Long Time, No Write, and some changes in direction

It's been a long time. I think my new goal will be to post at least once a week. I'd become discouraged in the last year or so because just posting, "I'm very busy at my day job and can barely write" over and over again would be pretty pointless.

Things have changed a lot for me in recent months, mostly for the positive. The bottom line is for various reasons, I'm now free of my primary day job. Now, for various other reasons, this doesn't mean I get 100% time to write (for one thing I have children, and I'm heavily involved in editing for my wife), but I do have a lot more time to write.

I'd hoped to have the final book in the Osland Trilogy finished, but I'm only about half-done. I'm not going to give any firm projected times at this point other than "before the end of the year", as I just seem to be terrible about that, and it is unfair to my readers. We'll see more going forward if I can do a bit better about that.

I've had a lot of time to reflect, even during the periods where my writing was fairly limited. There's a lot of types of things that are perhaps a bit more idiosyncratic to my tastes that I've avoided working on because I've worried they weren't "commercial enough." Some of this is an artifact of me being more interested in traditional publishing before finally committing to self-publishing and worrying about what agents might want, but the bottom line is I don't know if I've truly devoted myself to writing the kind of books, in general, that please me versus a mix of my pure ideas and what I thought I "had to write" to get an audience.

Now, don't get me wrong. I like everything I've published, but in the back of my mind, I've always been tweaking characters, plots, set-up, et cetera with the idea that those tweaks would help with marketability. Not saying that's wrong, and for many authors, their natural writing inclinations just line up better with certain audiences, but for me, I think it's led to a muddled focus.

As a result, I think I've produced a number of books that aren't as strong as they could be, even if I did like them, and I feel they were good books overall. I've very grateful for the readers who have enjoyed my books, but, at the same time, I wonder if I've been robbing them of a better experience because I'm letting these doubts influence my writing process.

The main reason I started writing was to express my personal creativity. I wrote for years (mainly short stories) without any thought of publishing or even, to be honest, other readers than myself. Back when NaNoWriMo first started, I realized I did have it in me to write a novel with proper motivation.

Now, those early efforts were completely unreadable, but they were good practice for some of my later books, which judging by reader reactions, are at least somewhat readable.

So, where do we go from here?

Well, for one thing, I'm going to just write what I feel like without a particular concern about neatly fitting into certain genres or expectations. Honestly, this doesn't mean I'm going to be producing something all that transgressive, but more I'm trying to return to why I started writing in the first place.

What does this mean in terms of my future writing? A few things really.

I intend to finish the final book in the Osland Trilogy (about half-way through that), but I'm unlikely to have a follow-up to A WOMAN OF PROPER ACCOMPLISHMENTS. I do appreciate the readers who liked it (the admittedly small number, if we're being honesty), but I think it was an experiment that didn't quite come out the way I truly wanted, but still, it was worth doing.

I'll primarily be focusing mostly on pure non-YA fantasy in the foreseeable future. Now, I may mess with sub-genres a bit, but probably nothing as directly identifiable as, for example, pure romance (not that I won't have romantic elements) or pure mystery. Many of my books will continue to feature strong and intelligent female protagonists as well.

I'm doing research on a project of, uh, well limited commercial appeal. I've been burning for a while with the desire to write a suspense/thriller set in Heian Japan. Although I'm familiar with the general history of the period, there's a lot of research needed to get the fine details right. Of course, just doing the research has opened up more plot possibilities. Now, this project can't get started probably for a year or so due to the research requirements, but if I have a true "dream" project, that one probably is it.

My core process going forward, and starting in mid-October (because I'm on vacation for a bit), will involve me working on one core main novel and rotating through serials (probably bi-monthly serials).

A sequel will be coming for MIND CRAFTER, but I don't have a firm ETC for that yet. I originally started work on that earlier this summer, but became a bit disillusioned for various reasons, but I actually do believe in the series and want to keep going.

THE FINAL CITY, the last in the Osland Trilogy, will be the primary novel focus probably until the end of the year, maybe sooner depending on how quickly I can get it done.

Why the serials? This is not really because I think serials are the light at the way or whatever, but honestly just because I want to be able to write a lot of different things at the same time. I want to experiment to see what kind of stories I'm truly enjoying writing.

One of my problems has always been the surfeit of ideas swirling around. Writing serials are a way that I can scratch that itch.

On the other hand, I get that some people despise that format, so I'll be putting serials into collections probably every 6 or 7 episodes. With each episode being around 15,000 words or so, that means the collections will be a novel-length bundle of work, and I'll be organizing them accordingly.

So, here's my general plan for the next three months:

1) Blog once monthly: This probably won't involve a lot of history blogging or interviews because at this point, I want to focus more purely on just getting words on the virtual page, but you may see an occasional interview or announcement related to friends of mine.

2) Finish up THE FINAL CITY, hopefully by the end of this year if not sooner.

3) Finish up the sequel to MIND CRAFTER by spring of next year. I actually have a draft, but it was written years ago, and I'm extremely dissatisfied with its quality, so there's a lot of work to be done.

4) Start on two serial bi-monthly serial projects. I'll reveal more about this once I'm closer to releasing episodes. Currently, I'm tentatively looking at November for the first serial release.

I feel good about where I'm going with my writing, and I've been pleased with the readers I've been able to reach at this point.

Do not misapprehend me, good sir: Modern vs. non-modern dialog

It has been pointed out to me on more than a few occasions that I rarely seem to discuss my own work on my own blog. That's something I hope to somewhat remedy in a somewhat interesting way starting with today's post.

As one might surmise from either my previous statements on the matter or just my general interests, several of the writing projects I'm working on are historical in nature. Now these bring with them some additional complications that haven't plagued with my pure fantasy or contemporary projects. There is the obvious issue of the requisite historical research. The minute you make any aspect of your story historical, people do take notice and it affects verisimilitude.

When I was passing through my upcoming Regency paranormal work, A WOMAN OF PROPER ACCOMPLISHMENTS (AWOPA), through my writer's group, several of the readers were people with a particular interest in the Regency Period. The book is set in an alternate 1811 in Bedfordshire, England. In this alternate timeline, a type of magic (which, of course, the various stuffy members of the Royal Society insist isn't magic) called spiritus has been discovered. Among other things it allows for the animation of objects. The martial applications aren't unappreciated, so many countries bolster their armies with automaton soldiers. In addition, the American Revolution was squashed after the English win at the Battle of Saratoga with the aid of these artificial troops.

What was interesting during the process of having my novel critiqued was that, for the most part, people were able to accept these rather significant diversions from history inserted into what was otherwise a sweet* Regency Romance. Instead, they were far more concerned with elements such as potential period inappropriate social interactions, et cetera. Period fiction, whether it involves magic or not, does have to be rather careful. Atmosphere is everything.

Language is one of the trickiest areas to navigate. To capture the language of 1811 for AWOPA, I spent some time reading some period letters and diaries. When I wrote the first draft, I used etymology resources to ensure that the words I was using were appropriate both in that they existed in the period and they were used in the same manner. There are probably a small handful of slightly out-of-period words I ended up letting slip through.

When I first passed my book along to my writing group, there was a bit of a problem. My desired fidelity to period language had hurt accessibility. No one disputed that the language style was appropriate for the period, but many were having trouble getting into the story because of the same style. On occasion, amusingly enough, I did have a person suggest that I was using a word in a too modern way, a discussion that was quickly ended with, for example, me pointing to a primary source. Sometimes certain words and concepts are far older than we might think.

I split the difference and rewrote the work to end up with something that it is evocative of the period (and still mostly uses only period words), but with a bit more modern syntax. Perhaps overly influenced by the work of Georgette Heyer, I was also initially rather aggressive with the insertion of Regency slang, which, admittedly is rather impenetrable if you aren't otherwise familiar with it. It took me half the first Heyer book I read until I figured out what some of the words she was using almost every page meant. I didn't excise all the slang from my manuscript, but I tried to stick to things that were a bit more easy to figure out in context.

In the end, it was a compromise between accessibility and accuracy. I'm sure upon release some will complain that it's still too stuffy and some will complain that it's not true enough to the period, but I'm pleased with the overall compromise.

A story set in England, even two hundred years in the past, still has the advantage of language that can be parsed by most modern English-speaking readers. I may have compromised for accessibility, but I could have kept my original style. Writing an understandable story with "accurate" language in say, the 11th century, would be a much more difficult affair.

My other major historical project is a straight (that is no paranormal elements) historical thriller set in the Heian period of Japanese history. Writing accurate language for the period would require me to, among other things, write the story in classical Japanese, which would present challenges even for Japanese natives to parse.

During a recent discussion of Hilary Mantel's work by The Economist, there was a discussion about her linguistic choices. She doesn't, for example, trend to perfectly and accurate render the language of 17th-century England. From what I've read of her work, I'd agree with that assessment. It's more about atmosphere than pure accuracy.

I've read several books by J.R. Tomlin, who writes medieval novels focused on the Scottish War for Independence. She uses modern English interspersed with the occasional period Scots, English, or French word, She also makes use of, on occasion, somewhat archaic syntax to communicate the feel of the language. It's  certainly not an accurate direct rendering of the language, but it certainly communicates a certain atmosphere.

On the other end of the spectrum is someone like Gordon Doherty. I read one of his books set during the Roman Republic period and another set in the Byzantine Empire. Mr. Doherty, for the most part, uses rather modern syntax and modernish slang. He intersperses in period words, typically, in relation to specific weapons and military terms.

Arguably, these are opposing techniques. J.R. is trying to promote the historicity through atmosphere while maintaining accessibility. Gordon's going straight for near maximum accessibility. Neither technique is "accurate" in the pure linguistic sense, but short of learning new languages (or classical forms of languages one already knows), no one, I think is going to have that much of an issue. Gordon's style is a reflection, I think, of something that we often forget: the commonly used language of the past was the vernacular for those people and so reflecting it in more vernacular modern language form is a way of communicating the spirit of those exchanges even at the potential cost of some atmosphere. What style a person prefers will, I think, just depend on their own reading biases. I seem to have a natural inclination more toward J.R.'s style than Gordon's, but both have their merits.

Sometimes people also have false expectations of what constitutes accuracy in language depictions. I saw a person once complaining that a book focused on 17th-century Canadian Native tribes had the natives using contractions and that their languages didn't have contractions. The book was written in English (with the occasional bit of French). Now, it's a bit odd, I think, to suggest that "translated" dialog, as it were, should mirror the exact syntax and morphology of the original language. Mandarin, for instance, doesn't have true tense in the sense you see in English. Instead, it has aspect, which marks not time of action but rather state of completion. It'd be downright silly to write a book in English involving characters speaking Mandarin and then not use tenses.

As I circle back around to my thoughts on my Heian project, I'm still unsure how I'm going to handle it. At the moment, even though I've a good outline of the plot, I'm still knee-deep in research. Although I have a good high-level understanding of Heian history, that's not the same as having the firm grasp of daily living details that are necessary when writing a work of fiction.

The question of language is one I go back to again and again. How many classical Japanese words (or even modern Japanese words) should be inserted? Is it better to express the concept completely in English if there's an easy equivalent word? Conversely, if the word doesn't have an elegant translation, is it best to leave it in Japanese? There's a certain amount of atmosphere that comes with using Japanese. Kami can be translated as god or spirit, but it's somewhat in-between. Not using the word results in a certain subtle lost of atmosphere and even conceptual understanding. Though, at the same time, if a person doesn't have the conceptual understanding to begin with, it might just confuse things.

There's the question of the best way to handle non-English terms. Some authors just are careful to let their meaning be inferred in context, and some even just present short sections that define the terms before or after the actual main text.

Most of the characters in this novel are highly educated aristocrats, members and family members of a bureaucratic elite obsessed with form over function. In that sense, somewhat old-fashioned English marked by flowery language, the kind that some people tend to often associate with historical speech, accurate or otherwise, may be appropriate. Heian aristocrats, after all, were people who expected each other to produce specific-form poetry quickly in social situations.

In the end, though, no matter what I do, it'll be inaccurate. I mean I'm not even writing the dialog in modern Japanese, let alone classical Japanese. So, with that in mind, does that grant me a sort of freedom that I don't quite have with say my Regency work?

I'm curious what your thoughts are?

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*For those unfamiliar with romance novel "temperature" levels, sweet is typically considered the least steamy in terms of sexual content. It used to mean no sex at all, but nowadays it often can mean just "no sex shown." In my case, I use it to mean no sex at all.

Coming Soon: A Tibetan in Oz and the Regency with a touch of magic

In my zeal for my research involving my historical products, it's sometimes lost that I'm working on other projects. Two of these writing products are coming to fruition (i.e., on the final stages of editing and proofreading). Now that I have the cover for one, it's starting to hit me that I'll be releasing books soon. Let the panic begin! It's all well and good when you're in the self-flagellation of writing-self-editing-beta reading-editing-rewriting and all that, but actually sending your precious baby to the harsh world of the general public is a bit unsettling.

At the end of January, I'll be releasing a book that I've previously discussed on my blog, The Emerald City. The story is a somewhat loose and modern young adult urban fantasy reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz centered around a Tibetan-American teen from Kansas who ends up at a more than a little strange boarding school in Seattle.

It's actually a bit surprising, when I think about it, that my first release is going to be a young adult urban fantasy. Although I read plenty of young adult books, I never had any intention, when I began writing, of producing young adult work. Mostly, I intended to produce work in my favorite genres: historical fiction (as one might have surmised by my main blog content), historical fiction with magical elements, and adult fantasy.

I happen to really enjoy musical theater, though. In the course of satisfying that particular interest, I had the opportunity to see Wicked. So, I ended up inspired to write a reinterpretation based on another reinterpretation. The Emerald City will be out at the end of January. This book also benefited from being written after I'd written several other manuscripts. The old saying is that it takes a million words before you produce something worth reading. In my case, that's pretty much true.

The finishing proofreading and editorial touches are also being put on my sweet Regency paranormal romance, A Woman of Proper Accomplishments. Alas, I don't have my cover yet for that one. It was fun, but also a bit challenging, producing a Regency story where a type of reliable supernatural ability exists that still preserved the social atmosphere of the Regency period that interest readers. I think I succeeded (at least some of my beta readers claim I did), but I suppose the general reading public will have to decide here come February.

While I'm on the subject, I have an adult fantasy project, Mind Crafter, coming down the pipe, but it is still in first phase of editing.

Of course, I have a wonderful (I hope) Heian mystery coming out, hopefully, in fall of 2012.

Science Fiction Fantasy Saturday #4: Always find the positive in a given situation

Welcome to #SFFSat – Science Fiction Fantasy Saturday -  a chance to post six sentences from a piece of speculative fiction. Want to join in? Check out the site and links to other great speculative fiction authors at Science Fiction Fantasy Saturday and follow the hashtag #SFFSat on Twitter.

This six is from my fantasy WIP Mind Crafter.

In this six, the protagonist (Shala) finds herself having a most curious nightmare in which she's a foreign woman on a doomed ship. For reference, in this book, a crafter is a type of magic user with specialized abilities. Shala is, when she's awake at least, a mind crafter.

Through the sheets of rain and flying debris, she spied a golden-haired woman yelling into the storm. Why hadn’t the damn Caranian air crafter protected them? Despite all the silver they'd given her, they were still going to die. A fellow Dassian would have done more for them. Jalisia cackled into the wind. A fellow Dassian also would have wanted double the silver.

When that brilliant idea doesn't seem so brilliant half-way through the writing process

Although it is only recently that I’ve managed to produce something readable for the general public, I’ve written many stories over the years. Today, though, I was reflecting on the novels that I’ve written and then abandoned. In general, once I’ve generated an idea and actually start writing on it, I finish. I don’t think this is the result of dogged determination or discipline as much as a reflection of the fact that I try to only write the kind of thing I want to read. It makes the actual writing process very fun for me. Editing . . . not so much fun. That's perhaps why I've only managed to produce two decent works and only rather recently. I've slowly (with the aid of critique partners and beta readers) acquired the necessary editing discipline. 

In considering the two major projects I abandoned, they were both helped me realize a lot about the kind of things I enjoy in books and, consequently, the kind of things I enjoy writing.

The first abandoned project was a somewhat dark YA paranormal. The story concerned a college freshman that learns she is a faerie. Unfortunately, she learns this because a group of faerie-hunting humans called the Iron Sword attempt to capture and kill her. She only manages to escape with the aid the human agent (who was posing as her roommate) of a faerie-affiliated group. After she thinks her roommate is killed, she ends up being saved by another faerie who also, conveniently enough, is also a hot guy. The twist is that he’s actually the bad guy. He’s been seducing her as part of an attempt to resurrect the spirit of Baba Yaga (who in this book was going to be depicted as a sort of dark faerie-witch hybrid). It had lots of angst, magic, ruthless guys with iron swords, random references to Wisconsin and Illinois (I live in Madison, WI) and what not. I wrote a good 2/3rds of the novel before abandoning it. After all that planning, developing, and work, why did I abandon it? One simple reason: protagonist agency.

One day, after I spent a good hour editing, I realized the protagonist basically had no agency. She spent the entire book being pushed from one person to another person. Everything happens to her, but she initiates nothing. Now, I don’t think that all protagonists have to be action heroes or whatever, but something really bugged me about a protagonist who is nothing more than a leaf on the plot wind and spends the entire book being just timid, sad,scared, and manipulated, even it was a totally realistic reaction to the situation she was in. Part of the problem with this was that it made everyone around her seem more interesting. Her roommate/guardian, her boyfriend/evil dude, et cetera. I toyed around with some rewrites and realized I was so dissatisfied with the result that I abandoned it.   It did, however, rise again in a sense. I took many of the elements of the plot with some slight tweaks and incorporated them in as the plot of an adult urban fantasy novel I wrote that focused on a different protagonist who was involved in the search for a faerie girl who had gone missing.

The second novel I abandoned for a totally different reason. I had started working on a YA paranormal about a girl who can see ghosts but since no one else can, she’s been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. The book concerned her meeting up with a ghost hunting other, far more evil ghosts, but the main idea was to make it ambiguous (i.e., as no one else can see the ghosts, maybe it really was all in her head). When I got about half-way through this, I felt  uncomfortable. On a certain level, I wondered if what I was writing was somehow insulting to schizophrenics. Now, who is to say? One thing that strikes me about people raising sensitivity complaints is that horrifically serious things like murder are treated very casually in certain genres that are often considered light, fun escapist reads (e.g., cozy mystery). I've seen no one make the argument, for example, that cozy mysteries shouldn't be around because there are a lot of suffering people who've left friends and family to murder. Anyway, despite my intellectual defense of the idea, I found I still felt very uncomfortable with the project. My spouse told me I was thinking it through too hard, but, ultimately, I abandoned the project.

I was inspired to write this post today, though, because when I was flipping through my blogs, I saw a new YA book coming out with a very similar premise (unfortunately, I can’t remember the title or the blog I saw it on). Basically, a girl gets committed because she can see ghosts no one else can. Now, reading through the blurb and what not, it didn’t really strike me as exploitive or outrageous, yet in my own case overthought my way to abandoning the project. If I can find the blog (or the book) again, I’ll probably buy it. My reader interface with the idea was quite different than my writer interface.

I’m curious. If you’re a writer, why have you abandoned projects in the past? If you’re a reader, what sort of things make you want to abandon a book or make you uncomfortable?