Paksworld

NewBook is growing nicely, at 210 pages, moving right along every time I sit down to it,  so I think we need a contest to end this year and start the next.  Read the rest of this entry »

It’s being a windy, sunny Christmas Day here, and I wish all who celebrate it a Merry one wherever you are.  For those with other traditions,  the same sentiment of joy and peace and goodwill expressed in your way and toward your own traditions.  Happy Holidays, best wishes for a joyful, peaceful, prosperous New Year.

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This is a very brief post relating to a comment someone made awhile back (and I’m too rushed this morning to look up–apologies.)   But I want to answer this while I think of it, since I meant to back then and didn’t.

What I remember is that I mentioned how many pages of the new book I had, and what the wordage was, and someone was surprised that it took that many pages (or was it that few??) for that number of words.

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Fantasy requires as much research as science fiction, but slanted somewhat differently.  Or so it feels in my head, because the SF stories and the fantasy stories are situated in different places, not just fictionally, but psychologically.  As it happens, I like both kinds of research (and I also like flying without wings, sometimes, as in the CHICKS stories–no research there, nuh-uh.)   At any rate, I knew the new Vatta book would demand considerable research, despite being set in the same universe, because it’s set largely on planet.   The nail-biting moments (well, most of them) will be down in the gravity well.   And–just because it had to be, the story demanded it–much of it is in environments I have never personally experienced.   (Of course, the space-based stories are in environments I’ve never experienced, but not even our current astronauts have either, so…there’s more wiggle room.  Still research, but not likely to find someone who says “I served in an interstellar empire’s space navy and you’re completely wrong about the tactics of space warfare and not only that your conception of ship design is ridiculous.”

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Somebody’s going to ask “So why that story and not that other one you mentioned you were writing/had written?”   Some decisions were easy.  One of the Paksworld stories I was working on came to a halt, hooves stuck in the ground, back up in a hump, neck stretched out, ears flat and would. not. budge.   It’s not a failure to thrive: it’s a story telling me I made a mistake, that’s not how it goes, and it’s not going to cooperate until I take it where it wants to go.  But it won’t tell me.  Eventually, left alone out there in the pasture, it will come wandering up to my mental cabin, climb up the step to the porch, and stomp on the porch.  But it didn’t choose to do that before the time I had to have stories turned in, so…maybe next time.

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This post is the promised one about living with another kind of failure.  You wrote the story; you think it’s a good enough story to submit for publication; you give it one or several final polishes.   And all you get for the submission is a rejection.   Now what?

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Sometimes a story of any size starts…and then crumbles to dust, or lies down and refuses to move, or otherwise reveals itself as a failure.   I’m not talking about stories completed that never find a market (that’s another kind of failure, which I’ll talk about another time) but stories that you want to write–at least when you start.  Stories that are happy, gurgling, grinning infant stories, that may even get far enough to start crawling on their own–but develop what doctors call “failure to thrive” in spite of your best efforts.

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No better sign of a really live book than plotbombs, annoying as they are when they arrive as I’m trying to go to sleep because I have to get up early in the morning to be ready for the 8 am plumber, because R- will be somewhere between here and there picking up M from his apartment in the city to take him to the dentist in a city between here and there.  Why couldn’t the plotbombs have arrived at a decent hour, say 2 pm in the afternoon?  (I hear the plot daemon’s wicked chuckle over there behind the boiler…followed by a headshake and “Ye should be thankin’ me, lass, not complainin'”)

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