Swan Tower

So as I mentioned before, I think this book is going to run a little long.

How exactly do I know that?

Nobody ever talks about this in books of writing advice, at least not that I’ve ever seen. Nor have I heard it being discussed in creative writing classes (though if your teacher taught you this, I’d love to hear about it). We all know writers need a variety of skills, things like characterization and plotting and the ability to string together an interesting sentence . . . but nobody talks about how you learn to tell how much story you’ve got in your hand.

I thought of this because I was doing some calculations, trying to figure out how hard I would need to drive myself to get a draft done by the end of the month. It’s a little tricky, doing that math when you don’t actually know what goes on the other side of the equal sign. I knew I couldn’t fit the remaining plot into ten thousand words; fine, that means I’ll overrun my target length of 90K. By how much? Not sure. Well, okay: if I wrote two thousand words a day instead of one thousand, then I could write 26K by the end of the month. Ooof, no, way overkill — there’s no way this is 26K of plot remaining. Somewhere between 10 and 26. 15-ish, maybe? That sounds about right . . . .

How do I know this? I can’t even really tell you. I am not the sort of writer who says “this chapter will consist of four scenes, two of them one thousand words long and the other two five hundred.” The scenes are as long as they need to be to get the job done, and I find out how long that is by writing them. I keep forgetting to put in chapter breaks, because for four years I wrote Onyx Court novels that didn’t have any; now I go back and drop them in wherever there’s an appropriate point within a certain range of wordcount. But I can only forecast by approximation: can I get Isabella off Lahaui in a thousand words? Definitely not. Two thousand? Ehhhh, maybe . . . (Verdict as of tonight’s writing: nope, definitely not.) I won’t need five thousand, that’s for damn sure. Somewhere between 2 and 5.

I have to do this all book long. I want to write a 90K book; that means I need to be able to judge how much stuffing goes into the sausage. I sort of weigh it in my hand as I go, looking at the casing, trying to decide whether I should pack more in or not. Eventually I start to feel like okay, we’re at the point now where it’s time to pull things together and wrap them up, rather than adding in new stuff. Within a certain margin of error, I’m right. (When Ashes ran 30K long, I saw that coming a mile off. I hadn’t even finished writing Part One when I e-mailed my editor to say, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.)

Nobody taught me how to do this. I don’t know if it can be taught, because the answers can vary so much from writer to writer. What one person knocks off in five hundred words, another might spend two thousand on. Even if you’re the sort who outlines ahead of time instead of making it up as you go along, you need a sense for how many words it will take you to say something. And I’m not sure how you acquire that sense, other than by writing a lot and seeing how many words you end up with.

All of which is just sort of me rambling, because wordcount has been on my brain lately. But it’s one of those things I never really see discussed — a skill nobody tells you you’ll have to acquire.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

A bit belated — I didn’t want to post anything in the first days of the year because I was busy getting my WordPress setup functional.

Mother of the Believers, Kamran Pasha. A novel about the founding and early days of Islam, from the perspective of Muhammad’s wife Aisha.

It’s always tough, reading a fictionalized account of something like this: I find myself going “oh look, another enemy has converted to their side, geez, this ‘Messenger of God’ guy is such a Gary Stu.” Which, you know, missing the point. At the same time, though, it gestures in the direction of an actual problem, which is that it’s Pasha’s responsibility to sell me on the events he’s describing, and he didn’t always succeed. He could have done it one of two ways — either by emphasizing the numinous and miraculous, or by digging into the motivations of the people involved to help me understand why they acted that way. I would have been fine with either. Sadly, Pasha didn’t quite manage to do that consistently. Couple that with the fact that I really disagree with his handling of Aisha’s age (I think his reasoning is flawed and he failed to follow through on it anyway), and it’s surprising that I found this as engaging and readable as I did. But: engaging and readable, so recommended if you want to read a novel about the founding and early days of Islam.

A Tale of Time City, Diana Wynne Jones. Re-read for Yuletide (look for a post about that soon). It is still a lovely book. And I have even more fondness for Elio than I did before — writing fanfic will do that to you.

Ancient Hawai’i, Herb Kawainui Kane. Read for research, on the recommendation of Kate Elliott. It’s a brief and abundantly illustrated book about pre-contact Hawaiian society, ergo useful to me.

Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch. Once again, I feel like the two plots in here were just happening to share a book, rather than tying together very well. I was also deeply uninterested in Peter’s romantic relationship — or rather, his sexual relationship, since I got very little sense of any substance to it other than bedplay. (In fact, that skew had me convinced for a while that his fixation was going to prove to be a Significant Thing, to a much greater degree than turned out to be the case.) Having said that, I still enjoy the general feel of this series, and I very much liked the way the consequences of the previous book played out. To some extent, this is the denouement I felt was lacking before — though I still would have liked more at the end of Book One.

Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch. Better plotting! In part, I think, because the B plot here is actually just a continuation of what got set up in #2, and isn’t looking to be resolved any time soon, so it tooled happily along being its own thing and I didn’t expect it to interlock with the A plot the way I kept wanting before. Mind you, I found the thing they uncovered at the end to be a little O_o . . . but I may be okay with that, if the series follows through on what it’s been hinting about for a while now. There’s a point at which you really start questioning how much longer the world can go on failing to notice all the weird shit going on — I’m just sayin’.

(Ten points from Ravenclaw, though, for atrociously misleading cover copy. I expected this book to heavily feature Peter working with Agent Reynolds and having to dodge around her evangelical faith. Instead Reynolds just shows up sporadically and shows virtually no signs of being the “born-again Christian” she was billed as. I’m not sure the former would have actually been good, but it’s what I was led to expect, so the lack was annoying.)

Also: more Quicksilver. Because I have always been reading Quicksilver. And I will always be reading Quicksilver.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

You know how I said that A Natural History of Dragons was in the semifinal round for the Goodreads Choice Awards?

Apparently it wasn't in the first round. It was, instead, one of the top five write-in candidates during the first round, and thus got added for the semifinal.

That? Is really cool. I don't know how the write-in votes stacked up against the ones cast for first-round nominees, but the fact that people remembered it well enough to vote for it off their own bat is very flattering.

I think voting ends tomorrow, so if you want to cast your vote, you still can.

In other news, I was trying to make a paper shell for my inflatable globe so that I could finally work out where all the continents are in Isabella's world, when it occurred to me that what I really needed was a spherical whiteboard. So there's a white beachball that should be arriving here in the next few days, and I'll be putting the water-soluble markers we bought for drawing on the D&D battle map to an exciting new use. :-)

Lost quite a bit of this month to travel and being ill. Feh to the latter. (I did, however, get massive amounts of photo-editing done. This is not reading, but it is satisfying.)

Sorcery and Cecelia, Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. Re-read, because I felt like it. Still an enjoyable little romantic alt-Regency fantasy romp.

Child of a Hidden Sea, Alyx Dellamonica. Not yet published; read for blurbing purposes. I'm still trying to put my thoughts into words, but it's a nifty adult portal fantasy about Stormwrack, a world made up of hundreds of islands, with dozens of different cultures among them. The ways in which the Fleet maintains peace in Stormwrack are interesting.

Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton. Had started this ages ago, then got interrupted. This is about as different of a book as one can get from A Natural History of Dragons while still having both books be describable with the words "Victorian" and "dragons." If you're the sort of person who would be entertained by seeing nineteenth-century literary tropes recast with a lot more teeth and claws and fire-breathing, this book is for you. I was entertained.

The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com. Didn't actually read all of this, but given its RIDICULOUS SIZE, I feel quite comfortable with deeming it an entire book's worth of reading regardless. Tor.com released a free ebook containing the first five years of fiction published on their site. As you might expect from anything that large (with that many editors choosing what to buy), the quality is highly variable -- hence me skipping stories. Some just weren't my cup of tea, but some were actively bad, and not every author has a good handle on how to write a tie-in story to promote their novel. (Some of them, however, have a very good handle on it. So it isn't like you should just skip all the tie-ins.)

Brief aside for a rant: my GOD is this ebook badly formatted. The text itself is generally fine, but the table of contents?

• 4. The Department of Alterations, by Gennifer Albin
  
• Title Page
  
• Copyright Notice
  
• Contents
  
• Begin Reading
  
• mac29_ep04
  
• mac30_ep05
  
• mac31_ep06
  
• mac32_ep07
  
• mac33_bm01
  
• 5. The Fermi Paradox is Our Business Model, by Charlie Jane Anders
  

It's all like that. Separate ToC entries for every element in the book, many of them with useless names, like those five lines of gibberish. And for at least three-quarters of the story, the ToC entry for the actual text is "Begin Reading," which means that the running footer doesn't actually tell you which story you're reading. I hope that if Tor.com does this again, they take a moment to clean up the text, because the formatting here looks really unprofessional.

The Spice Islands Voyage, Tim Severin. I've been reading this in bits and pieces for, ye gods, I don't know how long. It's written by a guy who sailed around Indonesia in a locally-built prahu to recreate the voyage Alfred Wallace was on when he figured out evolution. (There's an aside about how we don't know, but have reason to strongly suspect, that Wallace's letter to Darwin did not in fact arrive right after the latter figured out evolution for himself, but right before, and played a large role in Darwin's work.) The text goes back and forth between telling the story of Wallace's voyage, and recounting how the modern crew are checking up on the state of the environment and wildlife in the places he went. In many cases, the latter is kind of depressing -- but not always. I sort of wish the book had been more firmly one of those things, rather than being both, but it was still a useful read.

So I know you all are still waiting for The Tropic of Serpents to come out, but backstage, we're already ramping up for the third book of the series. And you know what that means: research!

. . . on a topic I don't know at all. A large portion of the third book, you see, will take place in an area based on the Polynesian Islands. My knowledge of Polynesian culture pretty much consists of "tourism in Hawai'i," which, y'know. Not so much. The sole book in my library on the topic is Pacific Mythology, which is an encyclopedia-style overview of the entire Pacific, Polynesian and otherwise.

So where do I start? Does anybody out there have recommendations for good early histories (pre-European contact, though not necessarily pre-other-people contact), "daily life in ancient Hawai'i" type books, local mythology 101, etc?

I also could use recommendations of appropriate music. I make heavy use of playlists to set my brain in the right gear, but I have zilch in the way of stuff from that particular milieu. I don't even know what it sounds like, beyond "stereotypical hula tunes." Traditional folk music, movie scores that draw on that kind of sound, all of those things are good.

Help me, o Internets. I'm dead in the water here.