According To Hoyt

I’m running as fast as I can.  It might not look like it, when I spend most of my day at the keyboard, but inside I’m running.

Right now, my life has very set times and places.  This will probably change, if/when the kids leave home starting next year.  But right now I wake up at six thirty am to make sure that they get  breakfast and don’t rush out the door with no lunch.  (Look, if I’m not there to make sure, they don’t eat.)

Then I do the absolute necessary (usually catboxes!) around the house, if I’m not going Officeish (usually Wednesdays and Fridays.)  If I’m going officeish, I run up the stairs to shower and get ready, since my ride leaves by seven thirty.

In either case, I sit down by eight or so, do the blog if I haven’t done it before, then write till around three thirty, when I must start doing dual duty again, by starting dinner, doing laundry and whatever else needs it.  Yeah, the guys do stuff around the house (and other extracurricular stuff, too) but ultimately I do most of it because I’m better at it.

If I am still compus mentis, I edit in the evening, most of the time for myself, sometimes for NRP where I’m supposed to edit some of the authors (mostly my friends.)  To this I’m adding editing my own old stuff and putting it up with Goldport Press.  And I try to get to bed by eleven.

Around this fits stuff like birthdays, the occasional weekend away, and yeah, I do consider a walk in the park with my husband an amazing treat.

Now, before you tell me that I’m going to burn out, remember I’ve done this with variations (no officeish till last year, no putting stuff up, no NRP but other stuff I was doing instead) for a good six years.  I’m actually less burned out now than before, and will probably feel a whole lot better next year.

Why next year, you ask?  Because next year I’ll be largely out of contracts.  Does this mean I don’t intend to traditionally publish anymore?  No.  I’ve said before and will say it again that I’ll work for Baen while they want me to.  (I’d say till death do us part, but they’re a corporation and can’t die.  And some people have doubts about me.)  BUT I’m changing the way I’m working with them in the way I’ve wanted to for YEARS but didn’t dare: I’m writing everything on spec, sending in, and letting them decide if they want it or not then.

Until this year, this was not a feasible strategy.  Why not?  Because I have a really high sell-through rate on proposals for a working writer – I sell between fifty and seventy five percent of every proposal I write.  See where that’s not a practical way to live, if I’m only selling fifty to seventy five percent of every NOVEL I write?

But now that’s not a consideration.  If there are things they don’t want to publish, then I’ll bring them out myself.  I have yet – save for one, and that was not from Baen, and it sold to someone else – to get a rejection on any of my books that cites a flaw with the book.  Most of them say something like “we have too many of ” or cite reasons that the editor doesn’t like it that have to do with the editor not the book.  Like the famous “Your woman wasn’t assertive enough” – I’ll leave it as a class exercise to imagine how assertive my female character was, and how insane that comment is.

Add to that that I hate writing proposals and that this is incredibly stressful to me, because once the characters come alive it’s wrenching to have to let them die while I move on to something else and leave that book unfinished.  Yes, I know that’s crazy, but that’s how it feels.  Also my proposals usually fell like I’m groping around looking for a plot, which is largely true, since I don’t plot THAT way and therefore don’t know all the twists before I write the novel.

Now I don’t have to deal with that.  And I don’t intend to.  Baen will get all my DST-time books, and all my shifter books, and perhaps others I think are up their alley, depending on how many books they have in cue, and what I want to be seen when (the idea of having control over this is by the way amazing.)  I might even send some books other places, if I don’t think they’re right for Baen.

But in either case, it won’t matter.  If the traditional publishers won’t publish them, I’ll find other ways to bring them out.

Now, consider that writing a book a month is not difficult for me (and that’s taking weekends off) but that what’s been stopping me are the months of self-doubt in between, when I sit in front of the keyboard and not a word emerges.

If you subtract those months, it will look like I’m working harder.  But I’ll actually be relaxing more.

So, no matter what it looks like, over the next year I intend to keep running.  But this time, not on ice.  Or at least, I’ll get me some cleats.

Sometimes I have reading cravings.  Now, most of the time these are easy enough.

Like most of you, I go through phases.  I will read mysteries of a certain type, for instance (cozies, or historical or sometimes – not often – procedurals) for months at a time, then suddenly be unable to face the idea of reading another one.

It is well known – because I was rather shocked and blogged about it – that I spent a considerable period of the beginning of the year reading regencies.

These sort of make sense.  They’re usually diametrically opposed to whatever I’m writing at the moment, and the amount they’ll be memorable or absorbing is inversely proportional to my need for a vacation.  I.e., if I’m reading a book whose title and author will be gone ten seconds after I set the book down, you can probably bet that I’m stressed and in need of, if not actually on vacation.

During the year from heck – six books due and homeschooling the younger kid – I read mostly Disney comics.  (Stop laughing.)

All that is perfectly understandable.

But what do you call it when I start craving non fiction books of a particularly dry kind?

Well, it depends on the DRY book.  For some reason biology manuals and dinosaur books are for me, personally, the equivalent of hot chicken soup and a nice warm bath for other people.  If in addition to being extremely tired I’m also coming down with something, you’ll find me curled up in a corner reading books on the biology of some specialized marine life form, or the habits of the common ant.  Yeah, there’s a reason.  I became fascinated with that type of book at about eight, and spent many a happy childhood hour reading them.  So they’re “cozy.”

But what about a sudden interest in… oh, revolutions.  Or massacres?  They’re no one’s definition of cozy.  I also spent a whole year reading books about cults (I THINK I’m starting to get a glimmer on what that one is about.)  Months reading about the history of chocolate.  Months on the flu pandemic (back in 98, when it was hard to find stuff to read on line.  I spent hours scouring all the bookstores I could get to.)

Then there’s the truly out of nowhere wild hares.  It would make sense if you could say “oh, you stumbled on that book, liked it, and now are reading everything about that type of thing” but it’s not like that.  It’s more I wake up in the middle of the night, and like someone would say “I feel like a crab patty” I go “what I could use RIGHT NOW is a good book on the building of medieval cathedrals” or “painters in Paris in the nineteenth century” or “medieval cities.”

All I can say is that after those years or months of reading on one subject, I’ll suddenly go completely cold on it.  And then a few months or years later, an idea will come up for which that reading was essential.

Do the ideas come up because I read the books?  Or as the craving set off by the nascent idea?  Do ideas occur so deep in the subconscious that I don’t know they exist at all and they manifest themselves only as cravings?

I find that idea vaguely terrifying.  It would seem to imply a life of the mind outside the mind, as it were.  And yet it would fit the facts to an extent.  Does anyone else get these non-physical cravings?  What are your theories on the why of these?

and other imponderables…

Writing is a weird job.  Once becomes a job, that is, which for the vast majority of writers, it isn’t.

I noted early on that for most of the writers that made it big, writing was a full time job.  And it was a full time job before it justified the money they made, because they were forced to stay home for other reasons.  For me it was kind of, sort of like that.

In fact, it still IS pretty hard to say that I’m a full time writer.  I’m a full time writer as opposed to working ALSO outside the home.  I’m a full time writer insofar as it is the only one of my jobs that pays in real cash.  Is it the job that takes most of my time?  I’d say that’s evenly divided between writing and housekeeping/house management.  (Yes, I do dream one day of affording one of those.)  And I’d hate to admit to exactly how many days I only work an hour or so as a writer, and the rest of the day as a handywoman/cook/cleaner/bottle washer.  I’d hate to admit it, because several of you, at various times, have offered to come cook and clean for me, something that is PARTICULARLY disturbing when I know and you know you live across the country.  Yes, I do appreciate you love my books that much (Weirdly, mostly Kyrie and Tom) but all the same, you have to agree it sounds a little odd.  (Okay, so I’d have scrubbed floors all day for a peek at Heinlein’s first drafts.  But my dears, I’m not Heinlein.)

Anyway, the thing is, once it becomes job in the sense that you have deadlines and that at least part of your income depends on writing, you get hit between the eyes with exactly how odd it is.

You see, the thing is, at least for me so much of writing depends on the subconscious, that I can’t always say “I’m going to write this now.”  This collides HARD with my personality, which has a strong sense of doing what I’m supposed to when I’m expected to and not whining about it.

For years now, because I was working with main stream publishing, my schedule went something like this: Get an oh wow idea – say, musketeer mysteries.  Write proposal.  Send out to agent.  Depending on the agent (I had four, serially) get back suggestions or simply a “I don’t think I can sell this” which could take anywhere from a week or two to six months to get back.  Needless to say by the time it was six months, I’d be doing something else.  This was particularly vexing for historical, because the research wouldn’t ALWAYS be fresh in my mind, and I could very easilly confuse current historical period with old one.

Send revised proposal in, then wait.  Selling periods for my proposals, from moment they hit publisher desk range from twenty minutes (yes, it was Jim Baen.  Shifters.  I sent it in, email, went for a walk with my husband.  Came home in twenty minutes.  Had an offer in email.)  to eight years.  Needless to say, twenty minutes NOT a problem.  The idea was still hot in my mind.  Eight years… well.  The proposal was written in 97.  Let’s just say… I wasn’t that person anymore and be done with it, shall we?

And half the proposals just never sold.   Which is the average sell-through rate, actually.

Now, I’m not complaining.  I made a living at this for ten years, with one year off (2003.  Man was that year fun – not.)  But the thing was when the books sold, setting the delivery date was a matter or working with the publisher, and… ye can’t always get what ye want…

Which meant that I often found myself with, say, three books due a year for a particular series, while doing three other series.  2007 – which was no end of fun, too – chained six books, one after the other: shifters and musketeer mysteries and MBE.  Which meant I finished GTAC in time to start Soul of Fire, in time to do another musketeer mystery, in time…

It wasn’t the books that killed me.  It was the SILENCE in between, as I tried to “switch heads.”

Of necessity much of the writing for traditional publishing – a creature of deep scheduling – is write it when it’s up.  And to the extent I’ll still do that, I’ll still have to make my subconscious jump through hoops on demand, a process that works about half the time.

But it might be easier if in between I can write what my mind is hot on “right now.”

In fact, just knowing that I can let my subconscious write on spec and that I can always bring it out and bring it out quickly feels like a great calm descending over me.

I think it’s because it gives me a measure of control.  Could be, of course, because I’m insane.

The problem is this.  There are… twenty some novels, outlined, the first three to five chapters written (which is to say the work half done) that are stirring and wakening.

And I’m faced again with the problem I had when I started out.  How do you pace yourself when it feels like everything you do is a collaboration between you and that blind idiot you call your subconscious?  It’s not like the bum cares about deadlines or even Nanowrimo…

At the same time there is this (probably morbid) curiosity.  If I’m not fighting the lack of control, the incredible tiredness, the schedule not of my own setting (at least for most of the books) can I do a book a month?

Or do I have to do what I do on the treadmill, and set it for a pace I can keep up for the long run, instead of a burst of speed and a long rest?

I’m not really blogging today.  Not in any meaningful sense.  This blog while it appears to be a blog is really a bunch of disgruntled musings.

“Why are you not blogging today, Sarah?”  Well, because I’m laying down words very fast on my Nanowrimo novel and writing non fiction might pop me out of the mood.  Also because frankly I am still in shock from having to seriously hurt a character yesterday.  “What do you mean having to seriously hurt a character, Sarah?  Don’t you know they don’t exist?  Don’t you know that hurting them is a needed thing for the plot?”  I mean shut up, shut up, shut up.  Yeah, you’d think after almost thirty years of writing I’d treat my characters as disposable widgets that go in and do what they’re supposed to and then die or go off or something, or at least stop existing for me.  Ah!  You’d think so, but you’d be wrong.

Oh, there is a certain distance I can achieve in short stories, particularly.  I can write a story where the character really is there for the purpose of x.  But the novel characters?

Look, I’ve got no illusions about myself.  I am primarily, if not exclusively, a character writer.  The last twenty six years have been a long, slow, often hopeless struggle to learn how to plot because I realized no character exists in vacuum (well, unless it’s my short story In The Absence Of Light published by Naked Reader Press recently — coff)  For the character to show to best advantage, you need to show him/her pitting him/herself against something — usually adversity.  The exception — sorta — is my refinishing mysteries, which are truly “novels of the quotidian” with the thinnest of plots as excuse.  Weirdly, no, I don’t want to write those all the time.

So, I must write characters facing adversity.  (Note for the religious — this is how I view the problem of evil in the world.  Without it, G-d would be up a creek for a plot!)

But here’s the rub — to me, if not to the readers — the characters exist pre-plot.  And if they weren’t fascinating people and most —  though admittedly not all — of of the main characters are people I’d like to know and be friends with (though some of them I’d need to keep thorazine handy for.)  That is why they are my main characters, because I couldn’t resist playing with them and spending time with them.  Heck, look at Athos, who isn’t even MY character and whom I’ve now stolen to have my wicked way with in TWO series.  (And in Sword and Blood my way is VERY wicked indeed.)

Does it hurt when I have to hurt them?  You bet.  Do I hurt them even harder in consequence?  Oh, yeah, because I know that will make their eventual triumph tastier both for me and my readers.  Does this mean it’s easier to drag them through hell by their heels?  Oh, heck no.  Really no.

I just had to seriously hurt one of the main characters in the current book AND have the other one feel guilty for it and unable to do anything — at least unable until I run him into a corner and he snaps, when we’ll get… explosions, blood and mayhem.

I prefer the explosions part.  I feel beat and battered and need to go write them out of this fix, but I don’t want to go back there.

(Incidentally, and a subject for a post when I’m not feeling emotionally rubbed raw — part of this relationship with characters is what made writing proposals and only selling at best 75% of them so grueling.  You had to love them, bring them to life and live them.  Not good for any creator.  On the good side, I now have about 20 novels where the plotting and the first three chapters [i.e. half the work] is done and which are ready to finish and bring out.  I’m so looking forward to 2012 and the possibilities it brings.)

Now I’m going to shower, and then I’m going to spend the afternoon dragging my characters through hell (The current book section is called Come Hell.)  Not literally.  This is the Earth of Athena’s time.  But … close enough.

Pity the poor writer who must hurt her creatures…

*First chapter here  Third chapter here.   Yes, I’m lazy.  But mostly, frankly, I just woke up.  This week has not been good for sleeping, between snowstorms throwing all our schedules askew and various due dates bugging me.  So, I slept till almost noon central, almost ten my time — which doesn’t happen but once every few months.  The explanation for this, for late arrivals is that I started this story for Austen fandom years ago, but have never finished.  It’s a desecration of Pride and Prejudice.  I threw elves at it.  Literature purists, feel free to avert your eyes and cry.  If this gets enough following on this blog, I’ll finish it.  If not, I’ll let sleeping fanfic lie.  First chapter is here*

II

Through the great hall at Netherfield, Lord Darcy came striding. Though the palace at Netherfield – ancient and honored – was the seat of his friend Duke Carolus Bingley, it was now hosting the most high court of Fairyland and the Elven Realms of Avalon. As such, its great hall had been outfitted with the twin thrones of the king and queen of the elven realms in these isles, and – because the kingdom was in danger – filled with every great Lord and Lady, every prince, every duke, every mere baron that held land and magic in the kingdom.

Lord Darcy entered, without bothering to change out of his riding attire. The silver spurs on the well polished boots that encased his legs up to the knees, struck sparks from the polished marble floors. The court parted, like clouds when the sun appears. The ladies lined, on either side of the path he strode through, and knelt one after the other, as he passed, turning to him their flower-like countenances which sparkled with admiration of his fine figure, his glossy black locks and the grey eyes which shone as though bits of silver had got caught deep within.

The faces fell as they saw who followed him – the proud Carola Bingley, his fiancé, who looked at them all as though they were beneath her contempt. Lord Bingley, with his softer features and his vague smile, would have encouraged them to come forward, but Carola was jealous of her position and prerogative.

Ten steps before the throne, Prince Darcy stopped and bowed deeply but did not kneel. The grandson of the king, and his heir – who would be king whenever Oberon should go forth to the isles of the blessed – he was the highest born there, save the sovereigns.

“Speak grandson,” Oberon said, from his throne, his voice deep like thunder and rolling over the court like a wave. “What have you found? The boundaries of our land, are they secure? What signs of the rebels? Is there any magical defiling? Any show of his encroaching?”

Darcy bowed again, a contained gesture. His features froze into somber-seeming stillness, as though he had of a sudden turned to a statue. “Noble Oberon,” he said. “I would not deceive you. Though I found no explicit sign of the rebel, I could taste the flavor of his foul magic, the touch of his followers on hill and glade.” He hesitated. “The home you spoke of, fifty years ago, but three miles hence, is now inhabited by a family and not, as you had said, just a lonely old man. And that family…” He struggled for words while Oberon watched. “That family, oh noble king, has five daughters, all fair virgins of… of distinguished lineage. Far away, and in their mother’s line they are of your own blood, your majesty.”

“Five virgins,” Oberon said, frowning slightly. “Of my blood. The rebel will never resist this. He will come for them.”

“So I thought,” Darcy said. He bit the side of his lip, lost in thought. “And being that though they are mortals, they are of your blood, I think we have only two options…”

The king looked at him and then said, his voice terrible as the thunder that announces a storm. “I see only one,” he said. “We must bring them to us and find them marriages and keep them safe, deep within our palace.”

Something like pride or disdain twisted Darcy’s lips and his eyes flashed. “Bring them within? Oh, no your majesty. For though they are descended from you, many generations of mortals have poured their coarse, impure stuff into their veins. You’d not allow them to thus pollute the shades of fairyland!”

Oberon opened his lips, as though to say something, then closed them. “What do you suggest, then, grandson?”

“Two things we can do and one of them is to wrap them tight in spells so that they won’t consider the intruder or go with him, or even think of him, or of believing his foul lies.”

“And the other?” Oberon said. His lips twisted in turn. It was well known that since the Bard incident he didn’t approve of putting spells on any humans, be they ever the rudest of mechanicals. Besides, Darcy knew, every sense would revolt at the idea of spelling his descendants, no matter how remote.

“The other is that, under some disguise or contravention, dressed as mortals, behaving as they do, we meet them and warn them.”

“I like that idea better,” Oberon said. “It doesn’t do, grandson, no matter your opinions, to treat humans as though they were mere cattle. They are our cousins, in body and in magic, and deserve better treatment than the deer in the forest, whom we bespell to our traps.”

Darcy pressed his lips together but, in public, forbore to argue with his grandfather. Instead, he bowed again. “We have found, through the minds of the sleeping mortals, that an assembly is held every month, in Merryton, the nearby city. That is a … ball… A dance. Carolus Bingley and I have spoken, and we think the best thing would be for us to arrive in Merryton perhaps a day or two before and to attend this assembly under the guise of mortals. There, we’d talk to the young women – their name is Bennet – under pretext of dancing with them, but… your majesty… if words fail… then we must try spells.”

“If words fail….” the king conceded.

---

It wasn’t till later, in the receiving room of his private quarters, having changed from his riding attire into a blue velvet suit of doublet and knee breeches that sparkled like the deep summer sky strewn with distant stars, that he turned to Carolus and said, “I believe my grandfather means well, but I don’t see why we can’t just spell the mortals from a distance. To have to mingle with them will make for an unbearable evening.”

Golden haired Carolus Bingley sitting near him, laughed heartily. “It is no so bad, Darcy,” he said. “It will be great amusement. It is years since we dropped in at a mortal feast, since our king disapproves of it. I am sure there will be many pleasant people and many uncommonly pretty girls.”

Darcy smiled at his friend. Though they were very different from each other, the prince and the duke had been friends since childhood. And though he did not agree with Carolus, he couldn’t help being amused by him. “You, Carolus, are ever pleased with your company elf or mortal.”

“I just don’t see any reason,” Lord Bingley, Duke of Silver Bells, said, “For going through the world disapproving of everything and everyone.”

But Carola Bingley who sat nearby, admiring her golden beauty on a mirror, turned her passionless eyes to Darcy and said, “I will go with you, milord. I’ll make an unbearable evening perhaps not so terrible.”

Darcy’s gaze flickered onto his fiancé and he said “Yes, that will make it easier.”

“Do you really think we might have to put spells on them?” Bingley asked.

“I very much fear so,” Darcy said. “Mortals are not known for their rationality.” He turned at a sound of soft footsteps behind him. There stood, in the half-light of his sparsely but beautifully furnished domain, a young girl in a flowing green silk dress, her blond hair loosened down her back, her green eyes making her look like something untamed and quite fearful of approaching other creatures.

Prince Darcy’s features split in a wide smile, “Ah Georgiana,” he said, softly. “Come sister. Come and play for us.”

As the young girl sat before the harp, the music poured from her sweetly precise fingertips to fill the entire palace and leak out into the mortal night to enchant unwary passerbye.

---

Lydia had talked of nothing else all the way to the assembly in the carriage. “And they say there are two gentlemen, and both wearing such fine things and paying with such liberality that, perforce, they must be very wealthy. And…”

But nothing prepared Lizzy for the shock she received when, on entering the assembly, Sir William Lucas begged to make known to the Bennets “Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley.”

There they were, one dark and one blond, but both unmistakably the men she’d seen riding in outlandish costume in the moonlight just a few days before. Were they elves? Or had she dreamed all? Or were they just men of the ton in search of fresh amusement?

Through the great hall at Netherfield, Lord Darcy came striding. Though the palace at Netherfield – ancient and honored – was the seat of his friend Duke Carolus Bingley, it was now hosting the most high court of Fairyland and the Elven Realms of Avalon. As such, its great hall had been outfitted with the twin thrones of the king and queen of the elven realms in these isles, and – because the kingdom was in danger – filled with every great Lord and Lady, every prince, every duke, every mere baron that held land and magic in the kingdom.

Lord Darcy entered, without bothering to change out of his riding attire. The silver spurs on the well polished boots that encased his legs up to the knees, struck sparks from the polished marble floors. The court parted, like clouds when the sun appears. The ladies lined, on either side of the path he strode through, and knelt one after the other, as he passed, turning to him their flower-like countenances which sparkled with admiration of his fine figure, his glossy black locks and the grey eyes which shone as though bits of silver had got caught deep within.

The faces fell as they saw who followed him – the proud Carola Bingley, his fiancé, who looked at them all as though they were beneath her contempt. Lord Bingley, with his softer features and his vague smile, would have encouraged them to come forward, but Carola was jealous of her position and prerogative.

Ten steps before the throne, Prince Darcy stopped and bowed deeply but did not kneel. The grandson of the king, and his heir – who would be king whenever Oberon should go forth to the isles of the blessed – he was the highest born there, save the sovereigns.

“Speak grandson,” Oberon said, from his throne, his voice deep like thunder and rolling over the court like a wave. “What have you found? The boundaries of our land, are they secure? What signs of the rebels? Is there any magical defiling? Any show of his encroaching?”

Darcy bowed again, a contained gesture. His features froze into somber-seeming stillness, as though he had of a sudden turned to a statue. “Noble Oberon,” he said. “I would not deceive you. Though I found no explicit sign of the rebel, I could taste the flavor of his foul magic, the touch of his followers on hill and glade.” He hesitated. “The home you spoke of, fifty years ago, but three miles hence, is now inhabited by a family and not, as you had said, just a lonely old man. And that family…” He struggled for words while Oberon watched. “That family, oh noble king, has five daughters, all fair virgins of… of distinguished lineage. Far away, and in their mother’s line they are of your own blood, your majesty.”

“Five virgins,” Oberon said, frowning slightly. “Of my blood. The rebel will never resist this. He will come for them.”

“So I thought,” Darcy said. He bit the side of his lip, lost in thought. “And being that though they are mortals, they are of your blood, I think we have only two options…”

The king looked at him and then said, his voice terrible as the thunder that announces a storm. “I see only one,” he said. “We must bring them to us and find them marriages and keep them safe, deep within our palace.”

Something like pride or disdain twisted Darcy’s lips and his eyes flashed. “Bring them within? Oh, no your majesty. For though they are descended from you, many generations of mortals have poured their coarse, impure stuff into their veins. You’d not allow them to thus pollute the shades of fairyland!”

Oberon opened his lips, as though to say something, then closed them. “What do you suggest, then, grandson?”

“Two things we can do and one of them is to wrap them tight in spells so that they won’t consider the intruder or go with him, or even think of him, or of believing his foul lies.”

“And the other?” Oberon said. His lips twisted in turn. It was well known that since the Bard incident he didn’t approve of putting spells on any humans, be they ever the rudest of mechanicals. Besides, Darcy knew, every sense would revolt at the idea of spelling his descendants, no matter how remote.

“The other is that, under some disguise or contravention, dressed as mortals, behaving as they do, we meet them and warn them.”

“I like that idea better,” Oberon said. “It doesn’t do, grandson, no matter your opinions, to treat humans as though they were mere cattle. They are our cousins, in body and in magic, and deserve better treatment than the deer in the forest, whom we bespell to our traps.”

Darcy pressed his lips together but, in public, forbore to argue with his grandfather. Instead, he bowed again. “We have found, through the minds of the sleeping mortals, that an assembly is held every month, in Merryton, the nearby city. That is a … ball… A dance. Carolus Bingley and I have spoken, and we think the best thing would be for us to arrive in Merryton perhaps a day or two before and to attend this assembly under the guise of mortals. There, we’d talk to the young women – their name is Bennet – under pretext of dancing with them, but… your majesty… if words fail… then we must try spells.”

“If words fail….” the king conceded.

---

It wasn’t till later, in the receiving room of his private quarters, having changed from his riding attire into a blue velvet suit of doublet and knee breeches that sparkled like the deep summer sky strewn with distant stars, that he turned to Carolus and said, “I believe my grandfather means well, but I don’t see why we can’t just spell the mortals from a distance. To have to mingle with them will make for an unbearable evening.”

Golden haired Carolus Bingley sitting near him, laughed heartily. “It is no so bad, Darcy,” he said. “It will be great amusement. It is years since we dropped in at a mortal feast, since our king disapproves of it. I am sure there will be many pleasant people and many uncommonly pretty girls.”

Darcy smiled at his friend. Though they were very different from each other, the prince and the duke had been friends since childhood. And though he did not agree with Carolus, he couldn’t help being amused by him. “You, Carolus, are ever pleased with your company elf or mortal.”

“I just don’t see any reason,” Lord Bingley, Duke of Silver Bells, said, “For going through the world disapproving of everything and everyone.”

But Carola Bingley who sat nearby, admiring her golden beauty on a mirror, turned her passionless eyes to Darcy and said, “I will go with you, milord. I’ll make an unbearable evening perhaps not so terrible.”

Darcy’s gaze flickered onto his fiancé and he said “Yes, that will make it easier.”

“Do you really think we might have to put spells on them?” Bingley asked.

“I very much fear so,” Darcy said. “Mortals are not known for their rationality.” He turned at a sound of soft footsteps behind him. There stood, in the half-light of his sparsely but beautifully furnished domain, a young girl in a flowing green silk dress, her blond hair loosened down her back, her green eyes making her look like something untamed and quite fearful of approaching other creatures.

Prince Darcy’s features split in a wide smile, “Ah Georgiana,” he said, softly. “Come sister. Come and play for us.”

As the young girl sat before the harp, the music poured from her sweetly precise fingertips to fill the entire palace and leak out into the mortal night to enchant unwary passerbye.

---

Lydia had talked of nothing else all the way to the assembly in the carriage. “And they say there are two gentlemen, and both wearing such fine things and paying with such liberality that, perforce, they must be very wealthy. And…”

But nothing prepared Lizzy for the shock she received when, on entering the assembly, Sir William Lucas begged to make known to the Bennets “Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley.”

There they were, one dark and one blond, but both unmistakably the men she’d seen riding in outlandish costume in the moonlight just a few days before. Were they elves? Or had she dreamed all? Or were they just men of the ton in search of fresh amusement?

Back when I was a beginning writer we used to do something – and we got the idea from stories Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith told.  (No, this does not mean we killed our secret pen names in a love triangle murder suicide, though – given mine – it’s something I have considered on occasion.  Well, I’ve considered killing them, and a love-triangle murder suicide is JUST what they all deserve.  I’ll make it in sordid circumstances!)

First I must explain that much as I hate to admit it, we writing couples are different.  Sorry.  We’re wonderfully, amazingly, extraordinarily more… dorky than anything you non-writing couples can imagine.   Starting in the mists of time, when the kids were toddlers, I heard of other couples having “date nights” every week.  This seemed a little odd, since we got in our dating time the first year of marriage, like we were supposed to (at least like we were supposed to, because we never dated before marriage, due to the Atlantic Ocean being in the way and never moving out of the way, not even when we nudged it with our knee.)

But we did have our very own equivalent of date nights.  Since waaaay back then we didn’t have a writing group and the very concept was somewhat alien, and since I spent my writing day surrounded by non-verbal people, sometimes I just needed to talk a plot point out.  So when Dan got home I’d already have called our friend who would babysit for us (not afraid of way too smart kids – hi Charles!) and be ready to go.  We’d pick some place with slow service, a quiet atmosphere and servers with nerves of steel.  The latter was very needed since otherwise they panicked when they heard us discussing body disposal methods.

Well, Kris and Dean talked of something similar – the intensive writing retreat.  We tried it twice, with our friends, Rebecca and Alan Lickiss.  In the form we did it, we got the kids out of our house (and into theirs, with a trusted sitter – hi Charles!) Then we set up writing areas for each of us in our house.  And then we wrote from mid-Friday to mid-Sunday.  When taking breaks, for coffee or water or something, we tossed whatever we’d finished so far on the larger coffee table.  Other people could add, or sit down and read, because late on Sunday there was a critique session before they went home.

I think the lowest wordage for those weekends was 15k words.  The highest was 40k.  And since we inevitably went out to eat on Saturday night and took a bit of time, plus there were talks in the kitchen late at night, it wasn’t bad at all.

We could never replicate it on our own, not even when we had an internet one.  There is something about more than one writer in a house, concentrating only on writing, at the same time, and doing nothing else, with no distractions.

It’s better than one writer in one place, concentrating only on writing, even.

Some of you, who have had occasion to call me or email me, know that I do this sometimes, when criminally late – I find a hotel with really cheap rates and hole up for a week or so and just write like a demon.  It works.  I mean, it’s better than being at home with the kids, the cats and the telephone.  (Better in the sense of my writing more.  I rather enjoy the kids and the cats.)
But it is not the same as having a group, all pulling at the same time, in a small space.  This is why if I could and had other writers in the city I could do this with, I’d rent a communal office to do it in.  I think the same synergy would develop.

Nanowrimo of course is not the same synergy, or not quite.  There’s also the fact that if you are connecting through the Nanowrimo site, you end up talking more than you write.  Some people there, I swear, live to talk.  Which is why I don’t do official Nano site anymore.  BUT Nanowrimo connecting with a small group who reports in, really seems to help.

Still not the same.  We also tried to do writing weekends where we connected via the net and it didn’t seem to raise the same feel.  Real life still intrudes.  So 60k words in a month are okay, but 40k in 48 hours are beyond us.

However, we found out by accident, on the weekend of a con when both of us had stories due for an antho, that the same synergy develops when Dan and I go away Friday through Sunday alone and both of us write.  It’s actually romantic, because (around the con) we got a couple of meals out alone in.  But even with those and the con panels, we wrote as much as we did at those long-ago writing retreats.

Since I found this out, I’ve had this dream where we get to do that about once a month and I get ahead of my schedule.  The problem is that it’s never been possible.  When I first wanted to do that, we’d just moved to this house and were paying on both houses, so I thought “when the house sells we’ll start doing it.”

When the house sold, there were a few other emergencies, and now there are college tuition costs.

So, I’m thinking…  If the donation button on this site raises only enough to pay for a weekend for us (two nights) away at a hotel per month (we’re cheap dates.  No, not as cheap as the hotel we first stayed in for Liberty last year, before moving to the con hotel.  I don’t like worrying about rats) it will have conferred an incredible boon on us.

See, it’s always been for writers that the more you wrote the more you made.  But under the new model that’s much more so.  Instead of fifty percent of your stuff being published (and the rest often waiting years, not on quality – I sold some of it years later, and at least one story that took me eight years to sell was a year’s best fantasy and horror honorable mention – but on “it doesn’t fit our needs” or rather it didn’t fit what they were looking for [I never managed to sell any of my future history short stories, set in the same timeline as Darkships because ‘your future history is not logical’ – ah!]  And I have all these series started: the musketeers mysteries, the refinishing mysteries, orphan kittens, the Shifters, Darkships and the rest of the future history stuff.  I have fans waiting for each of those, and, of course, I can only write a book at a time.  But if I get that weekend away I’ll do them faster.  And weirdly I always come back from that type of experience felling energized (Yes, I’m broken.  Deal.)

At any rate, I think the button has done that this month, for which I thank you more than I can say (though we might postpone the onset of these till January because November is a holiday and two birthdays in this household, and then we hit the holiday season.  Or maybe not.  It occurs to me that a weekend of writing is a wonderful birthday present for self.)

Hopefully it will continue and be one of those self-feeding things: the more I write, the more I can afford to give away on the site as a loss leader, the more donations I get, which make me write more/faster, which means more properties I can either write-in-public or give away under the free short story tab (story changes every week.)

So, again, thank you to everyone who has hit that button.  It will be used to promote writing (so I don’t need to steal the kitty kibble money) more and faster and hopefully better.

Meanwhile, it’s time I got out of here and went to officeish.  I have two novels to finish.

My friend Dave Freer posted on Monday about writing what sells… for the new market.  As so often happens, we were in a similar place mentally.

Monday morning in the shower (yes, I think in the shower, deal) I found myself thinking about how we don’t know what sells.

Now, we might know what has literary merit, but literary merit is a matter of opinion.  I read someone today talking about how Harry Potter is totally devoid of it, which it very well might be, but compared to what?  The comparisons this person pulled up were Dickens and Tolstoi.  Dickens wrote by the frigging word, so what principle of literary value are we applying?  And as for Tolstoi, I treasured his work and kept it by my bedside for years.  You see, I suffer from insomnia and I could never go more than fifteen pages without falling asleep.  So, I’m willing to concede it’s very important to the history of literature.  At least I hope so, or I’d hate to think of all the trees that were killed to print it.  Just don’t make me read it.

Frankly, though I gag at the idea that Harry Potter is the most inventive piece of fantasy evah – it’s rather like Enid Blyton boarding school mysteries with magic – I gag even more at the idea of people putting it down because it doesn’t “illuminate the human condition.”  I don’t know about you but when I want to illuminate the human condition, I get a flashlight.  (Wait, that’s the human basement.  Never mind.)

Doesn’t matter anyway.  Literary value is a will o’ the wisp and has been used for centuries by those-who-know-better to tell the masses what ’orrible little people they are and what ’orrible ’horrible taste they have.  (Shakespeare.  All that blood.  Ghosts.  Inaccurate history.  Rotted the mind like cheap candy.  A favorite of truculent apprentices and low brows.  Why, he had the violence happen right htere on the stage, while all the well bred people knew the way to do it was to have a messenger come and announce it.  In the more fraught plays, messengers crossed back and forth on the stage, but it was good taste.  Everyone knew that.  As a literature major I’ve had to read those plays.  They’re very illuminating of the human condition.  Like Tolstoi.)

What literary value is not is a predictor of sales, unless you are talking ONLY sales to a small subset of status-insecure people who want to show how intelligent they are.  Now, there are any number of those and there are scam– er… authors who make a living off them, but I am not an artist – I work for a living – and I’d rather sell stuff people genuinely enjoy.

The question is… what is that?

Until recently, if you wanted to be read by the largest number of people, the path was easy.  First, you had to impress the gatekeepers.  Fortunately the gatekeepers were a small clique living mostly in NYC and all attending the same parties and reading the same books or – more likely – watching the same movies.  And they weren’t shy with their opinions, either.  They talked all the time, because you see, living in an echo chamber, they viewed their tastes and opinion as symbols of their status and intelligence.  So, attend one or two conventions, and you could psyche them.

Failing that, there were slews of books, seminars and workshops that taught you how to think the way they did, for the purpose of creating stories they’d love.  Then they’d make sure your book got in all the bookshops, and then, if you were lucky, a miracle occurred and your book appealed to the public also.  But that was secondary because a) first you had to catch your rabbit – or editor – and b) the public selection was limited, and often constrained to the current fad.  So if all editors wanted purple swans, (shud up you.  Actually it’s barely less plausible than things they did want: romantic inoffensive vampires; female detectives who thought only of shoes, etc.) you wrote purple swans and if your purple swan was a little better than average you were gold er… purple… er… the purplest of them all.

Recently, while trying to cut down on the number of dead tree tomes around the house, I went through my how-to-write-shelf and realized most of those books are now useless.  All of them, openly or not, teach you to write the book the gatekeepers will love.  So other than the grammar books and the Swain (which you’ll pry off my cold dead hands) they’re mostly useless.

This was confirmed for me when a writer of far more experience told a group of us to “Put it all out there, even the things you think are bad.  Don’t judge your own stuff.  Writers are horrible judges of their own stuff, and these days we just don’t know what sells.  We don’t know what people want.”

But the thing is, I’m a wussy.  Oh, not in most circumstances, but when it comes to my writing.  I sent stuff out DESPITE my fear it sucked and kept sending in the face of rejections because I’ve got a quitting dysfunction, not because of any self confidence.

I hated having to jump through the hoops of the gatekeeper’s opinions, but at least I could study the books, and know I was getting better, as defined to ‘closer to the goal.’  Now, it’s like… gravity is gone, we’re all floating free and, like Thena, in Darkship Thieves, my internal sense tells me I’m always upside down, no matter how I turn.

And awards are no indication of what is good or what will sell.  SF writers are horrible at judging their peers.  It devolves to either status seeking or personality contest.  And fans are only slightly better because the fan awards usually are voted on by only a subset of fans.  (The Prometheus is perhaps the best predictor of sales, and I say that, not just because I got it, but because I know people who read every winner as a matter of course.  Of course, I run with that set of people, so my opinion is biased.)

And I’ve already disqualified myself from literary merit.  So, what remains?

Funny, but Dave and I both arrived at the same conclusion more or less at the same time.  Go back to the beginning of the field, to the things that caused the explosion.  Many of those are now marred by archaic language and style.  But any person with half a brain can tell the things in the story that appealed to people.  Well, I can tell you some of them that appeal to me: Resourceful and daring heroes; strange lands; bravery; larger than life characters.

Mind you, I don’t know if my tastes are universal.  But I know what I like.  And I’d bet you there’s at least ten thousand people out there who have the same tastes I do.  Probably, more like a hundred thousand.  And although it might take time, the new market place gives me a chance to find most of them – or for them to find me.

The new net of friendships between kindred minds spans the globe, so if I find someone who likes me, and they talk to their like minded friends… well…

Will this make me as rich as Rowling?  Who knows.  Probably not.  Besides, I can’t have everything (where would I put it?  Who would dust it.)

Making a comfortable living writing the stuff I like for people who like it sounds like paradise to me, compared to the last ten years of competition contortionism to fit the square peg into the round hole of expectations.

It’s good enough.  It will do.  And it’s enough to aim for.  (And illuminating the human condition can wait for the flashlight.)

I am going to officishing today, which means I should have written the post last night, instead of which I spent time preparing for Nano wrimo.
So, watch this space.  Something will be posted after work.  Now, whether that will be sane or coherent, it’s something else.

Let’s start with what a subplot is – at least for me.  For other people it might mean different things.  It is one of those things that writers, living by the word, tend to give terms so many different meanings, depending on writer, time of career and sometimes mood, that you can find personal definitions for all of our professional terms: synopsis, outline, concept, subplot, character arc, etc.  (I think this is also a result of a profession where apprenticeships are kind of individual, self-created and depending on either what books the writer finds on his way to learning, or which pro he can gang press into helping him.  It might be true that when the pupil is ready the master appears, but in writing it often seems to be more under the heading of “first find a few masters.  Then pick bits of each teaching that suit you.”)

For me a plot consists of the events that serve the central theme of the book.  Say you’re writing a book about growing mutant chickens (shut up you.  It’s early and I’ve had no caffeine.)  The plot would be buying the eggs, building the incubator, possibly the money aspects of this, where you have to mortgage the farm to buy the eggs and the incubator and then through the try-fail sequence, you worry about you and the mutant cows being thrown out of the farm because the mutant chickens won’t hatch.  Then at the end your mutant chickens hatch, but they fly away (I did say they were mutants, right?) and you think all is lost until the mutant chickens come home to roost.

A subplot would be the farmer’s relationship with his younger brother who thinks they should grow pterodactyls instead and his aged grandmother going off in search of a priest to exorcise the incubator and, on the way, finding her son whom she thought was eaten by mutated sheep as a toddler, living as a prosperous witch doctor in the next village.  This will tie in, of course, with fixing the incubators, but it’s also an entire if smaller and less important plot arc.  (Yes, it’s a weird world.  LIVE with it.  Early.  No caffeine.)

Let me start by saying your novels don’t really need much in the way of a subplot.  Not if they’re going to come in as what might now be a viable length of about sixty to seventy thousand words. For this length the inevitable subplot like the relationship between the characters is enough.  And there is always a relationship between the characters, even if it’s the fact the farmer’s wife thinks mutated sheep are unnatural, not like those nice mutated cows.

Then I can – I think – explain that I don’t think I can write a novel without subplots.  Sometimes even my long short stories develop subplots.  It’s just the way my mind works to complicate things.  (Yes, live with THAT either.  Why not?  I have to.)

Also this explains my… difficult relationship with plotting vs. pantsing.  I can do a detailed outline.  Have in the past, mostly because agents or editors demanded them.

Turns out it might not be the … best thing for someone like me to do.  Why?  Well… take the outline to Heart of Light.  (Please!) When it was done, it was 50 pages, typed, and I listed every incident (I thought) that would happen in the book.  The problem?  I hadn’t listed every incident that would happen in the book.  When a plot gets in motion, my subconscious gets fully engaged.  And when my subconscious gets engaged, it produces subplots like bad chilli produces gas.

So what happens with something like Heart of Light – and btw, to generate an outline THAT complete, I’d needed to take several runs at the outline, over and over again, which took me the best part of six months because I needed to get to know the characters, whence all subplots come  – that is outlined till it’s about a quarter of a novel?  Well… it develops more subplots.  And then you have to weed them back.  Possibly with a machetti.  Or what you end up with is in fact soup.

Now, for the longest time, like when I first got published, I used to plot like that, on paper, anyway, before I wrote the novel.  This is because I didn’t trust my subconscious, which, let me tell you, is a wily and cunning beast (possibly a mutated chicken) to give me subplots that tied in to anything, much less my main plot.  And if I came to the end with a bunch of plots that pointed to nothing at all and could no more figure out how to tie them together than how to give a fish flying lessons, I’d have wasted the six months or so of writing the d*mn book.

So, what did I do?  Oh, I wrote a book three times as long as it needed to be.  (If I was lucky.)  And then I sat down with the scalpel and the sewing needle, and cut it to about 1/3 to 1/5 the length, keeping in only the relevant stuff.

I don’t do it like that anymore.  What changed was the way the field, which was collapsing under me as I broke in, interacted with another of my characteristics: the inability to give up once I start something.  You see, round about 2003 I had to make a choice.  I could admit I’d made a mistake in aiming to be a writer most of my life and working like crazy to get published, because there was no way to make a living from this or (worse) at least no way I personally could make a living from this.  Or I could find a way to make a living from this, including but not limited to, doing the work of four to six writers.

See again how I cannot figure out how to give up on something.  Blame it on parents who emphasized follow through and persistence.  Or blame it on a mind that, when I was seventeen, earned me a certificate saying I was perfectly sane.  (Pauses to let the idea of WHY one would need such a certificate sink in.)  I could give up.  I could also levitate.  Theoretically.  Not that I’m willing to test either theory.

The advantage of becoming several writers at once, is that it taught me to trust my subconscious, because I simply didn’t have the ability to write twelve to twenty novels a year (well, I’ve never tried, to tell the truth.  But at the time, the kids were YOUNG and needed a lot more watching.)  So I had to outline the plot and let the subplots take care of themselves.

For someone of my disposition, this is sort of the equivalent of learning to swim by being thrown into rapids.  (I don’t know how to swim, btw.  It’s hard to write under water, so I was never much interested.)

The first book that I did this with was Draw One In The Dark, and, to my surprise, not only did all the subplots tie in, but they tied in at the right time and in the right way.  And then it happened again, and again, till I’ve had to come to the conclusion that my subconscious knows its business, often better than I do.

So, my current process is I write the general outline, (say ten pages, double spaced) then let the subplots fall in place.  This can be distracting to publishers like Baen who emphasize plot.  I think Toni is getting used to the idea that the outline she gets might sound thin on plot, because I write better novels than I do outlines (I think.)

There are two drawbacks.  In the space operas, this plotting by sudden fits of brilliance (Ah!  I see, so that’s what happened a hundred years back!) has played holy havoc with my future history, which in turn affects other stories in the line.  I’m trying to fix it so I can do a couple of novellas in the Thena Verse, but that’s something else.

The other is that I NEVER KNOW if my subconscious will deliver the goods or not.  Okay, so it has done so for the last fifteen books, but that doesn’t mean a thing.  It could fail me tomorrow!  So I live in a constant state of terror of what lurks in my own mind.  (I really don’t appreciate that low whistle and “so you should, sister.”  Mind your own mind!)

And yet the other is that when I write a novel in public – Witchfinder – people ask me questions and say “I didn’t realize this from the beginning” and I have to say “I hadn’t either.”  Or “I might have had a misleading paragraph in there, because I thought it was so.”  I’d like to point out the truly bizarre thing is that I don’t usually have too many wrong-pointing paragraphs anymore.  Towards the middle of the novel, I’ll make a note saying something like “Make sure on revision that S and G haven’t been doing this that long.”  And I’ll go back, hunting paragraphs that say they’ve done it for five years or whatever.  (There might be one.  Haven’t looked.)  Nine times out of ten, it’s not there.  I.e. the subconscious took care of it, already, even though the conscious had no clue.  Often, towards the end of the novel my desk (roll top) looks like a postit note porcupine with “Go back and make sure” and “Drop a hint that x is y back in chapter three.”  BUT the funny thing is about half of those are already there, somehow.

I wouldn’t dream of writing a novel without ANY outline.  But I also wouldn’t dream of outlining EVERY detail of plot, because then my subconscious will just come up with subplots to the subplots and then… well… 650k word book.  Nicknamed doorstop.  Manuscripts kept in case we ever run out of fuel in the middle of winter.

Is this a sane way to work?  Sure it is.  Brother, I have the certificate.

Is it the most efficient way to work?  I don’t know.  It allowed me to make a living in the most messed up state the field ever got into.

And the lesson to take away?  Find your process and trust it.  Don’t listen to me or to any other pro in “I do it like this and so must you.”  Ignore the plotters who tell you you need graphs, charts, maps, and a step counter.  Ignore the pantsers who tell you that you must stare into the void and leap into it without a parachute.  Do as YOU must.

When the writer is ready, the personal method appears.  Now go hatch your own mutant chickens.