more short story!

Pretty much everything I've sold lately is coming out this month. Dancing the Warrior, "Love, Cayce," and now "Coyotaje," in Ekaterina Sedia's new anthology Bewere the Night. The TOC includes people like Cherie Priest, Holly Black, Elizabeth Hand, Genevieve Valentine, Marissa Lingen . . . I could keep going, but you can see the whole list for yourself. I don't have my author copy yet, so I haven't read it, but I'm pretty excited about this one.

Also, don't forget about the giveaway for Dancing the Warrior. All you have to do is let me know what your Hunter name would be, and you'll be entered to win a signed pair of the doppelganger novels.

And now, back to the page proof mines.

The Diana Wynne Jones Project

Okay, folks. So I mentioned a while ago that I think I'm going to re-read the complete works of Diana Wynne Jones.

How should I go about doing this?

She wrote multiple different series, and a whole lot of stand-alone books. Should I read them in chronological order of publication? That would, in some cases, break up series by rather large amounts. Read all the series first, then tackle the stand-alones, in chronological order or not? Go at it any which way, grabbing whatever tickles my fancy? I'm really not sure how best to approach it. The one thing I'm sure of is that I'll start with either Fire and Hemlock (beause it made me a writer) or The Lives of Christopher Chant (because it was the first one I read), but recommendations for what to do after that would be welcome.



For the first time, it occurs to me to wonder if my subconscious had The Lives of Christopher Chant in mind when it came up with the title for "The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe."

more Scion tidbits

I'm a bit proud of this idea from the game I'm running, so I wanted to share. It will make the most sense to those who already know the cosmological setup for White Wolf's Scion system, but for everybody else, I can quote the nutshell description I gave when I posted about my concept for the game:

The underlying enemies in this scenario are the Titans, the parents of the gods themselves. They're truly impersonal, elemental powers: the "body" of the Greater Titan of Fire, for example, is more or less equivalent to the D&D Elemental Plane of Fire. However, Greater Titans can manifest more concretely as avatars, which are god-like beings reflecting a particular aspect of their concept. Prometheus, for example, is an avatar of the Greater Titan of Fire; so is Kagu-tsuchi, but they embody different things. The Titans aren't precisely evil, but they're not friendly to the world, and their influence usually isn't a good thing.

Got that? So, it mentions in the books that some of the Titans were never bound. Hundun because it's the Greater Titan of Chaos and can't be bound; Logos because the Greater Titan of the Word struck a deal with the gods. Etc.

I was trying to decide what to do with the Mississippi River, cosmologically speaking. I failed to turn up any useful info on how tribes along its length viewed the river -- no deity names or anything -- and I knew "Old Man River" was a relatively late concept, but at the same time it seemed necessary and appropriate to have some kind of unifying entity for use in the game.

What I settled on was this: that Iteru, the Great River, is a Greater Titan, and it, like Logos, struck a deal with the gods way back in Ye Old Mythic Times. Part of its body now serves as the Godrealm for the Pesedjet, the Egyptian gods. (In the game books, Iteru is the name of that realm, and it's also the Egyptian name for the Nile.) Major rivers around the world are avatars of Iteru, and they individually formed contracts with the gods of early civilizations along their banks: the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Ganges in India, the Yellow River in China, etc. Old Man River is just a recent (from the viewpoint of game-time) name for the Titan avatar that is the Mississippi River, which hasn't had a contract with any society since the decline of the Mississippian culture exemplified by Cahokia. But since this game is in part about the attempted land- and people-grab of a whole bunch of pantheons, you can bet they're all courting Old Man River's favor . . . .

Anyway, this is what happens when I let Archaeologist Brain out to play with Folklorist Brain. I come up with ways to mythologize and then translate into RPG terms the frequent pattern of early civilizations forming on the banks of rivers.

Next task: figure out what I'm doing with 1876 New Orleans.

Writing Fight Scenes: Maps

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.]

After a delay of much longer duration than expected, I finally have for you a follow-up post on the topic of where to set the combat, which will function as our segue into craft-related aspects of writing fight scenes.

If the layout and contents of the environment are important to the scene -- as they should be -- then you need to have a very clear grasp on their relative positions. It doesn't guarantee you'll communicate that information effectively to the reader, but believe me: if you don't have that clear grasp, your odds of communicating the necessary information go way down.

To that end, I suggest making a map.

It doesn't have to be fancy. Mine, in fact, are hideous. Let me show you, with three examples from Warrior (the novel formerly known as Doppelganger):

( Nobody ever has to see them but you. Unless, of course, you decide to write a series of posts on the topic of fights, and use your own work as a demonstration. )

All right, there's that hurdle done with. Hopefully I'll finish the rest of the posts in a more timely fashion. From here on out, it'll be more specifics of craft rather than broad considerations, though we'll definitely be referring back to those as we go.