Ragged Feathers

*clears throat*

Angel Town, the last of the Jill Kismet series (for now) is now shipping from Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, and Amazon.

She wakes up in her own grave. She doesn’t know who put her there, she doesn’t know where she is, and she has no friends or family.

She only knows two things: She has a job to do: cleansing the night of evil. And she knows her name.

Jill Kismet.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be hunched in a corner shaking, as is my usual wont on release days. You’d think they would get easier to handle, but no–I feel the same fierce anxiety each time.

Over and out!

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

It is just way too bright and sunny today. And it’s a good thing I’m damn stubborn, or I would have quit after three miles today and not had that awesome endorphin-kick runner’s high. Not to mention the drift of honeysuckle, the cheerful “good morning”s from other runners–I content myself with a “Morning!” in return, because I can’t be cheerful while struggling to stay upright and moving. I would have also missed having the shaded park all to myself for a few glorious circuits. That was nice.

So, announcements!

* If you’ve ever wondered how Selene returned to Saint City, you can read the brand-new Selene and Nikolai story, Just Ask in the upcoming Mammoth Book of Hot Romance.

* Also upcoming is Reckoning, the final book in the Strange Angels series. The end of August will see a bindup of bboks one and two, Strange Angels and Betrayals with an all-new, lovely cover.

* November will also see the final Jill Kismet book, Angel Town.

* You can now buy all five of the Dante Valentine novels in one smoking-hot omnibus. (Personal demon not included, sorry.) Also, Graphic Audio has released parts one and two of Working For The Devil, I believe part 1 of Dead Man Rising is also available.

* I will be attending SpoCon in August. Not quite sure what my schedule will look like, but I’ll be there on panels etc. I will also be at the Cedar Hills Crossing Powells annual SF/F Authorfest in ?November?, more details on that as it gets closer.

* There’s an interview with me up over at the Gatekeeper’s Post.

* I can’t really talk about this yet, but it’s up on Amazon. Tempty tempty.

* A big “welcome home” shout-out to TP, back from the wilds of Europe. *evil wink*

…I’m sure there’s something I’ve forgotten, but I haven’t even finished my coffee yet, so forgive me. Off I go to find a name that means “a hunter” for a wooden garden-boy. He wants Calhoun, but I’m not sure he should have it. He’s not the protagonist, so he doesn’t really get what he wants as far as names.

Damn characters. Over and out.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames, where there’s advice, giveaways, or cool things every day.

It’s time for another Friday writing post! I promised I’d talk about fight scenes, didn’t I. Well…it turns out I have more to say about action scenes than I thought, so I’m going to break it up over a couple Fridays. Today I’ll be talking about why you would possibly want to beat the shit out of your characters.

*pause, evil smile*

It’s not just because it’s fun. Or because one is sadistic. (Although those are considerations.) There are several reasons why you might possibly have to write a fight scene.

* Raising the stakes. There’s nothing quite like fisticuffs or a blaster battle to tell the reader that things are Getting Real, or Getting Desperate. There’s nothing like a surprise attack for making two characters who might loathe each other realize they have common cause. Pacing and tension pull a reader through a story, and several little crises along the arc of tension keep a reader interested. If you are not raising the stakes throughout your story, how are you planning on holding the reader’s interest? Sure, raising the stakes can be done in other ways…but a good fight is sometimes the best way.

* Breaking a character. When I set out to write a Jill Kismet book, part of the process is figuring out just how to break her. How physically tired and miserable I can make her, how far I can push her, and what a person’s mind and body does under that sort of strain. I’ve written before about how fascinated I am with the mechanisms of the human mind and body and how they react to extraordinary situations, how the mind breaks down or is reinforced by training. (If you’re interested, a good place to start researching might be Grossman’s On Combat.) I don’t think you really know a character until you break them, and I am perennially fascinated by the question of endurance and why and how some people endure.

Without risk, no reward, for the character or the reader. Pushing a character toward (or over) the edge, especially when that character is the reader’s point of entry into the story, makes the risk higher and the reward, when it comes, that much sweeter.

* Because life isn’t fair. Life is not all rainbows and ponies and butterflies. Bad things happen. Every human being knows that sometimes, shit just happens. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but it’s the way it is. Art is a way of transforming the world, and a lot of the impetus for art, for that transformation, is the fact that the world is messed-up and sometimes shit happens. Being relatively honest about this fact will give your story depths it might not otherwise possess. If there is no real risk, if you create a world on the page where everything is fair and there are no real consequences…well, you can write that story, you have a perfect right to, but I prefer not to. Writing that sort of story doesn’t feel real to me, and reading that sort of story doesn’t generally set me on fire.

* Unresolved issues. This is a tricky subject to talk about gracefully. Sometimes, writing a combat scene can help a writer process a trauma. For example, a few Decembers ago I was in a car accident (twisty road, dark and rainy, a deer with a death wish, voila) and it gave me fuel for nightmares (never a huge trick) until I wrote a car-crash scene or two. Something about writing that helped my brain and heart say, okay, that was awful, but it’s over and we can put it on this shelf now.

I’ve had some dreadful experiences, and writing has been a chain to pull me through the soup of nasty lingering trauma plenty of times. Exorcising my demons on the page hasn’t always been fun, but it works. And afterward, those experiences became much less scary for me to think about, because (this is my personal theory, YMMV) I had exercised control over them through transmuting them into words, and I had found a meaning in them. (Thank you, Viktor Frankl.)

* Pacing and practice. You may need to speed a story up, get its heartrate revving and build momentum for the big finish. Alternatively, you may want to trip your character and send them sprawling so you can get a word in edgewise and slow things down. Both are things a fight scene can do. Fiddling with a book’s pacing is largely a matter of practice, and combat scenes are great practice for both for intra- and interscene pacing, as well as overall.

There are other reasons you might want to kick the everloving hell out of your characters. But only one more bears mentioning, and it is the single most compelling reason. All the other reasons are in addition to this precondition, without which there is no combat scene:

* The story requires it. It’s nice to have combat scenes and they’re fun to write. But, just like sex scenes (which, I suppose, a lot of the same skill set for writing combat could be used for), they must be germane to the plot.

Here is an Ideal Law of Writing Well: every piece of dialogue/sentence/paragraph/chapter/section/book must ideally do three things: build character, give the reader a sensory cue, and move the plot along. I call this an “ideal” law because it’s something to aim for even though we live in an imperfect world and are working with imperfect tools. (If you can manage to do at least two of the three necessary things consistently at the sentence level and above, you’re a frickin’ genius and you don’t need any bloody advice from me. I’ll probably read your books and weep with grinding envy.) It will not always be possible to do this, but (especially when you are revising) this is a wonderful clarifying concept to keep in mind.

A combat scene is no different. It must give the reader sensory cues, it must show us something about the characters, and it must also move the plot along. If it’s just thrown in for the hell of it, or thrown in the wrong place, or shoehorned in because “all these types of books have to have a combat scene”, the scene (no matter how beautifully written) has a virtual certainty of failing for the reader. We don’t want that. We want to maximize the reader’s chances at every turn. So first, critically and crucially, before you write that combat scene, take a second to think about if it’s necessary and what kind of pacing you’re trying to accomplish.

You are the best judge of this while you’re writing. If you’re going hot and heavy and a fight scene falls out of your head, don’t sweat it. Take it as a gift and move along. If you decide you need a combat scene but haven’t the faintest idea of where to begin, don’t lose hope. Next week we’re going to talk a little bit about what a good combat scene consists of.

Can’t wait. Over and out.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

I literally have not stopped running since I climbed out of bed this morning. I even braved the post office, picking up a package–now there was an inspiring moment. Everyone was quiet, calm, smiling, and well-behaved. Considering that most trips to the post office during the holiday season are brutal survival-of-the-fittest scrums, I felt lucky to witness a half hour of strangers standing in line and making small talk, grinning at the antics of a small child, and actively helping other people out.

Today is for beating on a zero draft to finish getting it in respectable shape. I already know two major changes I have to make, but they were things I suspected would end up changing when I wrote them, so I’m not stressed. The most difficult part of this is saying goodbye to characters that have occupied my headspace for multiple years now. That part is never easy, especially when one suspects one could have told their story better, if one had just known.

Anyway, I finally managed to eat something and get some more coffee down, and now I have a whole afternoon to spend in the laborious process of revising and bidding farewell. I probably won’t cry until I get closer to the end.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’m going to be a leaky spigot. Fetch me the Kleenex and pay no attention to the sobbing. This is still the greatest job in the world.

Over and out.

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That’s right, it’s the release week for the fifth Jill Kismet book, Heaven’s Spite.

To celebrate, I’ll be giving away three signed copies, over at the Deadline Dames. I regret that I can only ship inside the US, but that’s the way things are. To make it even, I’ll also be giving away a $20 Amazon gift certificate. And what must you do to win these wonderful prizes?

Simple! Just comment on this Deadline Dames post by midnight on Sunday, October 31 (the witching hour on Samhain, even). But not just any old comment, please. You can give your favorite quote, give a Dame a compliment, tell us your favorite Halloween candy or spooky story. The winners will be picked with the help of Random.org, and I may pick a special prize for originality. You never can tell.

I’ll announce the winners next Friday, and (I promise! I promise!) will have the long-awaited next Process Post then.

Thank you for reading! I’m very excited that Jill’s next adventures are out in the world.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames. Check us out!

You can see the pictures from last night’s Educator Appreciation shindig here; many thanks to Jason of Bluewater Comics for manning the camera! He makes a great paparazzo. I got a chance to hang out with Darren Davis of Bluewater as well, who is just the most darling and scorchingly funny man since Mark Henry. (Which is high praise, believe me.)

In other news, the building that houses our very own favorite indie bookshop, Cover to Cover, caught fire yesterday. Smedley the cat is fine and currently lounging at his summer home well away from the hustle and bustle, none of our employees were hurt, and we’ll be working on getting things squared away over the next few months. It’s a hell of a thing, and if there’s a call for help from C2C I’ll pass it along here.

Last but not least, I am pleased and proud to announce that today I horked up a big 6K chunk of wordage…and finished the zero draft of Angel Town, the final Jill Kismet book. It needs work before I can turn it in as a reasonable first draft, but I have time to do that now before deadline. Which is a huge relief to me.

That’s a part of process I’m going to talk about today, but very briefly because my brain is dry and squoozled. My deadline for this book is two and a half months away, but I need that time for revision and was stressing over getting a zero draft out in time. Part of process is learning what you need in order to turn in publish-quality work, which is not just the first draft that claws its way out of your cerebellum and lands squalling and bloody on your laptop. It pains me to ask for the month of padding I generally need to let a work rest before I can go back and hammer it into first-draft form. There’s always the temptation to bow to the pressure of getting it in sooner, which naturally editors like. Compounding this difficulty is the natural aversion I have to saying “no”.

I’ve learned that a little discomfort when one is negotiating deadline dates is well worth the feeling of having enough time.

I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to get this book finished, ever. That’s also a part of my process–that long trudge three-quarters of the way through the book, when it seems like the damn thing will not die no matter how much you stab it, that you’ll be writing this forever, that every ounce of your brain is squeezed dry and it’s an unfinishable monster, you’ll miss your deadline, it’s all crap, GOD THE WORLD WILL END AUGH!

The only cure I have found for this is putting my head down and bitching and moaning while I plow straight through. Discipline is essential.

At some point, I will hit a dry spot where I can only produce a couple hundred words a day, but I’ll go back and tighten what’s happened before. This phase frustrated me to no end before I realized it was my engines winding up for the big push. Because sooner or later, after a couple weeks of frustration, suddenly I’m catapulted forward and I’ll have a string of 6-10K days. This won’t stop until I hit the end of the book, at which point I sit there, blinking, and have to shake my head and stare some more to verify that I have, indeed, finished the zero draft.

The first few times, the dead spot in the middle and the frustration phase literally reduced me to tears. I thought I was Doing It Wrong. It wasn’t until it dawned on me that this had happened with every book I’d finished that I started to treat it as just a normal part of the process, for me.

This does not ameliorate the pure frustration or the tooth grinding. It just makes me less likely to give up.

I keep promising you guys process posts, and this one is rather short, but I suspect lots of other writers (or creators) have the same frustration, perhaps at different points in the arc. It might help the tender new writers–or even the slightly more grizzled–to know someone else suffers it too. So, my dears, do you have a similar frustration point, and if you do, where does it occur?

And now I need to go soak my poor head in a bucket. Tune in next week for more SquirrelTerror, and another Process Post!

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames. Check us out!

I’ve finished somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty books. A good proportion of those are on the shelves. Yet, every time I sit down to write, it’s still a struggle. I still have the long shoal of “nobody will like this, it’s going to be shit, everyone will hate me” and the “Oh GOD why won’t this BOOK just DIE stabstabstab” and the terrible nerves before every release and the same jolt of pain when I read an awful review. I keep thinking time will mute the sting or that I’ll figure out how to do this whole thing without the emotional cost, but so far, I haven’t.

I wonder if any writer ever does. Certainly none of the ones I’ve spoken to have ever admitted it to me.

The last Kismet book has been a slog so far. It broke free this week, and I have the sense of accumulating momentum which means I am going to finish, which I’d spent some terrible hours laying in bed in the dead of night doubting. During the day I’m much too busy to doubt, but sometimes at night…well, the night always has teeth. Every single book I’ve finished, published or not, I have doubted it. I doubted when I started, I doubted after the first flush of enthusiasm wore off and the slog set in, I doubted when I finished, I doubted while my agent read it, I doubted while the editors read it, I doubted through every fucking revision and I doubt now.

This is a huge part of the reason why, when I am asked to give advice, I begin and end with write every day.

I point out things like John Scalzi’s excellent Writing: Find The Time, Or Don’t of Suzanne Johnson’s Excuses, Excuses: Writer’s Block because I think they are good advice. Often, I am depressingly unsurprised at the number of comments such essays receive along the lines of, “But what about XYZ, which means some people don’t have TIME? You’re being unfaaaaair!” Or the ever-popular comment where someone takes what could be a good respectable daily wordcount and wastes it whining about how they don’t have time to write, but they have time to show the author of an essay the Error Of Their Ways. Or the “of course YOU have time to write, it’s your JOB!” I wish someone would have told me that when I was desperately working my ass off and going to school, writing in minute chunks filched from job, study, and sleep. It would have been nice to know that was optional instead of the struggle for survival I mistook it for.

I write every day because I must. (And partly because I’m afraid of what would happen to my brain if I didn’t.) The everyday habit gave me the stamina to get through my first finished book, and my second, and every other of the thirty-odd and counting. But it also did something incredibly important: it taught me about my process.

My process shares some commonalities with other writers’ processes, while being unique as every writer’s is. But at least I know what it is, now. It was a damn sight harder to finish a book when I couldn’t look at the other ones I’d finished and say, oh yeah, I remember this part where I think it fucking sucks and nobody will ever want it and I feel like crying. Yeah. I remember–this isn’t the end of the world–it’s a stage in the process. I’ll get over it. Those first few books were literally murder. The first time I finished a book and had a week of emotional wind-down I thought I was going insane. The second, I’d forgotten all about the first–but by the third, I was starting to grasp the fact that there was an emotional cost to what I was doing, and I needed time to deal with the snapback. Which means today, I can schedule in time for the snapback to occur, and let it happen.

Just like I can tell myself, of course you feel like you want to quit. You always do at this part of the process. Keep going.

I am a firm believer in the truism that one doesn’t know how to write a novel, one can only guess how to get through the novel one’s writing now. Each one’s different. But thankfully, the process will begin to be clear to you, and that process tends to change much more slowly than the novels do. Your own general process for successfully finishing a novel (or a short story, an essay, a poem, what have you) is something you can plan for, anticipate, fine-tune, and generally learn how to work your way around.

But you can’t do that anticipating if you don’t know your process, you cannot know your process if you don’t finish anything, and you stand a much better chance of finishing something if you write every day. I say every day, knowing full well that for experienced writers there may be days off, when the mental work of building the story is happening but not much occurs with the fingers on the keyboard. I say every day, knowing full well that I could be wishy-washy and say “regularly” and hopefully avoid some of the “but I CAN’T!” that seems to pop up in the comments of posts like this. I say “every day” even though I know as soon as I say it, someone will pipe up with “but my process is different and I’m published!” and that’s OK. I say “every day” even though I know, my God do I know, Life Happens, things happen, and you may be called away from writing by an emergency.

I say this because if one says, “Write regularly” you can write once every six months and consider that “regularly” and you might die of old age before you get close to producing publishable work. I say it because I consider it to be the reason why my career is as (moderately) successful as it is. I say it because I consider that discipline crucial if you want to write for a living. I say it because I can have the rule of “write every day” and have occasional Emergencies that I am flexible enough to accommodate, but the needle of habit, discipline, and need gets me back up on the horse as soon as possible after the dust has cleared. Telling myself “write every day” is a foundation that makes it possible for me to even recognize I have a process.

Next week I’m going to talk a little more nuts and bolts about my particular process. But I want it to be absolutely clear that I consider the commitment to everyday writing as a precondition to recognizing one has a process early enough for it to do any bloody good. I firmly and fervently believe that writing every day gives you the chance to find your process before you get frustrated and decide you’d rather do something else with your time. Which is fine and well and good if that’s what you choose, but if I can point out a stumbling block and what I think is the best way around it, well, I will.

So. That’s out of the way. Next week, we’ll get nitty-gritty about just what my process entails.

Over and out.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

I have very little to say for myself, being occupied in sorting out the tangle that Angel Town wants to turn into. So, three random things on a Thursday:

* Note to self: don’t ever buy cheap Q-tips again. You will regret it for MONTHS. It’s worth a couple extra cents to get the cottony goodness. Apparently Q-tips will be joining the short list of Things I Try Not To Skimp On, which also includes toilet tissue, coffee, and enrichment materials for the kids.

* I am at the stage where I just have to keep repeating, “You always feel the book is total crap at this point. Work through it. Put your head down and go through. You can’t fix what you don’t write.” Of course, the signs that I’m at this stage include staring blankly at the monitor, a sudden overwhelming urge to do housework, frequent rounds of whispered cursing, the urge to listen to the book’s soundtrack over and over while I’m running, and the frequent despairing thought that perhaps I should change careers. Go back to school and be a plumber or a paralegal or something. That thunking sound you hear is me hitting the desk with my head. Repeatedly.

* Our cats have gone insane. It’s like they’ve never seen rain or squirrels before, though this is impossible because they’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest all their lives. I can only surmise that they are two-marble beasts–they can only hold two marbles in their head at once. For example, the locations of the food bowl and litterboxes. If you try to shove something else in–like the idea that there is, yes, a screen that is ALWAYS pulled to at the sunroom door, or that windows are solid–one other marble, say the location of the food dish, will fall out, and crazed leaping and OMGWTFBBQLLAMA will occur. Therefore, the only marbles EVER in their furry little heads heads are the food bowl and the litterboxes, and anything else is a perpetual surprise.

I consider this an exciting, if terribly nervous, way to live. And I know I shouldn’t laugh at them, but I can’t help it.

Anyway. I’m going back to slugging away at Angel Town. One of the cats is perched in the window right now, staring at a squirrel in the front yard and making that throaty little oh please oh please sound in the back of his throat. He’s going to leap in a few minutes, hit the glass, slide down, then give me a filthy look as if I’m to blame.

Of course, I will be laughing too hard to care.

Peace out.

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Wednesday. Which means link salad. Especially since I’m sunk in the book, and resenting anything that pulls me away from it.

* This song was in my head this morning. It’s uncannily apposite. (White Nights is one of my favorite movies. Baryshnikov’s ballon is just so…and he’s just so…whew. And Gregory Hines! *fans self*)

* Philip Palmer’s SF Song of the Week!

* Author Solutions wants to be seen as a Real Publisher instead of a scam. I am skeptical, to say the least.

* Jim Hines on Remedial Publishing Math.

* The Damiversary is still going on, with tons more prizes and giveaways!

* And a kind Reader linked me to the first Jill Kismet book in German. Isn’t that cover gorgeous?

I have some good news and some more covers, but I have to wait before I can share. In the meantime, enjoy the link salad. Off I go to hit the treadmill and plan out the next few critical scenes…

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You can win a copy of Strange Angels over at the Library Lounge Lizard. (Just one of those sentences I never thought I’d type. Wow.)

Really I am very boring today. There is not much to report. So here, have a few links:

* The Symphony of Science, or Carl Sagan rocks the Universe. The videos made me cry. We do indeed live on a wondrous planet in the middle of a wondrous universe. Anyone who is bored has only to look at their own hand, or barring that, out their window. There is stuff to be interested in all over.

* Maria Geraci on “why read things that offend you?” Here’s the germ of it:

I guess what I’m trying to say is that stories are about real people. And real people (especially single men and women in their 20’s and 30’s and beyond) have sex, occasionally cuss and do other assorted things/behaviors that you’d find in any movie/TV series out there. Here’s another big shocker: Teenagers also have sex and use profanity! Maria Geraci

* Hivelogic’s Podcast Equipment Guide. I keep thinking I’ll do some podcasting one of these days, maybe when the kids are in school and I have some time and quiet.

Yeah, time and quiet. Why are you laughing? It could happen.

* Kit Whitfield, on how submissions are like dating. Hilarious, and full of no-nonsense advice and information.

You say: ‘I know you don’t usually accept unsolicited manuscripts, but please, just have a look at this.’
Dating equivalent: ‘I know you’re married, but please, just go out with me once.’ Kit Whitfield

*snort* *giggle* *choke* *guffaw*

In other news, I’m thinking of putting together a new section for the website, where I’ll list the “soundtracks” to all the books. It will be a Project, and an enjoyable one. Once I finish the current Jill book (hit 50K last night, huzzah!) I’ll look into that. If, of course, there’s interest. Would anyone care to hear about the songs I put together for, say, the Valentine series? The Watcher books didn’t get a soundtrack, but pretty much everything else has. Drop me a line in the comments if you’d be interested in that section on the site, mmmkay?

Last but not least: Tzia, thanks for pointing out I’d forgotten to link to Borders. I’ve fixed that. And to Maria from Russia, thank you for your kind letter. It is very good to know one’s work has made someone else happy. I don’t mind your questions, even though I can’t answer a lot of them–I am just thrilled that you’ve read the books so deeply as to have those questions. Thank you very much.

And now I bid you a civil adieu. I’ve got Perry strapped into an iron frame and Jill standing there with a flechette. Methinks this is about to get interesting.

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