why I have this icon

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .

. . . it was the time between contracts.

That's right, folks, I am at present the writerly equivalent of unemployed. Aside from the copy-edits and page proofs for With Fate Conspire, I have no contractual obligation to a publisher. Which means it's time to go rooting through the brain and figure out what I'm going to try and sell.

It's a fun time because, dude! New ideas! Shiny! Four years of Onyx Court means four years' worth of creative backlog, all kinds of characters and concepts that have been stewing away in my subconscious. Some that used to look all sparkly and keen have now faded, but others have arisen to take their place. Just off the top of my head, I can think of twenty-two books in six series that I would be willing and able to do next, plus some stand-alones. So I am living in a time of wondrous possibility, where anything could happen . . .

. . . or nothing. This is also the time where I chew off my fingernails, wondering if my sales figures are good enough, whether the ideas are commercial enough, second-guessing what would be the best thing to do next from a career point of view. Self-doubt creeps in, because right now I have no safety net, and the publishing industry is not exactly in good health. I don't think I'm likely to find myself sans new contract, but it's taken writers by surprise before, and what if I'm one of them?

And, of course, the worst part is that it's slow. I have to polish up a proposal, send it to my agent, get her feedback, maybe polish it some more, then wait for her to submit it. After that, it might take weeks or even months to achieve resolution. Hence this icon.

You may be seeing more of it in the days to come.

Writing Fight Scenes: What?

NOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.



[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

Enough with the touchy-feely stuff about character and purpose; you want to know about weapons.

I said at the start of this series that you mostly don't need technical expertise to be able to write good fight scenes. Weapons are the one place where that's less true. You don't have to be trained in everything you put into your characters' hands, but it does help to have a grasp of general principles, and to look up details once you've decided what to use. What I'll aim to do here is give you a sense of those general principles, and a few examples of what I mean by detail.

( Let's get to the stabby things! )

I'm going to make something of a controversial recommendation here, which is: watch movies. There are definite flaws to this method, of course, the chiefest of which is that most movie fight scenes bear very little resemblance to actual fights. What they can do, though, that simply reading a book can't, is give you a sense of how a fight with a given weapon moves. A favorite example of weapon geeks is the rapier-versus-claymore duel in Rob Roy, which very clearly illustrates the tactical scenario posed by that matchup: the rapier guy is much faster and can poke lots of little not-immediately-lethal holes in his opponent, but god help him if he gets hit once by that claymore. To pick a more arcane example, I know precisely nothing about spear-and-shield fighting, but I do know that the fight between Hector and Achilles in Troy doesn't move like a sword fight would; if I had to write a similar scene for a book, I would watch that fight a few times and think about how the combatants position themselves, the angles from which they attack, how the shields play into the equation, to see if I can poach any of the principles for my own use. (I did this the one time I had to choreograph a quarterstaff fight for a play. You might be interested to know the first six moves of the fight between Little John and Robin of Locksley in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves are actually two moves, repeated three times from different camera angles.) It can even apply to unarmed combat: want to write a really brutal, hard-hitting fistfight? Watch Ong Bak and take notes on Muay Thai. What you really need is the ability to think about movement, on a level of basic concepts, so that when it comes time to imagining it for your characters, what you come up with makes sense. Having a visual resource can help with that, and we're not all in a position to go to a Muay Thai class for observation.

Next post, we take the characters out of the empty white space and put them somewhere for their fight!