck has nothing to do with it), I know where to get help. God sent me a terrific team.

No words today

2007-12-19T11:28:00.000-08:00

I'm resisting the urge to write today. It'll bring down the WPD, but what the hey.

The last chapter has most of the pieces it needs, but I have a couple more scenes that I have to write. It will probably get split in two as it's over 9000 words and I've tried to keep most of the chapters under that. Right now it's a bunch of prose fragments, which need to be pulled into a coherent narrative somehow without writing a lot of filler. The very last section, which was one of my original files from two years ago, is in present tense and I need to decide if I'm going to keep it that way or rewrite it into past tense.

So there's work to do, but I feel dangerously unfocused. Yesterday I got a lot done by basically writing a bunch of key scenes without worrying about how they joined up. Then I tried to look at how to bring them together and my brain just wasn't up to it. Hence the enforced rest.

I may finish up over the next couple of days. Or I may just let it rest and work on it over the weekend. Either way, insh'allah I will be done well before the New Year. Then I'm going to declare a break, length TBA, before I tackle the first edit.

There's a lot less description and a lot more action in this section. Partly it's a reflection of Akshedhen's role in the story, and partly it's that his story covers a lot of landscape that I've covered before and I don't need to re-describe it. Partly it may just be that I'm tired and I'm not putting in as much description as I should. I'll decide that during the edit pass. But actually I think it's not a bad trend to have; it gives a feeling of acceleration towards the end of the book.

Tired. I'm changing the working title to The Brainsucker. When I'm done with the rough draft I'm going to look back over my blog posts and see if I can chart my mood swings relative to my WPD...

Almost there

2007-12-18T21:05:00.000-08:00

I think I'm pretty close to the final word count for the rough draft. Maybe 2000 - 3000 words of new material to add, plus some to hack out. I dumped the "End of the Beginning" file verbatim into the end of Akshedhen's part 3 and it needs to be rewritten. But it gives a sense of the finished shape.

A couple more days work...

Light at the end of the tunnel

2007-12-17T21:13:00.000-08:00

Insh'allah, by the end of the week..?

Excerpt: On the Levee

2007-12-16T15:44:00.000-08:00

This scene is why "On the Levee" will never be published as a short story.

The sky was leaden grey, heavy and hot as a pot lid. There was no breeze. The surface of the Snake lay flat under the weight of the air. Our boats' wakes spread behind us, interlocking and tangling. Glantrim and Nitsur played a work rhythm, helping Shelani'aï's guards pace themselves; we'd agreed the added speed was worth the risk of attracting attention from the shore, as long as we kept to midstream.

We'd passed several open irrigation gates. Shelani'aï's people had done their best. Of course the water level now, at the very end of the dry season, was well below the level of the gates, so no water was escaping the Snake. We meant to change that. The plan was to breach the east bank levees in at least two places; Shelani'aï' thought that would be enough, but any damage we could do to the levees should ease the flooding in the Delta.

"Here," said Shelani'aï. She and the other guard turned their boat towards the east bank. The second boat followed. The remains of an abandoned village came into view beyond the levee. It was a good place to have chosen; the plain was level and water let out of the Snake here would spread a long, long way. There was another abandoned village in the distance. I averted my eyes from the weed-choked fields and tumbledown houses. Once, people had lived here. This might even have been the village where I was born.

There was no joking or teasing among us or the guards. We were here to do a work of destruction, and though we had all agreed it was necessary, it went against the grain for us Ta'arane. Glantrim and Nitsur sympathized, and so the mood was somber.

"Do you want to wait for morning?" Nitsur asked me. It was late in the day already.

"No. I want to be back in the boats before dark and heading downstream to our second site."

"I think that's wise," said Shelani'aï'. She was scanning the plain watchfully. From the top of the levee we could see no sign of human activity, but we knew how fast horsemen could move.

"You'll want to be careful," said Fera'animo, one of the guards. "Once the levee's breached, water will pour out through here and tear big chunks out of it. We may need to get back in the boats in a hurry."

Shelani'aï gave orders. The guards beached the boats against the levee and took their places, paddles ready. It had been a long hard day for them, but there was an island not far downstream where we planned to tie up for the night.

Che'atamaï and I were ready. I nodded to Nitsur. In the past months, other drumspeakers had learned to initiate the pattern-trance with other dancers, but they all still looked to the two of us to lead when we were trying something new.

The earth-breaking rhythm had seemed so appropriate when we cleared the marsh around the Woneiyal camp: a new beginning dedicated to the Mother in Potential. Now, we were ending something, not beginning something. Nitsur led Glantrim into the death music. I began with a wide homage gesture, stooping to press both palms to the earth. Mother, forgive us. Che'atamaï followed.

I had thought about it all afternoon, in a light trance, watching the water ripple against the sides of the levees. The Snake would be our ally here. I showed Che'atamaï how the water pressed against the walls of earth. Yes. We had only to find the weak points and weaken them further.

Water began to push through the dirt. A dark stain appeared on the face of the levee below us, spreading rapidly. Not just a stain; a bulge. Beads of water oozed out. The levee sweated like a fever patient. The packed earth shook under our feet, cracks appearing as the levee began to collapse. Enough, enough! The drummers dropped their rhythm in the middle and we all scrambled for the boats.

"Cast off!" shouted Shelani'aï, dragging Nitsur bodily over the side of the boat. The other boat was away already and fighting its way out into the middle of the water. I risked a glance over my shoulder; where we had danced was empty air, brown water pouring over a lip of earth that sank away as I watched. Then I was in the boat and we were all paddling furiously as the water sucked us backward toward the breach, toward the empty plain beyond.

It was long, tense minutes before we were out of danger. Slowly the water flowing out of the breach lost its hold, relinquishing us to the main flow of the Snake. We shipped our paddles and breathed. "Mother, that was close..."

"Next time," said Shelani'aï crossly, "try not making the breach right under where you're standing!"

"Uh, that would have been a good idea," I said feebly.

"Oh, no," said Fera'animo. He was staring toward the levee. No, beyond it; there was a figure struggling through the rising water, waving wildly. A faint cry sounded over the water noises.

"Turn in!" shouted Shelani'aï, seizing her paddle. We were well downstream of the breach; there was no danger of our boats being sucked out of the Snake. It was only a few moments before the boats grounded against the levee. Fera'animo and Taölaheli leaped out of the boats, ran down the eastward face and plunged into the water. It was already deep enough to swim in.

"Mother keep them safe," Che'atamaï gasped.

"Now that is something I have never seen," said Nitsur in amazement.

"What, swimming? We used to do it at Alati'enoaë. When there weren't crocodiles."

The two guards had reached the struggling figure. It was a woman, I thought. They were towing her back towards the levee. We scrambled down to meet them and helped pull them out of the water. The woman was Ta'arane; she was coughing and gasping, and it wasn't until we had all climbed back up to the top of the levee and she had sunk to her knees, panting with exhaustion, that I recognized Ajalēmona.

Memento Mori

2007-12-16T09:58:00.000-08:00

I may as well say it now: the news about Terry Pratchett is breaking my heart. Part of the reason I've been ripping out so much verbiage for the last week is that I can't bear to sit idle when I should be writing-- wasting moments, of which I have so many, and he so few.

Of course, there's no guarantee that I have that many, either. Anything can happen: Allah alone knows the future, and while He has chosen to give glimpses of it to certain people, I ain't one of them. I could get hit by a meteorite tomorrow, or be diagnosed with an incurable tumor the next day.

We shouldn't need the reminders, but apparently we do.

Reposted from KFI:

This moment, here, is all we have to live--
to reminisce, appreciate, forgive--
and there are no exchanges or returns.
Time runs out like water from a sieve
or refugees when some poor city burns.
The last reward that no-one ever earns
is extra time. No extra innings run,
the final lesson no-one ever learns:
how little time we have beneath the sun.
We all protest: "It can't be! I'm not done!"
when Atropos with fatal silver shears
approaches. All the time that Clotho spun
we spent or squandered. Now the living years
have dwindled to a point. This moment, here.

Motorvate!

2007-12-15T20:51:00.000-08:00

Didn't add a single word to the front end today. Over 3000 words of backfill! But I really like the new scene with Hingol's playing, and the stuff with Mafileo and Waïlaraitēo is definitely headed in the right direction.

Writing and chocolate

2007-12-15T12:52:00.000-08:00

OK, the thing abut the chocolate? It's weirder than it sounds. I was too tired to go into any detail last night.

I've never been one of those people who crave chocolate. I can take it or leave it. Actually for a while I was slightly allergic to it, and it wasn't any hardship. I don't have much of a sweet tooth and I rarely eat candy of any kind.

But after dinner, if I sit down at the computer to write, a square of semi-sweet baker's chocolate really hits the spot.

Not anything sweeter. Not anything really rich: the fancy, 70-80% cacao, flavored with curry or tamarind or what have you chocolates that are popular right now aren't what I crave. (Though I am quite fond of some of them, especially the curry one.) I suspect the baker's chocolate is delivering something my brain needs, in a sensual package that isn't strong enough to be distracting. Weird.

One hundred thousand

2007-12-14T20:00:00.000-08:00

plus words.

My WPD is back up over 2000.

But here's the real shocker: In the last 6 days I've written almost 20,000 words. That's about 3000 per day. I'm flying.

There are still some places I have to go back and fill in. I'll probably spend most of the weekend reworking the Mafileo/Waïlaraitēo scenes. The WPD will go down some, although it will actually probably be mostly additional writing rather than rewriting.

I'm also probably going to completely toss the "Beginning of the end" file. There's a lot in there that just doesn't go with how I've imagined things since. I want to save the description of the storm: everything else can go.

There's definitely light at the end of that tunnel now...

God knows these words are not coming from me. My head is as empty as the husk of a coconut.

Writing makes me crave chocolate.

Sacrifice

2007-12-12T16:19:00.000-08:00

Thank you, God! I could not figure out what the heck to do about that, but I knew it was for something.

An illustration of life in the Delta

2007-12-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

Actually it's from BBC's "day in pictures" for today. The caption is : A man carries vegetables along the Brahmaputra River in Gauhati, India.

Splurging!

2007-12-11T19:23:00.000-08:00

Over 4000 words today!

I skipped the duel and wrote the end of Mafileo's part. I'm going to go back tomorrow and finish with Mafileo, I think. Strangely I'm not looking forward to the duel as much as I'd expected. It's probably because I did write a version of that scene before in "Riding the Sea Dragon", so it's not going to be new to me.

My total word count just broke 90,000...

Today for the first time, I felt like, if I had plenty of time and I didn't get tired, I could actually just keep writing and finish the novel. Of course it's not true. There's still plenty of stuff I have to figure out with Akshedhen's story. But still, it was a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel.

Part of the reason I'm having trouble with the duel scene, and what's held me back with a lot of SofS part 5, is that I don't have a handle on Waïlaraitēo yet. I don't want her to be a cardboard villainess. She's a real person with legitimate concerns and a strong faith, even if it's narrowly defined. Has suffered emotional disappointments: her relationship with Astirama'a is something I'm going to have to leave unspoken, since none of the now living characters know much about it. At the same time, I need to clarify it for myself. Something to sleep on. If I don't feel able to write the confrontation with her, I can always go on with Akshedhen's story and come back to the duel later.

Insatiable monster

2007-12-10T21:27:00.000-08:00

This novel has now eaten most of the short stories I wrote back on '05 and earlier that were set in this world. To wit:

"Fear the Dark" got absorbed into F&S part 5: Nitsur and Mafileo's experiences in the Sun temple. Actually a piece of that story showed up earlier as the festival of the Boy in F&S part 4.

The hydrological/ecological motif from "On the Levee" is showing up throughout Spark of Sun, but it's the driving force behind SofS part 5 and will continue into part 6.

The fight scene at the end of "Riding the Sea Dragon" is going to feature prominently in Mafileo's duel with Waïlaraitēo, which will be either at the end of SofS 5 or somewhere in SofS 6 depending on the page count and action breaks.

I'm holding the line, insh'allah, this novel will not get to eat any part of the Raft People story. I want to save that one for later!

Cruisin'!

2007-12-10T20:49:00.000-08:00

Feels like the afterburner kicked in. Over 3000 words today, and I really busted a logjam: I can see now where the rest of Mafileo's story is going, and how Akshedhen's piece ties back to it. Alhumdulillah.

Rewriting

2007-12-08T20:15:00.000-08:00

Spent today rewriting. It plays hell with the word count, but it's worth it. I only generated a few hundred new words, but I've moved the story well ahead and in a better direction than where it was going.

1800-plus WPD is still well above the average necessary for the NaNoWriMo goal. And that's counting several days that I didn't get any writing done at all. It's coming along, alhumdulillah.

Slogging

2007-12-06T20:31:00.000-08:00

Lord, I am tired. Half of me wants to race ahead and get this thing done; the other half wants to take it slow. 2000 words a day: if I can keep that up, insh'allah I'll be done by the end of the month.

It's eaten my brain. I haven't written a line of poetry in weeks, except for 3 Word Wednesday haikus. Thank God for Serif, it gives me something to do that's not words.

I've pretty much lost track of what I think are the good parts. I think when I'm done with the rough draft I'm just going to put it away and not touch it for about two weeks; then make an editing/rewriting pass; then hopefully send it around to my alpha readers. Sometime I have to get back to rebuilding my poetry and bringing readers back to KFI.

50,000 words? What were those people at NaNoWriMo thinking? This novel is going to easily come in at twice that. I think I'm getting close to the end of Mafileo's part, but Akshedhen's is already at over 10,000 words and he's just getting started.

Section titles (tentative):

DRUMSPEAKER: NITSUR working title: Fire & Silence
PATTERN TRANCE: MAFILEO working title: Spark of Sun
TRIPLE BRAID: AKSHEDHEN working title: New Paths

I like these better than the section titles I've using, I like "Triple Braid" especially, because I think I'm going to have to have the other viewpoint characters tell some of the events in that section. Hoping to avoid, or at least minimize, the back-and-forthing.

Truckin'

2007-12-04T18:31:00.000-08:00

I find it actually works better for me to have two narrative threads open at once. That way, if I'm stalled on one, I can work on the other. The multi-first-person structure helps. I just have to watch for continuity errors.

Back up over 2000 words today. If I can maintain that through most of December I think I'll be, insh'allah, very close to done...

Back to work

2007-12-02T16:28:00.001-08:00

Took a couple of days off to deal with other stuff, so my average has suffered, although I put in a good stint today. (A lot of today was rewriting, so didn't generate that much new wordage.)

It was worth it. Mafileo's part 3 is now much stronger and I've found the emotional thread I needed for her. It will continue through parts 4 and 5 (her section is probably going to be the longest of the three). Also introduced a new character that I needed to, somewhat earlier than I'd planned, but this seems to be the right place. The chapters are now in better balance in terms of length and as emotional units.

I think I'm still on track to finish the rough draft by the end of this month, with God's help. I now feel like I'm close to 2/3 done.

Probably not much wordage tomorrow as I have to go to an all-day meeting in Eugene... but it's good to be back in the saddle. Onward!

Change of plans

2007-11-29T12:33:00.000-08:00

I'm going to have to work on Mafileo's part 3 before I go any further, after all. Because it has implications for everything that happens after, including most of Akshedhen's part. I got him and his friends out of Ahon ken Taridh, and I'm going to have to leave them that way for now: on the run with nowhere to go.

So I'm going to need to print out all the Mafileo stuff I have so far, read through it, and figure out exactly (a) what the emotional tone I'm setting is and (b) what's supposed to happen. I think I need to have them pick up a Woneiyal refugee before they get all the way down to the Delta.

The "chapters" are starting to take on a life of their own. I had originally framed them around breaks in the action; now I find that they're structuring the story emotionally in important ways. One of the problems with M's part 3 is that it hits too many different emotional events: I need to figure out how to unify them, or else split them out.

This is editing-while-writing and is exactly the stuff one isn't supposed to do. My word count average is going to take a hit. But what the heck: I met the NaNoWriMo goal. And I'd rather do the rewriting now then keep forging ahead along what might turn out to be a wrong path.

I'm going to try to straighten it all out this weekend insh'allah and get back to producing verbiage for December. In the meantime I probably won't bother posting any word counts... I feel like the end of the tunnel really is in sight. Still aiming for a complete though very rough draft by the end of 2007.

To-do list

2007-11-28T19:04:00.000-08:00

To do after I finish the rough draft, but before I send to alpha readers:

Expand the section on Nitsur's training by replacing exposition with scenes that illustrate the principals. Ideas: Hingol plays at a variety of village events; conversations between him and other villagers

Rewrite Mafileo's part 3. Too dialogue-heavy and not ringing true emotionally. She should be angrier and more damaged. Difficult writing. If I write the end of her part first, with what happens in the Delta, I think I'll be able to see how to get there.

Still averaging >2000 words per day. Last night I wrote Akshedhen and Co's escape from the city while the Locust People attack completely in my head: wrote it down this morning and it came to over 1700 words. Good stuff, but fairly gruesome.

Word count change

2007-11-27T11:36:00.000-08:00

I'm changing my word count; it seems silly to go on accumulating "overage" toward a goal I've already met. Instead I'm going to track my total and average.

Trying to maintain the 2000-word-per-day rate. Yesterday was a shortfall, but that's only to be expected. Typically weekdays fall short and I make it up on weekends.

Another milestone

2007-11-25T17:06:00.000-08:00

I've reached the NaNoWriMo goal: I've written over 50,000 words in November, and it's only the 25th.

Alhumdulillah.

My total now stands at over 64,000... and I feel like I'm about half way, maybe a little more. This is going to be a 100,000 - 120,000 word novel. Allahu akbar!

The plan right now is to try to keep the pace through December. I'm actually averaging over 2000 words a day (including Thanksgiving Day when we were on the road and I wrote 0 words). At that rate, by the end of November I would have about 74,000 words. 30 or so days in December would give me another 60,000. I should be done by then.

I hope.

Then I have to do some editing. I know there's redundant dialog that I have to pare down and tighten up. There are some places where I want to cut out some description and instead write scenes that depict what I'm saying. Also check for minor continuity errors, etc. And run a spellcheck *cringe*

What I think I'll do is finish the rough draft and maybe make one editing pass... then send it out to some alpha readers, at least three or four. And put it away, and not look at it or at their comments on it, at least until I get them all back. Then (we should be well into the New Year by this time) I'll settle in and do some serious editing.

Then I get to start looking for a publisher. Wee ha! But the first step is to finish the beast.

It's a damned good story... and there are some bits of really good writing in it. I just have to try to keep the level up. May God help me.

Best-laid plans

2007-11-23T23:02:00.000-08:00

So I got no writing done yesterday as we were on the road. I expected that. Luckily I had lots of overage.

But with the bad news, I may or may not be traveling in the next few days, and I may or may not have access to GoogleDocs. So the word count may collapse.

That's OK. I have to do what I have to do. Besides, the important thing is: I've proved to myself that I can sustain a 1500-2000 word per day pace for a good long time, and I've proved to myself that the novel is both feasibly finishable and worth finishing. The success of this project is not really dependent on my meeting the NaNoWriMo goal, although it would be nice to be able to say I'd done it.

Actually, I've written over 46,000 words already. I only need some 4000 to make the goal. I could get that done in two or three days, God willing.

Milestones

2007-11-19T13:07:00.000-08:00

I now have over 50,000 words written, including the 12,000-plus I had at the beginning of the month. I'm not half done. I think I'm close to half done.

It looks like we're not going to the coast after all, but I'm still taking the next couple of days off for the heck of it.

If I can keep this up for 11 more days, I will finish the month with a total of well over 70,000 words. Then I'll have a decision to make. Back off from it and get back into the poetry groove? Or forge ahead and try to finish the rough draft? Watch this space...

Something else to note: After a scare about the home computers, I've uploaded all my Drumheart files as Google docs. Let them worry about backups. The only drawback is that some weird things happened with the formatting: I lost all my tab-indents and I got a weird mix of fonts. Some of this is probably due to the way my docs have been shipped back and forth between OOWriter's .doc format and genuine MSWord format (I have to figure out how to get all the quotes to line up...), but some is just GoogleDoc weirdness. Probably what I should do is download them all into one format, fix whatever needs fixing, and then do copy/paste instead of upload to get the fixes back into GoogleDoc.

One more note: My typing speed has gone way up since Nov. 1. Unfortunately, so has my error rate. I'm going to have to spellcheck the whole thing at some point-- and then I'm going to have to proofread it...

Hiatus

2007-11-18T21:14:00.000-08:00

Off to the coast for a few days. I'm taking the laptop and plan to keep up the writing, but probably won't post a daily word count for the next few.

Nice of them to tell me...

2007-11-17T18:10:00.000-08:00

So I'm writing an argument between two minor characters and suddenly it turns out one of them is the other's mother.

Huh?

People, c'mon. I mean, I don't fool myself that I'm in charge or anything. But please could you let me know about stuff like this at least a couple of paragraphs in advance?

Sheesh. I'd like to at least think we're partners, instead of me being just the transcriptionist...

Halfway through the month

2007-11-15T15:00:00.000-08:00

and I've written over 30,000 words. At this rate, I'll have over 60,000 for November plus the 12,000-some I had before I started NaNoWriMo.

And I won't be done. I'm figuring this for a 100,000 word novel.

New POV

2007-11-13T11:40:00.000-08:00

Now writing from Mafileo's viewpoint. "Viewpoint" makes more sense in reference to her than in reference to Nitsur: she's the visual one. I kept the recap of the temple scene to a summary.

Have to figure out where to work in a chapter about her childhood & training that parallels Nitsur's. Probably I'll follow the same structure: write a good-sized chapter about their escape and early travels, then break for her flashback, then back to the main story line.

Words continue to accumulate. Insh'allah I'll break 25,000 today: half way there and only Nov. 13 out of 30.

Working title

2007-11-11T10:29:00.000-08:00

Drumheart.

I'm almost at the end of Nitsur's piece. Finish up the temple scene today, insh'allah: then there'll be some editing to do overall, but that'll wait until after NaNoWriMo. Start Mafileo's part, probably beginning with a reprise of the temple scene from her POV and then going back to her childhood and training.

Nitsur's piece is roughly a third of the novel, maybe a little more. I'm guessing it'll come to 33,000 - 34,000 words. That suggests a finished draft length of between 90 and 100,000 words. Wow.

Update: Finished the temple scene. Nitsur's section is now complete (unedited). He comes in at almost 34,000 words.

Word count perils

2007-11-09T08:47:00.000-08:00

MS Word and OpenOffice Writer count words differently. MS consistently comes up with a lower number. I've got no idea what the difference is: does it count hyphenated words as one, where OOW counts them as two? Do I have that many hyphens in my text? I may experiment.

7605 words in the file last night in OOW; 7567 this morning in MS Word. 38 words disappeared overnight. One more reason not to obsess about my word count.

Confirmed: I had 5822 words in the file according MSW, OOW is reporting 5840. Weird.

Unwriting

2007-11-07T21:52:00.000-08:00

You'll notice the initial word count in the sidebar and the November cumulative total no longer sum to the current total. That's because I tossed a (small) chunk I'd written from Akshedhen's point of view, as an interlude. I found ways to incorporate that information into Nitsur's narrative.

This multiple-first-person narrative is an interesting challenge. It's helped structure my writing, in that I really feel motivated to finish Nitsur's part before I try to start Mafileo's part: hard to be inside too many heads at once. It also means I'll have the opportunity to revisit some of the events I'm writing now from other viewpoints. In particular, the temple scene (which should be coming right up in the next few days, exciting!) ends Nitsur's section, but I'll probably write it again from Mafileo's perspective.

The downside is that there are bits I'd like to cover that I can't seem to find a way to. For example, I really wanted to explore the Old Man cult and their power-brokering and decision-making methods, but that's not going to happen in Nitsur's track. As secretive as the old men are, and him being a slave, there's just no scope for him to observe one of their meetings or some such thing. I'll have to see if I can find some opportunity for Akshedhen to have that experience, maybe after Nitsur and Mafileo escape.

Sad today for reasons I won't discuss. Luckily I had a very sad piece of writing to do: Hingol's death and funeral, as witnessed by Nitsur. I'll have to revisit it in a few days and see if the writing's any good.

Religious conflicts

2007-11-06T13:18:00.001-08:00

Grappling with religious conflict between the Kesset and Ta'arane; among the Ta'arane; among the Kesset. I'm not doing justice to Woneiyal religion right now; much simpler to write Nitsur as a basically agnostic observer with all these other sets of beliefs swirling around him. Have to address his beliefs in other sections.

I'm realizing that part of Akshedhen's character arc will be coming to terms with at least some of the Old Man aspects. He doesn't realize the value yet. Charisma and persuasiveness shade easily into manipulation and coercion, but the converse is the ability to get people moving and pointed in the right direction. Akshedhen will leave Ahon ken Tai without having received most of the Old Man training, but he'll reconstruct a lot of it from having observed his father.

Excerpt: Accomodation

2007-11-06T13:17:00.001-08:00

By the time we reached the house, the sun was rising behind the Blackwall. Dawn was filling the city like clear water. Akshedhen went at once to his rooms; I felt very tired, but wakeful.

All the slaves except Minkatar were gathered in the kitchen. Old Fi’alasheï was sitting by the unlit fire, rocking and staring into the hearth. The other three women were grouped motionless around the table. Loïne sat in a corner of the room, arms folded across his chest. I hesitated at the door, but Temeraiao said: “Come in, Nitsuri, it’s all right.”

I joined the women at the table, feeling awkward. “I’m... I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Temeraiao opened her hand, palm away from me; it’s past, it’s of no consequence. “Every year they perform this... ceremony. They make us attend. After, we come home and beg the Mother’s forgiveness.”

“For what good it does,” muttered Loïne.

Temeraiao said, with uncharacteristic sharpness: “That isn’t the point. We have to witness this desecration, but we don’t have to accede to it!”

Loïne subsided into sullen silence. I offered: “The temples, they were built by your people?”

“Yes.” Temeraiao smiled with private satisfaction. “The one they use for the Boy: the dome represents an egg, the Mother in potential.. The one they’ve converted to the Old Man represents the Mother realized, her bounty—a cow’s horns. Of course the Kesse’ got it wrong.”

“And the third?”

“The spiral roof represents the Mother as mystery.”

Loïne burst out, “Why do you bother? Why do you keep hanging on to the Mother’s worship? She’s abandoned us! She left us to be enslaved by the Kesset!”

Ajalē was on her feet. “So you say. You have no faith in the Mother—typical man!”

“No, no,” whispered Ng’ara. “Hush, someone will hear us...”

Fi’alasheï said hoarsely: “We betrayed the Mother. We enslaved the Great Snake and his children. The fields turned barren, plagues came on the wind, and the Moon sent his sons to punish us.”

There was a horrified silence. After a moment, Temeraiao said quietly, “It’s morning; the vigil is over. Go get some sleep, all of you, there’ll be work to do in a few hours.”

Loïne and I left the kitchen together, heading to the men’s quarters. “Are there many Ta’arane who believe what Fi’ala said?” I whispered. Loïne shook his head; he didn’t know. “Most won’t say it. Fi’ala’s so old, she doesn’t care. It’s no concern of yours, anyway.” He went to his room without another word.

Sequential writing

2007-11-05T08:52:00.001-08:00

Made almost double my count Saturday: fell short Sunday. Oh well, that's what overage is for.

I don't think it would ever work for me to write a novel from first word to last word. Though that has been how I've tended to write short fiction. I find myself writing key scenes and then going back and figuring out what has to go in between; there's a logical structure connecting A to Z, which you can determine if you also have, let's say, K, P, and S.

Moreover, the key scenes are usually the more exciting writing and are the ones that motivate me.

Process comments

2007-11-03T21:41:00.001-07:00

I've changed my mind. I now think 1667 is a reasonable short-term daily average even for a fully employed person. I managed it Thursday and Friday, and I wrote over 3000 words today. There may be days ahead when I can't make the goal, but I'm steadily accumulating overage-- I now have more than a full day's worth of overage.

That doesn't mean I get to skip a day. It means I can fall short if I have to.

Long-term sustainable might be different. I think it's clear that I won't be finished (that is, done with a first draft and ready to do serious editing) by the end of November. Can I keep up this pace long enough to finish the novel? Good question. I think at the end of November I may want to take a break.

But I'm recognizing the difference between free time and duration more and more. It feels as though I have to wait for things to actually happen (somewhere outside my head) before I can write them down. Or, for the words to be generated somewhere. Either way, I at least couldn't just sit down and write without stopping, no matter how much free time I had. There's a maximum number of words, or amount of story, or something, that I can output in one day, and at 1667 words I'm not close to it. At 3000, I'm pushing it.

Excerpt: Drumspeaker responsibilities

2007-11-03T16:58:00.000-07:00

This is in no way intended to be a metaphor for my role as a blogospheric poet, or a novelist, or any other aspect of my life...

I sprawled on the floor of the hut, my head ringing. Hingol was standing over me, hand raised. "Nitsur! Nitsur, answer me!"
The side of my face stung. I touched it gingerly. "What... happened?"
He let out a gusty sigh of relief and sat down heavily. "You were sunk in the drumtrance and wouldn't come out. I had to hit you, Nitsur; I'm terribly sorry." I'd heard of other apprentices being beaten, but Hingol had never struck me before.
I picked myself up off the floor. "Didn't you go to Flambol's house?"
"I did. I've been there for hours. I came back. Do you have any idea what time it its?"
I looked at the door of the hut. The slant of the shadows said the sun was very low. "I was practicing."
"I know. You trance easily. Maybe too easily; you need to remember where you are, also." He studied me for a moment. "How do you feel?"
"Uh..." Suddenly I was weak and shaky. Ravenous. Cramped and stiff. My hands ached. "Oh." I fell over. Hingol picked me up and sat me on a stool. "Sit right there for a minute."
I put my head in my hands. Hingol made me drink some water, and then pushed a chicken leg into my hands, while he boiled water. When we each had a steaming cup of tea, he said: "This is your problem, Nitsur: you're not connected enough to your body."
"It's because I'm a visitor spirit."
"Maybe. As I said, that's shaman business. Drumtalkers need to be anchored. I don't mean you have to think about your body all the time; you already know you can't drum if you're thinking about what your hands are doing. But the body has to be there with you, understand?"
"I think so."
"You need an anchor," he repeated. "You weren't close to anyone in your family or your village, that's part of the problem. Woneiyal aren't meant to live alone, even inside our own heads. That's one of the reasons for drumspeech, you know; it keeps us all together. Any won, even one who isn't a drumtalker, listens to the drumstream and just takes it in, and so they know everything that's going on and no other won is ever a stranger to them."
"I hate it when people talk about me," I muttered.
Hingol frowned. "You're a drumtalker. You can't take from the stream and put nothing back. I don't just mean, by drumming; you have to let other people drum about you, give yourself to it, you see? That's how it stays alive.
"It's different for most people; they just listen. But we are the heart of the drumstream. We're the heart of the Woneiyal! That's the responsibility you take on when you become a drumspeaker. Listen, you know Banka?"
"She's a gossip."
"She's a very good drumtalker. Oh, there are plenty who can play better, but Banka understands the importance of news, of knowing. She shares it all. No-one within hearing range of Banka can claim they don't know if someone in Pamond is hungry, or lost a relative, or if someone's hurt someone else. Sometimes she goes too far, it's true: then someone in her village complains to the headman, and they have to sit down and talk about it. But the reverse is worse."
"What do you mean?"
"When people don't hear themselves in the drumstream they think they're not part of it, not part of Woneiyal. They begin to think they aren't won. They forget that what they do matters to the rest of us. They can cause all kinds of harm without thinking about it, like taking food that other people need. And if they have troubles, no-one hears about it and no-one will go help them. That's why it's terrible for a village to be without a drumspeaker.
"You have the talent to be a very good drumspeaker, Nitsur. Technically, you're way ahead of apprentices who've been in training longer: you have more vocabulary than some active drumtalkers, and you can hear nuances even I can't. But you have to learn to use your talent for the Woneiyal, for all Woneiyal. Otherwise it's no use. Understand?"
I stared at the floor. "Will I ever be a good drumspeaker?"
"Oh, of course you will! Nitsur--" Hingol pulled me to my feet and surprised me with a hug. "Listen, son-- " (He'd never called me "son.") "This is partly my fault. I forget that you're just a boy; I've pushed you too fast, and not given you time to do boy-things. But you learn so well, it's a pleasure to watch you-- and I'm proud of you. You'll never be just good. You're going to be a great drumspeaker."
I was too stunned to say anything but: "I am?"
"Yes!" Hingol sobered. "But it's going to mean spending time away from the drums. Just keep in mind that it's part of your training."

Excerpt: Riding lesson

2007-11-02T12:33:00.000-07:00

Written recently. Akshedhen teaches Nitsur to ride horseback.

“First lesson,” he said that first day, in a field near the east gate. The ground had been plowed, and was bare and soft. “A rider uses his legs more than his arms, but his body more than his legs. That’s why it won’t matter that your legs are damaged. Some great warriors of our people have been lame.”

I was perched uneasily on the back of a grey mare named Vikti, whom Akshedhen had assured me was very gentle. Akshedhen had unsaddled her. “You’ll learn to feel your horse better this way,” he’d said. “Afterwards, you’ll find riding with a saddle is just like sitting in a chair. Besides, the time might come when you have to ride bareback. I was on patrol on the steppes once, this was a couple of years ago... you know Libandh, we were at his father’s house last week? Well, we were on the watch for Locust People, but it was early in the dry and the wild cattle were mating.” He sighed reminiscently. “Good hunting, but vicious! Anyway, Libandh was with us, he’d unsaddled his horse, he was fixing one of the straps, I forget now which. This bull comes up out of a wash with no warning, horns on it as long your arm, and charges us!” Akshedhen waved his arms. “Of course we scattered. Poor Libandh dropped his saddle and got up on his horse somehow, and got away safely—but the bull trampled his saddle and destroyed it, completely ruined it. You see?”

“Yes, lord,” I said. “Are there dangerous animals like that hereabouts?”

“Eh! Not near the city. We keep them away from the herds. Don’t worry, we won’t go far until you can ride better. Now, relax.” He clucked softly, and Vikti started to move. “No, relax! Rock with her. That’s better.”

I let my eyes half-close, feeling for the rhythm. I could hear the mare’s hooves in the soft earth: plop plop plop plop. That’s easy, I thought.

Akshedhen clucked again, and Vikti’s motion changed. Tlunk. Tlunk. But now there was a jarring, up-and-down feel to it, an off-beat: I rephrased. Tlunk a-ha tlunk a-ha tlunk—I lost my balance and tumbled off Vikti’s grey back.

“Not bad,” said Akshedhen approvingly.

“Lord?” I sat up, trying to brush the soft dirt off my shirt.

“You had it, for a moment. It will come and go, until you forget there was a time you didn’t know it. Now, pet Vikti and tell her you’re sorry. She’s insulted.”

He was serious. Every time I fell during my training, I had to pet my horse and apologize to it. Akshedhen said it was very bad to make a horse think it was his fault a rider had fallen off; you could ruin a good horse that way.

Time Problems

2007-11-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'm putting my NaNoWriMo word count in the sidebar. Yesterday I exceeded the goal (1,667 words, which is the daily average I'd need to meet the 50,000 word goal) by 283, or 17%.

It's a good start.

Steve Perry says yes, 50,000 words is considered a "skinny" novel. Although according to SFWA, anything over 40,000 is technically a novel (eligible for awards in the novel category), 60,000 or so is considered minimum for a salable novel. Standards may vary by genre, though. I wonder who picked the 50,000 and how for NaNoWriMo?

I will not do a daily word count post. I will, however, try to keep the sidebar updated. I'll also try to post any thoughts I have about the writing process as I go along.

Today's thoughts are about time. When a writer (I think this is probably similar for other creative types) says: "I need more time", there are at least two things they can possibly mean. One is, I don't have enough free time, I cannot consistently assemble enough free minutes per day or per week to be productive on this project. This is probably the sense most of us mean most of the time.

The other is rarer and perhaps more subtle. It means: I need to think about this some more, digest this material, let this idea ripen a little longer before I incorporate into my novel (poem, sculpture, etc.).

This second meaning addresses duration rather than free minutes. It's important for a writer to know which of these two kinds of time is the problem-- if you think the first kind is the problem, and you rearrange your life to assemble free minutes, and then find yourself staring blankly at the screen or paper... there are few more frustrating experiences in a writer's life. If it's actually the second kind of time that's the problem, the best thing to do is take a break, go do something else entirely, and let the necessary duration pass.

Beginning word count

2007-11-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

Official word count as of this morning: 12,509. Mostly written a couple of years ago, some over the last month.

BTW, if anyone's reading this blog, November's gonna be boring. I'm having plenty of good ideas, but they're getting rolled into the text and I feel like it's double work to write about them here. So... unless you really get off on reading word counts...

The Burning of the Brain

2007-10-31T17:26:00.000-07:00

These are the books I've been wrapping my head around, in no particular order:

K. M. Endicott, An Analysis of Malay Magic
Robert Nelson, Finnish Magic
James Chambers, The Devil's Horsemen
Niels Mulder, Mysticism in Java: Ideology in Indonesia
John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility
William Seabrook, The Magic Island
Zora Neal Hurston, Tell My Horse
Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Alice M. Terada, The Magic Crocodile and other folktales from Indonesia
Erik Hildinger, Warriors of the Steppe
Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java
Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas

No wonder my head hurts.

Add: Joseph Campbell, especially Primitive Mythology and Oriental Mythology. I'm not sold on all of Campbell's theories, for a lot of reasons, but if you read his books as fiction, he tells a good story. And they're full of great stuff to rip off.

Numbers: I have already written about 12,430 words in this story. I feel like I've barely begun to scratch the surface, and yet I'm almost 1/4 of the way to the 50,000-word NaNoWriMo goal. I'm beginning to think 50,000 is a pretty slight novel. It's clear that mine will be considerably longer than that when it's finished insh'allah.

So... it might be reasonable for me to aim for 50,000 total words by the end of the month, realizing that represents neither a complete novel nor the output of a month's work. By then I should be able to tell approximately how long I expect the finished product to be.

One of the things this exercise is meant to accomplish has to be getting people into production mode. To meet the word count, you really have to just get the words out there: you can't be doing all the self-editing and backing and filling that people do that slows down the writing process. So, accept that there will be a lot of revising and editing to do on the body of work that NaNoWriMo produces.

At the same time, I'm realizing it really doesn't take that long to write 1667 words (the necessary daily average to meet the 50,000 in 30 days goal). If the material's there.

Stuff to do

2007-10-31T10:30:00.000-07:00

Stuff to work on:
--languages, especially Kesseten and Wonei. I'm not going to Tolkien-like lengths, here, I'm really more interested in the mindsets behind the language, and enough personal and place names and other bits of vocabulary to give the reader a sense of the language.
--Woneiyal religion and art style
--sketch out the minor characters
--create a map of the Delta region

Update: I've made a good deal of progress on the first point. Names are accumulating and I've think I've developed an "ear" for both Ta'arane and Kesseten. Woneiyal is harder, but that's the nature of the language. Now the question is whether the "ear" I've developed translates into the hearing of the reader. Also have to figure out how to create diacriticals in OpenOffice word processor-- it shouldn't be too difficult. (NB: when posting excerpts, I'll have to create the HTML by hand. Bother.)

I've sketched out several minor characters, but there are more to come.

I need to try and find a nice map-making freeware.

I need to locate some good models for Woneiyal culture.

Diacriticals

2007-10-31T08:54:00.000-07:00

I can't figure out how to make MS Word produce a macron. And I can't figure out how to get OpenOffice Writer to produce any of the diacriticals I need. But, if I make them here and then copy and paste them into Word or Writer, they work.

So...

Ä
ä
Ā
ā
Ë
ë
Ē
ē
Ï
ï
Ī
ī
ñ
Ö
ö
Ō
ō
Ü
ü
Ū
ū

what a kludge.

Nitsur and possession

2007-10-30T09:23:00.000-07:00

Reading through Endicott's analysis of Malay magic, I find that amnesia is commonly thought to be a consequence of the loss of one's soul, or the part of it referred to as semangat (with diacriticals that I'm not coping with right now). This makes perfect sense with Nitsur's ordeal by fire as a child, followed by amnesia and a sense of complete detachment from his family and surroundings. Maybe he should have gone into shaman training instead of drumming. Or maybe that's why he has the ability to become the catalyst for the drum magic. Mafileo's in a very similar situation with her traumatic muteness and near-catatonia when they first meet.

I'm going into multiple-explanation mode. Both their cases can be easily explained in conventional psychological terms, or in terms of Malay-style magic (these concepts probably aren't unique to the Malay area). The question then is, how does it appear from the inside? Both Nitsur and Mafileo will see themselves as being set apart (Nitsur more so, because this all happens earlier in his childhood), but do they see themselves as being other than human? Nitsur entertains doubts, at least.

Gearing up

2007-10-29T07:58:00.000-07:00

Spent the weekend head down in reference books. I'll post a list here tonight or tomorrow. In the meantime, my head is full of undigested info and I sleep poorly. It's all good; it's what I need to do to really wrap my head around this world, or this world around my head.

One of the things that's emerged from the weekend's reading is that the world the novel takes place in really is much younger than our world. Specifically, the modes of social organization I'm writing about resemble early versions of the ones I'm reading about. Eg. the steppe peoples resemble the Mongols and other Central Asian tribes before the time of Chinghis Khan: individually just as fearsome and disciplined, but without the political and organizational unity that Chinghis and generals like Subedei created. Similarly, Woneiyal drumming is less sophisticated and less pervasive in daily life than the West African drumming described in African Rhythm and African Sensibility. Also, the Woneiyal don't have, or have a very poorly developed, dance tradition, whereas the Ta'arane have an extremely well-developed dance tradition but the rhythmic/musical accompaniment is stronger on melody and uses only very simple rhythm. It's what happens when the two halves come together that is the subject here.

Syncretism and adaptation to changing circumstances are strong themes.

Reading about Indonesian and Malay religion/magic/spirituality, also Finnish. Odd mix. I'm not sure what I'm going to put where, but I'm sure all the bits and pieces will bubble up into something useful at some point.

I have about 8000 words written already, mostly from a couple of years ago but some written or rewritten over the past month. I'll post a precise word count come Nov. 1 and try to keep a running tally as I go through NaNoWriMo.

Ecology and gender dynamics

2007-10-03T14:25:00.000-07:00

Another thread that's emerging here: The plains region is undergoing ecological catastrophe. Partly it's human-caused-- overgrazing, burning and logging (actually charcoal-making) by the Kesset. Partly, it's a natural dry cycle.

The last thing I want to do is set up a simplistic moral equation: Ta'arane = matriarchal = harmony with nature = good vs. Kesset = patriarchal = impact on environment = bad. It might be hopeless: the fact that the Kesset keep slaves is a moral strike against them that's going to be hard to balance.

One thing I mean to do is stress that the Ta'arane had just as much impact on their environment as the Kesset. (Mafileo and Akshedhen are going to have flaming arguments over this.) Though the Ta'arane interventions may have been more sustainable in the long term, it's not clear that they would have stood up to this drought cycle-- at least, at the population densities of the Ta'arane at their peak. (Note: make clear that the cities occupied by the Kesset hold far fewer people now than before the conquest.)

So far the Woneiyal are the most egalitarian group, and also the most low-impact on their environment. Hmmm...

What I really want to convey is that the relationship between people and landscape is not simple and not easily reduced to a moral dimension, especially to a dimension related to gender dynamics. Different aspects to explore: effects of large-scale irrigation and flood control (salinization, reduced fertility of the floodplain? Declining food supply and chronic malnutrition/occasional famine among the Ta'arane could have been a contributing cause to the Kesset conquest), burning as a means of rejuvenating grassland and certain types of forest (are different plant species becoming more important under Kesset land management?). Invent some really horrible, painful, disfiguring insect-borne diseases (or just look them up!) that affect the Kesset when they come near the river and forests, so that their decision to burn seems less cold-blooded.

The ecological concerns have been with this story since I first wrote On the Levee lo, these many years ago. It's a two-way street; landscape influences people as much as people influence landscape.

Specific adaptations: The Wonei drumspeech exists in large part because of the steep terrain and dense forests that make any other kind of communication (including walking from place to place) difficult. Kesset culture is centered around nomadic pastoralism and isn't adapting all that well to city life. (Note: the herds are kept outside the city, far from the supervision of the owning family; there have to be problems with theft and raiding. Wild West-type livestock rustling may happen. Does this contribute to the growth of a police culture among the Kesset?) Ta'arane art and dance are made up almost entirely of curved movements, reflecting their dependence on rivers (the river).

Language details

2007-10-03T09:45:00.000-07:00

Ta'arani uses the following consonants: ch, f, h, j, l, m, n, ng, r, s, sh, t, w. Words and names in Ta'arani do not end in consonants. Ng' can occur at the beginning of a word, as in Swahili. It never appears before a vowel: instead, soften to nn. A Ta'arane would pronounce "ringing" as "rinning". (I found out how to do diacriticals in HTML! Check some of the character names in the previous post.)

I may have to discard the detail about the Ta'arane not being able to pronounce the u in Nitsur. Given their rich and finely divided vowel set, they should be able to pick up a new vowel without too much trouble. They'll want to pronounce Hingol as Hinnol.

Kesseten features most of the same consonants as English. Exceptions: no ng, kh instead of ch (pronounced like ch in German), dh instead of th. Avoid z and x. High frequency of k, h, dh, v, b, p compared to English. Kesseten has a formal/rhetoric speech mode used for clan/tribal councils, but it won't play much part in the story. (I'd like to write a scene where Vannasen uses it.) (Note: consider Old Man-fostered mind control techniques embedded in the formal mode. Re-read Science of Coercion? Gesture and tone play important part as well as pure eloquence.)

Among the Kesset, proper names end in consonants. Names ending in vowels are nicknames or diminutives (Akshedhen's mother might call him Akshi).

Wonei uses English consonants plus some, English vowels plus some. Because the story is not likely to feature nearly as many Wonei place and person names (since it mostly takes place in Kesset or Ta'arane territory), it's going to be difficult to create a characteristic "sound" for Wonei given the diversity of sounds in the language. Instead, stress linguistic adaptability and sound-orientedness of Woneiyal characters-- have both Kesset and Ta'arane characters stumble over certain sounds of Wonei.

Near the beginning of the book, Nitsur suffers from being isolated from people to whom he can speak. Near the end of the book, this is Akshedhen's position, as he's accompanied by few Kesset. Both of them are forced to acquire language skills, but it comes much easier to Nitsur. Mafileo doesn't ever have that problem and probably doesn't appreciate how important it is.

Supporting characters I

2007-10-03T09:22:00.000-07:00

Hingol is Nitsur's drumming teacher. A large middle-aged man whose easy-going manner hides passionate beliefs. He will be the first to articulate the importance of speech to humanness. Hingol is a strict taskmaster and a perfectionist despite his relaxed demeanor. He will only appear in flashbacks of Nitsur's childhood, but he has been a powerful influence throughout Nitsur's life.

Vannasen is Akshedhen's father. He is also the head of the Red Goat clan and a powerful force in Kesset politics. Late middle age. Vannasen was a strict but loving father in Akshedhen's childhood, but is growing tyrannical and arbitrary as the vigor of youth leaves him, which Akshedhen attributes to the influence of the Old Man.

Kaspell is Akshedhen's closest friend and will go with him into exile. He is Akshedhen's age and shares his opinions; a follower rather than a leader. Kaspell is distinguished by an unusual streak of kindness.

Astirama'a is the priestess who trained Mafileo in the dance arts (and in the fighting arts which are hidden in the dance). She was killed in the raid in which Mafileo was captured. Astirama'a advocated resistance to the Kesset and that the Ta'arane should learn the use of iron weaponry, but was opposed by the more conservative priestesses.

Waïlaraitēo is the surviving senior priestess of the Delta. She is an older woman who has lost most of her family to the Kesset. She is fiercely conservative and resists all change, associating it with the bad things that have happened to her and her family. She will lose a duel to Mafileo.

Machion is a Woneiyal boy who joins Mafileo and Nitsur on their journey to the Delta. His village was destroyed by fire and he was unable to find his family (if they survived). He is an excellent hunter and tracker in the forest and adapts well to the Delta. At first withdrawn and near-speechless, Machion will become Mafileo's apprentice and the next Dancer. As one of the younger characters, he'll also exemplify the innovative and synergistic culture evolving in the Delta region.

Che'atamaï is a Ta'arane girl raised in the Delta. She is fearless and inquisitive. She will become Nitsur's apprentice and the next Drummer, another synergy character.

Plan

2007-09-26T11:21:00.001-07:00

So, to clarify what I'm up to:

I plan insh'allah to spend October developing more background. Will try to post regularly-- daily, if work allows. I see where the big gaps are, and I'm going to try to fill them in. I don't expect to do much actual writing this month, but of course if a great scene occurs to me I'll try to capture it.

November will be devoted to actual writing, and will probably be a much quieter month as far as this blog goes. I may post excerpts, but certainly not daily.

What's my goal for November? Well, I don't think the 50,000 words is realistic for a first-timer and someone who's also working 40 hours a week, plus there will be other commitments during the month. I also really have no idea how long the finished novel is likely to be. So I'm going to try to get as far as I can in a month of steady writing, and then see what I have to show for it. It'd be great to have a complete rough draft. More likely I'll have a draft of the first half or so, but that's still a good start.

A writing exercise

2007-09-22T17:37:00.000-07:00

I picked this exercise up at Write Stuff. The idea was to read this short story and then answer the following questions:

1. Explain the title. In what way is it suitable to the story?

The title is "Attempted". The story is about an attempted suicide. The narrator also makes reference to "So like me. So almost." suggesting that not quite finishing things is characteristic of her, but there's no other indication of this in the story.

2. What is the predominant element in the story - plot, theme, character, setting?

Character. Specifically, the sixteen-year-old narrator and her parents.

3. What sort of conflict confronts the leading character or characters?

Between the narrator's emotional needs and her parent's' inability/disinclination to supply them. Also, between the parents' (and society's) expectations and the narrator's inability to meet them.

4. How is the conflict resolved?

It isn't. We get good indications that the parents care a lot more for their daughter than she thinks, but the daughter either doesn't recognize these clues or doesn't find them satisfactory. It's possible some serious conversation might go on after the end of the story, but the story doesn't hold out a lot of hope.

5. How does the author handle characterization?
a. by description?
b. conversation of the characters?
c. actions of the characters?
d. combination of these methods?

D. The narrator is characterized by "conversation", that is, the internal monologue that forms the narrative thread. The father's character is revealed almost entirely by action, the mother's by description (she seems to talk quite a bit, but most of her speech isn't actually reported).

6. What is the high point, or climax, of the story?

Difficult to say, since it's not an "action" story. The emotional high point is clearly the point where the father kisses his daughter on top of the head.

7. Does this story create any special mood?

I think the author was trying for pathos.

8. Is this story realistic or true to life? Explain your answers by giving examples.

If there's anything unrealistic, it's that the narrator's reasons for trying to commit suicide seem a bit thin. I can't really give any examples, though. Also, I'm not sure a hospital would allow an attempted teen suicide case to leave without at least talking to a counselor.

9. What is the general theme of the story? What is the underlying theme?

It seems more like an exercise in character development. There may be a theme going about how actions (father's) speak louder than words (mother's), but that may have more to do with my current preoccupations.

10. Did you identify with any of the characters?

No.

11. Does the story contain a single effect or impression for the reader? If so, what?

Mostly irritation, for me. The moment with the father is meant to be moving, but it comes too early in the action and reduces the interaction with the mother to bathos. Also it really doesn't seem like anything has changed. As an early scene (or a flashback scene) in a novel, it could be useful, but as a stand-alone story it seems pointless.

12. Name one major personality trait of each leading character, and tell how the author makes the reader conscious of this trait.

For the narrator, poor self-esteem-- obvious from the fact she's trying to commit suicide. The mother, tendency to be overtly emotional and to babble ("reactor meltdown", "monologue"). Father, inexpressive and talks very little ("twenty-degree rise of left eyebrow" = "out of control", "generic, eight-word sentence").

13. Does the story have a moral? If not, what do you think the purpose of the author was?

I don't think there was a "moral". I think the purpose was, as much as anything, to experiment with the different ways that the characters were handled.

14. Did you like it? Why or why not?

No. It was technically competent, but completely unimaginative.

15. Finally, why do you think this story placed in the top five in the Writer’s Digest Short Story competition?

I have no idea.

What do the Kesset need with all those slaves?

2007-09-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

you may ask.

The Ta'arane cities along the foot of the escarpment harnessed a huge amount of kinetic power in the form of water flowing downhill. Mills to grind grain and decorticate flax, water-driven looms for the weaving of cloth in large quantities, not to mention indoor running water and sewage disposal. There was an extensive reservoir system so that these activities could go on at any season.

All of this machinery is breaking down, or has broken down. The Kesset don't have the knowledge to repair it, and neither do most Ta'arane any more-- the artisan class was mostly wiped out with the fall of the cities. But the Kesset try to maintain the way of life they took over from the Ta'arane, and this requires a lot of human labor to be substituted for machine labor.

Iron

The Kesset also need slaves to work their iron mines. There are iron deposits in the valley, but the Ta'arane did not work iron nor mine it; they knew only bronze until the conquest. The Kesset brought ironworking technology from the steppes.

Somewhere "up there" (I'm vague about this geography, and don't expect it to become important), there's a mountainous area with extensive iron deposits and forests. In this area there are permanent settlements of Kesset-related peoples whose wealth is iron. One of the reasons the Kesset invaded the plain is that they identified iron deposits there.

Over the years, the Kesset have kidnapped or persuaded ironworkers from the mountains to settle in the Kesset cities (former Ta'arane cities). They have merged into Kesset society and brought their knowledge with them, including mining and the working of ore. The Kesset now have all the iron they need, and trade it to the steppe tribes (including the Locust People). Kesset ironworks are also contributing significantly to deforestation of the plain (which is mostly savanna anyway) and surrounding hills (except on the Woneiyal side).

For the Ta'arane slaves, being sent to the iron mines is a terrible fate. Working conditions in the mines are hellish and unsafe. Also the Ta'arane regard iron with a superstitious fear, as one of the causes of their downfall.

Main Characters

2007-09-22T16:02:00.000-07:00

Nitsur

When Nitsur was a boy, about 8-9 years old, he was caught in a fire that left him partially crippled and also amnesiac. He's never regained his childhood memories. As a result he grew up somewhat isolated and alienated within his village. His parents arranged for him to be apprenticed as a drumspeaker. Nitsur's strongest emotional attachment (until he meets Mafileo) is to his since-deceased drum teacher; at the time of his capture by the Kesset, he has no close ties to anyone.

Nitsur's drum teacher is the person who first articulates the importance of communication to humanity. Nitsur will become the spokesman for this idea as the novel progresses.

Temperamentally, Nitsur is patient, phlegmatic, detached, and tends towards passivity. Because of the fire damage to his legs, he's physically restricted; this is one of the reasons he resigns himself to slavery among the Kesset; he has no real hope of escape.

After Nitsur meets Mafileo, she will become his main source of motivation. Later in the book, the survival of their friends and community will also become important to him. Nitsur's growth will be towards emotional involvement and responsibility. By the end of the book he should be developing into an important teacher and mentor.

Nitsur is a very aural person. In writing him, I have to remember to describe how things sound as much as or more than how they look.

Physically, Nitsur is below average height for his people, who average shorter than the Ta'arane and Kesset; his legs are short and twisted from fire damage. His upper body is disproportionately strong. He can walk, with some discomfort, but can't run. (Ride? We'll see if the occasion comes up.) Like most Woneiyal he's dark-skinned and has woolly hair.

Mafileo

Like Nitsur, Mafileo was set apart as a child; she was orphaned very young and was dedicated to the worship of the Mother. Unlike him, she was raised with very strong emotional ties to the community of priestesses at her temple. They are now all dead or enslaved elsewhere-- Mafileo's home is further south than Nitsur's, she was originally a slave in another city and was traded to Ahon ken Tai, while the village and temple were destroyed.

Since her enslavement, Mafileo has been repeatedly raped, branded, and suffered other ways. She has retreated into herself, doesn't speak, and is probably near-catatonic. The Kesset consider her an imbecile, but Nitsur elicits flashes of intelligent behavior from her that convince him otherwise.

After their escape, her true nature will begin to emerge. Mafileo is volatile and passionate. She is very intelligent, but her emotions sometimes get the better of her. She grasps new ideas easily. She is also a natural leader, and this becomes more apparent as she recovers from her ordeals: her upbringing has left her with considerable reserves of inner strength, but she needs to learn how to draw on them. She will never lose her corrosive hatred of the Kesset, but she'll learn to work around it.

Nitsur and Mafileo have complementary strengths, which makes them a good team. Her main motivations are similar to Nitsur's: the survival and safety of those she cares for. She's less idealistic than he is.

Mafileo has a dancer's trained body. NB: this means athletic/not bulky, but not skinny. Though when we first meet her, she's in physically poor condition and may be emaciated. The Ta'arane are darker than the Kesset but lighter than the Woneiyal; they have straight hair, and average slightly taller but less muscular than the Kesset.

Akshedhen

Akshedhen, unlike the others, has grown up very much a part of his larger community. He's got family and political allies (at first). He's the only son of an important family and a recognized leader among his age group. He will suffer personal betrayal that the others won't; as political fortunes turn against his family, some of his friends will turn against him.

Akshedhen has a rigid moral code. Personally, he's disciplined and stoic; he has strong feelings, but will rarely show them. Akshedhen fears the influence of the Old Man on Kesset culture and on himself (he sees it developing in his father, who's an active member of the inner cult). He's also adept at the mental training methods of the Boy's warriors and these will help him maintain his sense of self and purpose.

He is curious and an innovator. He takes the initiative to learn more about the Woneiyal and the forest, claiming that it's important to the future of the Kesset. It is, but it's also to feed his curiosity. Akshedhen adapts quickly to changing conditions. His motivations initially are to support his family and his father's purposes, but he dislikes his father's methods.

Akshedhen's emotional ties are to his family (who are all killed) and his age-mates, who will either betray him or accompany him to the Delta.

Akshedhen learns that people he has considered his inferiors (the Ta'arane and Woneiyal) are of equal worth to him. After joining the refugees in the Delta, he will transfer his loyalty to them. At the very end of the novel, he will reject ethnic identity completely and identify himself as a member of his new community.

Akshedhen is a typical Kesset, olive-skinned, straight dark hair which he keeps braided most of the time. He has the calluses of weapons use and riding.

Religions and Arts

2007-09-20T13:34:00.000-07:00

I know very little yet about the religion of the Woneiyal; I think it's animistic and very tied to place, such that each feature of Woneiyal territory has a genius loci of some sort. This is an area that needs development. Nitsur's experience of captivity and slavery should be profoundly influenced by the fact that, unlike the Ta'arane slaves among whom he lives, he's been removed from his native soil.

The Kesset and the Ta'arane are polytheists. The main deity of the public Kesset religion is the Moon, who is worshiped under two aspects: the Radiant Boy and the Old Man. The Boy represents the waxing and full moon, also light and the forces of rationality; his titles include Lawgiver and Truthspeaker. He's credited with inventing their system of numeration, especially the writing of it. The Old Man represents the waning and new moon, also darkness, madness and treachery.

All young men of the Kesset are nominally in the service of the Boy, and all older men nominally in the service of the Old Man. Wealthier and more important families are expected to take their religious duties more seriously, however; for a poor family, the only duties required might be an annual tithe and attendance at public services. While most young men are expected to undergo warrior training and initiation, and form raiding and war parties, under the auspices of the Boy, the only son of a very poor family might be excused on the grounds that his family can't afford to risk him. This would be especially likely if his father were in poor health. It would also be terribly shameful for the family.

As Kesset men grow past certain ages, they enter the Old Man's service and some are inducted into the Old Man cult. This doesn't happen to all Kesset men; the cult is selective and very secretive, and is also where most of the real power-trading among the Kesset takes place. Clan feuds and inter-city warfare often spin out from Old Man temples (note that in the cities, both the Old Man and the Boy have permanent temples, which are the physical locus for all these activities; before the conquest, the Kesset had no permanent buildings).

Older men who are not cult members are expected to be at the command of those who are. The Boy's servants are also at least nominally under the command of the Old Man's cult, but not necessarily as individuals; there's a command structure, and warriors have to be able to act autonomously in the field.

Ahon ken Tai is a Kesset name meaning City of the Moon (the city was known to the Ta'arane as Olaeinama). It was the first of the plains cities to fall into Kesset hands. Boy cultists of the city say that the name commemorates the victory by force of arms (the province of the Boy), while the Old Man cultists tell a different story: Olaeinama fell by treachery.

Kesset society before the conquest of the plain was a fairly mobile meritocracy, where the measures of merit were how much stock (goats, sheep, horses-- cows relatively rare on the steppes) a family owned, and how many fighting men they could field by calling on all of their allies (alliances could shift rapidly under the influence of the Old Man). It was a pretty hard life for poor families, although they could place themselves under the protection of a powerful clan and perhaps gain an alliance by marriage; also, there was always at least the theoretical possibility that a poor family could somehow acquire enough stock/allies to become powerful. Since the Kesset have settled down to city life, the system has become somewhat more rigid.

The Kesset also recognize the Sun and the Earth as goddesses. The Sun, in public (male) Kesset religion, is a holy virgin, the guardian of unmarried women and of the honor of married women. There are Sun cults and Sun temples in all of the Kesset cities. The Earth is feared and hated as the devouring mother; most of the stories feature the Boy and/or the Old Man defeating her in some way.

There is also a shamanic religion among the Kesset, which is mostly female, illegal, heavily suppressed, and associated with the Earth. In many places, the Sun cult is a cover for an Earth cult. This religion features animal sacrifice and occasionally human sacrifice.

Ta'arane religion reveres the Earth as Mother. Birth and death, growth and decay, are her provinces. Rivers, especially the great river that runs through the plain, are seen as male fertilizing principles, as is the rain. Both are the gifts of the Moon, who is seen as untrustworthy and changeable, and propitiated rather than worshiped. (This probably reflects the awareness on the part of the Ta'arane that neither rivers nor rain are completely to be depended on.) The Sun and her sisters the stars are seen as the timekeepers and regulators of the world; Ta'arane agriculture ran on a solar/astral calendar, and astronomy was an important field of knowledge for them.

Since the conquest, there has grown up a sect among the Ta'arane who believe that the misfortunes of their people are the revenge of the Moon for the disdain in which the Ta'arane held him, and especially for the flood control projects-- which they refer to as "caging the Great Snake".

The Ta'arane worship through dance, elaborate artworks, various rituals associated with agricultural events, and animal sacrifice. They do not have human sacrifice. They had a quite elaborate system of temples and priestesses, which is now mostly destroyed and scattered. Ta'arane society before the Kesset conquest was very conservative, and hasn't adapted well to change.

A semi-secret among the Ta'arane: the temple dances of the priestesses are also the movements of their martial art. Disputes among high-level priestesses are, if all other options fail, settled by combat. These fights are not for display and are often fatal (usually they use knives). The Mother is said to have given strength to the victor's legs.

A note on art forms. Ta'arane art is almost entirely two-dimensional; they use paint, dyes, and mosaics extensively. Most of their art is abstract rather than figurative. Much of it also encoded various meaning; examples throughout the text. Technically, much of Ta'arane art might qualify as an ideogrammic (not pictogrammic) written language, but it's too elaborate and requires too much space to be really useful for everyday use: it tended to be incorporated as parts of architecture and other permanent structures. Ta'arane cloths are often extremely intricately dyed or printed with carved wood blocks.

The Kesset have plastic arts, which began as small carvings of wood or bone which they carried on them or attached to their horses' trappings. Representations of the Boy were particularly popular. Since occupying the cities, they've taken to creating life-size or better sculptures from wood and stone.

The Woneiyal decorate their persons extensively; patterned cloth was always a favorite item of trade with the Ta'arane. They also carve wooden items (eg. drums) in a decorative fashion. Otherwise they have very little in the way of art. (No tattoos or scarification.)

Plot

2007-09-19T11:24:00.000-07:00

After a fire destroys his home and a vast stretch of surrounding forest, Nitsur, a Woneiyal drumspeaker, is captured and enslaved by a Kesset scouting/raiding party under the command of Akshadhen. The Kesset set the fire to clear the area of insect-borne diseases that are rife in the area and are very dangerous to the Kesset and their horses (this is why they don't normally cross the river).

Akshadhen takes an interest in Nitsur, who is the first of his people to be captured by the Kesset. On the trip back to Akshadhen's home, the city Ahon ken Tai, in the company of Ta'arane slaves and Kesset guards, Nitsur's command of Ta'arane improves and he masters the rudiments of Kesseten.

Nitsur lives as a slave with Akshadhen's family for several years and appears reconciled to his fate. (He will also treat us to an extended flashback about his early life and his apprenticeship as a drumspeaker.) Then a new slave arrives: Mafileo, a young woman suffering from traumatic muteness. No-one knows this, (in fact, no-one knows her name), but Mafileo is a dancer and formerly a priestess-acolyte of the Ta'arane religion.

Seeking help for Mafileo, Nitsur goes to the Temple of the Sun. The priestesses agree to help, but they have a hidden agenda; they need periodic sacrifices for their secret religion, and think they can make it look as though the two slaves ran away together. Unawares, Nitsur brings Mafileo to the temple, and the two are made participants in a rite which is supposed to end in their deaths. They figure out what's happening and, in the stress of the moment, the magic begins to happen. They escape. Mafileo has regained her speech, but she keeps this secret from everyone except Nitsur.

Nitsur alerts Akshadhen and his father to the secret practices of the temple. The Ahon ken Tai authorities raid the temple, killing many of the priestesses. This touches off riots in the city, as it turns out there are more followers of the secret religion than anyone thought. In the confusion, Nitsur and Mafileo escape the city.

They try to get back to Nitsur's people, but the forest has been subjected to periodic burning to try (mostly unsuccessfully) to convert it to pasture for the Kesset's herds. The Woneiyal have scattered, moving further up into the hills, in inaccessible terrain, or further south and west. Nitsur and Mafileo head that direction, dodging Kesset raiding parties and flash floods along the course of the river, crossing back and forth as they can. These dangers force them to practice the new form of magic they've discovered and learn to control it.

At some point, the travelers learn that Mafileo's home has been destroyed. Probably they pass near it. Mafileo takes the opportunity to treat us to an extended flashback of her own.

They are making for the Delta. The Delta is the region where the river meets the sea, and among the Ta'arane has profound significance as a religious sanctuary. It's also the farthest of the Ta'arane lands from the Kesset strongholds. Mafileo is sure the fugitives will be safe there. Nitsur isn't sure, he knows that the Kesset are under increasing pressure from the Locust People to the east. But the Delta is even less hospitable than the forest to the Kesset way of life, and besides, it's unburnable. (Though they see increasing evidence of drought.)

Along the way, they acquire a motley group of companions: displaced Woneiyal, escaped Ta'arane slaves, even a Kesset who had been stripped of his rights and condemned to slavery for crimes (unspecified at this point. He may have been falsely accused), but had escaped.

Arriving at the Delta, they find things are not as they had hoped. Dry-season drought and severe floods during the monsoons have made the Delta physically a less safe place to live; also, refugees are putting increasing pressure on the region's resources, as the Kesset of the more southern cities are raiding further and further afield. It's clear that it's only a matter of time before the Kesset come raiding into the Delta itself.

The priestess caste retains command, but clearly the fabric of society is strained. (Ta'arane society, in many ways, has never recovered from the plague and the Kesset conquest-- even in areas the Kesset have never occupied, the Ta'arane are fearful and demoralized.) They welcome Mafileo and the other Ta'arane refugees, but turn the Kesset and Woneiyal refugees, including Nitsur, away. Mafileo begs for them to be allowed to stay at least through the rains, when traveling will be very difficult; also, several members of the party are ill. The priestesses agree.

The onset of the monsoons brings devastating flooding to the Delta (again), though the rains are lighter than usual. The Ta'arane attribute the floods to the gradual failure of the flood-control and irrigation works of the ancient Ta'arane upstream, which have not been maintained by the Kesset. Nitsur and his fellow-travelers think the cause is the deforestation of the western hills. (They're probably both correct.)

Mafileo gets into increasingly acrimonious arguments with the senior priestesses about the fate of the non-Ta'arane refugees and about how to cope with the flooding. The priestesses are very conservative, but their traditional methods are no longer suited to the changing physical landscape. Tensions are brought to a head by the unexpected arrival of Akshedhen and a handful of others from Ahon ken Tai.

Ahon ken Tai has degenerated into clan feud/civil war. Akshedhen's family has been disgraced and stripped of most of their possessions and Akshedhen's father and family have been assassinated. With his last few breaths, Akshedhen's father told his son to leave the city; the Kesset have lost their way, and Akshedhen must find a new way. He and a few friends have made their way across the grasslands, helped by the light rains, but are all desperately ill (and their horses mostly dead).

Mafileo hates Akshedhen, who raped her when she was a slave. When she first sees him, she tries to kill him, but Nitsur prevents her. The priestesses are outraged and blame Nitsur for Akshedhen's presence, claiming that Nitsur is a spy for the Kesset and means to betray the secrets of the Delta. Mafileo fights a knife duel with the senior priestess and wins. She then pulls off what amounts to a coup: refugees of various races now make up a substantial portion of the Delta's population, and many long-time Delta Ta'arane are unhappy with the ineffectual leadership of the priestesses. Mafileo and her friends reveal the dance/drum magic, and explain that they can use it to protect the Delta from the Kesset and possibly from the floods. This makes them extremely popular.

Akshedhen has pretty much been overlooked in the excitement. Nitsur, who was fairly well treated as a slave (the Kesset saw him more as a curiosity) isn't hostile towards Akshedhen and sees to it that he's looked after. Akshedhen recovers from the fever, along with some of his companions.

The new Delta community buckles down and begins developing dance/drum magic and preparing to defend themselves. Newer refugees bring word that the Locust People are gathering in great numbers on the steppes, where the rains failed almost completely. Locust People scouts and small parties are beginning to appear on the plain, an indication of growing weakness on the part of the Kesset, who normally patrol against such incursions. There are rumors that the Kesset of the nearest city (not Ahon ken Tai) have made alliances with some of the Locust clans.

Akshedhen and his fellow Kesset make themselves useful in several ways. They are able to talk to Kesset refugees and slaves who were taken young and speak little or no Ta'arane. They make sense out of news about the Kesset and the Locust People. As a trained warrior, Akshedhen advises the Deltans about battle tactics. Most important, the Kesset warrior disciplines include mental training techniques which vastly enhance the effectiveness of the Deltans' new magic.

Somewhere in this section (probably in conversation with Nitsur), we'll get a flashback from Akshedhen about his childhood, his relationship with his father, and his warrior training.

The end of the book pits the Deltans against an army of mixed Kesset and Locust People from the nearest Kesset city.

Note to self: figure out if there's a way to turn off the spellchecker in Blogger. It's driving me crazy...

Some answers, maybe

2007-09-18T09:55:00.001-07:00

So I have at least partial answers to the problems I posed myself in the first post.

Problem #1: How to create believable and coherent language fragments for three imaginary languages.

Research, research, research.

I actually already have a fairly good idea what the Ta'arane language sounds like. It's similar to Hawaiian in having a restricted consonant set (a different set, though) and a very complex vowel set, with multiple stress levels and different dipthongs. This creates a small problem in itself, in that the Roman alphabet isn't optimal for such a language; I've seen Hawaiian written with all the diacriticals and it's pretty intimidating.

I know Woneiyal is agglutinative:
won = person, human (lit. a speaker)
Wonei = the Speech
Woneiyal = the Speakers, the humans, the real people

I don't really know what it sounds like, but think it has a larger sound set than either of the other two languages.

Kesseten I know nothing about. There's lots of room for growth here. NB: Any and all character or place names that appear in these excerpts are subject to change...

Problem #2: How to write effective dialogue between characters not fluent in each other's languages.

The character who's going to carry the bulk of the narrative is a Woneiyal drumspeaker. (You met him in the first excerpt.) He has an extremely good ear for sounds and sound patterns. He'll pick up languages quickly and when he reports dialogue, it'll sound fluent. Because I don't want to gloss over the problems of communication, there will be plenty of scenes where he's not present and the other characters have to fight their way through to understanding each other; also, as being from the least materially developed culture around, his vocabulary won't always be up to the task. The trick will be to give readers a sense of real difficulty without making the story just plain hard to read.

Problem #3: Fantasy readers expect to see magic. How can I hold the interest of such readers, given that the magic isn't going to start happening until probably about halfway through?

Flash-back and flash-forward. As I'm envisioning it now, the novel will begin with the first half of the very last scene, and end with the last half of said scene. That my be giving too much away right at the start, though: I may want to start the novel with a flash-forward to some other magic-using scene. I'm not going to worry about it too much for now; once the pieces are written, I'll play around with arranging them.

Plan for the immediate future: Develop some more linguistic background and some more supporting characters. Write up a formal plot outline and maybe character sketches for the main characters. Regard none of it as set in stone.

I expect to spend the next couple of weeks and most of October doing groundwork. After Nov. 1, I want to start serious writing, in keeping with NaNoWriMo. I'll probably post a daily word count.

Captivity

2007-09-17T20:14:00.001-07:00

In the first days of my captivity, I drummed ceaselessly, desperately, on anything that would carry sound. Help me, help me! Help Nitsur! I called out to everyone I knew, recited the names of my family and the other folk of Honatol, of my village, without knowing if they were alive or dead. I called on other drumspeakers I had spoken with, but never met. No answer came.
In the foothills northwest of the great river, I beat on charred, smoking stumps, burning my hands. Southeast of the river, in the grasslands, there were no trees living or dead. I pounded on the dry earth, raising choking clouds of dust but no sound. My captors finally tied my wrists, muffled my hands in cloth, and put a bag over them. They argued about me; I did not speak Kesseten, not then, but I remembered the sounds, and later I was able to translate the conversation. Mostly it concerned the worth of a slave who was lame-- as I was-- and who damaged his hands-- as I was threatening to. But Jantyr was determined to bring me alive to Ahon ken Tai, and Jantyr was in command.
The other captives in our train were all Ta'arane, from the southeast bank of the river and the western plains. I spoke their language, a little, but they had none of mine. They seemed resigned to their fates. "It's been this way for some generations now," an old woman told me. "Ever since the Kesset came from the east, with their horses and their cows. They didn't build the cities of the plain, you know... our foremothers did that." At the time I didn't know what she meant; I had never seen a city.
"The empire of the Kesset rests on the backs of Ta'arane slaves," muttered a young man who was with her. I think he may have been her nephew, or her foster son; I never knew for sure. It was evening, and we were all huddled in a circle, surrounded by watchfires and Kesset guards. "Every year they reach further west and south, to enslave more of our people. They've raided as far the Delta, I've heard..."
"No, no," said someone else, "that's the one place they can't touch. The Mother kills them when they set foot there..."
"There was a time we thought they'd never reach the Hundred-Thousand-Mouth," said the old woman sternly. She was speaking of the great river, now several days' march behind us. To my people, it had never had a name; it was just "the great river". "No place is safe from them any more."
Another woman murmured, "I've heard the guards speaking. They have an enemy in the eastern wastes, beyond the cities."
This was new. We all turned to her. "You speak Kesseten?" I asked.
"A little. They think guarding slave trains is boring work, not..." She groped for words. "Not honorable, not warrior's work... they were all hoping to be sent east, to fight there."
"Well," said the old woman, "perhaps these new easterners will destroy the Kesset and enslave them, just as the Kesset destroyed our temples and enslaved us. So the world continues." She made a ritual gesture, open palm pressing down and then rising, fingers trailing behind. I learned later that it signified homage to the Earth Mother. "Life and death, children."
There was a soft murmur from the other Ta'arane within earshot. The old woman turned to me. "But you're a different thing altogether, Nit-ser." The Ta'arane can't say "u"; it's a sound they don't have in Ta'arani. "I've never even seen one of your folk this side of the Hundred-Thousand-Mouth. How did the Kesset come to lay hands on you?"
I couldn't bear to speak of it. I wept. The Ta'arane patted my shoulders and murmured sympathy, but none of them understood. How could they? Captive they were, torn from their homes and on their way to lives of brutal slavery, degradation and early deaths... but they had one another. The Kesset had captured whole families and kept them together; three Ta'arane villages, more or less intact, travelled east with me. And I was alone. There was no one to speak my language, the Wonei, the Speech.
I had never, ever been alone before. In my land there was no silence; even travelling between villages, along steep river gorges where the rocks were slick with spray and the twining vines hung thick as night before your face, there was always drumspeech in the air, in the earth, in your bones. Every village of the Woneiyal had its drumspeaker, every drumspeaker had a signature. I am Truona, I speak for the village of Miloli, you might hear. Welcome, traveller. And then the news of Miloli's marriages, births, deaths; and other news, relayed from villages further away. Messages from families to their distant kin. The lives of the Woneiyal were all woven into this vast net of drumtalk, rippling back and forth across the jungled foothills that looked down on the great river and the plains beyond. Severed from it, I felt like a ghost, both deaf and mute. Neither the quiet talk of the Ta'arane nor the shouts of the Kesset guards touched my ears, my inner ears, the ears that craved the sounds of the Wonei as my throat craved water.

Getting Started

2007-09-17T19:22:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Outside Over There.

I created this blog back in January, when I was getting ready to switch Knocking From Inside to the "new" Blogger, and wanted to be sure I could do everything with the new version that I'd been doing with the old version. At the time, I had no idea what further use I would make of it.

Now I think I'm going to use it chronicle an attempt, insh'allah a successful attempt, to write a novel. If successful, you can expect to see my efforts to find a publisher, etc, here.

You will see, as I go along, excerpts of text; probably more than that, you'll see my ruminations about the writing process, about particular problems I'm trying to solve, maybe things like character sketches, stuff like that. I'm not going to post the whole thing here.

Why Outside Over There?

Outside Over There is the title of a wonderful fairy tale by Maurice Sendak. It's obviously not going to be the title of the novel. The novel doesn't really have a title, even a working title, yet. The idea for it goes back to the summer of 1990, when I was a grad student at UC Santa Cruz, living in Davis and working on my grad advisor's research project in the Sacramento area. I wrote a short story then called On The Levee, which has been extensively revised (the latest draft, with Steve Perry's help, in 2005).

Meanwhile, I was studying drumming and martial art and converting to Sufism, and all kinds of other things-- We're talking seventeen years of my life, here. On The Levee now stands as a short sequel to this as-yet unwritten novel, taking place probably some 200 years later.

What's triggered me to work on it again? Well, for one thing, National Novel Writing Month is coming up in November. The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days. I don't know if that's realistic, especially given the Thanksgiving holiday, traveling, family stuff etc, but it sounds like fun to try.

For another thing... it just seems like time.

What is this novel about?

It's about communication. It's about the utter, desperate importance of communication to people trying to survive, and to the humanness of people in general. As such, it's about language and speech. There are three cultures in collision; their relationships are such that they have not developed a pidgin or trade tongue. The characters have to learn each other's languages, and thereby absorb something of each other's world-views. In addition both of the main characters undergo periods of traumatic muteness or near-muteness, in which they become temporarily less than human.

Problem #1: How to create believable and coherent language fragments for three imaginary languages.

Problem #2: How to write effective dialogue between characters not fluent in each other's languages.

Besides language in its conventional sense, there are several other important modes of communication at work. The Woneiyal have a form of drumspeech that carries across distance, through thick forest and over difficult terrain. The Ta'arane have a pictorial (can't really call it written) language. The Kesset are more numerate than the other two; they also don't have anything you could call a written language yet; I see them possibly developing something like cuneiform eventually. They also have a heliograph/smoke signal code.

The novel is also about the discovery of a new kind of magic, a new way of working on the world. This magic arises from the synergy of at least two out of the three cultures. No one culture alone would have been likely to have stumbled across it.

Problem #3: Fantasy readers expect to see magic. How can I hold the interest of such readers, given that the magic isn't going to start happening until probably about halfway through?

Places and People

The setting is the semi-arid tropics. The action takes place in and around the valley of a very large river (think Ganges, Yangtze, Mississippi). The river is flanked by forested hills, giving way rapidly to mountains, on the northwest. On the southeast, there's a gallery forest and then a gradually rising grassland plain, the low-lying parts of which are subject to flooding, which ends abruptly in a steep escarpment (think Rift Valley). Further east, there are high, dry steppes. The river ends in a massive, multi-channeled delta that blends into the ocean on one side and into the surrounding grasslands on the other. (Think the Nile delta.)

The Woneiyal live in the foothills. Of the three peoples, they have the least material culture. They hunt and grow food, mostly root crops; they also gather considerable amounts of food in the forest. They tend to live in small villages set fairly far apart. They have never had a centralized form of government.

The Ta'arane live on the plains below the escarpment. In the past, the Ta'arane did a lot of engineering; they built flood control and irrigation projects all along the course of the river and built cities at the foot of the escarpment. They used streams falling down the escarpment as sources of hydropower for mills and the like, had municipal sewers, baths and fountains, and all kinds of other good stuff. They grew linen and hemp and kept animals.

The Woneiyal and the Ta'arane had trade relations along the line of the river (bronze tools, ceramics, and fiber goods from the Ta'arane; forest products including skins of wild animals, fruit, feathers, medicinal herbs from the Woneiyal). They got along OK but kept pretty much to themselves.

The Kesset were originally a tribe of horse nomads from the eastern steppes, where their kin still live. A couple hundred years ago, they came down over the escarpment and took the Ta'arane cities. The Ta'arane had been badly reduced by a plague; also, their bronze weapons and armor were at a serious disadvantage compared to the iron equipment fielded by the Kesset. The rest was history.

Now the Kesset live in the cities and raid the surrounding countryside for Ta'arane slaves. The Ta'arane are depopulated; much of their farmland has been converted to pasture for the Kesseten herds. The waterworks have fallen into disrepair. The Woneiyal haven't been affected much... yet.

The Kesset are facing a crisis of their own. The world has entered a long-term drying trend, which is not severe yet in the valley (strong, reliable monsoons carry a lot of moisture, which is trapped by the high ground on both sides), but is putting terrible pressure on the eastern steppe tribes. Lately the Kesset have suffered attacks from a tribe or confederation of tribes whom the Kesset disparagingly call the Locust People; they are, in fact, distantly related to the ancestors of the Kesset.

Will the citified Kesset be able to withstand the ravages of their savage cousins? Will the Ta'arane take advantage of their oppressors' weakness to throw off the yoke of slavery and restore the cities of the plain? Will the Woneiyal decide once and for all that the folks across the river are just plain crazy?

Insh'allah we will all find out one of these days...