I am not here. I am over at the jolly good Orbit blog posting on the subject of the short life expectancy of characters in The Godless World.
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People ask me questions. Which is nice. I try to answer them if I’ve got the time, but that’s a commodity that’s in rather short supply these days so I can’t always be as volubly responsive as I’d like. As a fair proportion of those questions tend to congregate around certain topics, I thought I’d try the bulk purchase approach, and offer up some answers to some of the more frequent queries here. We’re starting with some housekeeping-type questions today, but I promise to get to (possibly) more interesting writing-related stuff in a future episode. Onward!
The Social Networking Question. No, I’m not a member of the Twitterati, so you can’t follow me there. No, I don’t frequent LinkedIn or Myspace or a. n. other social network of your chocie, so you can’t connect with me there. Sorry. All that stuff is appealing, but it’s a prodiguous time sink which feels dangerously like doing real work without actually falling into that category. For now my social networking energies (not vast at the best of times, being the dour and reclusive soul that I quite obviously am) are fully occupied by this here blog and by Facebook. On the latter you are welcome to befriend me or befan the Godless World trilogy, the latter perhaps being the more highly recommended option since (a) the books are arguably more interesting and deserving of your affections than I am, and (b) you might benefit from one of the occasional giveaways hosted there (of which more might be in the imminent offing – I’m toying with some options for next month at the moment).
Will I Answer your Interview Questions? If you want to publish the interview in a blog, magazine, whatever, the answer is probably yes. Like most newish writers, anonymity is my deadliest foe, so I crave attention with much the same desperation as a starving man craves chocolate cake. If you can offer me eyeballs I will endeavour to offer you some answers. Can’t guarantee it, but if time permits I’ll certainly try. If you want to interview me for a school or college project (I never knew asking writers questions was such a popular project activity for students!) – the answer’s still probably yes, but that ‘probably’ is starting to take on strong ‘possibly’-like characteristics. It’d help if (a) there aren’t too many questions, and (b) they indicate that you actually know who I am and what I write and that you’ve put some thought into them. Even then, I might sometimes have to say no if my to-do list is getting ugly. Don’t hold it against me.
Will I Read Your Manuscript? That’s a very flattering question, given the implication that I might have something sensible to say about your book/story/whatever. I never object to being asked it. But the answer’s no. (Unless you’re an old and dear friend friend of mine in which case: maybe, if there’s a beer or two in it for me). There’s a whole unruly host of reasons why I must decline, of which that bugbear of ambition, time, is by far the most important. I mean, manuscript’s are big, you know? And my not exactly impregnable finances are dependent on me producing my own, not reading other folk’s.
Also, consider: You are no doubt a thoroughly pleasant, grounded, sensible sort who genuinely wants constructive criticism with a view to improving your manuscript. There is another sort – a very small minority, occasionally seen frequenting discussion boards here and there – who may think that’s what they want, but are actually in search of praise and validation above all else (such people, I’d suggest, are not the most likely candidates for future publication, but you already knew that, right?). They might not appreciate being told their manuscript is less than perfect (which it is – believe me, I know from personal experience that virtually no manuscript, including those that end up being published, qualifies for the description ‘perfect’). So although you’re not going to bite my head off, take a look at that person behind you in the queue for my notional free manuscript review service: don’t they look just a little wild-eyed, a little feverish, a little … too keen?
And honestly, what I think of your manuscript wouldn’t matter all that much. I like to think I can broadly tell the difference between technically competent and incompetent writing, but beyond that my opinion isn’t the one that counts to an aspiring writer. I’ll certainly have one, but like everyone, I read plenty of highly successful published books that leave me mystified as to what their appeal is, so what I think really doesn’t amount to a reliable guide to anything much. The opinions that matter are those of the agents, editors and publishers who control access to the sunlit uplands of commercial publication, and the only way to get their feedback is by submitting stuff to them (after you’ve revised said stuff to death, of course). You have to develop your own ability to assess your work, and getting rejected – or, joy of joys! – accepted by those people is, IMHO, while not the only way, certainly the most reliable way to sharpen that ability.
Here endeth the Q&A for today. More to follow in due course, including a brief meditation on one of the more interesting questions I’ve ever been asked: What Lies East of Anlane? On the off-chance anyone has specific questions they’d like to see me fumble around with, feel free to e-mail me, and if they’re of possibly wider interest, I’ll see if I can work them in to a future blog post.
One of the things I occasionally get asked is how I make up names for my characters. To which the answer, if you’re talking about secondary world fantasy like The Godless World, is: mostly I just make them up, playing around with sounds and letters in my head until something vaguely plausible (and roughly consistent with the other names I’ve already used) volunteers itself.
Generally speaking, I reckon it’s worth sticking with the idea of inventing your own names, even when the creative juices are flowing sluggishly, just because names are – or should be – a pretty important element of a story. They’re more than just badges: they can convey mood and character and cultural affiliation; they can create expectations in the reader’s mind that you can then confirm or subvert; they can carry symbolic and metaphorical weight.
Sometimes, though, I guess a little bit of external inspiration might help, and there’s a ridiculously large amount of it available.
You can just go the direct route and press a few buttons on a purpose-designed fantasy name generator (though with this, and all other methods I’ll mention, I’d suggest still tweaking any results to take proper ‘ownership’ of the names and make sure they fit your setting and story and intent).
Or if you’re looting real world cultures for a fantasy milieu, you can mine the rich and varied strata of baby name lists. They come in all flavours, whether you’re looking for Celtic influenced names, or Native American.
Or you could make the quest for names a rewarding and educational process in itself and immerse yourself in some weighty historical tomes. Personally, I’d recommend trying some Byzantine history, since it covers in excess of a thousand years and a whole load of different cultures, from Roman and Greek through Turkish and Armenian and Arabic. There’re some very fine names buried in there, let me tell you.
Or, and here we get to the thing that made me think about all this in the first place, you could put your faith in a weirder approach. I noticed a while back that the anti-spam comment filtering process on this, and presumably all other Blogger blogs, had subtly changed (unless it was always like this and I’d never noticed). When the software shows you some wobbly letters and asks you to repeat them back to it, those letters have started displaying a strange and appealing coherence. They are no longer random; instead, they’re clearly psuedo-words. Or, more relevantly, wannabe names.
Just by hitting the refresh button repeatedly, I harvested (amongst a few clearly unuseable tongue-twisters) the following list of what looks to me a lot like name seeds for fantasy characters: phathea, miculap, porev, potlycos, sches, speres, cysedi, incia. Now these are weird fantasy names, admittedly, but there’s potential there. I particularly like Porev, Sches and Cysedi as starting points for some name play, myself.
Not what the designers had in mind, obviously, but I’ve no doubt the cockles of their heart are warmed by the thought that they might unintentionally offer aid to the desperate and despairing fantasy writer in his or her hour of name-blocked need.
Earlier this week I spent a pleasant hour or two in the company of the students who make up Strathclyde University’s Writers’ Society, inflicting upon them some of my experiences, views and prejudices regarding the whole writing thing. I’ve done this kind of thing a handful of times now, and so far it’s always proved enjoyable. I can report that our nation’s students – at least the aspiring writers amongst them – are a fine body of folk. (But when did they get to be so young? More to the point, when did I get to be so old? Surely it was only a year or two ago that I was a student myself … oh, wait. Maybe it was rather longer than that … don’t think about it. Ignore the harsh realities of time’s passing. If you don’t pay it any attention, it’s not really happening …)
Some universities, it has to be said, benefit from the wisdom of writers rather more … well, rather more consequential than me. Here, for your Friday viewing pleasure is a whole half hour of a speculative fiction legend talking about his craft at Point Loma Nazarene University. Take it away, Ray Bradbury:
As promised in the last post here, some brief details on the new book I’m writing. Yes, the fine folks at Orbit, in their infinite wisdom, seem to feel that the world could withstand further literary output by yours truly. (I say wisdom, but it might just be some ghastly administrative error on their part, of course. No matter. They signed the contract, so they’re stuck with me now).
The working title (and so far everyone, including me, seems to quite like it, so I imagine it’ll probably survive all the way through to publication) is The Edinburgh Dead. The setting is, as you might guess, Edinburgh; specifically, Edinburgh in the first half of the 19th century. Since I write fantasy rather than history, though, it’s not quite as simple as that.
I’m taking some gruesome and rather famous aspects of Edinburgh’s past and spicing them up a bit with veteran warriors, magical conspiracies, killers both human and decidedly not, desperate combat and sinister goings-on in general. In short, it’s a dark, heroic fantasy set in 19th century Edinburgh. With swords and gaslamps.
As for publication date – because I know someone will ask about that sooner rather than later – I can’t say exactly, but I’ll be delivering the manuscript next year and barring exceptional circumstances it takes at least nine months, more likely something approaching twelve, to go from that point to publication. So you can do the math yourselves.
I’m having a lot of fun working on this so far. It’s a stand alone novel, and that makes a very pleasant change after turning out a hefty trilogy like The Godless World. I’ll no doubt report back here on the creative process and progress (watch out for that mid-book slump of despair and self-doubt!), but I’ll leave it there for now. Got stuff to write.
There is, however, something to see over at Dark Wolf’s Fantasy Reviews, where I’ve hijacked the blog briefly to make a guest post.
So there’s this book tournament going on see, over at bookspotcentral. It’s a knockout deal, and Bloodheir’s in the first round - but going no further unless it gets the votes! So should anyone happen to be a member over there, maybe voting for Bloodheir might be a possibility? Not saying you have to, just saying … you could. You know. If you wanted. If you’ve nothing better to do.
Arguably better to do would be browsing a fun website for writers, aspiring or otherwise, and readers and viewers come to that: tv tropes. It’s got seriously extensive lists and descriptions for all kinds of themes and conventions that show up in fiction of all sorts, not just TV writing. Handily organised into sub-categories, too, including one devoted to speculative fiction. Hours of diverting browsing. Plus it’s a wiki, so the whole thing’s user generated and edited.
And many a true word is spoken in jest. In support of which contention I direct you towards this instalment of Penny Arcade.
Call me a grumpy, glass-half-empty, misanthrope of a worrier, but I fear, in my bones, that the Hollywood machine is about to chew up one of my (and a great many other people’s) favourite ever sf books, Hyperion by Dan Simmons.
Little snippets of info about the planned film adaptation have been turning up here and there for quite a while, with the most recent batch – which plunged me into my current gloomy apprehension – showing up on the invaluable sf signal blog.
It’s not so much the naming of the potential director that alarms (I’ve never heard of him, my movie director geek fu being much shrivelled in recent years – although a quick check of the IMDb doesn’t suggest my ignorance is exactly appalling). It’s the distant sound of the butcher’s knives being unsheathed as another genre classic heads into the studio slaughterhouse. It’s The Dark is Rising all over again. (And we all know how that turned out, right?).
It would take, I suspect, a genius to cram Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion into a single movie without pounding into a homogenous pulp much of what is distinctive and accomplished about them as novels: the Canterbury Tales mosaic of overlapping stories that flesh out the world and the characters, the literary allusions, the wanton firework display of exotic ideas and images, the balancing of extreme violence with much more personal, somewhat philosophical and existential, struggles. Seems pretty probable that the worries expressed over at sf signal – that the Hollywood instinct will be to excise much of the subtlety and elegance to turn it into a more accessible, action-packed event movie – will prove accurate. And I love me some accessible, action-packed event movie fun, it’s just I don’t particularly want it marching under the Hyperion banner.
I guess it’s the nature of things, given the huge cost of getting this stuff to the screen, but it always makes me wonder why the movie moguls don’t just go for more of the (equally high-selling, surely) flash-bang-wallop type of books in the first place. You’d think the less reductive surgery required to turn the original text into a movie, the greater the chance of a positive outcome. That’s probably my hopeless naivety talking, though. It likes to make itself heard now again. Shameless, it is.
On any entirely different subject, I’m going to work up a couple of blog posts in the not too distant future talking about writing-, book- and getting published-related stuff, taking as a starting point some of the questions folks have asked me by e-mail, over on Facebook, or in person (poor misguided souls, asking questions of me, but there you are). So just in case anyone’s got any questions of that ilk, now’s your chance to send me an e-mail, or ask it in the comments to this post, or head on over to the Facebook discussion board and ask it there; I’ll add anything new into the pot and stir it around for a while. Like porridge.
… breaking blog silence, briefly, for this update.
… writing! Fall of Thanes is making its way through the publication process (still seems to be on course for a summer 2009 release date – early summer, at that), so my attention turns elsewhere: to short stories, specifically. One of 2008′s nicer surprises was being invited to contribute stories to a couple of upcoming anthologies. Nice, but a bit scary. Writing short stories is hard.
…reading!
Books:
Infoquake by David Louis Edelman. First sf book I’ve read that’s essentially a corporate boardroom thriller. Only about halfway through it, but so far it’s interesting and feels at least somewhat original, which is (almost) always a good thing.
World War Z by Max Brooks. Subtitle is an ‘Oral History of the Zombie War’. Seriously clever idea: the story of the zombie apocalypse, told as if it’s non-fiction through transcripts of interviews with those who witnessed and survived the struggle.
Comics:
Or graphic novels, I suppose, since I only ever read this stuff in collected trade paperback format nowadays.
Umbrella Academy is an sfnal superhero romp, with robots, apocalyptic music, time travel, sentient chimps and a hero whose head has been grafted onto the body of a space gorilla. Very well written (despite the fact its author is considerably better known as a musician), and with great art. It feels full of excitement at the freedom offered by the medium, and is positively wanton in its flinging about of crazy ideas and striking images.
Scalped is quite a contrast. A crime story set in a modern day Native American community, it’s stuffed with brutal violence, spectacularly bad 
language, sex, drugs, local and cultural politics and messed up relationships. Very definitely not for kids (or easily offended adults). The characters, setting and tone are interesting enough to make me want to read more.
One thing about both these comics that appeals to me is that they keep their plot and character cards quite close to their chest. They both very deliberately create the sense that they have a hinterland, as yet unrevealed, of plot and history and setting, and there is an implied promise that we will be digging deeper, peeling back layers, in future volumes. I like that.
… listening!
To tales of financial armaggedon on the NPR Planet Money podcast. An accessible, often illuminating and occasionally even amusing, guide to the ongoing implosion of the world’s financial system. It’s like watching/listening to a slow motion car crash in which an endless succession of security vans laden with our money plough into one another and explode, incinerating their contents. Boom! There goes another billion. Smash! Yes, that’s your pension turning to ash …
…admiring Julian Beever’s 3D pavement drawing!
Go check out his remarkable online gallery. Seems ludicrously, almost indecently, clever to me.
… in awe of the ruthlessness and efficiency of Nature!
A sparrowhawk killed a pigeon in the back garden not so long ago, and spent close to an hour sitting on the grass right outside the window methodically dismantling its victim. The pigeon was plucked and devoured with awesome precision, and its remains were then carried off, leaving just a near-perfect circle of feathers, a few strands of gut and a bizareely neat and tidy little pile of corn, presumable decanted from its crop. The corn was soon gone, eaten by other birds – pigeons, as likely as not – picking it out from amongst the remains of their late colleague. That’s recycling for you. No room for sentiment out there in Red-in-Tooth-and-Claw World.
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