Something Wicker This Way Comes*

Image © copyright Jim Champion and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons License.
The original was cropped for use in this blog post.

(* Yes, I still have Ray Bradbury on my mind...)

My story "How the Wicker Knight Would Not Move," a somewhat grim tale from the world of Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone, is now up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It shares issue #99 with a cool-looking Asian-themed fantasy by Alex Dally MacFarlane evocatively titled "Fox Bones. Many Uses."

It's great to see BCS nearing 100 issues, a tribute to the hard work of its staff, Editor Scott H. Andrews and Assistant Editor Kate Marshall. Thanks for making it all happen.

New Worlds

A coloring sheet I drew for my last library storytime. The  Muppet lineage is probably obvious...

Although it seems premature to talk about details, things in my writing life have accelerated to the point where my wife and I decided it was time for me to give full-time writing a shot. (Admittedly this is "full time" to the degree I can do it while looking after the kids -- but I'm going to love that aspect of it too.) So, I have left my job as a children's librarian at Campbell Library.

I've been extremely fortunate to have a "day job" I loved, and I can imagine many scenarios where I would return to library work. (In fact, I'm already scheduled to do a little volunteering.) It's been tremendous fun, and very rewarding. There are few things as gratifying as getting the right book into a kid's hands. And then there's storytime, where I got to ham it up while reading picture books, gradually overcoming my stage fright. Plus the way that reference desk time always teaches you something new every day. And then there's all the drawing I got to do...

My library colleagues have been hugely supportive of this change, and I will miss working with them. Thanks, everyone.

I also have to emphasize how much I owe my wife. She has always looked out for me -- all the way back to the '90s when it first started looking like I might get somewhere with writing. That was a lot of typing and coaching and beta-reading and idea-bouncing and hand-holding ago. I think only a writer's partner can fully appreciate how much work that can be. Thank you, Becky.

I hope I can fill this blog with more specific news in the months ahead, but I can say that things look promising from here. Onward!

Scenes and Pacing

Muybridge's "The Horse in Motion." Image credit: Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons

I've been thinking about story pacing lately, and this led me to thinking about scenes. I'm not holding forth here, just thinking out loud. Sometimes it's daunting, how much I've got to learn. But follow along if you like.

So far I've thought of pacing as a function of sentences and paragraphs on the one hand, and overall storyline on the other. For example at the sentence level, you want active verbs. At the paragraph level, you want to drop details that drag. And out at the storyline level, you want to have a sense that everything's driving toward a big finish, and avoid the temptation to overcomplicate the plot. (A big, big temptation for me, always. Love those strange byways of plot.)

Somehow, though, I've never thought carefully about a middle layer of pacing -- what you do with scenes. I tend to handle scenes off the cuff, throwing things around until I get something that has some energy, that feels right. Nothing wrong with that, but I'm surprised to see I've never tried to get analytical with scene construction, even as an experiment.

I suspect part of that's a preference on my part for fiction that has a strong narrative voice, in which scenes rise up like jewels in the storyteller's hand, are spun in the light, and then returned to her treasure pouch until a new scene is needed. In between we have her voice and the motion of her hands to carry us along.

Or in less romanticized terms, you have narration that conveys you from one scene to the next in a seamless way, so that you may not even notice the transition between "showing" and "telling," and the "telling" part, contrary to introductory writing advice, is often the best part. Ursula K. Le Guin is one writer that comes to mind who is wonderful at this. Another I've recently discovered, thanks to the Howard A. Jones-edited edition of his "Cossack" stories, is Harold Lamb.

The other extreme is a kind of story that seems like a screenplay in prose, where everything revolves around scenes, and the narration's job is to get you from scene to scene with as little fuss as possible. I think I've unfairly overlooked this method, because of my preferences, but it does have its advantages. It forces you to think carefully about what scenes are needed, to pack those scenes with as much punch as possible, and to waste no time with what doesn't support those scenes. Some of Robert E. Howard's work seems to fit this pattern, and I've lately discovered John C. Hocking's "Archivist" stories and admired how his scenes build a fast pace.

For example the first story in the series, "A Night in the Archives,"  compresses everything into a single scene, as if it were a one-act play. The story involves political intrigue, magic, vengeance, and several twists and turns, all in the confined space of the Archives of the fantasy city of Frekore. I realized reading it that I would have told the same story with at least three scenes. They might have been good scenes, but the story would surely have been slower-paced. Hocking's later Archivist stories (the most recent in Black Gate 15) aren't quite so compressed, but they retain that lean, mean pacing. It's something to study.

Speaking of scenes, I got some good tips about them at Worldcon (where I didn't actually manage to blog the Hugos live as planned, but had a lot of fun nonetheless) when I had the great honor of talking writing with an sf legend, Joan D. Vinge. She was one of my Clarion West instructors way back when, and it's great to see her back writing after terrible difficulties -- see this Tor.com article for more information. She passed along some solid advice on scenes. A good scene, she said, should tackle at least two, and preferably three of these items -- develop or show character, advance the plot, and establish background.

(Now, I think I may have hit two or three of these targets in my own scenes by accident, but that may be a case of throwing a lot of stuff at the barn wall. Maybe some actual planning is in order.)

I'm attempting to apply this advice in the science fiction story I'm working on, a sequel to my space pirate story "Sails the Morne." Meanwhile I'm trying to pull off the all-in-one-scene approach with a short fantasy story. Hopefully both exercises will teach me something.

From a Work in Progress

Image credit: Jahn Henne, from Wikimedia Commons

(I finished a novel draft last week, so I'm working on a short story. This one is not part of my "Gaunt and Bone" series but belongs to the same world. Here's the opening.)

Shadowdrop wasn't afraid of the hellsnout that chased her down Statuary Avenue past the hundred marble emperors glaring beneath pigeons' feet. She didn't trouble about its spittle-flecked fangs chomping the air behind her leaping legs as she cleared the iron fence of the Western Gravegarden. Nor was she overly concerned about its frantic howling as it summoned a half dozen four-legged friends for a chase up the Stairway of Time, up the stone stretch, the bronze stretch, the iron and orichalkum stretches shining near the hilltop.

No, what the black cat feared as she raced toward the Tower of the Infraseers was that she'd shed her natural bad luck upon all the innocents in the forum. Again.

The Tower pretended to lack a first story, with only scaffolding, pipes, and gutters connecting it to the ground. The Infraseers were proud of their bond with the guts of the city. It wasn't until she'd clawed her way up the the second story and its gargoyle-covered facade that Shadowdrop turned and saw her fears were justified.

As she gasped between the stone monstrosities, the mutated hounds baying beneath her, she looked down the hill, past the gardens, and along the avenue. The street was now a trail of misfortune.

Overturned fruit carts spilled pink wondermelons and purple squirtbursts onto the stone emperors' feet... A carriage sprawled within the Fountain of Empress Zayne, and silken-clad nobles fled the spray spurting from every gilded window... A throng emerging from the Zodiac Arena was spattered by the water and like angry bees it convulsed in battle between the partisans of Glorg Headsmasher and Snarl Biteblood.

"It is all my fault," Shadowdrop moaned. For she had crossed their path.

On the Road to Karthagar

Image credit: Jim and Ruth Keegan

Black Gate 15 is set to appear in the near future, stuffed full of fantasy adventure, and I wanted to share the amazing illustration created by Jim and Ruth Keegan for my story "The Lions of Karthagar." (See more of their great artwork at their site.) The gentleman on the left is known as a parchman, just one of the dangers the guy on the right will encounter on his journey to the mysterious desert city of Karthagar.

Black Gate is a fiction magazine focusing on fantasy, and with special attention to action and adventure. Check out their website for more information, as well as a lively blog covering books, movies, writing, comics, games, and more.

Crashing Through the Wall of Text

  I think there are two basic solutions for exposition, and fortunately they're not mutually exclusive.

  The first is to minimize and streamline it, by choosing your background info carefully and then distributing that information alongside other interesting things, like say the billboards your character zips past during a hovercar chase scene. It's a method that's usually credited to Robert A. Heinlein, and which Jo Walton gives the neat term "incluing."

  The second is the old-fashioned method -- make the pure exposition itself as interesting as possible. Learn the rhetorical tricks of good nonfiction writers and lecturers, and make your infodumps fun.

  I think Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is worth studying for great examples of both techniques. Snow Crash has both a dizzying opening that sets the stage for the whole future milieu, and a long section deeper in explaining the major science fictional idea of the story.

  Many people say they hated the long explanation, but personally I enjoyed it at least as much as the opening. Then again, I'm a weirdo who sometimes skips ahead to the next infodump. But I figure there must be at least a few other readers like me.

  Another trick you can pull with the long lecture-y explanation is to add stress around the edges -- the guy lecturing your hero is doing so while waving a weapon, the lowdown on the conspiracy is delivered under a dark bridge or a spooky underground parking lot, or there are ominous bumps and scratches outside as the lecturer speaks about zombies... A great example of a long infodump with tension is "The Shadow of the Past," Chapter 2 of The Fellowship of the Ring. Check out Kate Nepveu's commentary here, and consider what a great history professor Gandalf would have made.

Speaking of Libraries

Image credit: Lin Kristensen, New Jersey, USA

A while back, C.C. Finlay, author of the Traitor the the Crown series, "The Political Officer" and "The Political Prisoner," and much other good stuff) put up an amazing blog post on his connection to his home town library. 

I can't add anything to the post, except gratitude he shared it. But I do want to follow up on something he added in the Comments:

"Every generation needs new books. They're like a life preserver tossed out into the dark sea -- you don't know who will need a particular book but you can be sure that someone will."

One of the important concepts that a recently retired colleague (see this post) taught me is that we keep some books, not because they are popular, but because they are game changers for certain people. Circulation statistics can't tell you which books they are, unfortunately. Identifying them is an art, one that I don't think I've learned. Finlay's essay is, among many other things, a reminder to never let it all be about the numbers.