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Books read, early October

John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These. I understand that people split things up differently, but the combination of portal fantasies and alternate timeline worlds was a combination of one of my favorite things with a thing I can totally take or leave, so that was a bit disappointing. Still, my favorite stories did not actually split along those lines, so it worked out all right. I felt that the standouts in this collection were Alastair Reynolds’s “Signal to Noise,” David Barr Kirtley’s “The Ontological Factor,” and Carrie Vaughn’s “Of Swords and Horses.”

Joan Aiken, Dido and Pa (Kindle) and The Teeth of the Gale. This is not actually the last in the Dido Twite series of slangy children’s alternate history fun, but it’s the last I can easily get my hands on at the moment. Hanoverian villains amuse me. Not sure how I would feel if I was British. The Teeth of the Gale is the last of the early-19th-century Spanish adventure series, and while the outcomes are all fairly predictable, they’re a fun kind of predictable, and a swashbuckly kind I don’t have enough of in my current life.

Tim Akers, Memory Analog. Kindle. Short story that was more or less all premise; fine within those limitations but not outstanding. Akers is better at longer work, I feel.

Boris Akunin, The Death of Achilles. Next in the Erast Fandorin mystery series. Not deep or mind-blowing, but well-set, well-set-up, continues to be reasonably fun, within the context and its prejudices. The people who say “Russian James Bond” are not spot-on, but they’re not as far off as one might think sometimes.

Samit Basu, Turbulence. Indian superhero novel. Quite well done, and a great deal of fun to have a different view on priorities and human tendencies. More cross-cultural publication like this please.

John Calvin Batchelor, “Ain’t You Glad You Joined the Republicans?”. Grandpa’s. This was a history of the Republican Party, and I was afraid it would be intolerably yay-rah-rah about a group towards which I have no allegiance. No, the title was a quote from a mid-19th-century song. The book’s flaws were otherwise: basically it attempted to tell a history of a major political party with almost no reference to the legislative branch. No, really. No, really. It was bizarre. And of course the executive branch is not entirely separable from the legislative branch historically, so there were all sorts of weird gaps and things that appeared to come out of nowhere but did not. Also the important party political players from the executive branch were neglected if they did not get a presidential nomination, so…yeah, not so good. Also it was published in 1996, which…put a weird spin on things.

Anthony Blunt, Borromini. This was interesting about the architecture, but mostly I wanted it for a window into Anthony Blunt, you know, that Anthony Blunt, the spy. You can watch him being a bit plaintive about how Borromini was following rules, quite explicable and even rigid rules, just not the same rules as everyone around him expected. That’s…rather a thing, actually. Also the diagrams are lovely.

John Boyko, Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation. This is not fantastically written, but it’s entirely readable if you’re already interested in the interrelation of the American Civil War and the formation of the Canadian Confederation. And it’s got John A. MacDonald in it, and he’s always…vivid.

Barbara Hamilton, Sup With the Devil. The third of the Abigail Adams mysteries. I think Hamilton does a particularly good job here of having good people on both sides of the major question at hand (that being the Revolutionary War) and of having Adams reflect attitudes of her time, not of ours.

Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince. A Brazilian-inspired future with nanotech and artists–despite the title, not a fantasy. Teen/parent relationships, teen friendships, politics, entirely appropriate crazy teen behavior. Recommended.

Suzanne Joinson, A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar. I picked this up on a whim in Chapters in Montreal. It looked lovely. It was lovely. It was one of those two-timeline novels, one contemporary and the other interwar Kashgar (which, for those not in the know, is very far western China, or at least has been for awhile–central Asia). And it was the rare example of a bifurcated perspective novel where I actually liked and was interested in both timelines equally. I will be keeping an eye out for more Joinson; recommended.

Natsuo Kirino, The Goddess Chronicles. Japanese novel in translation. Felt a bit like early LeGuin, but with different cultural expectations about structure and timing, and of course different baseline myths.

Martin Luther, A Treatise on Good Works. Kindle. Wanted to see what it actually said, not paraphrases of paraphrases. Some of the stuff fit its premises entirely, and then…oh dear. Spices. Spices are not our enemy. I promise. Dear dear oh dear.

D. Peter MacLeod, The Canadian Iroquois and the Seven Years’ War. Does what it says on the tin. Does not do a great deal with Iroquois culture leading up to or after; ah well, war histories, what can one do. I really did like how MacLeod started to behave as though siege warfare really didn’t make sense, because, y’know, it didn’t, and the Iroquois were pretty clear on that.

William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory 1874-1932. Manchester walks a fine line between fondness for his subject and excuse of his faults. He is clearly charmed by Churchill, but by no means finds him perfect or even free of totally exasperating moments. I think it works reasonably well, but particularly well with immediately topical contrast like….

Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts: The History of One Radical Family. The beginning of this book was much stronger than the ending. While it was clearly not intended to be a biography of Emmeline Pankhurst exclusively, the parts when she was still alive were much stronger; Pugh did not seem interested in exploring the old age of the Pankhurst daughters in any detail, and the grandchildren barely got a cursory glance. Not staggeringly well-written, but certainly well enough written that it won’t be painful if you’re interested in the topic.

V. E. Schwab, Vicious. Discussed elsewhere.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Sea Watch and Heirs of the Blade. These both had what I read Tchaikovsky for, which is: a) different cultures than the usual fantasy furniture and b) politicking. By which I mostly mean backstabbing. Structurally I’m wondering whether he’s going to end threads separately or bring them back together–it’s a very weird structure, with the result that Heirs had some of the most disturbing stuff in the series to date and Sea Watch…was fine. But that’s a question that’s in no way interfering with my enjoyment of them, particularly as airplane reads.

Toh EnJoe, The Self-Reference Engine. Mosaic hard SF novel. It’s a bit like Greg Egan and a bit like Alan Lightman and a bit like Stanislaw Lem and then a lot more Japanese than any of those. There is a lot of nature-of-the-universe level stuff going on here, so if you’re expecting that hard SF means rayguns, recalibrate, this is not that. Dimensionality is a major issue here. Get comfortable with it.

P. G. Wodehouse, The Head of Kay’s. Kindle. If you are feeling sick and dizzy and have run out of paper books on an airplane, this is a diverting enough thing, with its cricket and its house rules and all that. It is one of Wodehouse’s school stories. It is probably not the best of them, but it may also not be the worst, and it passes the time as a Wodehouse thing will do.

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Vicious, by V. E. Schwab

Review copy provided by Tor.

Rarely have I read a book with such an apposite epigraph. It’s Joseph Brodsky: “Life–the way it really is–is a battle not between Bad and Good, but between Bad and Worse.” And if you read that and think, gosh, that’s a darkish view of human nature, well, possibly this is not the book for you, because the book does follow through on the epigraph. And also if you run into people claiming that women don’t write gritty dark fantasy, you may pelt them with copies of this book and run away laughing. (Try to hit with the corners rather than the spine or the pages. They’re pointier.)

Other than dark: this is a mad science story. This is a mad science superhero story, and also it’s one of the sorts of stories that often ends up at the center of superhero tales: the brother-against-brother story. (In this case, college roommates rather than literal brothers.) There was also an important sister pair whose relationship was more complicated than the word “against” would really sum up, although I wanted a bit more of that than I got.

For me, the science was not mad enough and also not functional enough to really suspend my disbelief. But given the flaw in the premise in that regard, Schwab came about as close to distracting me from it with characters and violence as you could expect, so people who are less science nerd-ish may find it to be an entirely surmountable problem.

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One for sorrow, two for…holy crud, that’s a lot of crows.

I know at least two rhymes for counting crows, off the top of my head (“One for sorrow, two for joy,” they both start out), but I just looked out in my backyard, and there were dozens of crows. Scores of crows. There were not more crows than I could shake a stick at, because I would just stand at the back door and shake it broadly. But I don’t really want to go shake a stick at the crows, because it has a sort of Hitchcockian vibe at the moment. Say what you will in favor of Lovecraft, pulsing horrors mostly don’t show up in my backyard without notice. And giant flocks of birds…apparently do.

So what I want to know is: where does the crow counting rhyme go after seven or, in some extreme cases, ten? It’s really looking to me like the fortune-telling aspect will start to wear thin with a flock like this. “Forty-seven for a hangnail…forty-eight for your library books came in…forty-nine for, uh, a sale on the kind of cheese you don’t want to buy….”

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The last Farthing Party con report post: Rothfuss and uphill

Patrick Rothfuss. Panelists noted that he will be the GoH at Vericon, March 21-23 of 2014, so for those of you who are interested, there’s a Rothfuss-spotting event. There was division amongst the panelists as to whether the second book made the first retroactively better or worse. The panelists all found Rothfuss compulsively readable but varied about whether his extensive use of negative capability at this point was a good thing. There was also division as to whether Kvothe’s horrible dooooom mitigated or enhanced his Mary Sue (Gary Stu, if you prefer) status.

It sounded like a great deal relied on whether or not the reader trusted Rothfuss to pull it all together, and if so, in what areas and to what degree the distrust kicked in. However, at least some of Rothfuss’s readers are having an experience gossiping and speculating about the characters that they compared to media fandoms wherein people are waiting for the next episode, so it sounds like these can be a very social read with the help of the internet.

Writing Uphill. This was the “that’s another panel” for the year, and I was on it. It’s about writing against the currents of story, against the expectations of both the reader and the writers him/herself–that is, both in communication with the audience and in sticking to one’s own internal guns. It’s about telling the stories you want to tell for personal, ideological, or narratively surprising reasons, rather than the stories that are standard. The undermining of the standard story does not in any way have to be unhappy, although that’s some people’s association/preconception of deconstructive narrative.

The common expectations and preconceptions about story have a lot of genre specificity, so one of the ways out from under the weight of expectations–if you are a person who experiences the weight of expectations at all–is to hybridize genres/modes. We also talked about writers who don’t seem to have gotten issued the expectations and preconceptions in the first place, which gives them less of a wall to bounce things off of but also less of a wall to surmount. Some of the cross-cultural differences in non-Anglophone movies and fiction can be helpful here also.

There was also some disagreement among panelists as to whether having had a factual, personal experience with the counter-narrative thing you wanted to depict was particularly helpful or not. I think it’s probably never un-helpful, but may not reach the levels of helpful depending on the individual writer.

We also talked about a cultural suspicion of reassurance, and how books earn their own endings (their wyrds!) regardless of emotional tenor. And then I got up on my hobbyhorse about the good hard work of writing books for which a hopeful ending feels earned, and one or two other people may have petted and possibly ridden similar hobbyhorses as well, I could not possibly comment.

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Towards a Farthing Party con report: Worldbuilding and Writing Funny

Building Fantasy Worlds. Cuvier was quoted as saying that he could deduce an animal from a single bone. This, the panelist noted, was not guaranteed to get you the right animal, but the deductions Cuvier made were fascinating and detailed–which can be a lot more important in worldbuilding. Other panelists agreed with the “single bone” theory of worldbuilding, starting with something so small as a single word, or with an image or a cool concept. Start with fun! Sometimes things get unfun later, but starting with the unfun guarantees you unfun. For most of the people on the panel, the emotional expression in worldbuilding was a target rather than a starting point or the only point. Unintended consequences are awesome but also inconvenient.

In worldbuilding as opposed to mimetic fiction, small error can have unintended ramifications–if someone says that Napoleon is still ruling France in 1817, in mimetic fiction they’re just wrong, but in speculative fiction they’re giving you information about an alternate world–so get good fact-checkers so that you’re not misleading readers who know more about various things than you do. Or write such fun stuff that the more knowledgeable readers are willing to go on with it; this is less reliable than good fact-checkers. However, the willing suspension of disbelief can in some outstanding cases move into the willing construction of a lattice to hold up disbelief.

No one on the panel did all their worldbuilding explicitly before starting to write, but more than one person felt that the details were implied in what they knew before they started, if not spelled out. Broad intersections were encouraged, as were leaning on history and knowing the metaphysics of the world you’re building. No one used all of Patricia Wrede’s worldbuilding questions, but they can be useful individual jumping-off points rather than exhaustive complete surveys. One of the hardest parts of worldbuilding was agreed to be getting really into really foreign mindsets, such as the idea that Plato had literally no notion of progress, or even of things being different over a thousand years. Shifting one’s brain around to apt characterization of that sort is hard and fun.

You Write Funny: The Process Panel. I am going to use first initials since I don’t know who is all right with being quoted, and it was a very personal-context panel. I do think it’s important for people to be exposed to different styles of work, though, because I have run into any number of people who have said that I introduced them to something like writing out of order and in some sense gave them “permission”–this is of course a nine-and-sixty ways sort of thing. If you are one of these writers and do not want to identify yourself in comments but feel that I have mistaken something you said, please let me know on e-mail, and I will correct it.

T needs silence to work. She thinks in freewriting. Her freewrites go into narrative gradually, changing tense and acquiring dialog and other narrative characteristics from previously being “talking” to herself in writing about the characters. She has a target last scene but works at a deliberate pace up to the end. She does not conceive of her characters as interactive and uses the “talking to herself” mode to bounce things off–any resistance is intrapersonal, not character dialog.

A also needs silence to work. She describes her method as organic and composting, going into notebooks and talking to herself therein also. She shoots down her own ideas and builds up better ones, although this behavior is more pronounced at the beginning. She almost always finds that when she gets to the end, the beginning is misaligned and must be rewritten. A’s characters stick around rattling around her head until the next lot take over.

L writes in coffeeshops to do the emotionally wrenching bits: the noise and distraction of people can be useful. L is a kinesthetic writer who uses a blown glass metaphor. L translates those blown glass shapes into a prose rhythm, which gives what’s needed for going forward, but then must go back and see what was foreshadowed earlier. This makes the prose style intrinsic to the substance of the book. The endings become more polished, more formal, and more informed thereby. L finds revising the fun bit and does not do outlines. L rarely writes short stories and does them in one draft. L’s characters’ known lives end with the book.

J gets a pointless feel from outlining, as though she’s already told the story at that point and does not feel any additional urge to do it more. She gets much faster towards the end of a book and often has to rewrite, which she said she enjoyed, but she does that on the go rather than in separate drafts. Her least favorite part about finishing books is not spending more time with these people. She knows what her characters are like at all ages up to their death, and they will sometimes argue or volunteer for books they are not already in.

D feels like the last 50-100 pages are like packing a suitcase for a trip while the cabbie honks outside–she works with a writing partner and gets him to do the outlines, and then strings cool/interesting things along them, knowing the gestalt in advance but not the details of the story. She does, however, know worldbuilding details, often with footnotes. She used to use 3×5 cards but has switched to Scrivener. She feels that short stories are more linear and have only room for one thing.

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“And who played 99 on ‘Get Smart’? And how do you feel about that?”

This afternoon I made short story sale #99. “Unsolved Logistical Problems in Time Travel (Spring Semester)” is going to Nature Futures. Hurrah! I love selling to Nature, not least because I feel like I’m talking a bit to my old profs.

This is one of the stories that I’ve finished in this hyperproductive period, so I’m feeling a bit vindicated on that front. But mostly just pleased, pleased, pleased.

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Towards a Farthing Party con report: Mad Art

Mad Art. So this panel was somewhat about outsider art, somewhat about art by the literally mentally ill, and somewhat about the cool things we would not expect from art but get anyway because we live in a very weird future. (Example of the last: Balinese bluegrass. Really.) There was a lot of discussion about obsessive art, the people who build and build without particular permission or reinforcement from external factors, often with tiny fractal details. Henry Darger, Leaf By Niggle, Mary Lamb, Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love, The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain all came up on this panel. One panelist talked about Burning Man experiences, another about photography and another about pottery.

There was significant annoyance from the panel at the fact that children are mostly taught that they don’t know how to draw, that we’re taught a left brain/right brain dichotomy that actual neuropsychological research has more or less completely overturned, and that there is cultural support for the idea of an art vs. technology gulf which doesn’t exist. One panelist proposed that art is a normal property of being human, including horrible situations like the Haitian kids since the earthquake. This position was particularly opposed to the idea that art was entirely inborn/magical as opposed to substantially the result of work and practice.

I was a little uncomfortable with the discussion of autistic artists as though they were a separate category from persons present in the room, a “them” rather than part of an “us,” but the person doing so did not in any way seem to think that “they” were a bad, wrong, or inexplicable “them.” Also at least one autistic artist present was comfortable adding to this part of the discussion, relating to autism, hyperfocus, and art, noting that not all hyperfocus is monofocus, so the us/them was not maintained; good.

I didn’t go to the Cordwainer Smith panel due to having some time to help entertain a certain really great baby. So that’s up through Sunday morning.

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Towards a Farthing Party con report: Saturday afternoon

The work of John M. Ford. This panel ended up more memorial than analytical. Both are worthy, but I think with Mike’s work, there’s so much variety that it would be hard to talk analytically about more than one or possibly two at the outside, just to bring the focus into something manageable for an hour-long panel. In fact one of the issues discussed was that Mike didn’t do just one thing, and that this was a blessing and a curse for him as a writer. He changed the rules of each form he worked in and had a horror of being obvious. There was also substantial discussion of his focus on triumph over despair and his firm moral sense.

Make a will make a will make a will make a will no really I mean it make a will.

Families and Generations. I was on this. We talked about the primacy in many speculative genres of romantic relationships but not the aspect of romantic relationships that gets to be familial–negotiations and “roommate stuff” and like that, which shows up a lot more in mimetic genres. Someone proposed that the mimetic genres have more room for this stuff, since they’re not having to build the world from scratch, but on the other hand the speculative genres have more need for it, since what we don’t build is not there. What I want, and what I think several people present wanted, is not necessarily for families to have to play a direct role in every story but that they should cast their shadows on it–that characters’ places in their families should be clear from characterization, that they should think of their families and be influenced by them in various real-world ways–at least some of the time.

We talked a bit about how the timing of the story matters as to what kind of dynamic you can have–little children have a very different story dynamic with each other and with parents than do teens or grown children. It’s also possible with younger grandparents in a story to–gasp shock amazement–have a story with grandparents wherein the grandparent does not have to die.

There was also some thought about how difficult it is to write a sequel to a romance, how it require some kind of destabilization of the previous ending or in fact of the character’s lives in general.

Works discussed: Pilgrim’s Progress, Dark Lord of Derkholm, Minerva Wakes, the Moomin books, pretty much all of Pamela Dean, Saga, Pacific Rim, superhero comics (in that some companies are walking back nearly all their familial relationships–but not the Fantastic Four, the Fantastic Four is all family!), Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Steve Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, Jay Williams’s The Magic Grandfather, Among Others, Aliette de Bodard’s “On a Red Station, Drifting,” C. J. Cherryh’s family ships, Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant, Suzette Hadin Elgin, Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside, Robert Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones, Brave, Buffy, Medium, Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker, Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population, Daniel Abraham’s Long Price quartet, Piers Anthony (very very badly), and Marge Piercy’s He, She, & It.

Ends of the World: every age its own apocalypse! There was a strong theme of different apocalypses being popular in fiction for different generations: while plagues and environmental disasters are good perennial staples, their forms do vary. Overpopulation and nuclear war are out of fashion. The Yellowstone supervolcano and the underwater cliff out from the Canary Islands are much more de rigeur perhaps.

The cyberpunk motto (or at least a cyberpunk motto) was apparently, “Apocalypse is boring.” Humans tend to muddle through.

“Apocalypse” means revelation: you will understand everything on the last page. That’s part of the appeal. Another theory proposed was that there was a certain amount of processing of the possibility of nuclear war through more fantastical apocalypses. Also there is a certain sense of the cozy catastrophe–the idea that if only these other people weren’t around, how grand things would be. This is in some ways apocalypse as high school escape fantasy rather than nuclear war processing. The 14th century’s huge European population drop resulted in improved property and labor conditions for the remaining humans, so there’s something to the coziness, even if it’s sometimes creepy and sadistic. Another panelist theorized–I think possibly quite correctly–that it’s a lot easier for some readers to consider mass extinction than their own personal individual deaths.

On the other hand, the panelists who had lived through urban disasters reported that people behave much better than writers theorize. JG Ballard’s personal experiences are at least something of a counterexample, but they relate to war, not other disasters.

Works discussed included: Joanna Russ’s “We Who Are About To…” (the anti-“The Cold Equations”!), American Psycho, Breaking Bad, Iain Banks’s Complicity, Stephen Baxter, Larry Niven’s “Inconstant Moon” and Fallen Angels, The Stand, Spider Robinson, Alan Nourse, Earth Divides, Fourth Horseman, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s The Time of the Fourth Horseman, The Screwfly Solution, John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, Peter Watts, Thomas Disch’s The Genocides, Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island, Keith Roberts’s The Furies, John Christopher, Good Omens, Kim Stanley Robinson’s capitol trilogy, Vinge’s The Peace War, Barry Longyear’s Sea of Glass, Z for Zachariah, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Lord of the Flies, Revelation Space, Spin, John Varley’s “Air Raid,” Ilsa Bick, Childhood’s End, The Child Garden, Left Behind, and Bruce Sterling.

Also, if various calculations are correct, Dante is due to exit Purgatory in 2017. Surely some fun can be had with this.

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Towards a Farthing Party con report: Maybe It’s Sunspots

I’m going to talk with names on this, because it was a very personal panel, and there was a lot of “this works for x but not for y.” It featured Jo, Greer, and me, since we are all having very productive years. One of the important points Jo made was that productivity is personal–Greer is having a very productive year for Greer, and while that meant she was a little startled by the word counts Jo and I were discussing, it didn’t make her productivity less real or less important. Jo talked about how we are improving on ourselves, not reproducing others.

I quoted Alec as saying, “Thinking is the most important part of writing,” and it sounded like we had been substantially thinking in advance on these books, so that they were more ready when we got to them. Someone–I didn’t note who–described chunks of book falling on them with flaming swords through a blizzard. For me it’s more that everything I’m writing is much closer. It’s like I would usually have to stretch a little to reach it on the shelf, and now it’s all just sitting on the desk within reach.

One of the notable points of commonality is that these bouts of productivity did not, contra suffering artist cliches, come from times of great suffering. Greer was coming out of the first flush of a great grief, and Jo and I had less physical interference than we sometimes do with writing. (I should note that the plane ride home was through a thunderstorm and has kicked up my vertigo–and that this has not turned the spigot off. Which is in some ways a relief and in some ways pretty alarming.)

Greer apparently had her book fall on her head while eating strawberries with creme fraiche and brown sugar. And to this I say: this is excellent advice for young writers. Those who have strawberry or dairy allergies can modify it slightly. But think of all the things we tell young writers as advice! Some of these things are potentially harmful! Eating strawberries, on the other hand, might not help them with their stories but is highly unlikely to do any harm. The next time someone tells you to outline or freewriter or talk it out with a friend or keep it bottled up inside or whatever else they tell you as writing advice, feel free to substitute, “Or strawberries. I could eat strawberries and think of my story. It might work, and if it didn’t work, at least there would be strawberries.”

I bet this works for other art forms, too, at least as well as it works for writing.

Anyway. I talked about the three rules I was following (discussed in this post, and Jenett and I had a good laugh about how well they map to the 4H pledge), but that’s by no means universal. A lot of people don’t try to keep up with doing everything else while they’re having an unusually productive period, or else can’t even if they do try, and that’s okay; the unusually productive periods do not last forever. One of the audience members once wrote a contract novel in 56 hours, playing Richard Thompson on repeat the whole time. This audience member still appears to be on speaking terms with their family.

Honestly, folks, I expected this panel to be a retrospective. Gosh, I had a productive month! 2/3 of a novel and 8 short stories! Wasn’t that productive! But so far it’s still going. I have one or possibly two short stories to finish up this week, and then it’s straight into the next book, for which I have [counting] five pages of notes on paper sitting on my desk. It’s doing that thing where if I don’t actively think of something else, the book says, “Helllooooo, book here, you wanted this plot point, didn’t you? I could tell you did. Also here is some worldbuilding! You’re welcome!” I think it was during the process panel (more on which anon) that Jo talked about if she didn’t want to do the laundry, getting a character in her head who thought the washing machine was awesome modern technology, so much better than having to drag it down to the river and pound on it and etc. And I do that too. Except, for example, if an opening act at a concert is no good and it would be rude to snark out loud about it, if a novel is going well, there’s usually at least one character in the novel who would snark about it too. And then the snark starts telling me worldbuilding things about the character’s assumptions about education or art or whatever else. And then there it all is. Which is a lot more diverting than a bad opening act, don’t get me wrong! It’s just that it’s there all the time.

And this is part of why I’m writing another novel: because the fire hose is still turned on, and sticking short story shot glasses under it to catch the water is only partly useful. And then there’s this novel! So who knows how long the fire hose will keep going, but…there’s this novel! So here we are. Still. Okay then.