There was a discussion on sartorias ’ LJ some time ago about Elves in current fantasy. What makes them different than being “ordinary humans with magical powers”? This led to mentions of Elves being immortal. (I'd meant to get this written and posted for weeks, but better late than never.)

Now, one of the things that has always fascinated me is the huge differences between the experiences of immortality and mortality. And certainly, Tolkien’s choices in his works have something to do with my outlook. But I was always left feeling that he had not resolved the matter of what happened when an Elf had his or her body destroyed in some fashion. It wasn’t clear in Tolkien: there apparently was some sort of “reincarnation”, but it was not clear how it worked.

( So what does "Immortality" mean? )

Recently, I was reading the first chapter of a friend's current work-in-progress, in order to give her notes on it.

So, let me say that first off, I did like her story.  She is a good storyteller.

But something about the chapter nagged at me, because the descriptions felt flat.  On the one hand, it was clear to me that she has a sure vision of her characters and setting.  And the chapter was not lacking in the details.  But on the other hand, something just wasn't working.

( Read more... )

Last night, as I was getting ready for bed, I got an idea for something coming up in my novel.  I thought, "Oh, hey, that's an interesting idea.  I'll write it down in the morning."  Of course, you don't always remember in the morning things that occured to you late at night, especially just before sleeping.  Happily, I remembered that point too.  I went back into the living room, turned on the light, went to my desk and got out the notebook where I write down the odd out-of-sequence ideas that come to me about the current work.

I have to say that it is really, really tempting to explain the specifics of what this idea is, because the way it fits in with the story is very satisfying.  But, because I think it will make a particular moment in the story even more emotionally powerful, I don't want to spoil the surprise.

But I do want to talk about it generally.

( Read more... )

One of the things about creating a totally new fantasy world is that you don't want it to sound too much like "this world".  And I certainly didn't want to sound like I was copying Tolkien bit for bit.

Today, I was going along, working on some new text in The Ring of Adonel, moving the story forward, and I had a character say "I will go tell the lords."

And I stopped.

Because, the reality was that he was doing more than just talking to those the common folk would consider "lordly".  He was going to talk to the leaders of the three Fynlaren Houses.  One of which now is actually a woman.  And suddenly, I realized that I wanted a term that was not quite as laden with gender baggage as "lord".

So, I wanted a term that would refer to these specific characters as the principal figures of their "tribes".  And I didn't want it to be a really obvious borrowing from real world cultures.

After running through the thesaurus looking for possibilities, I decided to start mining Old Irish.  I'd studied it in graduate school, and have a grammar book, that glosses a lot of the vocabulary.  So I drew up a list of English words that had meanings that could be applied to the position under consideration: head, crown, leader, first, lord, one, master, rule, sight, voice, king.  As I grazed through the book, other possibilities of meaning suggested themselves: high, great, very great, highest, treasure, gift, I judge, holds fast, hero, forehead.  In the end, I went with one of the words for "high", ard, and a term for "prince", mal.  Combining them, I get ardmal (sing., with ardmalen for plural -- the "-en" ending for plurals has already been established).

Of course, after coming up with the term, I then had to go back through the manuscript as it stands and replace the terms.  Except that not every instance of "lord" is being replaced, because it is still used as a generic honorific.  And then, also, there's the decisions about when to capitalize it and when not to. 

I believe it's these little touches that are important to creating the sense of place, the sense of existence, of a fantasy world.  Especially for dealing with things that we don't have. 

It's also one of those things that I felt satisfied with. Probably a detail others won't be interested in, but there it is: today's achievement in my work.  :D

It's frustrating to be in a situation where I need to be writing - as in, if I want to make an income at it, I need to get the words down.  The job hunting in show business goes very slow (over-qualified for most listed jobs).  So, I feel I ought to be working on the projects that are most likely to provide a monetary return the soonest.

Unfortunately, my creative impulses aren't cooperating.  I suppose I could be more disciplined and just focus more clearly on the projects I want to get out first.  But I've been a bit too haphazard of late, not writing as much (working on other things, like Mythcon and household matters).  So I figured, I would just work on whatever thing had a stronger impulse when I sat down.

The result has been rather mixed.

One friend's reaction to my recent posts about my education was to suggest that I write a memoir.  I was at first dismissive, but the idea took root.  With the result that I laid out an outline, basically looking back at my life and how things shaped me towards becoming a writer.  I've even gotten so far as giving it a title, drawn from the intention I set for myself when I began my undergraduate career: Making Everything Count.  This has actually turned out to be an interesting exercise, as I find that many more things fed into my impulse to tell stories than I had previously thought.  But this is hardly likely to be a "serious money" project, and will take a deal of time to complete.  Still, it does prime the pump.

I have gotten some more work done on Godiva, which is good, because I do have hopes for it.  Hopes, but again, it's a long-term prospect.  It is surprising me a little bit.  For one thing, although my original intention had been to limit the points of view in telling the story (mainly to Godiva and Leofrich), the story is opening itself out.  I do try to keep the narrative focus very clear, however, and not shuffle between too many points of view within one chapter.  It is more work, though, since I have to get inside the heads of many more characters, from the 23 year old, egotistical king to the almost-15 year old daughter of the Earl of Mercia (who resents Godiva's arrival).

I have also been arranging materials for the next non-fiction project: Paper Movies: Adapting Screenplays to Graphic Novels. (Yes, I did take one friend's suggestion for the title.)  It's actually shaping up rather well, and a couple of friends in the comic book world have agreed to write some things for it: writer Chuck Dixon actually volunteered to write about the experience of adapting big screen scripts to comics (he's done a couple of these, such as Snakes on a Plane), and Colleen Doran, who I've asked to write about creators' rights on original properties (it's an important issue to her, and she has fought the battles to keep control of her own work, A Distant Soil.)  I still need to work on the outline for this book some more, and do some additional research.  But I'm hoping I'll have it in shape enough to start sending the proposal around to a couple of publishers (an advance would be very useful about now).  I also expect this will be a quicker book to write than some of my other projects.

I have been making some forward progress on The Ring of Adonel, but that does go much slower.  The story is moving into "new" territory for me, places I've only known about in my imagination, but haven't yet been. And there are some new characters coming up, and I'm finding that I'm feeling as if I'm about to meet important new people in real life. Weird.

What I really want to be working on is the short story, "The Beauty of Turbines", but it has been dancing just outside my focus / attention / discipline.  Last night, I sat down with every intention of working on it.  I even put on a CD of Strauss waltzes for inspiration.  And instead worked on Making Everything Count. 

There are, of course, other projects on the slate too: a couple of TV spec scripts (which I really should make top priority, but they won't stick there!), a feature script called Ice (involving diamond smuggling from Canada through Alaska, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers investigating), and a meditation on the Sermon on the Mount titled The Measure Dealt to Me (see the Feb. 2, 2009 entry).

As you can see, I have absolutely nothing to do.  I play games of solitaire and nurikabe to while away the time, trying to come up with ideas (actually, just procrastination in dealing with the ones already "active").

Still... I am stringing words together on various projects, which is better than not doing any writing at all.  But I could certainly use some prayers for focus (and income would be nice too -  :D).

I recently completed a chapter of The Ring of Adonel that had a goodly share of exposition (this is chapter 14).  Not only that, when I got into the writing, I realized that what on the outline was supposed to be one chapter was going to have to be split into two.  Part of it was that I had underestimated the time it would take the characters to get from Point A to Point B (as in averaging about 25 miles a day), so I had to write in stuff to fill the time (things that would happen anyway, I just thought some of it would be later).

Anyway, after finishing chapter 14, I started feeling anxious about the flow of the story.

You have to understand, most of the first part of the book was written years ago.  Then I got stuck at a major point.  Once I got past that point, I started moving into "new" parts of the story.  New in the sense that I haven't had it on the page before.  I've been thinking about the rest of the story a lot, but that's not the same thing as living with it on the page.

On top of that, it has been quite a while since I read the work straight through, the way a reader would.  I've reread sections, to refresh myself about character attitudes and discussions.  I've reread chapters doing revisions, correcting typos and tweaking sentences.  But all that is not reading the work for the story.

So, I decided that to help me move forward into the next chapter, and to find out if chapter 14 really is as "slow" as I was thinking it was, I needed to reread the whole to myself.  I'm reading it out loud.

The first thing that surprised me was that it really DOES move along nicely.  All these years, I'd been concerned by the first three chapters -- there are a lot of characters and relationships being introduced.  I'd wondered if they were slow.  Happily they are not.  I'm now up to chapter 10.

The main thing that struck me about doing this is how easily I can get removed from a sense of the whole when I'm working on the immediate portion of the story.  Yes, the "Big Picture" of the story sits there in the background, holding everything together.  But the nature and quality of the work previously done becomes almost invisible, because I'm so focused on making the immediate portion work. 

Another thing that struck me is that in the years since I began the story, my skills as a critic and editor have grown a lot.  And it pleases me to exercise those skills on my own work, and find that ... it is not bad stuff.  (Okay, I know every writer thinks that of their own work - we wouldn't be able to do it otherwise.  But I do feel the work is "good enough".)

These are encouraging things to find.  They energize me to keep going. When I have lots of projects on my slate, all in various stages of "production", it is too easy to get discouraged and shift to something else.  And I really want to finish this book at long last.  Reading the work aloud to myself is helping me keep on track for that.

I was sorting through some stuff today, determining what I could throw out, what could get packed up and moved to the storage unit, and what I wanted to keep at hand.  I ran across a box on an upper shelf in the hall cupboard, and pulled it down to check it.  Oooo, boy, am I glad I did!
( More about reading maps ). 

Since I got back from my trip, I've been doing some work on my fantasy novel, The Ring of Adonel.  Some of it has been typing onto the computer one chapter that had gotten skipped in typing (I do the first draft of the manuscript longhand).  Another part of it has been actually moving forward with the story - which is exciting, as the story had been stalled at one spot for quite a long, long time.

Anyway, in typing the skipped chapter, I've been very conscious of the over-use of two things.  Lots of sighs going on, and lots of references to eyes.

Gah.

Now, admittedly, the chapter in question deals with the aftermath of a murder, the grief and other emotions.  So on the one hand, it is natural that there would be a lot of sighing going on.  But when I start really noticing it, it's way too much.  I see a word search in my future, not just on this particular chapter, but on everything else.  Because if it's cropping up too much there, it might be doing so elsewhere as well.

As for the eyes bit, that's a bit more tricky.  As many have pointed out, J.K. Rowling uses "twinkling eyes" too much.  I can well understand the impulse to use the expression, especially since I'm tempted to it a lot myself.  And in the ordinary course of events, we do tend to feel that eyes are very expressive.  And in the case of my story, there is an additional factor that the appearance of the eyes has actual significance - in certain circumstances, it is indicative of the exercise of power, or of a particular state of existence.  That being the case, I will have to be very, very careful about references to eyes in "ordinary" circumstances.

It's one of those things that I start thinking of when I get beyond "just writing down the story".  Now that I'm back in gear in working on this novel, I'm also much more conscious of what will be needed to make it "publishing presentable".  But isn't that what they say about serious writing? That it's all about the REwriting?  Heh.

But finding that I have these two stumbling blocks in my prose, it makes me wonder about what other writers find themselves tripping over.  How about it?  What words to you find yourself using to the extent of terminal redundancy?

As I've been re-reading what is written of The Ring of Adonel, and working on the rewrites/polishes, I've also been thinking about some of the choices I made in the story. Particularly the scope of it.

 It seems there is a powerful impulse in fantasy writers to make the major conflict in their stories the most important clash of good versus evil that their world has ever seen. The Ultimate Confrontation with Evil. A total Save The World story, with the whole of the world as the stakes.

Now, it's not that this is necessarily a bad thing. There have been some good stories from such confrontations.

But....

What happens when the author finds that he or she wants to go back to that fantasy world? The heroes in the first story have already take out the Major Evil. So, isn't any evil figure that follows going to be a lesser one?

Tolkien got around this by having his Uber Bad Guys, Morgoth and Sauron, be (in effect) fallen angels, immortal and not such as could be completely destroyed by those born in Middle-earth. But not everyone goes to such lengths, and they have their heroes manage to destroy the Looming Evil.

And there's a really big problem when the apocalyptic fantasy involves prophecies as well. If all the prophecies are fulfilled in the original story, what the heck is going on when the author returns to visit the world? What does happen next? And why didn't anyone know that there might be something beyond the apocalyptic confrontation? Wheren't there any prophecies that apply to this new conflict, and why didn't anyone mention them the first time around?

So, some of these questions were part of what led me to shape my story as I did. Sure, my hero is indeed in a bit of a conflict with my Uber Bad Guy.  But this conflict does not involve the idea that my hero would ever be able to destroy or even severely diminish the Uber Bad Guy. And, actually, the main myth that underpins the whole of The Ring of Adonel will, in the end, explain why the Attondar (the major resident angelic Powers) do not engage in direct conflict with Caimcadar (the Uber Bad Guy).

But I still think about the problems that apocalyptic plotting can create for a writer. And basically, I didn't want to irritate my reading audience by having heroes win a complete victory over an Uber Bad Guy... and then come back with a sequel where I was asking them to believe that "Ooops, the victory wasn't quite as complete as they thought." , f

I've been nose-to-grindstone the last couple of weeks, working on getting the manuscript of The Scribbler's Guide to the Land of Myth (plug, plug!) ready for BookSurge to do their magic on it. So, working on my fantasy novel has been simmering quietly on a back burner. And it'll wait a bit longer. I'm almost done with the spell-check on The Guide, and then I need to beef up an outline for another project. But, I'm hoping in a few days to get back to it. 

Still... in the back of my mind, I've been mulling over a minor problem. What shall I call my created world? Tolkien called his "Middle-earth", but mine... isn't "middle" anything. 

I began writing my first fantasy novel in high school. Inspired mostly by Tolkien, actually. In the sense of ... it was reading Tolkien's work that nudged me into actively focusing my writing impulses on creating a fantasy world. I loved the work of many other writers, and over the years they have had major effects on me. But it was Tolkien that really stirred up the storyteller in me (which had already made some piffling attempts at writing).

So here I am slowly working my way through revising the completed chapters of The Ring of Adonel, and I find that I don't have chapter three completely typed into the computer. So I scrounge around for the manuscript to see how many pages have to be entered (I know it's not many). Now, you have to understand that I'm doing this during breaks from sorting papers and deciding what books to put into storage and get out of the apartment. So there are piles of things around. I hauled out a notebook that was the right size and sat down to skim the handwritten pages.

It wasn't The Ring of Adonel manuscript. 

Nope, instead, it was a notebook I used for developing some short stories. Mostly fragments of them, actually. Still, there are the early forms of the two comic book short stories I've gotten into print, "Tsalosha" (a fantasy set in a pseudo-Native American world of shapechangers) and "Zeus' Box of Deceit" (the Prometheus / Pandora myth). But there were other stories I'd forgotten about, or hadn't thought of in a long time. One of them I have been mulling over, to possibly turn into a graphic form, so it's handy to have this notebook turn up now. But there was another bit that intrigued me, but for the life of me I can't remember where I was going to take the story. I'm considering posting that fragment here later (like tonight, when I get home).

Still, it seems strange to run across these incomplete snippets of creativity.

I need to remotivate myself to get back on track on various creative projects. And there's nothing like "public exposure" to assist in that.

Much of the opening third of the book takes place on Midsummer. The ceremonies and mythology of the day are important to the story as a whole, which is the principal reason for that focus. The following poem was (inside the story) composed by Caoin Il-lyran (one of Darael's sons) for the celebration.

The last few months have been a process of disinterring both my life and my apartment. I babble about some of the spiritual matters connected with this process elsewhere on the Internet (at scribblerworks.blogspot.com).  Getting back into working on The Ring of Adonel has been part of that process.

Last night, I was moving some boxes of books to make way for a dresser I had just purchased from a neighbor who is moving out of the building. (I really needed the dresser!) And had to deal with a bunch of old matte boards, unused canvas boards, a large box that is storing some old paintings of mine. And I came up with two paintings I had completely forgotten.

Well, maybe I shouldn't say completely forgotten.

One of the things about being both a writer and an artist is that eventually, the artist gets an itch to draw something that the writer has written. Of all the possible scenes, characters, and events in The Ring of Adonel that appeal to me, however, I did not expect the first one to be the following one. Mainly because the character is quite fantastical.

But I've now done a preliminary sketch for an eventual pen & ink drawing. I'm not going to start on that for quite a while (at least, I don't think I will be). But it amuses me to put the sketch before you, my friendly readers. :)