stillsostrange

I'm not so good at this posting every day thing. But tomorrow! Tomorrow is my dental surgery! So I'll come home full of anaesthetic, take some Vicodin, and wake up eight hours later convinced I can write something coherent.

I believe this is the really real functional link to my write-a-thon page: http://clarionwest.org/writeathon/amandadownum. If you sponsor me now, you'll be paying for incoherent opiate wordage. None of which will make it into the final book, of course, but I might be foolish enough to post snippets to LJ.

I may have possibly spent tonight drinking cocktails to fortify myself for the many days of yogurt and pudding in my future. And as practice for the incoherent days to come.

Because I...enjoy public humiliation? No, that's not right. Need motivation? Maybe that's it. Anyway, for whatever reason, I've joined the Clarion West write-a-thon this year.



I'm not sure exactly how this works. I write words and you donate money to other people? It seems odd, but whatever. I'm told it's for a good cause.

These words were hard won, between 6 a.m. alarms and dentist appointments and the vicissitudes of bedtime. (I cannot support the awkward adverbs and comma splices in Magic Tree House. And I know I'm judgey, but those kids are only a year apart.)

The Poison Court
Words today: 918
Words total: 5501
Reason for stopping: end of scene, days without 8 hours of sleep
Mean things: Finally made it to the inconvenient corpse.
Deaths: See above.

Finally murdered someone. Now I need to figure out why he was murdered and by whom. And how that ties in to the larger plot I think I have figured out.

Today I named a character. It may not sound like much, but after nearly ten hours of pondering it, I feel pretty accomplished having settled on one. I have never had any luck with placeholder names--I can know nearly everything else about a character, but if I haven't found their name, they won't put out. I can sometimes tweak spelling (Ciaran was meant to be Kieran, but then he ended on the same page with Kiril; one of them had to give), but rarely can I completely change a name without it having a profound effect on the person. Some of them won't change at all. That's why Adam is Adam, even though I had to do jump through a few worldbuilding hoops to explain why he would have that name. Adam has been Adam since 1996, and nothing I have ever done has been able to change that.

Isyllt is the last and best of a long string of not-quite-right names. Back before the oceans drank Atlantis, when I was sixteen, reading too much Lackey, and working on a terrible portal fantasy starring thinly veiled analogues of my friends, there was a snarky girl named Elizabeth who fell into another world and learned magic. Then I started college and decided the portal part was a bad idea, and made all the characters natives to a sad generic European fantasyland. I didn't want a Hebraic name screwing up my awful pan-Gaelic mishmash (except Adam, because he wouldn't change), so after much consulting of name books, Elizabeth became Isolde. It still wasn't quite right, but enough to get me through a few abortive attempts at a book. Then I found a new name book, which listed Isyllt as a Norse variant of Isolde*. Things clicked. Her appearance changed. Her backstory changed. Her snark remained. And so Falling Towers was born.

That fell apart eventually, but many characters crawled out of the wreckage. Isyllt, Adam, Savedra, Nikos, Ashlin (originally Aislinn**, but I'd been mispronouncing it for so long I had to take steps***), Kiril, Mathiros (originally Matthias), Brenna, Ciaran (Kieran). They emerged older, wiser, and with better wardrobes, and have gone on to win fame and glory.


* It should probably be Ishild, but she's Isyllt forever now.

** My first exposure to a lot of Gaelic names was the Cheysuli books. I mispronounced every single one of them, and bad habits became ingrained. Astute readers will notice I'm still borrowing names from that series to this day.

*** Yeah, I know it's still not quite right.

First, the bad kind. Jonathan Frid died. My first summer of high school, SciFi--back when it didn't suck three monkeys before breakfast--aired Dark Shadows in the mornings. I would wake up early every weekday to watch it, and then immediately go back to bed. This resulted in some pretty awesome vampire dreams, though my habit of sleeping with the radio on sometimes gave them odd soundtracks. Dark Shadows set to Collective Soul is just not right.

Anyway, I'm glad Frid was involved with and apparently happy about the Burton movie. I, however, am not. And now I am sad.

For the better kind of loss, today I'm wearing size 10 jeans for the first time in...probably two years, maybe more. I think I need to reset my goal weight down another five pounds or so to properly fit into my bras, but other than that I'm quite pleased.

L is also for lackluster and "let's try that again." I've been trying for the past two days to find the write beginning to a chapter. It's a murder mystery, and I'm fairly certain I need to save the body for the end of the chapter. But man, the opening is giving me a hard time. I've mostly given up and am just describing everyone's clothes until I figure out where the tension is. We can always layer it in later.

Spurred by today's hopefully-not-brief dam breaking, it's time for the first lines meme again. Any or all of these stories might be improved with Moar Lance Henriksen.

Of course, the story I need to finish in less than a month doesn't have a first line yet.

"Birthgrave"

The storm hadn't broken by midnight, and neither had Ziya's fever. Isyllt slouched on the floor beside the sweat-stained mattress, listening to her friend's harsh breath through the rush of wind and rain and distant thunder, the steady drip of the leaking roof. Winter had finally left Erisín, but so far spring had proven no kinder.

"Flood"

Nan doesn't mean to fall asleep--she never does. But Evie's soft breath and the steady creak of the ceiling fan lull her, till her eyes sag and the worn paperback slides from her fingers.

"Music From a Farther Room"

Alex found his wife waiting on the threshold, at the divide between memory and dream. He was used to finding her here, one of the many memory-ghosts to haunt these halls. But this was different. The door she stood in was one he couldn't cross.

"Needlepoint"

You wake crumpled on the floor, legs folded awkwardly and one arm twisted behind your back. The room is dark and still, except for the green blink of the timer behind your right eyelid.

"Serpentskirt"

All Souls Night and the gutters still brim with shed Hallows skin. Broken glass crunches under Jane's boots as she carries an amp to the van, glittering beside limp feathers and cracked sequins, tattered black and orange fliers. One hell of a party, she heard--Sixth Street is still subdued and sleepy. But even for the day after Halloween and a Monday to boot, the crowd is still better than last night's in Dallas.

"Snakebit"

The horses were restless.

"Teneral"

"Take off your mask," the arachne tells me.

"Waiting For the Train" (also waiting for a different title)

When it's raining here, you hear the trains. You hear them other times too, with the tracks so close, but the dusty heat of summer bakes the sound out of the air, till it gets buried under cars and trucks and TVs and voices and all the other small-town noises. But when the rain comes, and the trains come, the whistles carry all over, low and mournful and rumbling in my chest.

It was raining the first time Jimmy Lafayette walked into the bar.

The Ashen Throne

The Blue Wish left Suranë on the evening ebb tide, bound north for Andemar. She was a Ninayan merchant ship, three-masted and barque-rigged, carrying four passengers and a hold full of cotton and spices and Assari wine. In other seasons more berths might be full, but few travelers wanted to sail at the end of autumn, when the fierce ghibli winds spawned storms across the Caelurean and winter sharpened its teeth in Erebos.

Changeling Hearts

The girl whose name was not Aletheia Rampion woke to thunder, and the surety that something was wrong.

Daughter of Jackals

The empress’s antechamber was dim and hushed, warm from two bodies and a single lamp. Voices drifted through both doors: from the interior, the soft tones of the physician and his attendants and the occasional cry and curse from the empress; from the exterior, the muttered talk of courtiers awaiting news. Indihar al Seth sat on a cushioned bench, breathing in the taste of lamp oil and nerves, and waited for her life to change.

Mist & Chill

The Terminal is a dive on its best day.

Not The Monster Garden

The bombs fell again the night the stranger came.

Pinion

Lilah runs and darkness follows.

Prayers To Broken Stone

Springtime in Paris—the cruelest month come and gone, but storms still lingered. Rain washed the city, speeding the Seine in its rush to the sea. In the Left Bank it poured from the gutters and dripped from curling wrought iron balconies. Moisture darkened white walls, new paint and plaster over centuries-old bones. On rue du Four, water drummed against the awnings outside Les Vieux Os and fell in shining ribbons to the flooded cobbles.

2011 wasn't my best year for writing or publication, but it wasn't the worst either. I finished Kingdoms of Dust, and made it more than half way through the latest revision of Dreams. I also finished and sold "Red" and "Bone Garden."

My goals for 2012 are a) to finish this draft of Dreams by Jan 19th, b) sell more books (any books will do), and c) to finish a few of the short stories that have been collecting dust for too long. I would also eventually like to put out a collection of my short stories, but I care less about when that happens.

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21. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler

Beautifully written and plotted, and rightly a classic. On the other hand, the constant low thrum of sexism made me kind of tired, and it had the same bonus homophobia that made me sad in The Maltese Falcon. Sigh.

22. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (This must be a reread, but I can't remember when I first read it.)

This is really a sweet little book, but wow it makes me roll my eyes a lot. Could be greatly improved by monsters.

My other goal is to read more books in 2012. Perhaps as many as 40. 52 still seems a bit of a stretch.

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And now, the contest! necromancerchronicles.com is up now (though there's no new content yet), but it needs a tagline. As in "The Necromancer Chronicles: Sexy tagline goes here." I turn to you, beloved LJers, to come up with something brilliant.

TWR/TAT
Words today: 2512
Words total: 17855
Reason for stopping: end of chapter 3
Tyop: n/a
Darling: The sheets were cool and soft when she crawled between them, and she would have offered a prayer of thanks if she could have remembered the saint responsible for clean linen.

I'm happy with this last chapter (though I'm pretty sure I need to split it into 3 and 4). I managed to surprise myself, and knock a lot of the fourth book cockiness out of Isyllt. She may make me regret it later, of course. I seem to have traded one supporting character for another, but at least the new girl is earning her keep so far.

This gives me three chapters (or four) and a solid chunk of book. Which means that now I have to write the synopsis. This fills me with dread. At least no one expects it to bear much resemblance to the finished book.

A character started talking to me on the way home from the gym tonight, so at least I end November with a good wordcount.

Big Gay MacHamlet
Words today: 1452
Tyop: n/a
Darling: n/a
Mean things: ambition, bad memories, cold toes

10596 / 100000 words. 11% done!

I didn't mean for there to be a creepy Flowers In The Attic vibe between these characters, and yet there it is. Oops. On the upside, I just cast Stellan and Alexander Skarsgård as !Polonius and !Laertes, respectively. That tends to brighten a book. Now I need a matching !Ophelia.

Writing has been curtailed over the past few day due to frantic housecleaning. We got the house clean in time for the home inspection, only to learn that our smoke detectors are mostly dead. Don't worry, the guys says--just buy new ones and plug them in. Only we learn that the ones we can buy now (same brand and everything) have totally different plugs than the old ones, and rewiring will be needed. This is why none of our projects get finished quickly.

But at least writing happened after the abortive inspection.

Title Redacted
Words today: 1223
Words total: 3028
Mean things: skinny asses on hard chairs, lack of sleep, childhood memories

Today's excitement was writing a lullaby in a conlang. Or, more specifically, translating a lullaby into a conlang. Which isn't very connish as langs go--I'm afraid it shows its pilfered origins a little too much. But still! I made up a lullaby! I feel accomplished.