writing process

behind-the-scenes sunday

Oops. I didn’t get around to planning, writing and scheduling posts for this week. Life has been busy of late, but in a good way. So, let’s go behind the scenes and see what I’ve been up to lately.

Homeschooling

We went back to school after a week’s vacation. That required planning on my part, some of which included:

Find copywork sentences and passages for the olders
Correcting school work and ordering new workbooks as needed (math for Sir I., spelling for Miss M., phonics for the Baron)
Looking over the next few history chapters, picking supplementary books, and checking them out from the library
Choosing which science topics to cover and gathering supplies for experiments (current list includes cream of tartar, a head of red cabbage, and graduated measuring cylinders!)

And then there’s actual school time, which takes up all of the morning and an hour or so in the afternoon.

Writing

Folks, I’ve been struggling through Ironhand (working title of the Mourning Cloak sequel).

I’m a weird breed of fantasy writer. Barring a set of loosely-related short stories featuring the same character, I’ve never written a sequel. None. Zilch. Nada.

And I realized that I’m terrified of sequels. Yes, I would rather build a whole new world and bring a whole new set of characters to life than write a sequel.

Sequels come with baggage. Other people’s expectations. The sinking feeling that you might’ve broken the story. The duh moment that you wished you’d added that one detail in book one that would’ve set everything up so well for book two. The feeling that you’re writing yourself into a corner and you can’t do a darn thing about it because the first book is already published!

Working on Ironhand was like being a rabbit running away from a big scary dog.

It wasn’t pretty. One should not get that anxious and sweaty-palmed over a scene in which characters aren’t even being attacked.

So I took some time out to write a very short story, and a few nights ago the right brain and I had a little talk. In which right brain handed me some ideas for how to finish up the Kato/Flutter story in one novella, gave me some truly scary monsters, and some helpful plot guideposts along the way.

I’m calmer now.

In other writerly news, I’ve started a fantasy novel about a girl and a pegasus for 6yo Miss M. and a sci-fi collaboration with 8yo Sir I.

O.o

Yeah, that was my reaction, too.

This and That

Things are happening with the Quartz serial! I went through the novel and divided it up into 90 episodes. I’ve polished, proofread and stuck the first four into WordPress. My tech people and I are working on figuring out how to integrate the serial into my site (current plan is to give it its own page and RSS feed). A weekly episode will run on Tuesdays, with Saturdays open for a bonus episodes (at $5 each).

I also have a very tentative production schedule for this year (always subject to change), but it includes Ironhand, a follow-up anthology to Shattered, the completion of a Kai’s book that is sitting (still) at 80K, and a Snow White-inspired novella with electricpunk elements (and no, I don’t know if electricpunk is really a word).

How about you? What projects are you working on?

dragons I have known

When I first started writing fantasy, I swore that I would never ever include something so cliched, so stale, so overdone, as a dragon.

Riiight.

Whether I wanted them or not, dragons crept or stormed into my fiction anyway.

The sleeping dragon whose awakening would restart an ancient war. The cultured dragon who likes books and foreign travel. The continent-sized space dragon whose skeleton is home to humans and humanoid species.

And these are all in some way influenced by the dragons I have known, and fall in one of the categories below:

Force of Nature/Actively Evil

The dragons of Western literature dragons are seen as forces of nature–like a destructive storm–or actively evil. These are the dragons that Beowulf and St. George battle. These are the dragons from the movie Reign of Fire. The ones that are intelligent as well as malevolent are the most compelling and frightening of all–from Smaug in The Hobbit to the transformed Maleficent in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.

Loyal Companions

Two words: Pernese dragons.

Dragonquest — Admit it, you were thinking about Pernese dragons too when you saw the “Loyal Companions” heading

These telepathic dragons are genetically engineered to bond with human riders and fight Thread. They are sentient, but they are also totally, irrevocably loyal to and protective of their riders. These dragons fulfill a powerful human fantasy to command the utter devotion of such fearsome beasts.

They’re also from my grown-up perspective, a little boring. (I wonder what would happen if a genetic mutant in that sort of world didn’t bond with a human, didn’t die from lack of such bond, and grew up wondering what made humans so special that dragons had to obey them?).

Cute and Cuddly

These abound in children’s books, from the little kitten-sized dragon in There’s No Such Thing As a Dragon to the three, darling troublemakers in Good Night, Good Knight.

See, dragons just want to be cuddled and petted. Hmm, also sounds like Pernese fire lizards.

Good Night Good Knight — Very cute story. And look at those adorable little dragonlings!

Just Like Us

They may have sharp teeth and be overfond of princesses and sparkly stuff, but they are like us. They talk, they give dinner parties, they form governments. They argue and form alliances. Some of them are inquisitive and question everything. Others would rather read poetry than fight. They are easy to identify with.

Who are your favorite dragons? Any dragon categories I might’ve missed?

weird worlds in fantasy and science fiction

I love weird worlds. Tempt me with a clockwork universe, a planet with two suns, or a moving city. Immerse me in the details of how life works in such a bizarre place. Entrance me with your imagination.

Give me a weird world, and I’m halfway there for your book.

Some of my favorite strange worlds are:

Upon Another Living Creature

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld rests on the back of four elephants which stand upon the shell of Great A’Tuin, the cosmic turtle. In Martha Wells’ The Serpent Sea, a large part of the action takes place in a city built upon the back of a sea creature magically compelled to swim at the water’s surface (and you can just tell what would happen if that compulsion failed, can’t you?). In Leviathan, Derryn Sharp is a midshipman on a living airship engineered from a blue whale, with its own ecosystem of flachette bats, strafing hawks, hydrogen-sniffing canines, and many other (fun!) creatures.

Non-Earth-like Planets

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars (second in the trilogy) has delightful sections on the terraforming of Mars and the creation of colonies on other planets and moons. A giant umbrella shades Venus. The human settlement on Mercury is on a moving train. Denizens of the moons around the gas giants genetically alter themselves to survive the environment.

Life on the Edge

Living in extreme yet Earth-like environments also works for me. Kat Falls’ Dark Life takes place on Earth–but in human settlements built undersea. Brandon Sanderson’s world of Roshar is battered by massive storms and much of the natural life, including botanical, is able to retreat into shells.

In the Air

Flying cities show up in games, movies, and books. From Skies of Arcadia to Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky to The Floating Islands by Rachel Neumeier, habitats in the air are toe-curlingly wonderful to this reader.

Build Your World

Some habitats, notably in science fiction, are entirely man-made. Space stations and generation star ships are good examples. An interesting megastructure is Larry Niven’s Ringworld, an artificial ring orbiting around a star like our own sun.

Weird worlds also creep into my writing. The world of Quartz is a disc in a mechanical universe. The world of Riven is folded, like a paper fan. And in Rainbird, an entire community lives upon the skeleton of a continent-sized dragon.

What are your favorite weird worlds and environments, in fiction and out of it?

more on science fantasy: language and vocabulary

Sorry that this is a day late! Instead of cleaning up the rough draft of this last night, I worked on my fiction. Which only goes to show that I have my priorities straight, right?

Last week’s post on defining science fantasy (and the subsequent discussion) had me pondering more on the differences between science fiction and fantasy. This week, I want to focus on one aspect of those differences–the language and vocabulary of the two genres.

Fantasy is rooted in the past, and often draws inspiration from historical Earth cultures and societies. The literary traditions in fantasy novels often take the form of mythology, religious and prophetic texts, epic poetry, and song.

The vocabulary of science fiction, on the other hand, is drawn from the modern age, reflecting the huge leaps in technological and scientific progress. It’s unlikely that you’ll find epic poetry in science fiction; instead, you’ll find lines of code, snippets from scientific lectures and academic texts, extracts from instruction manuals, and transcripts of video and audio recordings.

So, even if science fiction and fantasy concern themselves with the same themes, they’ll use different language to do so. Take, for example, encounters with non-human sentient races. Fantasy draws its races from mythology and folklore, populating the world with elves, dwarves, dragon and sea monsters. Their origins are explained through myth and folklore. Science fiction has its aliens, but these are described in terms of their evolution and adaptation to their natural habitats.

Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I’m currently reading Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Future, and his predicted technology looks an awful lot like magic. While the effects of technology and magic might be similar, fantasy and science fiction employ different vocabulary to describe their use. Fantasy’s mages are science fiction’s genius physicists. Witches and wizards create portals between worlds, while space ships cross interstellar distances using FTL drives, hyperspace, and wormholes. The magically gifted might mind-speak to each other across fantasy continents; ordinary people take advantage of advanced communications to do the same in science fiction.

The processes of magic and technology also differ. A wizard’s workshop is often at the top of his lonely tower, and he makes magic by using arcane language and ritualistic gestures, maybe aided by mysterious bronze instruments and jars of dragon liver pickled at the dark of the moon. A scientist, though, is one cog in an industrial-military machine. Her lab is of steel and glass and plastic. Robotic arms and computer screens are the way she interacts with what she’s attempting to change. The end results may be the same–say, creating a whole new species–but the vocabulary used is not.

What happens when the terminology and processes of one genre creeps into the other? A mage might manipulate matter by knowing the True Names of objects or seeing a pattern of living energy. But when a mage manipulates matter by moving subatomic particles around with her mind, as in Jo Anderton’s Veiled Worlds trilogy, your fantasy just got a little bit more science-fictional.

Similarly, when you use a mystical, unmeasurable energy like the Force in your spaceships-and-guns science fiction universe (and follow that up with swords, robes, and prophecies) you’re dangling your feet in the shallows of fantasy.

This crossover of language between science fiction and fantasy is what leads me to characterize some of my work as science fantasy. I have no problem with science and magic running parallel through my worlds. Ward magic exists alongside reality-altering radioactive elements. New species are created through a hybrid process that uses magic and genetic engineering. And I like being able to use precise technical language even in my heavily fantasy-skewed worlds. I like calling an atom an atom.

Do you find the language of science fiction and fantasy to be different? What about sub-genres like steampunk and urban fantasy? Do they fit right into the middle of the spectrum where the lines between science fiction and fantasy blur?