May 2009
I did not expect my appointment with the orthopedist today — my first in well over a year — to end in minor surgery, but I think I’m glad it did.
The tibial tubercal transfer surgery that I had in the fall of 2007 left me with two long titanium screws through my leg bone below the knee, one of which has been incrementally extracting itself right out the front of my leg. I haven’t been able to kneel since the surgery, which is frustrating on top of my other problems, and makes for some very dirty floors. Worse is the fact that even a minor tap against the skin-covered metal sends me into paroxysms of pain, and in my chronic clumsiness I usually manage to slam it into something two or three times a day.
Now that two-inch screw is sitting here in an envelope. Jak, whom I’d dragged with me to the doctor, made some joke about going out for coffee during the extraction so he didn’t have to hear me scream.
This, incidentally, was over a hastily-procured pomegranate martini at a nearby restaurant. We had just under an hour between my original appointment and the impromptu screw-removal — not enough time to fill a Vicodin prescription, so I opted for ‘vodkadin’ instead.
I glared at him for even joking about abandoning me, and insisted that I would not either scream. I’ve endured a great deal of pain in my life and had high confidence in my teeth-gritting abilities.
I was wrong. My shriek of “SHIT!” reverberated throughout the office, and I belatedly understood why they wanted this to be the last appointment of the day.
Still, it was over relatively quickly — perhaps five minutes, all told. The doctor estimated I’d just saved three thousand dollars over an operating room procedure with general anesthetic, so I figure it was worth it.
We’ll see how complacent I am later, when the local anesthetic wears off …
Those of you reading this are about to learn a secret that I doubt the eventual readers of our eventual book(s) will ever imagine:
Our epic fantasy is science fiction in disguise. Really, really deep disguise.
I am often able to lose myself in someone else’s fantasy novel without questioning, for example, the provenance of human beings on a planet that is very obviously not Earth. When constructing my own, however, I want an explanation, if only so my brain will stop complaining about convergent evolution and crap like that.
So our planet’s humans are descendants of colonists that originated on Earth. Our magic systems are examples of Clarke’s third law; they are technological in origin, even if the wielders don’t know it and the readers never guess. And so on.
(It occurs to me that I do this for much the same reason that I slaved over villanelles and sestinas but rarely bothered with free verse. I don’t work well in a loose system; it feels … sloppy. Give me a tight framework, please, and let me weave something intricate around it.)
By the time we got a trilogy’s worth of plots and characters roughed out, we had four major countries, each with a distinct culture. Each of these peoples has its own language, but again — the secret is that they’re all descended from a future English, which was the shared language of the colonists over a thousand years before. They are all cousins, like French to Spanish.
Jak and I are both getting tired of the lack of names for our major characters; we’ve been making do with placeholders like ‘mountain king’ and ‘red herring dude.’
So late last week I began the complex process of creating four separate versions of ‘far future English’, learning the necessary linguistics as I go. I spent almost all of Saturday and Sunday on it, on little sleep, and nearly burned myself out. Now I’m progressing a bit more slowly. Language One is at the phoneme stage, Three is into morphemes and basic vocabulary, and Two, where I’ve spent the most time so far, is all the way into early grammar. (Language Four I haven’t even started; none of Book One’s major characters are named in it, so it can wait.)
I’m enjoying the linguistic geekery quite a bit, despite occasionally feeling frustrated or overwhelmed. Plus it was totally worth it to read off a pair of sentences in Language Two, with translation, and watch Jak’s eyes go wide and his mouth fall open. Heh.
I remember what it’s like trying to write a scene too far from the here and now without adequate background information. It’s akin to trying to paint without colors.
I’d need to describe a room, and I’d have no idea what the walls or floor would be made of. So then I’d have to read about how stone is quarried, and about different types of roofs, and make some decisions about the availability of wood, which in turn entails some decisions about geography, maps, and placement of forests. Several hours later I might come back to my scene and eke out a sentence. Only to discover that I now need to know if the windows would have glass, which means researching the history of glass-making …
No. I’ve been firm in my conviction that I’m going to do all the research I expect to need before attempting a single line of prose. I want the geographies and the cultures and the technologies and the languages spread out before me like colors on an artist’s palette, so that the times when I have to halt everything and drive to the art supply store for a new pigment are mercifully few and far between.
Jak’s style, on the other hand, is much more ad hoc. He wants to outline the plot in considerable detail, but would be happier doing most of the worldbuilding on the fly. He’s never argued with my need to do it all up front, but he’s already showing signs of dismay at the amount of time it takes … and I’ve only covered a fraction of what I believe we need.
I suspect he feels like until we’re setting down prose we’re not really writing, and fears that perhaps we never will — that it will be all buildup and no payoff. I can understand this, but I can’t effectively reassure him, because I’ve never done anything on this scale before. I think this will work out, but I can’t be certain.
Last week I ran across this interview with Tim Powers:
How long does it take you to write a novel? And what do you make of the whole idea that a successful novelist ought to write a novel a year?
It takes me a long time. Longer than I can really justify, I guess. But I do have to do a powerful lot of reading before I can even figure what sort of plot would fit into the period I’m writing about and the things that were going on then. I take heaps of notes, make dozens of long, cross-indexed files! And I freely let myself get sidetracked on peripheral topics, which generally don’t prove to be useful (though it’s very nice when they do!). And then I have to figure out my plot and characters, in a lot of detail since I want to have made the tricky decisions in the outlining stage rather than be surprised by them as I’m writing—though inevitably a few sneak in anyway. All this winds up taking about a year, somehow.
Then all that’s left is to write it; and with revisions and all, if the book is in the neighborhood of 200,000 words, that takes about a year too. And then the editor usually has some suggestions for revisions, which prove to be good ideas.
If I wrote a novel a year, they wouldn’t be the sorts of novels I write. They might be better, objectively!—but in my eyes, at least, they wouldn’t be what they could be. The real reason to write fiction, after all, isn’t to make money, nor to show the human heart in conflict with itself, nor to give a picture of one’s time, nor to call attention to the plight of any oppressed classes, but to show off. You want to be able to say to visitors, “Sit down, let me clear that stuff off the couch, it’s copies of my new novel.” And to show off effectively, I want each book to be as close as I can get it to what I want it to be. It’s like making six-foot-tall replicas of Gothic cathedrals out of toothpicks in your basement—you might as well get all the saints’ faces right.
I found this immensely reassuring, as it all sounds very much like me and the way I work. When I told Jak, he half-laughed, half-groaned at the thought of a whole year of pre-writing. I honestly hope to have it done in less time than that, but it’s likely to be measured in months rather than weeks, which is tough. For both of us. I am very fond of instant gratification, and this novel process is the antithesis of that.
But damn it, if we’re going to make six-foot-tall replicas of Gothic cathedrals out of toothpicks, we might as well get all the saints’ faces right!
There’s a famous cartoon where two scientists confer over an elaborate equation, the middle step of which reads ‘then a miracle occurs …’.
That’s been the plot outline of our first novel — a complex escalation followed by a gaping hole where the climactic scene should be, indicated by ‘some powerfully big magic happens here’.
But it couldn’t be just any powerfully big magic, and finding something that would fit in that very precisely-shaped hole had been stumping us for weeks. Yesterday I think we finally carved out an answer.
I’m not quite ready to trust it — I’m still half-afraid one of us will realize some terrible overlooked flaw that sends us back to the drawing board. If this does work, though, then we have all the major story elements of book one in place, and the rest is just details.
Lots and lots of details.
Dear Jak,
You know that desk you moved out of Claire’s room last weekend and left in the hallway, where it still remains despite my earlier strong suggestion that you remove it to the living room?
It is a dark-colored desk in a dark hall, directly outside the office door. During this particular period of early-morning insomnia I have so far unwittingly attempted to occupy the same physical space as the desk a total of three times. I expect fully one third of the surface area of my lower body will soon be sporting a variety of interesting colors ranging from yellow to purple. The blood loss has so far been manageable, but I note forlornly the loss of several smaller toenails.
Granted, I am a hopeless clutz and also egregiously slow to learn from experience. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that my continued ability to walk is in your own best interest — I know you’d hate to be stuck with all the grocery shopping — and plead once again that you remove this obstacle before I become permanently impaired.
All my love,
Karawynn
Jak brought five more fantasy novels home from the library today, as part of our ‘survey every reasonably successful fantasy book/series from the last decade’ project.
From this you may correctly gather that I’ve not been doing so previously. It’s an odd reversal for me, as I was insatiable for fiction as a child and young adult. I was the kid who’d bring a book to gym class. In my twenties I’d regularly devour three or four books a week.
In recent years, however, my patience for less-than-perfect fiction writing has steadily diminished and now approaches zero. My standards are just too high, hardly anything can touch them. (Like I said: crotchety and hard to please.)
Despite what I thought were appropriately low expectations, I have been disappointed by most of what I’ve seen so far. In a few cases I was actually appalled.
I considered posting short reviews here, but on reflection decided that would do far more harm than good. Some of these authors are people I know (and even like); it’s probable that I will cross paths with many others if Jak and I stay on this road. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and I am awkward enough making small talk with strangers at conventions without worrying about whether they secretly hate me for publicly scorning their magnum opus.
So I may grouse about the quality of published fantasy in general, but I will only mention something by name if I can bring myself to recommend it without adding caveats and qualifications.
Thus far that list has a single entry: Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon is … well, ‘charming’ is the word that comes to mind. It’s too different from the type of thing we’re trying to write to be any sort of useful model, but it’s the one thing I’ve read this month that I’ve been able to actually enjoy.
And the marathon continues …
