Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
I have landed at Clockwork Alchemy. (Technically, I arrived yesterday). In 11 minutes, I am appearing on a panel on Real Women in the Victorian Era, even though it is not listed on my personal schedule.
Oh, and I almost forgot: this is my very first booth of my own!
More in a bit…
-the Centaur
This Memorial Day weekend, I will be at the Clockwork Alchemy conference, appearing on three panels (Real Women in Victorian Times Saturday at noon, Avoiding Historical Mistakes Sunday at noon, and Victorian Technology, Sunday at 1) and giving one talk (my old standby, The Science of Airships, Sunday at 4).
Since I won't be at my table the whole time, I decided to print up a series of postcards for all of my books using the service at Moo.com, which I and my wife have found to be great for printing customized business cards with a variety of artwork on the cover. I decided to do one for each book, showing the cover on one side and a blurb on the back.
But then I discovered that, just like for the business cards themselves, while you can have many different covers on the front, you get only one choice for the back. So what should go on that single back cover? What should it market? Then I realized: I don't have a book coming out right away. These cards actually have to market … me.
Ulp.
More precisely, the cards have to market my work. But I'm not a single-series author; I can't (yet) pull a George R. R. Martin and just say "author of Game of Thrones," especially not at a steampunk convention when my most prominent series, Dakota Frost, is actually urban fantasy. "Anthony Francis, author of Dakota Frost - who? Author of what? Ok, fine … but why is he here?"
So I have to list not just one series, but all of them, and not just list them, but say what they're about.
After some thought, I decided to use some of my own comic art that I'd previously used on my business cards as a backdrop, but to focus the content of the cards on my writing, not my comics (sorry, f@nu fiku and Blitz Comics … there just wasn't enough room on the cards or poster), unifying all of my books under a theme of "The Worlds of Anthony Francis". I feel like breaking out in hives when I write that. It sounds so damn aggrandized and pompous. But strictly speaking … it's accurate.
One of my worlds is the fantastic space of the Allied universe, where genetically engineered centaurs hop from world to world like skipping stones in the river (collected in the anthology STRANDED). Another is the hyper-feminist alternate history steampunk adventures of Jeremiah Willstone (collected in the anthologies UnCONventional and DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME). And yet another is the world of Dakota Frost, Skindancer, and the magic tattoos she can bring to life (FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK, and the forthcoming LIQUID FIRE). And I hope you choose to read all of them! Enter the worlds, indeed.
But if I want people to read them, I need to tell people about them, in terms that make people, I dunno, actually want to read the books. Normally it's a publisher who writes that copy, but they're generally marketing a book, not me. I don't yet have a publicist, and even if I did, the entire point of me is to do as many of the tasks of creative production myself as is practical, so I can speak at least quasi-intelligently about the process - case in point, the graphic design of the postcard above, which will be a blog post in its own right. But this isn't about that part of the process; it's about the feeling.
One thing I've learned is that no-one knows that you write unless you actually tell them about it, and no-one buys what you write unless they know it can be bought. SO I have to do at least the first stab at this all by myself (not counting help from cats). I have to try to summarize my work, to bite the bullet and actually sell it, and to package that sales language up in ways that get it out to people - starting with a series of postcards to put on my table. And oh, yes, to blog it: to finally lift my head far enough above the waters to shout, yes, world, I am here, and no, I don't need a life preserver: I need you to buy some of my books.
It still feels weird saying that.
I guess I'll have to get over it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the back of the postcards I printed for my table, featuring my own art; me, in a potential author publicity picture; and Gabby, helping me organize my book files and promotional materials.
SO yet again I've completed a challenge to finish 50,000 words in a month … this time the April Camp Nanowrimo challenge. My goal was to write 50,000 new words in the 4th Dakota Frost book, SPECTRAL IRON … and as of April 30th, I did it:
Normally I write a lot about how this happened, bla bla bla. But the big thing that happened with this month is that it has gotten me ahead of the game for a change. I've had breaks, of course, in the past year and a half, but no matter how easily I breathed, I always had two almost-finished novels hanging over me (LIQUID FIRE and CLOCKWORK), and chunks of several more half-finished novels waiting in the wings (HEX CODE, SPECTRAL IRON, and MAROONED).
Now both of those books are at the publisher, my editor and I aren't going to talk until after Memorial Day … and I, for once, feel like I'm starting to get caught up.
If you see me wielding a stick, it's to beat off new projects with.
The last thing I learned is that I can basically write 50,000 words of rough draft material in approximately 20 days, and that's with having serious work responsibilities and personal responsibilities I have to put first. It's a push, but it isn't an impossible push, and that means I can seriously start looking at other projects and start figuring out where to wield that hammer.
First up, the frontispiece for LIQUID FIRE. Then, my upcoming talks at Clockwork Alchemy. Oh, and the next version of Blitz Comic's Survival Guide. Lots of projects … but all were on the plate before. Now I just no longer have a giant sword of Damocles hanging over them; I instead have Thor's hammer, ready to strike.
-the Centaur
UPDATE: actually, first up, was an image for Blitz Comic's Free Comic Book Day Creator's Kit. But that's still Blitz. So it's OK.
I had decided to take out Aprils to do do Camp Nanowrimo, but as you can see, this was thwarted by my work to finish LIQUID FIRE, which spilled over into the beginning of the month. So since then, I've been racing uphill to try to get back on track … and as of a few days ago, I think I can at last say I'm almost there.
What's even more amazing is that I was able to keep up this pace even when I was out for Easter … and THEN after I caught the cruds on the flight home and ended up spending two days out sick. And it wasn't even crashed out sick, either; we had some internal deadlines at work that I needed to keep moving forward, so I spent most of my sick days working from home, sitting on the front porch bundled up in a blanket with my work laptop on my lap, trying to massage a tricky chunk of data through our pipelines while I watched surreal scenes unfold around me, like one of our elderly neighbors getting taken to the hospital.
But I've grown good writing in the margins, over lunch and at dinner, whenever I can, in the corners. (I'm writing this blogpost at dinner at a nice Irish pub right now, itself squeezed in between afternoon writing group meetings and Sunday evening prep for work). So I was able to, somehow, put in my time each day massaging that data, then still spit out the chunk of words I needed, and not kill myself, or at least not make myself any sicker than I was. And by the end of the week, we had the candidate chunk of data we wanted, I had the words I wanted, and I was out a lot of cold medicine and cough drops.
The weekend was even better for me, with a great swathes of time spent Friday late night, Saturday afternoon and Sunday lunch and early evening chasing that 2 meter exhaust port just below the main port. Allmost there … now I'm just 300 words away from begin caught up. Hopefully, I'll close that final gap late tonight. Wish me luck!
Oh yes, an excerpt:
“Dakota,” Terrance said, not turning his head towards me, eyes guiding the pointer on the screen. “When you guys go back to see this,” he said, reaching his head aside to puff at his air tube to rewind the footage, “I so want to be there.”
My heart fell. I didn’t think it was safe to take a quadriplegic into a war zone. But perhaps that was just me trying to shield him; we could work the security arrangements out. I opened my mouth to warn him of the risks, but just then, he puffed, and the video played.
“There,” Terrance said, the red crosshair of his eye tracker active again. “Watch for it!” At first I saw nothing, and grimaced as my yapping mug nattered on. I was rapidly growing tired of seeing this. Then the black form moved behind me—and in the red circle Terrance had laid out with his eye tracker … I saw the tail of my Mohawk brushed aside.
“Jesus!” I said, fear clutching my heart. “It touched me!”
Oooh … buggedy.
Now let's blow this thing and go home!
-Anthony
It's been hard getting back into SPECTRAL IRON - the beginning of the story is a smoothly progressing freight train, but about a third of the way through, the story went off the tracks --- not because there was anything wrong with the ideas, but because they lacked the right organization. I had to move many, many chapters around before I got the overall structure right.
Then, I found that I'd done "tricks" to speed up the narrative---scene changes, description, shifts of scale---which work great when a story is complete, but in early drafts just distract from creating what John Gardner called "the vivid continuous dream" of fiction. National Novel Writing Month material, for me, must be like that dream, continuously moving forward from point to point.
Often, if I was willing to just "dethrone my darlings" I could make progress. The old writer's advice to "kill your darlings" is something I have a love-hate relationship with, but in this case, I interpret "darlings" as a great turn of phrase that started a scene or chapter in the early draft---but which I found were getting in the way.
Usually, when I couldn't go forward from the next unwritten part of the scene, it was because the darling, while it sounded cool, glossed over too much. To fix the problem, I generally didn't have to delete the darling; I just instead demoted it from its privileged status of starting a scene, rolled my mind back to the point just before the scene break, and asked: no, seriously: what would really happen next?
Thinking very closely about how characters would react to a life-changing event, in the next hours or minutes or even seconds after it happened, is something that produced (for me) more real, honest, and compelling reactions---and, usually, created a far more solid framework for all the scenes that followed, enabling me to think about them clearly and write more quickly.
This strategy has been working well for me, and today it really has started to pay off. I'm getting back on track at last.
Oh, yes, an excerpt:
“No,” Nyissa said, delicately picking up one of the gumdrops with her chopsticks. She gingerly put it in her mouth, sliding it past her fangs with the white ivory prongs, closing her mouth—then her eyes closed in bliss. “Ahhh. You’ve cultivated a different set of skills.”
“Beauty is a skill?” I asked.
“Dakota,” Nyissa said, smiling at me mirthfully. “You are beautiful, but you’re not trying to be beautiful: you’re trying to be a butch badass biker. You wear leather, and a Mohawk, and actually ride a bike, even a fuel efficient one. Your whole outfit says: don’t mess.”
“It’s supposed to say, check out my tattoos,” I said.
“It does say that,” she said, though today my arms were covered with the sleeves of a turtleneck. “But hairstyles and transport are more serious choices than a coat. You’ve cultivated a whole set of lifestyle skills to project a butch image, down to your manly handshake.”
Now I covered my face with my hand. “Ah, I’ll never live that down.”
“I, on the other hand, am a vampire dominatrix,” Nyissa said. “I lure men and women to my bed with my beauty and the promise of a mixture of pleasure and pain. That, too, is a set of lifestyle choices—down to my quite extensive wardrobe, and the shopping that goes with it.”
"Your success at that,” I said, “has a lot to do with your physical beauty.”
“Yes, but, you don’t need a great body to look hot,” Nyissa insisted. “It’s all about your sense of style. You need to project the aura that you’re fuckable. Not dressing in a way that asks or offers sex—but how you show off your body shows you know what sex is, and how to do it.”
I was staring at her. My jaw was dropped. Nyissa slowly raised her chopsticks, taking them in her mouth with a sly smile. She cleaned them between her fangs with a lick of her tongue. Then she leaned forward and touched them beneath my chin, closing my mouth.
It occurs to me that the art of finding an excerpt which is interesting, yet reveals no plot points, is itself a skill. Hopefully I'm doing it well.
-the Centaur
Overall I'm making some progress, but each day has its ups and downs. Today was one of the downs (more because I spent a great deal of the day cracking a problem at work, then following up with a nice dinner date with my wife), but hopefully I'm going to get caught up over the next few days and through the weekend, when I've got some long plane flights to write on.
No excerpt: a lot of reorganizing today to get pieces in place so the story flows forward smoothly. I do write out of order, quite a bit, but the pieces must all make sense in order so that when I sit down to work on one the past concepts all build to and constrain the current moment, and the current moment supports the future concepts going forward.
Oh, okay, maybe one excerpt; I may have actually shown this before, but now I've written up the backstory for this:
“Here, Cinnamon,” I said, reaching for her with the Santa Claus cap. “Wear this—”
“No,” Cinnamon growled, jerking away. “I ain’t wearing no Santa Claus shit.”
I blinked. Most children I knew loved Santa Claus. Loved Christmas. So did most people, for that matter. Sure, I knew a few grinches, but not even they would have turned down a Santa Claus cap, much less snarled and swatted at it. This was something more.
“I’m guessing,” I said gently, “it isn’t disgust at his square fashion sense.”
“New word’s jank,” Cinnamon said, wrapping her arms around herself, turning away.
I put the hat down and walked out onto the porch, sitting on the sofa, stretching my long arms out over its back and my long legs out to the bottom rungs of the bannister. After a minute, Cinnamon joined me, curling up next to me, leaning her head on my shoulder.
“Sorry, Mom,” she said. “Santa Claus is a son of a bitch.”
That is all for now.
-the Centaur
Finally, got 3400+ words done today, starting to get back on track. We can win this thing! An excerpt:
Cosgreave cleared a space on the table, then opened the black plastic case and withdrew a small bundle of embroidered cloth, which he unrolled upon the table. He reached into the case and withdrew by its leather-wrapped handle a long, dark object, which rang as it hit the air and kept singing faintly until he carefully set the weapon down on the soft, bone-white cloth.
“The Salzkammergutschwert,” Cosgreave said reverently.
The Salzkammergutschwert was a strangely curved dark sword almost four feet long from the circular pommel of its oddly-angled leather-wrapped hilt to the oddly-angled tip of its gleaming blade, forged from some strange lustrous metal so dark it reminded me of hematite.
Upon closer inspection, the sword wasn’t curved, merely angled, like a geometric S. The hilt had two angled parts, one short, one long, neither quite aligning with the dark blade, which was straight like an European sword, but with a strange triangular taper, like a cleaver.
I had never seen anything like it … and it creeped me the heck out.
-Anthony
Definitely not the official cover of SPECTRAL IRON … something I just whipped up for my Camp Nanowrimo page. My goal this month is to take this novel from 52,881 words to 102,881 words - adding 50,000 words, just like in Nanowrimo, except now I'm taking the novel from a ghost of nothing and turning it into a full bodied spirit.
Because publishing stacks deadline after deadline, I had to shift from scheduling 50,000 words a year to 100,000 in order to keep to my schedule. 50,000 words is a half-finished book, and I have plenty of those (SPECTRAL IRON, HEX CODE, and MAROONED from Nano, plus STEEL TEARS and few other older books).
100,000 words, in contrast, is a book that can be feasibly completed, and I don't have so many of those ready to go. My 2002 Nano, DELIVERANCE, is at 150,000 words, but it needs a lot of work; my first novel, HOMO CENTAURIS, is a similar length with even more work needed. Not that I will never go back to them … but I need to move forward with new work.
Today was the first day that I really got my groove back on SPECTRAL IRON. The end of last month, when I was supposed to be finishing LIQUID FIRE, was consumed by EOQ (end of quarter) work at work, and so the start of this month was consumed with getting LIQUID FIRE to the publisher. I've only really been working on SPECTRAL IRON seriously this past week.
Some of the delay was re-reading the manuscript, some was reorganizing it (some of the sections crept out of plot order as I worked on ideas here and there), some was legitimate work-work getting in the way (gotta pay the bills, so the Search Engine That Starts With a G gets first dibs on my time) but most was just getting my groove back.
Now it's back. I just give you a tiny tease of an excerpt:
“Alright,” Terrance said, becoming less frustrated by the moment. “Alright. I may have no fucking clue what’s going on, but I’m still on the B team, and I have the entire sum of computable human knowledge at my fingertips. What can I do to help?”
“We’re tackling the ghost line,” I said. “But from a new angle. I’m less interested in the places that want to show us their ghosts—and more in the ones that didn’t. I want to know why they declined—particularly ones that were on ghost tours in the 1970’s and dropped out.”
“You may not remember this,” Terrance said, “but there was a recession in the 1970’s. Oil embargoes, gas lines stretching around the block, the double nickel—and the tourist industry in California collapsed. Most just went out of business—”
“But not all of them,” I said. “I know there are dozens of sites, and probably dozens of reasons a site might decline to appear in our show, but we can narrow it down considerably. I’m not asking them to change their minds—I’m asking if the ghost sightings stopped.”
The silence on the line stretched long enough that I thought something happened to him.
“Whoa,” he said at last. “Magic is real—you’ve proved that. Ghosts are real, or at least there are ghost like effects—you’ve caught them on film. So if ghost sightings stopped, it might not be because the light of day has burned away the campfire tales—”
“But because there was some real phenomenon that stopped operating,” I said.
More to come...
-Anthony
Having trouble getting up to speed … after all, didn't finish LIQUID FIRE until several days into the month ... but made some conceptual progress tonight. That is all.
-the Centaur
So, at long last … I have sent LIQUID FIRE to Bell Bridge books.
Phew.
This has been a long time in coming; the book that became LIQUID FIRE started with some florid philosophizing about the nature of fire and life by my protagonist Dakota Frost - 270 words written way back in 2008:
Liquid Fire
A Dakota Frost, Skindancer Novel
by
Dr. Anthony G. Francis, Jr.Started: 2008-04-19
Rough Draft: 2012-09-26
First Draft: 2012-10-23
Completed Draft: 2013-10-19
Beta Draft: 2013-11-01
Gamma Draft: 2014-04-05
Along the way, the story became something very different, an exploration of Atlanta and San Francisco and Hawaii, of learning and science and magic and mysticism. My obsessive attention to realism led to endless explorations and quite a few set pieces.
Now it's in the hands of Debra Dixon, who's already started to send me feedback. Feedback I'm going to do my best to shelve until May 1st, so I can focus the rest of April on SPECTRAL IRON, which is due early next year. Aaa!
But for now, my labors, I rest. If only for a little while.
-the Centaur
P.S. This is is my fifth completed novel, and the third Dakota Frost. Only 18 more Dakota Frosts to go in the main arc!
At long last, I have sent to the publisher my fourth completed novel, JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE: A Story of Love, Corsets, Rayguns, and the Conquest of the Galactic Habitable Zone.
This has been a long time in coming - in part because I had the not-so-bright idea of doing a related anthology, DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME, which has put me a solid year behind on my other writing projects - and in part because I had a lot of work to do. Lots of authors put their manuscripts through heavy revision, but the way I track changes gives a pretty clear view of my process:
Draft History
Started: September 7, 2009
Rough Draft: July 13, 2011
First Draft: March 10, 2012
Beta Draft: March 25, 2012
Beta Read: December 1, 2013
Gamma Edit: December 12, 2013
Gamma Draft: February 1, 2014
What’s less clear is the amount of research that goes into these books. For the story “The Doorway to Extra Time” I read parts of over 20 books on time travel. For THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, with its alternate histories and their intricate relationships, I read far more - dozens and dozens of books and hundreds and hundreds of web pages.
Now all that’s done, and the book is off to Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books. Hopefully I’ve learned from previous edits what it takes to make a great book; if not, I’m sure she’ll tell me.
As always, I leave you with an excerpt:
Lightning gouged a chunk of the wainscoting an inch from Jeremiah Willstone’s head and she hurled herself back, bumping down the stairs on her tailcoat, firing both Kathodenstrahls again and again until the oak doorpanels were blasted into sparks and splinters.
Her shoulders hit the landing hard enough to rattle her teeth, but Jeremiah didn’t lose her grip: she just kept both guns trained on the cracked door, watching foxfire shimmer off its hinges and knobs. The crackling green tracers crept around the frame, and with horror she realized the door was reinforced with newly-added iron bands. She’d intended to blast the thing apart and deny her enemy cover, but had just created more arrowholes for him-or-her to shoot through.
Jeremiah muttered a curse: the doors weren’t supposed to be reinforced! The Newfoundland Airship Conservatory was a relic, near sixty years old—and electric pistols had barely been invented when it was built in the 1850’s, much less Faraday armor. Yet this lot of miscreants had managed to erect in a few days barriers proof to the most modern thermionic blasters. In over nine years as an Expeditionary fighting the mad men and women who sought to let Foreign monsters onto the Earth, she’d never encountered a force as well-prepared as Lord Christopherson’s.
It made sense—the man had been in the Victoriana Defense League, and had their full playbook—yet there were dark rumors that he’d been bankrolled by Restorationist forces who threatened not just the Crown, but the Liberation Jeremiah held so dear. Given her history with the man, she hadn’t found the rumors surprising—but the complete lack of women soldiers among his ‘footmen’ practically confirmed them. Lord Christopherson wasn’t just in love with the monsters: he wanted to upend the whole Victorianan order. The man had to be stopped.
As the foxfire dissipated, the crackling continued, and Jeremiah’s eyes flicked aside to see sparks escaping the broken glass of her left Kathodenstrahl’s vacuum tubes. Its thermionics were shot, so she tossed the electric gun aside with a curse and checked the charge canister on her remaining Kathodenstrahl. The little brass bead was hovering between three and four notches. Briefly she thought of swapping canisters, but a slight creak upstairs refocused her attention.
No. You only need three shots. Keep them pinned, wait for reinforcements.
Now that Jeremiah is on her way, I’m returning my attention to LIQUID FIRE, which has a due date of April 1st, with a hopeful publication date in August. Wish me well, and hope that I have a picture like the following for LIQUID FIRE ready in the next month or so…
-the Centaur
For the 8th time, I have won National Novel Writing Month! This year, I knuckled down early, focusing on getting as much ahead as possible so I could coast early in the month. This really worked because my story soon started turning in unexpected directions as I mined the emotional relationships of the characters, rather than the overarching plot. And I think it worked well! Look at that:
I was successfully able to stay ahead of the game essentially for the whole month, enabling me to finish several days early. I hope to keep writing, to core dump the ideas I've had about the story, as while it is wonderful to find unexpected elements of the story (including a shout-out to one of my oldest childhood toys and the origin of the Dresanian universe) there's more to write.
But now I can take a more leisurely pace, read the giant stack of books I've accumulated to help me flesh out the plot ideas, and turn it all into something more interesting. For example, here's an interesting combination of plot and emotional interaction, none of which I ever really expected:
The mammoth city-sized collection of globules drifted by. Some were firm and puffy like gasbags; some soft like pillows, some trailing and drifting like punctured balloons. So many tentacles fell down from it that it looked like it was raining beneath. Slowly, the globules crested a ridge and began to sink.
Leonid’s mouth parted, but he maintained his firm, watchful, captain on deck boots-wide stance on the window, even though his legs had begun to cramp. Then the city slowly settled to the earth in a cloud of dust.
“It is a city,” Serendipity said. “Or something very much like one.”
“I’m not willing to give it that yet,” Leonid said, as the globules settled and burst, gas streaming up from some, gasbags lifting tentacles up from others, remarkably like towers. “But my mind is open to the possibility. Spores, your grandmother said.”
“Yes,” Serendipity said. “Perhaps the gasbags make the cities, and the spores that they release inhabit the cities. I don’t know—like she said, it appears most of the records of Halfway were sealed after the war. Damnit. And Greatgramma Clarice led me straight into this—”
“Sounds like a dick move,” Leonid said, “but you and your family are all geniuses. Let’s not give up on her just yet. Maybe she thought you were your grandmother’s granddaughter, that you were the right person to deal with Halfway.”
“Maybe,” Serendipity said uncertainly.
“One thing for certain,” Leonid said, smiling down at her, legs still firmly planted on the rail, cutting as heroic a pose as he could, “black sun or no, Halfway is a beautiful world—and we’re going to make the best of it.”
Then something slammed into the ship so hard it knocked him backwards into the soup.
So, my Nanowrimo winner's t-shirt is on it's way, I've "won" … but I've got a lot more to go to get this novel done.
Onward!
-the Centaur
At some point over the past weekend, I broke 40,000 words on Nano. This is no time to get complacent: even though I'm a few days ahead now - only 6200 words from the end - and I'm supposedly on vacation, I may need to go back to work tomorrow to deal with a minor, well, not crisis, but something that demands my attention.
So while that mountain above has impressive height and slope, it ends in a plateau, because the month of November is not done. And if you don't retain focus, you can end on that plateau, because the end of November is friends and family and Thanksgiving and Black Friday and the year-end scramble at work, if you have one.
SO while I have a lead, I'm going to do what I can to keep it. Speaking of which … I wrote 375 words between what I wrote above and the end of this article. Here's an excerpt:
“So, still thinking Halfway was a steal?” Sirius asked. “Was it worth it to spend your inheritance on the hideout of a war criminal, no doubt on her way back here?”
“She’s not a war criminal, and she’s not coming back,” Serendipity said. “She’s a prolific and nurturing mother. She would never have left her grandchild behind, much less her own daughter. Same rules as Norylan’s parents: if she could have come back, she would have—”
“Nurturing mother doesn’t mean,” Sirius said, “she wasn’t a war criminal.”
“A few hard choices don’t a monster make,” Serendipity said. “She led the First Contact mission between Dresan and Murra. For all practical intents and purposes, she founded the Dresan-Murran Alliance, the most harmonious grouping of aliens in the universe—”
“Founded on annihilating everyone who didn’t fit that mold?” Sirius said quietly.
For a moment, Serendipity didn’t say anything.
“I can’t take responsibility for the sins of someone who wasn’t even my ancestor,” Serendipity said, “but I’ll defend the values they bequeathed to me, values they developed trying to learn from their mistakes. When my grandmother came, I could have had her kill you all—”
“Hey!” Sirius said. Then he punched her arm. “Ass!”
“Hey!” Serendipity said back, feeling her arm. “Ow—”
“No, you couldn’t have had her kill us,” Sirius said. “She would have sliced up that blaster, and maybe lopped a few arms, or perhaps just gut checked a few of Toren’s goons with the back end of her scythe blades. Your back was turned. She took the room in an instant—”
“She’s a killer,” Serendipity said. “You don’t know her—”
“She’s a First Contact Engineer and a pregnant mother,” Sirius said. “I saw her face. Yes, she’s scary—I’ve never seen anyone that scary—but I could also see relief when she saw we were children. I refuse to believe she would just windmill through us all, rolling heads.”
Serendipity stared at him.
“I’m not sure I agree with you,” she said, “but I think you’re also making my point.”
Back to work.
-the Centaur
In only tangentially related Nano news, the beta copies of LIQUID FIRE are on their way to beta readers, and signed copies of DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME are on their way to the winners! Huzzah. I hope you enjoy them!
Not that things are going poorly. They're actually going quite well… UPDATE:
Quite well indeed.
-the Centaur
One of the great things about National Novel Writing Month is that it takes you into places you never anticipated. Well, for most of this month I've been working on Section 2 of MAROONED, "Conflicted", but much of what I've written today comes from Section 3, which I've alternately called "Determined" or "Galvanized". And the following section logically follows from the setup of the story … but I had no idea that it was going to happen. No idea at all:
“Buck up, spacer,” Eslyca said. “We’re at war. We have to make hard choices.”
“Like Toren said,” Kyrnal said. He shook his head. “Doesn’t mean I don’t regret it.”
They watched, from behind the cargo bay lights, as Leonid's crew kept punching. After a while, Eslyca got uncomfortable and shifted; then Kyrnal did the same thing, setting his hands and shifting his boots. But the crew below kept punching … and punching … and punching.
“How long are they going to keep this up?” Eslyca said. “Did she just say five hundred?”
“How long can they keep this up?” Kyrnal said. “And I thought they’d gone soft—”
“YOU THOUGHT WRONG,” boomed a deep mechanical voice behind them, and Kyrnal and Eslyca whirled to see the huge fox-like head of a robot the size of a cargo loader loom behind them, two scorpion-like pincers rising from its tail. “DON’T MOVE!”
Kyrnal whirled and tried to reach for his gun, but the scorpion-pincer shocked him. Eslyca dove aside, but a giant mechanical paw scooped her back up, then Kyrnal too, bringing both of them together—and in range of those darting pincers.
The paws spun them about, and Krynal felt the pincer snap tight on the upper safety harness attachment of his softsuit—the hardest to reach. He tried to grab for it and release himself, but when his hand touched the pincer, he got shocked again.
Then the robot shoved them both out into empty space.
Wait … who are Kyrnal and Eslyca? What do they regret? Why are they spying on Leonid's camp? What is Leonid's camp training for? Who's the robot? And will our intrepid young heroes or villains survive getting thrown out into space by this mechanical monster?
A day or so ahead now, taking a break to run errands. Onward!
-the Centaur
Each day in National Novel Writing Month, you need to write 1,666 words. It's the math: 50,000 words, 30 days, no excuses. The math seems simple: 50,000 / 30 = 1,666 and 2/3, so 1667 words will end you up with 50,010 words at the end of the month. So you may think you can get away with 1,667 words, or 1,666 with 20 words tossed in at the end.
It isn't that simple.
As you can see from the graph, or from following this blog, some days you just can't get 1,666 words done. You're off your game, you're off on a hike, or a distressed person shows up at your door in need of help. So, I prefer to say that you need to do more than you think you need to in a day - because you need to be caught up before you slip, or you'll fall behind.
For 24 Hour Comic Day - a challenge to do 24 pages in 24 hours - I and my buddy Nathan at Blitz Comics recommend trying to finish each page in 45 minutes, so you can absorb the inevitable eating, drinking, bathroom breaks and pencil sharpening and still finish your pages on time.
For National Novel Writing Month, I recommend something simpler: just try to get one day ahead, as soon as you can. Work super hard to get that first day of buffer, and then, even if something happens to throw you off, you're not behind.
So now, at lunch, I've finished my daily word count. I have a few errands to run - but tonight, I'll try to add that second day's worth of words, so that I'll not just be ahead for the day, but ahead of the game.
-The Centaur
I'm still ahead on National Novel Writing Month, again on the skin of my teeth. Only by being already ahead. Because after I had dinner with my wife last night, after she retired to her art studio and I was just sitting down to finish my word count …
A disoriented older woman showed up on our street, unable to find her way home - and speaking no English.
Our neighbors found her first, and came by for help. We took her to our front porch and tried to calm her while the police were on their way. Slowly her English returned, and slowly we drew out her story: she'd been sick for a long time, she didn't know where she was, and she just wanted to go home … to a mother and father who in her clearer moments she remembered were dead.
The police arrived, we all tried to comfort her, and then the presence of the police cars attracted the attention of the woman's husband, who had been driving around the neighborhood looking for her. He confirmed what we suspected: his wife had Alzheimer's, and could no longer remember her street address, or even her married name.
A moment's nodding at the couch watching television, and when he looked up, she was gone, out in the street wearing slippers with her shoes in her hand. Alzheimer's patients often have disrupted sleep or activity schedules, moving when other people expect them to be still - so this experience was by no means unusual.
For the record, report the loss of a loved one to the police immediately, so it will show up in the system if someone finds them.
She ended up safely home. Our prayers go with her.
Sometimes, writing must come second.
-the Centaur
On track. A brief excerpt:
“We could always double bunk, if it comes to that,” Leonid said.
Andromeda and Serendipity both looked at him. Then shot daggers at each other.
“Why would you need to double bunk,” Serendipity asked. “This ship was designed for a crew of six hundred and fifty. It seems like you’d have plenty of bunks—”
“It’s the load of the oxygen farm—how large a space it can oxygenate,” Leonid said. “We used to have twelve segments, but we were down to six—before the crash. Now, once we get back to space, we’re going to need to husband things more carefully. For example, adding you and Norylan—”
“Yeah,” Sirius said. “I’ll bet you just chew up oxygen.”
“Not to mention calories,” Andromeda said.
“Hey,” Serendipity said.
“Seriously, both of you eat a lot,” Leonid said. “I’m guessing … six thousand a day?”
Serendipity seemed to weigh that. “I think that’s about right—for him,” she said, nodding at Norylan. “And I was pushing close to eleven thousand leading up to the tournament—”
“Eleven thousand calories a day!” Leonid said. “You eat for four people?”
“In training, a human Olympic athlete can consume ten thousand calories a day,” Serendipity said defensively. “A normal centaur requires closer to six or seven, and an athlete like myself pushes closer to nine thousand on a regular basis—”
“Let’s budget nine thousand for starters,” Leonid said. “But Norylan—”
“Is an Andiathar,” Serendipity said. “Their metabolism is very different—”
“No wonder he was starving,” Sirius said.
“Don’t you have fights, tournaments?” Serendipity said. “Toren was huge. He’s got to be pushing four, maybe five thousand calories a day, even if he isn’t in training—”
“Six,” Leonid said. “That’s why I guessed what I guessed for you—”
“I’m a little out of his weight class,” Serendipity smirked. Her face fell slightly. “How did you all get this way? I mean, I know you were attacked by pirates. But there’s more to it than just one attack. You’ve got traditions for fighting, ways of decorating your suits—”
“Don’t you like them?” Leonid asked.
“Oh, I do,” Serendipity said, moving that thread of hair aside. “But … what made you decorate them? Did it develop naturally, or were you trying to intimidate the pirates? Or to impress each other? What are your stories?”
“You’re a historian,” Sirius said. “And this ship has seven centuries of history—”
“Seven and a half,” Serendipity said. “Tell me the stories of your people.”
“We don’t tell stories,” Leonid said, motioning to Beetle, who drew out his strumstick. “We sing them.” Serendipity’s mouth fell open, and Leonid smiled. “Beetle, you’ve got some pipes on you. Sing the Song of Irannon, and remind us why we keep fighting on.”
Onward into the deep…
Back on track, mostly. Head above water. That is all.
So my wife returns from a month long business trip, and the day after she gets back, we go hiking. Actually, we went to lunch, went shoe buying, went hiking, and then book buying, shop walking and dinner eating in Santa Cruz.
So zero writing got done yesterday.
"And that's why I try to get ahead!" Because I know from experience with Nano that there are days that writing just can't get done. Work catches up with you, life catches up with you, wife catches up with you. You're too busy, or having too much fun, or too sick, or whatever.
Even if you do as I do and refuse as many events as possible during Nano, you can't get life down to zero.
So it's super important not to stop at 1,666 words a day. If at all possible, try to get a notch more - a few hundred extra words a day. Even if you get just 250-300 extra words a day, by the end of the week you'll have enough buffer to take a day off. Not that I recommend you take a day off in Nano - but you'll have the buffer if you need it.
So I'm back on track today - it's 3 in the afternoon, I've finished my daily quota, and thanks to being ahead before, missing a day yesterday has left me merely on track, rather than behind. And I have at least two more writing sessions today, so I may get even further ahead. No excerpts today - writing near the end, all too spoilery.
Onward into the deep!
-the Centaur
