Swan Tower

First up: Book View Cafe is having a sale! From now through the end of the year, it's half off on all our titles (with a $3.99 minimum purchase).

And speaking of sales, Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers is offering all of its on-demand courses for $5 each, also through the end of the year. (This is the venue through which I've taught "Writing Fight Scenes" a few times, and for which I intend to do an on-demand version, though it won't be ready until next year.)

And speaking of teaching! On January 30th I will be doing a workshop on public readings through the Dream Foundry -- register at that link. Attendance is free, though they gratefully accept donations to help defray the cost of paying their instructors.

And speaking of me being online! Because I've got The Mask of Mirrors coming out on January 19th and The Night Parade of 100 Demons coming out on February 2nd, it is Interview Season Ahoy around here. Alyc and I were interviewed about the former at Litcast of Doom, and I did one about the latter at Court Games (web link, Apple link, Spotify link).

And speaking of The Mask of Mirrors! Alyc and I have two cool events planned for January, which I'm giving you a heads-up for ahead of time: first, on book launch day (i.e. the 19th), at 7 p.m. Pacific we'll be doing a live-streamed event at Mysterious Galaxy with Christopher Paolini. There will be signed books available! (Though it may take a while to get them to you, given the vagaries of shipping right now.) And we're also doing an Orbit Live event on the 21st at 6 p.m. Pacific, this one with our fellow Orbiteer Andrea Stewart (author of The Bone Shard Daughter).

There will be more to come, I'm sure; in fact, we've already recorded several other podcasts that just aren't up yet. But in the meanwhile, this should keep you busy!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/H61wTi)

Writing advice books tend to go into great detail on things like how to structure your plot, or develop character, or describe things, or whatever.

They do not — in my limited experience; hence this post — bother to say much about how to decide where to break chapters, scenes, or paragraphs, apart from telling you to start a new paragraph if you’re switching speakers in dialogue. Maybe a vague nod at “cliffhangers are exciting!,” but that’s about it. You’re just supposed to figure that stuff out as you go, apparently. Or else (and this is entirely possible) it never occurred to the writer of the writing advice book that there’s an actual skill buried in there.

But I haven’t read a huge number of writing advice books, so I’m perfectly willing to believe that someone out there has at some point unpacked this stuff for the reader. Any recs? Because it’s one of those things that I do instinctively, without much ability to articulate how the decision-making process goes — and since I enjoy teaching writing, being able to articulate it would be useful.

As you know, Internet Bob, I spent most of June in North Carolina, teaching an intensive creative writing course on science fiction and fantasy. It was a splendid experience: the kids were really engaged, and bonded amazingly well with one another. There's nothing better than teaching for a class where everybody wants to be there and supports one another.

Some people expressed an interest in seeing my syllabus for the course. I'm not going to upload the whole thing -- it's got a lot of extraneous detail -- but I did want to talk about the readings, and the topics we covered in discussion.

With the readings, I made a very calculated decision not to go the route where you assign "classics of the genre." Those classics are decades old, and almost exclusively written by white guys, with a cameo appearance by Le Guin; it was important to me that I show the kids a fresher and more diverse face of the genre. (I also thought at first that I could dodge the problem of getting permissions and paying for coursepack printing if I chose readings that were all readable for free online. This turned out not to be true, owing to the extremely limited availability of computers -- but even so, it made getting the permissions much easier.) The oldest story in the pack was, I think, from 2004. Here's the full list:

• "The Grammarian's Five Daughters," by Eleanor Arnason
  
• "The Jaguar House, in Shadow," by Aliette de Bodard
  
• "Where Virtue Lives," by Saladin Ahmed
  
• "On the Acquisition of Phoenix Eggs (Variant)," by Marissa Lingen
  
• "A Song of Sixpence," by Alyc Helms (unrevised draft manuscript)
  
• "The Brides of Heaven," by N.K. Jemisin
  
• "Movement," by Nancy Fulda
  
• "Trickster," by Mari Ness
  
• "Three Little Foxes," by Richard Parks
  
• "The Sun's Kiss," by Yoon Ha Lee
  
• "Love, Cayce," by Marie Brennan
  

As you can see, it ended up skewing heavily female -- owing in part to the fact that in many cases here I was approaching friends and asking if we could use their stories. (My budget was extremely limited, and I figured friends were less likely to demand a $200 reprint fee. Plus, I know a lot of really amazing writers!) The textbooks for the course were Samuel R. Delany's About Writing and The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, making Richard Parks the only white guy on the entire syllabus. :-P

Regarding topics, I spent the first week on the usual suspects: ideas, grammar and dialogue, setting and worldbuilding, character, point of view, conflict, plot. Week two started off with some basics about research, writing habits, critiquing, and revision, and then we had three days of "here, have every major social issue in condensed form" -- sex, gender, and sexuality; race and ethnicity; economic class and privilege; disability (and super-ability); religion; and violence and its role in stories. Week three had a day devoted to in-class critique and then a grab-bag of practical topics: intellectual property and fanfiction, writing for other genres or other media, and how the publishing industry works.

As you can tell from that list, it was intense. Six hours of instruction a day, plus a seventh hour of evening study, in which they read or worked on their stories. And bear in mind that a number of my students had never even written a complete short story before! At least when you go to something like Clarion, you have some sense of what you're in for and what you're capable of. But as I told the parents in the final conferences, part of the point of TIP is to ask these kids to do more that they're capable of -- because that's the way to find out just how far they can go. I'm ridiculously proud of the work they did and the amount their writing grew over those three weeks.

By that title, I don't just mean "I'll be going to X place during June" -- I mean I'll be in X place for essentially the entirety of June.

Some of you may be familiar with Duke TIP. (Others of you may know the very similar CTY instead.) This is a program I participated in as a kid; when I was twelve, I went to Davidson for three weeks to read and talk about science fiction short stories. The next year it was marine biology in Galveston; then it was tropical ecology in Costa Rica; then geology and a bit of archaeology in New Mexico. TIP is probably the single coolest thing I got to do during my adolescence.

And now I'm going back, this time on the other side of things. I'm heading off to North Carolina in early June to teach a creative writing course, focused on SF/F/H. It will be ridiculously intense: class runs for two three-hour blocks every day, M-F, and another block on Saturday morning. That's thirty-three hours of instruction per week, for three weeks straight. It's "Clarion for twelve-year-olds."

I'm not only allowed, I'm expected to make this the most awesome and challenging three weeks those kids have ever seen. We're talking about seventh- and eighth-graders who have scored a 570 or better on the verbal portions of the SAT. Want to know what I'm giving them for a "how to write" textbook? Delany. I'll be lecturing a bit, but there will be much more in the way of discussion, and they'll be doing writing exercises until their brains fall out. My challenge will be to figure out how to pace things such that they get enough variety to keep the brain-falling-out stage from happening too soon.

I won't be blogging the process as I go, because I don't think that would be appropriate. But I'll probably have thoughts about it after the fact, and I'll certainly share my syllabus/readings/etc. In the meantime, if I'm less chatty online than usual during June, you'll know why.

It's because my brain will be on the floor, along with those of my students. :-)

This is little Xerxes, god-cat and conqueror of mice and men . . . .

In other news, I think my students would like to thank the gods of the weather for gifting us with this gloriously warm and sunny day. I sat on the front porch in bare feet and a t-shirt to read their stories, and I can't rule out the possibility that their grades will reflect the circumstances.

Here's the deal: course proposals to teach at Collins have to be turned in stupidly early. As in, by October 19th, I need a complete syllabus, including readings broken down by week, assignments, grading system, and everything else. And since I have a variety of other things between me an October 19th, I'm going to bootstrap myself through this process a bit by soliciting help; otherwise this hunt would take way too long.

I need suggestions for small (i.e. article- or chapter-sized), reasonably scholarly nonfiction readings on certain topics, as follows:

• hard/soft primitivism
  
• the place of women in republic-era Rome
  
• western views of Far Eastern/Japanese history and culture
  (would Said's Orientalism work for that? I know he's more writing about the Middle East)
  
• the American frontier, esp. the interaction of diversity there
  
• current theories on how we perceive and use history
  
• the performance of gender/sexuality in Elizabethan England
  
• the intersection of religious, political, and secular life in the Renaissance
  
• eighteenth-century piracy in the Caribbean
  
• events leading up to the O.K. Corral gunfight (not the events of the day itself)
  

Bonus points if you can figure out what my course topic is, based on this eclectic set of needs. <g>

So I recently began teaching my own course for the first time. For those of you who weren't around on this journal when I was developing the course idea last fall, it's called "Fairy Tales in the Modern World," and is in essence about contemporary retellings/mashups/what-have-you of a whole variety of folktales.

I'm pleased with how it has started. The class enrollment is limited to twenty; I had three people wait-listed as of Monday. One student appears to have dropped, so we'll see if we get a replacement, or if the wait-lists have already moved on with their lives. I like the size, and since I'm only teaching the one class (instead of three sections), and we meet three times a week (instead of just once for each section), I'm much further along the road to learning students' names than usual. As in, I can correctly guess over half of them already.

Probably the most encouraging thing is that they aren't afraid to speak up. I've taught sections where people settled in quickly and got talking, and sections where getting anyone to open their mouth is like pulling teeth. (Or the latter, with just that one student who will talk when no one else does. Then I have to try and draw the quiet ones out without stepping on the enthusiastic one.) Several people seem to have come in with a pretty in-depth knowledge of fairy tales already, which should provide good fodder for discussion.

Next week we'll be blitzing through a history of the more famous tale collectors and/or writers -- Basile, Straparola, Perrault, d'Aulnoy, the Grimms, Andersen, maybe a few others. Not the most exciting thing to cover, since it doesn't provide many hooks for debate, but it'll be good to get everyone familiar with the basics before we dive into the nuts and bolts of tales.

I'll probably post about the teaching experience from time to time, though of course there's always the caveat that my students may find this journal and read it. I don't anticipate that being a problem, but if for some reason I have a meltdown and decide I hate teaching the class (unlikely), you won't get to hear about it. 'sall sunshine and roses, here at Swan Tower. ^_^