So today I climbed a mountain.

Okay, not very much of one. Just a little bit. But it was lovely, and easy enough that I found myself feeling confident that I'm in shape for Kilimanjaro if it ever does shape up that we can go (ashacat and I are currently planning to try to do it for our fortieth birthdays).

Today was a hike on Rainier with medievalist and mac_stone, an absolute highlight of the trip. My first volcano and my first rainforest, all in one. On what may have officially been the most beautiful day of the year. We hiked about eight miles, all told, which means (DUN DUN DUN) that on day 902 of my walk to Mordor, I have passed Rauros Falls and the Breaking of the Fellowship, and furthermore, I have embarked with Merry and Pippin and the orcs on our way to Isengard. Thus making this icon even more appropriate to the day.

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I've been thinking about worldbuilding and crappers. Some of this is from the Seattle Underground tour, which makes no bones about just how much the modern... face... of Seattle has been shaped, as it were, by the demands of sanitation. And some of it is because of the trip that stillsostrange and spouse and I took to NYC earlier this year, which--we were joking--turned into a tour of the Toilets Of Manhattan.

We started off having lunch with Amanda's editor, the charming and talented Dongwon Song, at what he described as a noodle joint for homesick expat Japanese, which had thoroughly amazing restrooms. They were large truncated cones with eight-inch-thick walls, suitable for withstanding zombie attacks. Spotlessly clean inside, they each had a small table with a chair and a reading lamp... and the kind of toilet that comes with pictographs. (I was especially amused by the lonely, dusty, slightly ratty role of peach toilet paper hanging beside the throne--I can only presume, for the convenience of cowardly gaijin).

From there, we wound up at the Slaughtered Lamb in the West Village, which Amanda selected for the werewolf in the window, and which offered the opposite extreme of toilet: cramped, grimy, careworn, and too small to turn around in.

Which led to me thinking about that most basic of mod cons, and what it can tell us about a setting. I've used a lot of different potties in my life, and they all tell you something about the place you find them--from portajohns to marble edifices....

Telling details.

In the meantime, I should go. Miles the Cat wants me to play fetch with him now.

(Part 2. Part 1 is over here. Since it seems for some reason to need re-iterating, the only person I'm talking about here is me.)

So having talked about what my job is not, I know (slightly delayed) propose to talk about what my job is. this part doesn't break down as neatly into artist and craftsman, because I find that here, the tensions are in different places. Whereas, if there is a conflict in that my job as an artist is not to console, but my job as an entertainer is--I find that the conflicts that inform my job overall, as a writer, a storyteller, and whatever else I may be--those tensions tend to lie in the need to do several contradictory things well at once.

The simplest answer, of course, is that my job is to tell stories well enough that people are willing to pay to read them, but in reality it's a little more complicated than that.

First of all, and perhaps most surprisingly, my job is to read books and articles and talk to people--as many books and articles people as possible, with as many conflicting views... even views that I do not particularly agree with. And while I am doing that, it is part of my job to attempt to find sympathy for those people, to understand them and why in particular they hold the beliefs they do. Everyone is the hero of his own movie. If I remember that, I will be able to write characters I disagree with, sometimes violently, as sympathetic human beings rather than as caricatures.

Sometimes, I will really want to wash afterwards, but there you go. That's part of my job too. (I give you Richard Baines, in The Stratford Man, as the type example of this sort of character.)

My job is research. Research is talking to people. It's also reading. It's also experiencing, as much as possible, and paying attention to those experiences. I've never done a lot of traveling (I've never had the budget for it: the only foreign countries I have been to are Canada, Scotland, and England, though I hope to visit a certain Caribbean island this summer) but that doesn't mean I can't read about them and talk to people who have been there, and read the literature of folks who live there. It also doesn't mean that I can't fall upon opportunities when they present themselves--not just for travel, but for experience. (Which is how I wound up canoeing under Hartford.)

The more real stuff I run through my fingers, the better my stories will be.

My job is putting words on paper, in its simplest form, and that seems pretty straightforward. Alas, it's about the least straightforward thing I've ever done. There are two interfaces between writer and reader--writer to paper, and paper to reader--and things go strange in both those interstices. Writers are often blind to alternate interpretations of their words, or that their words are uninterpretable (the latter being my particular sin). Readers may read projectively, and always read in the light of past experiences.

And when a reader reads a text, they own it. They help create it. So part of my job is to let go of my words, and let them be whatever they become in the minds and hearts of others, even if it's something I never thought of--or with which I disagree. (One of my favorite first readers, cpolk, is a mistress of telling me the stuff that goes on in the cracks of my stories, that I never really quite realized Fred* was putting in there.)

But the tension that this creates is not a bug, but a feature. Because it leads to another tension--also not a bug, but a feature--because if I can't believe in mutually contradictory goals, why am I an artist?

Specifically, the tension between accessibility, complexity, and revelation.

I believe in the unfashionable proposition that accessibility is a literary virtue. That a good story, plainly told, has artistic value of its own. I also believe that complexity is a literary virtue... ahh, yes, you begin to see the problem, then? Complexity, layers, things that unpack, things that reward rereading and re-thinking, density and multiplicity. Which, of course, conflict with accessibility. It may be possible to write a perfectly complex, perfectly transparent book. It's certainly a worthy endeavor.

Ahhh, but then there's the third rope in the tug-of-war: the literary virtue of revelation. Epiphany, induced in the reader through the use of words in narrative. The aha! moment when you know who dunnit, or you get what the missing word in Agyar or Light is.

Because it means more to the reader if he can figure some stuff out for himself. But if he can't figure it out, he gets frustrated. And if he figures it out too easily, he thinks I think he's an idiot, and he bounces the book off the wall.

Well, at this point, it becomes evident that a certain percentage of books are going to bounce no matter what you do, but that's okay. It's part of the way the game is played. My job is to make as few bounce as possible, by somehow balancing these three mutually exclusive and yet complementary literary virtues. Somebody's always going to figure out the killer on page two, and somebody's always going to hate the way I write about lesbians**, but--well, it's a bell curve. You do the best you can.

And perfection is for the gods.

And I'm an agnostic.

So writing is a sort of elaborate confidence game where the object is not to get something away from the person you are conning, but to get him to accept something--hopefully, something good. And it's also a sort of incomplete and fractured telepathy.

Now, I said previously that my job is not to console the reader--for that, we have consolatory literature. Literature that pats you on the head and tells you that everything is going to be fine: that good triumphs over evil, that true love will find a way, and that the fluffy doggie never comes to an unkind end***. I tend to find consolatory literature dishonest, and so I don't write or read it. However, I do think that my job is to offer catharsis and also to show the kind of characters who make me feel stronger--active, capable people like me who have agency. As you know if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, I was an adult before I understood the idea of character identification****, because I had never been presented with a character I could really identify with.

When I was, I fell instantly and passionately in love with him, because dude, that's me. And the fact that people like me (like me in a variety of ways) have always been presented to me as the other, as somebody without a subject position, and here's this guy with whom I have so much in common and he's a point of view character who is not just there to validate the heroes--in fact, he's a hero himself--well, it's been a vital tool for me in screwing my own bedraggled psyche back together in a form that is a little less drafty and easier and more comfortable to live in.

So I think my job is to be as honest about fictional people as I can, to consider them as subjects rather than objects, and to allow them their dignity. I try never to bring anybody on stage just to be evil, or to provide a foil or a support for the hero or heroine. My job is to bring that level of care to everyone I write, because somewhere out there there's a twelve-year-old kid who is going to be hurt if I don't--or maybe even when I do, but again, perfection is for the gods.

(I think the character with whom I had the strongest sense of caretaking is Lily, in Whiskey & Water. But it applies to everyone I write. They may be fictional, but I made them, and I am going to make them unutterably miserable***** and so I owe them.)

Another part of my job is to move the reader. I alluded to that above, with catharsis, but it's more than catharsis. It's the exaltation of story, and that exaltation brings strength. Of course, again, not all readers will find strength or exaltation in the same thing, and the best and most honest way I can try for that is to write what brings me strength, catharsis, and exaltation. Which ties into my literary kinks, and of course the thematic core of everything I write.

Because I am a human person, and what kicks me in the gut will kick a percentage of other people in the gut as well.

Anybody who's read more than two of my books can probably figure out that the thing that appeals to me more than anything is death-or-glory stands and inconceivably complicated ethics--the sort of situation where there are no really good options, and absolutely no safe options, and nobody's coming through unscathed or unbloodied. There is no interventionist universe in what I write: nobody is going to save anybody from the consequences of his mistakes. The good are not necessarily rewarded commeasurate with their goodness. But people usually try to be their best selves, or at least the protagonists do, and I think that's what's necessary for me to really like a book.

On the other hand, I think there's strength and comfort--though not consolation--to be found in that, and thank god my fan mail supports the idea that sometimes what I write is helpful to folks, because (I've said this here before) the whole reason I write is to be read, and the whole reason I am here to write is because somebody threw me a rope once upon a time+.

Am I ever going to get it exactly right?

...not until I'm among the gods. And as you may recall, I remain an agnostic.

---

*Fred is Damon Knight's name for the writer's subconscious mind.
**When my mother hates the way I write about lesbians, I'm going to seriously consider that I may have jumped the shark. And yeah, she'd tell me. 0.o
***At least one reader emailed me to make sure the cat survived Worldwired before he would finish reading the trilogy. Yeah, I don't blame him. I'm still sad about spoiler and spoiler.
****Not to be confused with character empathy or character sympathy, which are different things.
*****Pretty much everybody I ever write, yeah.
+The book that most memorably threw me the rope was Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, which probably saved my life more than once. It irritated my brain in ways that helped me learn that things I had internalized as absolutes as a child were not true at all, and gave me a metric for integrity and compassion. A deeply uncomfortable and deeply powerful little story, disguised as a fairy tale.

jmeadows has a good post on line-editing yourself over here.

I blame Donald Bellisario.

suzych posted recently on pain, and how the reality is much different from the fiction.  

And it got me thinking, I sort of wish the media (and writers) would stop mythologizing post-traumatic stress. It doesn't annoy me quite as much as characters enduring enormous trauma without visible after-effects, but in the past thirty years or so, there's been an increasing trend towards treating the survival of violence as an interesting character flaw, and it makes me tired. Tired people don't finish the books they are reading.

It's not the acknowledgment of psychological damage due to trauma that bugs me: I want to see more of it. What bugs me is lack of research and understanding, or treating psychological damage as sexy.

First of all, not everybody who is exposed to a major trauma or a series thereof suffers clinical PTSD. In fact, the majority will not. Incidence increases with severity, duration, and repetition of the trauma. On the other hand, sometimes all it takes is once.

The thing that many people seem to miss is that post-traumatic stress is an injury. It's not an interesting character flaw. It doesn't make your protagonist less of a Mary Sue to hand them some PTSD. It also doesn't define them: "traumatized" is not a character trait. It can lead to character traits, because suffering generally affects who we are, but all by itself it's not a character.*

(It's been interesting for me, writing Todd in Shadow Unit, because while he's certainly got some internalized adaptations to violence, I've never thought of him as a PTSD sufferer. And yet, there are fans for whom it's hard to image him without that label. People see what they expect to see, and PTSD is trendy like a trendy thing these days. Magnum: PI, this is all your fault.)

There's also a lack of understanding of what post-traumatic adaptation is, and how it manifests. It is, in fact, an adaptation. It is your body's way of protecting itself from similarly awful situations in the future. Don't do that. Defend yourself. This is dangerous.

(Post-traumatic adaptation can be exploited, by the way, by unscupulous persons who manipulate that adaptation: this is how brainwashing works. You put somebody in an untenable position, don't allow them time to think or police their boundaries, inculcate guilt and self-hatred, force them to repudiate deeply held beliefs, and they will latch onto the ideology you offer them with unbelievable fervor, because it's an ego-defense against the reality of the self-betrayal you have pressed upon them. In even more interesting neurology, Stockholm syndrome works in similar ways to domestication. If you make somebody dependent on you, they will come to love you. Because they need you so badly, it's adaptive to feel a bond.)

But it's really not sexy. Trauma cannot be smoothed away by the love of a good woman. Or hot, sweaty manlove, for that matter. (Manlove. It's what's for dinner.) Certainly, human contact and friendships comfort the afflicted, but it doesn't make the adaptations go away. A feeling of safety can back them down (if we are safe, we don't need to be ready for the apocalypse!) but since so many people who have suffered some kind of trauma are hypervigilant, that feeling of safety can be hard to find.

Another issue I see in fictional trauma survivors is that their crazy is kind of random, and it doesn't really work like that. The walking wounded are actually kind of predictable. They're called trigger issues for a reason, and those of us who have them will pretty much reliably always react in the same way to certain kinds of stimulus--either with anxiety, confrontation, or both. The really lovely part of that is that we're sensitized, so our brains will pick out the slightest trace of whatever it is that sets us off in an otherwise innocuous conversation, and *bang,* zero to panic attack in no seconds and we're all up in your face with the pre-emptive strike.

Part of recovery is learning your trigger issues, and how to manage them. Part of managing them is making other people aware of them, but also taking responsibility for them yourself. And realizing that if you have trigger issues, sometimes you will feel yourself triggering in situations where that response is not adaptive. I hate unsolicited advice, and everybody who has hung out here for a while probably knows all about that. It's a trigger issue, and it dates from the years I spent being told that whatever I was doing, I was doing it wrong.

On the other paw, I have had to come to accept as an adult that I have friends whose relational style is based on giving advice, because for them advice is comforting and nurturing. For me, it's an assault on my personal boundaries and an indicator that an attack! is! imminent!, and it sends me to red alert. You try to learn to compromise. You also try to learn to ask for what you need. So, using me as an example, because I'm here, I will tend to see condescension and scorn and attempts to control me in even the best-intentioned advice, and I know I can be violent in defending my boundaries.

On the third paw, I have the right to ask people not to put me in a situation where I feel uncomfortable and stressed and triggery and angry and anxious. Fist, face, right to swing ends at my, etc.

This is really too enormous a topic to cover in a reasonably-sized blog entry, but suffice it to say, generally speaking, people who have suffered trauma will have boundary issues. Either they'll have no boundaries at all, or their boundaries will have no give. (When I ask for a certain kind of space, I suspect by now my friends know that to cross that line is to trigger a targeted explosion. There is no play in those lines. In interacting with people I don't know, I try to set my boundaries further out than they really are, so there is some play in them, because I try to take personal responsibility for managing my damage.)

But the thing that really gets missed in literature, I think, is how boring trauma survival is. Boring and painful. This is not the sharp, interesting pain of a broken heart or a broken leg. It's the stultifying, crabby-making pain of fucking physical therapy every day for the rest of your life if you don't want to allow the trauma to make you a cripple. Pain is dull. Unless you glamorize it, which I think is ethically questionable.

(This is the treason of the artist, wrote Ursula K. Le Guin. The refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.)

So if pain is boring, what's interesting?

Adaptation, I think. And the indomitable human spirit. And really cute cats.

---

But I Digress:

*You know, not to totally derail the conversation with irrelevancies, but I'm going to. Possibly because I have been reading all this FFWM (fat fantasy with maps) lately, I'm also thinking of the idea that anybody with dramatic coloring (especially red hair or black hair and bright blue or green eyes, or very fair or very dark skin) must be a Mary Sue.

I kind of have some dramatic coloring of my own--including, yes, Jewel-Toned Eyes (random people in bookstores comment on them)--although these days I'm much more a brunette than a redhead or a blond (I've had phases of both). But I come from a family of redheads on the Swedish/Irish side, and it seems to me like there has to be a way to have redheaded people in my fiction without it being an instant marker of how much I suck and how stuck I am on genre tropes.  

So I was thinking this morning about what I said about having a problem with the lack of female characters (other than the redheaded assassin) in kenscholes' book, and that got me thinking again about an ongoing problem in all writing (and most art), which is, of course, Writing The Other without being a dick.

I still hold by the unpopular theory that it's actually pretty simple. (Simple, in this case, still does not mean "easy.") That in the long run, we are all people, and the basic similarities in the Venn diagram are more prevalent than the differences.

Please note, as a fantasy and science fiction writer, I spend a lot of my time writing things that are really Other--intelligent wolves and giant talking stag-headed ponies, for example. Also angels (fallen and otherwise), hyperintelligent supercolloids, virtual winged dinosaurs, and other stuff. So I keep thinking, well, if I can write something that doesn't even have the same senses I do, how hard can it be to write a Jewish former Army Captain from St. Louis?

Well, the problem is, I'm much more likely to run into a Jewish former Army Captain from St. Louis. And she'll tell me I'm getting it wrong. The talking stag-headed flying ponies don't have much of a lobby here on our planet.

But here's the thing. Unless I'm going to write people just like me, I'm going to have to write The Other. And there's gotta be a limited market for EBear self-insertion novels. Especially if it starts looking like that scene in Being John Malkovitch, where all the Malkovitches are walking around going Malkovitch Malkovitch.

You know. Like you do.

And besides, then I'd just be like, the butch girly version of Tom Clancy, and--well, that doesn't bear thinking about.

So I'm going to have to write people who are not like me. Okay, cool.

How do I do that?

Well, I think the first step is to stop thinking about those people as The Other. Because they're not. I mean, okay, they may not be a lot like you? But they're also people, and if you can question your own cultural assumptions about what people ought to be like, and also the stereotypes you've probably assimilated without knowing it, you can hopefully write people who are not just like you.

They're not Those People. They're people. People are us.

You may not be able to do it with the kind of deep immersion somebody who grew up in that culture can--one of the real joys about cristalia coming on board for Shadow Unit is how much easier it's getting to make Falkner properly Jewish--but you can at least try not to make a dog's breakfast or a blaxsploitation film out of it.

You probably know some people who are not like you, and not like mainstream culture either. One thing to do is ask.

I am not Jewish. I am not Catholic. When I write Jewish or Catholic characters, I try to get a couple of friends who are Jewish or Catholic to read those stories and tell me where I blew it. I'm also not middle-class, black, latina, Muslim, Canadian, white American (in the sense that yes, I am fairly amelanistic and chiefly though not entirely of European descent, but my cultural upbringing has very little in common with that of your average WASP)...

...I'm really not anything at all. I've rejected the subculture I grew up in and was acculturated to. I'm totally out of touch with what it's become in the intervening fifteen years.`

So if I'm going to write anybody, really, I have to find somebody to ask. 

When I wrote "Sonny Liston Takes The Fall," I threw myself on the mercy of a lot of friends with heritage through the African diaspora, because it was important to me to get it right.

Not writing the story was not an option: it was in me and it wanted out, in the way that art has. And I still honestly think it's my best work, and I really hope I did it justice.

But when I write, I am very aware, always, that if I am writing a character who has a personal background that is not bog-standard, there is going to be some twelve year old kid out there who is going to find that character, and it's going to be the only character like them they have ever seen, and if I screw it up then I am, essentially, tossing sand in the eyes of that kid.

I knew that when I was writing Lily in Whiskey and Water. I knew it when I was writing Jenny Casey.

Actually, now that I think about it, I suspect the thing that all of my characters have in common is that they are somebody's Other. Because, having been the Other all my life, it's what I know how to write.

And because of that experience, I desperately do not want to be part of the problem. I want to be part of the normalization. I want to work against the idea of The Other in any way I can. I do not wish to contribute to tokenism, or stereotyping, or kicking sand in the eyes of that twelve-year old kid.

I've been that twelve-year-old kid, and I've seen my story exploited (cheaply, commonly, because some of the things that contribute to my own status as Other are things that are hot-button issues for a lot of readers, and easy for the writer to install and then push, push, push) and you know what?

It feels awful, and I'm going to try very hard not to do it to anybody else. I will probably fail, because people do fail, but I'm going to try.

So, okay, I said it's simple but not easy. How do I do it?

1) For one thing, stop thinking about this person you're writing as The Other. Think of them as human, an individual. Not A Man. Not A Woman. Not A Chinese Person or A Handicapped Person or A Person With Cancer or a Queer Person. A person. Stop trying to make them universal, and make them unique.

1a) Do not use Otherness as a basis for pointing out how Wrongheaded Those People Are. Or, conversely, How Enlightened And Noble. They're not. They're people. Sure, you can pick the subculture you like and line 'em up and knock them down, and some are easier targets than others. But out there, somewhere, is a 12-year-old kid just beginning to tentatively explore her sexuality as a furry, and do you want to be the one who makes her feel even more ashamed and awful than she already does?

If you are going to write about people, try to be humane about it. Please do not use queerness, whiteness, blackness, obesity, or any such thing as a shorthand for Ebil. (I have a special hate in my heart for Teh Ebil Albino. One of my best friends is albino. I will give you a Very Disappointed Look if I find you bandying about Teh Ebil Albino. Guy Gavriel Kay, I'm LOOKING AT YOU.)

Also, do not use it for a shorthand for Good. If all your good people are carnivorous and polyamorous, and all the bad ones are vegan celibates, we're going to catch on. You're either overcompensating, or you really hate vegans.

(One of the editorial comments on Carnival was that the New Amazonians should be culturally lesbian. I said no for several reasons. One: I believe straight people exist. I even know a few. Two: I was not going to have that subtext in my book, thanks.)

2) If you do not know a great deal about people who share experiences with the person you are trying to write, research. Find some people whose lives were informed by similar experiences and talk to them. Read primary sources.

ETA: per nojojojo's comment below, do the research before you corner your friends. Possibly even do the research, write the story, and then ask them to read it for dumb mistakes. if your friends are writers, so much the better. Also, do not assume that the experience of your friends is Universal, because they are also unique individuals, and real live cultures and subcultures resist being simplified into An Experience. (The Gay Experience. The Black Experience. The White Experience. The Rich White Guy Experience. The Jimi Hendrix Experience... okay, that last one is valid.)

Also, if you actually understand what you are writing about, it's much less likely to come across as exploitative or hurtful.

3) Listen. And try to listen with openness and without assuming you understand. In anthropology, we talk about ethnocentrism, and the idea that cultural preconceptions color everything we perceive. Try to alienate yourself a little from your own tribal programming. Try to set aside your gut reaction to things that may seem horrifying or inexplicable or ignorant, and accept that your tribal programming is just that, tribal programming, and this other person's life is as valid an experiential path as your own.

When you create, try to reflect that, rather than using it as window dressing.

ETA: 3a) When you create your alien races, please please please try to make them something other than thinly disguised Japanese people. It's racist, and we will notice. No, really. We will.

4) Diversify. If you have one woman, one person of color, one queer, one whatever in the universe you're creating, chances are that they will be perceived as a token, and anything you do to them will become fraught with symbolic freight. If you only have one female character, and her major contribution to the plot is to get raped and then marry the hero and have babies, I don't care what you intended to say about her strength and recovery from trauma, I'm going to see a writer who brings a woman on stage just to have her get raped and let Hero Protagonist show a little sensitivity. If you only have one character of color, and she's there to teach the protagonist earthy wisdom, mentor him, and then get snuffed, I'm going to roll my eyes.

5) Be wary of patterns. If all your characters who are not like American Culture Base White Middle Class Protestant Male Able default seem to have the same sorts of things happening to them, people will catch on. (Frank Miller, I'm looking at you.)

6) Accept that no matter what you're doing, some people are going to think you're getting it wrong.

And that's okay.

Quite probably, for them, you are, but you can't make everybody happy. It's physically impossible. And at least you'll be doing the best that you can.

Yeah, so. The harpy story is definitely broken, because truepenny read it and identified exactly the same brokenness that I suspected.

The good news is, I think I know how to fix it. It may require some major surgery and an organ transplant, but I know what to do.

I hate broken stories. They hurt. Until I can figure out how to fix them--sometimes until I get the work done--they make a physical sensation of pressure in my chest, like being unable to draw a breath. I get very anxious and crabby, and I want to whine and pace like a nervous dog until they stop being broken. And when a broken one makes it into print (as does occasionally happen, due to deadline pressure or my never figuring out how to fix something that's been written to contract) I have to live with the knowledge that it will be out there, broken, forever.

Maddening.

Yeah, best job ever. I'm going to bed.

There's a lot of writing advice floating around the internet, often received as The Right Way To Do It. And for many years, I've often felt bad about my process and been apologetic for it, and sometimes tried to change it, because IM DOIN IN RONG.

You know what? I'm not doing it wrong. I'm doing it right. I'm doing something that works, and produces books, which are books that for some inexplicable reason people are willing to give me money for, and screw it. I don't care if I'm punching cards in the right order. I care that I'm writing books, dammit.

I hereby declare today, December 16, 2008, the first annual freedom from writing guilt day. On this day, I empower everybody who is engaged in some kind of creative endeavor who reads these words to quit feeling guilty for doing it wrong. If your process is working--and by working, what I mean is, creating finished works with a general upward trend in quality over time--then stick to it! Do what you are doing! It's fine! you're doing it right! If it's not working--if you're stuck, or if you're not getting better, or if you are not finishing things--then change it up! Do something else! try things until you find a process that does work!

Here is some writing advice I will henceforth be ignoring:

1) You must write new words every day or you are not a real writer.

...whatever. Some days, maybe I won't write. Some days I might even take off, and call a weekend. Some days I might take off and do nothing productive at all. I propose, "You must complete and release new projects every once in a while, on a schedule that suits your creative capabilities."

2) If you are stuck, it's because you are overediting. Push forward

...whatever. If you are stuck, it might be because you need to go back and fix earlier work that's no longer supporting the story as it moves forward. It might be because you need to go research related material until you get an idea. It might be because you need some cooking time. It might be because you need to go back and fiddle with stuff for a while until it all clicks together in your head.

To refute an oft-quoted and asinine comment, writing is not digging ditches, and if you treat it like digging ditches, you will get... very nice ditches.

Ditches, it probably goes without saying, are not very good books.

I think in reality writing is more like baking bread. You have to control a lot of variables: the temperature has to be within acceptable ranges, the yeast has to be happy, the moisture content of the air has to be right. Or maybe mountain climbing is a better metaphor: you are up there at the mercy of the elements, and for success, preparation and luck and timing are everything.

This is not to say that if you are constantly getting ten thousand or thirty thousand words into something and stopping dead, and never finishing, you shouldn't maybe make yourself quit dicking around with those first three chapters and move forward. But if you consistently find yourself pausing a third of the way into the book to rearrange the first hundred pages, and then moving on, that's okay. It's fine. Go ahead and do it. You may be stuck because you need to

3) You must write a book a year.

whatever. Okay, you most likely must write a book a year to support yourself, in whole or in part, as a writer. But that's industry, not art. No less a light than Dennis Lehane has said it takes him two years to write a novel he's happy with. (He writes pretty good novels, I note: I'm a fan.)

4) You must not write too fast.

Whatever. Write as fast as you are comfortable writing. Some writers draft a novel in four weeks. (Mostly they probably don't write every day between novels: I suspect they tend to be binge writers, who do a lot of their processing in their head rather than on the page.)

I get this one a lot. "You write too fast! Your books would be richer if you wrote more slowly!"  Considering that most of the books I've published in the last few years were decades in the making (Undertow, Carnival, A Companion to Wolves, and The Stratford Man came from new ideas) and that one of the most consistent critiques of my work is that it's baroque, incomprehensible, and overly complicated (even the books I think are transparent and straightforward, like Dust) I suspect that spending more time on any given book would, well, result in stuff nobody wanted to read.

5) You must work on one project at a time.

Whatever. See number four.

And now I have an eight-year-old novel I need to continue revising. But first, tea.

---

I leave you with the only good set of musts I know for any working writer:

You must write.
You must revise what you write.
You must finish what you write.
You must release what you write.

I haven't been doing a lot of writing at the big computer on my desk recently--most of that happens in my comfy chair, with the laptop--though I have been known to resort to it when stuck, or when the laptop (inevitably) dies when I am on deadline. It used to be that I only used the laptop when away from home. Funny how our patterns change over the years, isn't it? Someday I'll probably swing back in the other direction again. I get a lot of other work done here, too, and it's kind of essential that I have a backup computer.

So last night, I did battle with the forces of Russian malware, and emerged victorious. Today, I slept way late, for me--9 am--and then got up and spent two hours shoveling out my email inbox and dealing with pending issues. Maintenance work, in other words.

I guess I needed that sleep, because normally sleeping that long would leave me feeling stupid and sick all day, and today it seems to have been just about right--although it is nearly noon and I haven't managed to shower or dress or eat anything except a handful of pomegranate arils, all of which are things I should address. I fed my shoggoth last night, but forgot to make the sponge, which means that bread will be delayed until late tonight or tomorrow after my dentist's appointment. But there is other food around, and I could eat some of it. Go figure. I'll get right on that.

I think I'm processing something writing-wise, some deep issues of technique. Part of what I've been thrashing out all this year. I think I've finally gotten my prose to a level where I'm more or less happy with it--I have control of my prosody. Which has been one of my major issues for the past few years. Now, I'm moving back to thinking about how stories get told, and the most effective ways to make them both interesting and challenging--and accessible to the reader. As we have noticed before, most people's brains don't work the way mine does: I hyperintellectualize, and I'm also incredibly nonlinear. So stull that seems like obvious patterns to me isn't always, um, obvious at all to other folks.

I've been reading a lot of really brilliant older stuff lately--I just finished a Barry N. Malzberg collection, and I want to do a bunch more reading before I get back into the coal mines of novel drafting--and one thing I'm realizing is that I want to let some air into my own work. Which is not to say I want to dumb it down, any, but I think I need to keep adding levels to it, opening it up on top. Complexity and accessibility are not antithetical: they're elements that can be brought into balance and harmonized.

It's like cooking--if only one flavor predominates, you haven't made anything very delicious.

I think I got it about right in All the Windwracked Stars, honestly. It's got enough deep levels to keep me happy, and enough surfaces that it can be read entirely as an adevnture novel. And I sort of wonder, why is it that as a culture we have this tendency to assume that if something is bitter and unpleasant, it is far more likely to really be Art than if it's not? I'm not talking about fluffy-bunny stories, here. But realistically, life isn't always all that awful. If it was, no one would do it.

Anyway, for the time being, I have no plans to do any more writing just yet. I need some time off, and I have the luxury of having earned it, and so if you want me I will be under a pile of neglected books on the sofa, reading for pleasure--or what passes for it, these days. Really, it's kind of a busman's holiday. But it's still a holiday. In any case, the backbrain needs time to work out whatever it is that it's working out back there, and when it's done, it will certainly spit out all this stuff that's backlogged, and turn it into stories.

I swear, I've written a lot of posts just like this one over the years. I'm having the most intense sense of deja vu right now. Where's Laurence Fishburne when I need him? (Sorry, having a moment here. Ahem.)

Man, climbing is gonna be fun tonight, given how much my core muscles still hurt. Surprisingly, I'm in better shape than I expected--I guess I'm in pretty good condition--but my lower back is feeling all the walking around hunched over I did on Saturday.

And now I only have one more email left in my inbox, and that will require actual work, so I'd better go shower and eat something and think about the work in question.

I'm two episodes into The Middleman, and enjoying it, though I suspect it would wear thin pretty fast if I tried to watch it too quickly. I mean, it's funny as anything, and it's very interesting to watch a TV show that is entirely constructed of meta--but there is no there there. At least not yet.

It's like that great Champions game you were in in college where you never actually fought bad guys, just hung around and ate chips and tried to top each other's one-liners. I put in a request to review that for Tor.com too, but it's possible somebody else has already claimed it.

Speaking of Tor.com and reviews, my review for Criminal Minds 4x02 is up. In which we discuss SpencerCam and Trauma Hair, and other staples of the fandom.

---

On a totally different subject, Jed Hartman (one of the Strange Horizons editors) discusses a twist plot he's seen too often. Which leads me to talking about stories whose entire existence is justified by a last-line twist.

Guys? They're not stories.

Yes, O. Henry wrote stories whose lasting impact relies on a moment of crowning dramatic irony. But the thing is, that's not the only thing going on in those stories. They're stories, with a strong narrative and character development, which is revealed or... I dunno, counterlit... by the irony. The irony serves the story. The story does not serve the irony.

And that is why you cannot sell your story in which a serial killer's victim turns out to be a vampire and eats him. Yum.

No, really. It is.

Things I have learned about telling stories, by Elizabeth Bear

These are not hard and fast rules. I do not believe in rules. However, it's a list of auctorial tricks that have annoyed me recently, and made me want to stop reading something I might otherwise have enjoyed.


1) I hereby do solemnly resolve that if I introduce a likeable character on page one of the novel and then kill her off on page thirty, only to resume the story decades or centuries later with a far-less-interesting character, I will have a damned good reason for doing it. But generally, you know what? I think I will just not do that.

I reserve the right to kill off likable characters, mind you. But I will not make them likable, give them a primary (even introductory) POV, and introduce them into the book for the sole purpose of snuffing them.

Also, I will not kill off a character just because the audience likes him better than my protagonist. That's tacky and petulant, and won't make anybody like the protagonist any better.

You have to work hard enough to bridge the gap between reader and character. Should you happen to accomplish it, it's stupid to throw it away out of spite.


2) I do hereby solemnly resolve to eschew intentionally obfuscated Serial Killer POV. This is when the author is going through insane gymnastics to hide the identity of the killer so we can get long generic passages of exposition about how the terrorists are plotting their attack or the serial killer is stalking his prey.

An acceptable use of this technique, however, is to illuminate character. Which is why Thomas Harris got away with it in Red Dragon, back when he could still write.


3) Yes, I know Chuck Palahniuk and Dennis Lehane got away with it, but in most cases, the schizophrenic or dissociative or otherwise completely unreliable/out of touch with reality narrator is played, and also a cheap trick. And if you are going to try it, for the love of Mike, play fair. I hereby vow to avoid pointlessly unreliable narrators, or narrators who are unreliable on account of the author wanting to set up some kind of last-page plot twist.

Also, I will not write withholding narrators. I will not write withholding narrators. I will not write withholding narrators. (This also ties in with #2, above.) Unless there is an in-character reason for them to be withholding, which is to say, they are far more often going to be withholding about their own emotional states or history, rather than their identity and agenda.)


4) Murder mysteries in which the protagonist notices a clue to which not only was the audience not made privy, but which the author intentionally skipped over in describing the scene. Elizabeth George, I'm looking at you. You're dead to me.


5) Dream sequences are not plot. Especially dream sequences that are first presented as real life and then turn into "Bobby's in the Shower." Really. No. Just stoppit, SFF.

Repeat after me: Much like the serial killer POV and the sacrificial prologue narrator, dream sequences are not any better when I write them than when anybody else writes them.

And I say this as somebody who just last month opened a story with a *&%$&%^ dream sequence. Which is to say, an enormous hypocrite. But at least the second word in the story is "dream." (The first word is "the.")

Caveat: because this is SFF, and we do an awful lot of wandering around in dreamworlds, I except dream sequences that take place in dream-lands from this portion of the plaint. Also I except dream sequences for backstory, as long as they're not too transparently manipulative. Yeah, I used the nightmare-backstory trick in Carnival, but only because my editor made me. (The fact that people tell me they like that sequence does not alleviate my own dislike of it, but it does make me accept that my editor was right.)


My job as a writer is to manipulate people. It's what stories do. However, my job as a writer is to make them collaborate with and enjoy being part of the manipulation, not feel like I'm jerking their chain.


...okay, time to go soak my head take my shower, I think, now that I've gotten that out of my system.

Last night the writerchat was talking about poetry and its density of image, the layering of meaning and contrameaning, the conflict between what a poem may say, on one level, and what it may demonstrate in contravention of what it's saying. It was a good conversation, and it left me thinking about prose.

And specifically, that I want many of the same things from a good novel that I want from a good poem, on a prose level. I want the writer to have been aware of connotation and denotation and cognates when he was writing, and puns. I want him to really think about his words and use them such that the sound of the language tells you something in addition to the language itself. Among and amongst are different words, and which one the writer chooses is important.

There are no synonyms.

At the end of Refining Fire, for example, there's a sentence in which Falkner's coat droops in her hand. That coat is symbolically important, and coffeeem and I went through any number of verbs to find the right one. But wings droop, and ears droop, and spirits droop. So the coat had to droop too, and not dangle or hang or swing or cascade or trail. Well, you know, it could have trailed, maybe. Because banners trail. It also might have sagged. Maybe. But the drooping won out, and it was important.

Likewise, there's a scene in Ink and Steel wherein I used every English word derived from the Latin raptus* that I could manage. (Yes, it's that scene. You know the one.) Rapture, rape, raptor, rapt, rapine--

Why did I do it? Because these associations work not in the forebrain, necessarily, but in the back of your head, the place where you process connotation and emotion and feel things, where your gut emotions live. Because it makes a difference, whether or not the reader notices it. Perhaps especially if the reader does not notice it. Because this is part of the craft and attention to detail that makes good writing.

Now, having written that down, I shall now go do these other things I need to do.  Though I am a slow-moving life form this morning, and not very focused. But at least I have tea and raspberries, and the starter is fed so I can make bread for tomorrow morning.

And of course in no wise can I work without a cat upon my knee.

---

* raptus, meaning, “seized and taken, kidnapped by force, snatched hold of and then taken hostage, carried off or away.”

So I'm up and showered and dressed and fed, and in a minute I'm going to go start a pot of tea. These allergies are killing me: my normal rising time is closer to 6:30-7 am, but today I dragged myself out of bed at 8 and frankly wasn't good for much after that.

Now I have two and a half hours to write before I have to go start my errands for the day (tonight is also Archery Nite, so I won't be home much before 9) and I'm sitting here staring at the next scene of Bone & Jewel Creatures, which is from the jackal-cub's POV, and I have no idea how to get into it. What I may do is go repot a couple of plants that need it pretty badly while I make that tea, and see if working with my hands jogs loose anything in my brain.

Too much stuff on the schedule this week; it's hard to work in the crevices. But working in the crevices is often what life demands of us. Tomorrow, though, I have no plans but a run, which means it's a Work Day all day. And though the weekend will be taken up by a birthday party on Saturday and a trip to Fall River for the monthly D&D game on Sunday, Monday is all mine. Next week, if I can resist the temptation to overschedule myself, looks pretty clear, and a lot of work might get done then.

This novella is cooperating, after a fashion, just slowly and with great deliberation. Which I suppose is all you can expect from a story in which the protagonist is in her 80s and one of the supporting characters is named Lazybones. We'll get there, we'll get there. Stories are long-term projects, after all. still, I'm looking forward to having a whole thing when I'm done, even if it's a whole thing in need of a certain amount of revision. Deliberation and choice are part of the craft, after all. Taking some time to do it right is why we call it craftsmanship.

And now it's six seven minutes later than it was when I started this entry, and I suppose I oughta go make some tea and see if I can figure out what the cub is thinking.

I just recently finished reading Ian McDonald's (ianmcdonald) Brasyl, Hugo-nominated this year, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I learned an enormous amount from it.

Especially, I learned why we put transitions and exposition in books--because Brasyl doesn't have that stuff.

Don't get me wrong; it's a brilliant book and a seriously amazing achievement, but I'm a pretty hip and attentive reader, and I know I lost a ton of what was going on in the sheer tightness and density of the book's concentrated information delivery. There was no room to catch your breath.

As You Know, Bob, I'm a big proponent of getting every word in a story to do as much work as possible--I think every sentence should build or resolve tension, woldbuild, develop character, develop theme, and advance the plot (pick at least two)--but one thing I'm starting to realize is that sometimes, letting air into a story is a kind of work, also.

I also joke about not worrying too much about readers who don't want to do a little work. "You must be as tall as this sign to ride this ride."

Well, my experience with Brasyl was very close to "You must be as tall as this sign to attack this city." Heluva book; I could only read it four pages at a time, and I kept losing the threads of what was going on.

Because the jump-cut ethos of the book means that it takes effort with each scene break to orient youself (which is an artistic choice in this case; this is an observation rather than a critique), which messes with the line of direction and the flow through the book, and results in a somewhat mentally strenuous reading process. (Probably not unlike the sense of disorientation a number of readers have complained about with Blood & Iron, which (among all its other qualities) is my novel-length attempt to actually demonstrate the way my weird nonlinear kinesthetic brain functions on paper.)

So yeah, I've learned a lot. I've learned some things about why we exposit and why we write transitions, and how we can do both unobtrusively, and why we provide a little guidance--line of direction, the camera track and points of focus through the long shot (to strain a metaphor)--for the reader as he comes along with us. Some of it's direction, and some of it's misdirection, and all of it's important. And it's important when you chose not to use it, either, to abandon those guides and assists and kick the reader in neck-deep and see if she can swim.

NPR is full of things to make me think this morning, mostly included in an interview with Joyce Carol Oates on Weekend Edition..

First, a Henry James quote:

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Second, a discussion of Hemingway's inability to write while in the throes of depression and alcoholism.

---

I don't talk about craft here as much as I used to, and one of the reasons that I don't do that is because I'm not learning about craft as much as I was. I think I'm not learning new things as fast--well, I am learning them, or at least observing them, but the writing itself has become so much a struggle of using everything I know that I am not making new discoveries with any regularity. Right now, I'm struggling to integrate what I do know, to make it organic rather than intellectual, and that doesn't make for very interesting writing. Except more bitching about what a grind it is right now, and how hopeless it all feels.

I miss the epiphanies. They felt like progress.

But integrating all that stuff would be progress too, and if I could do that, I might be able to treat writing as play again rather than toil.

So I observe little chips of things brilliantly done, now, and think "I wish I could do that," while struggling to see any roller derby and any shiny in my own work. I think I have reached another plateau of "now write for ten years," which is in some ways both heartening and frustrating. Frustrating, because you know, one would liek to think one eventually gets good at this. Heartening, because, well, I got through the last one of these and didn't die.

I just need to keep telling myself that these books are not as bad as I think they are, and that what seems to me to be incompetence is actually just me being hyper-aware of all the many things that go into the narrative, and having to do them in stages. And you know what? Writing is not a performance art. It is okay to do them in stages.

I post a lot of examples here of revision, of the kind of sentence-level pickiness I tend to engage in. I do a lot of revision, drafts and drafts of everything. I also do a fair amount of stunt writing, by which I mean using the structure of the plot or the POV or the prose itself to support the narrative. It's one of my favorite tricks.

And it's not easy to do on the fly.

Anyway, I just have to have faith that this will get easier again, and give myself the time I need for my subconscious to put it together, all this new stuff I've learned, and build a process out of it. I'd really like to go away and stop writing for a year while I sort this out, but alas, that is unlikely to happen. So I guess it's one painstaking selfconscious step at a time, until I internalize all this stuff and learn to do it automatically. And I need to remember that conscious competence is, indeed, a stage of learning, and the fact that I need to think about what I'm doing doesn't mean I can't do it.

And now I need to go shower, and clean up my apartment some.

I missed pixel-stained technopeasant wretch day (observed). However, since you can find a great deal of my work online for free here at my webpage, and of course there's the Shadow Unit project, in all its guiltware glory, which is not just me but also Amanda Downum, Sarah Monette, Emma Bull, and Will Shetterly!

---

So I managed my first 5.7 without a single fall yesterday. I'm pretty proud of myself. It was on the slab wall, but I did it. Also, my endurance is improving--I can keep coming back at something now after I've failed it repeatedly, so I got a second 5.7. (I've sent this one before, but I did it much better this time. Though with several rests, and a bunch of falls at the crux.) I need to go back and try that pink 5.7 again (the first one I ever got, which I still can't do without rests and a couple of falls) and also the blue route I haven't quite got, even though I think I know how to do it. Knowing and being able, alas, are not always the same thing. (Also, there's a black 5.7 that I couldn't doo before because the overhang kicked my ass, but I'm stronger now, so I want to try it again. It's not a technically difficult route: the rating is mostly for RAAAAAAAAAAR!, and my RAAAAAAAAAAR! is improving.)

But there's a 5.8 Alisa wants me to try Monday, so it's possible the other hard wall I'm working on will wait until Wednesday. I am scared of the 5.8. It has an overhang and the entire top half is smearing up a wall where the only handholds are this crack you have to lay back on.

La.

There may be climbing outdoors on Sunday. That would be fun.

(Apparently, I have accidentally started something of a climbing renaissance among my writer friends, which I think is pretty cool. We are the buff chicks of SFF. Also, the new face thereof.)

---

Spring lasted a week this year, and I was in Michigan for it. The plum tree under my bedroom window is in full bloom, and violets and dandelions and tulips are all over the place. The Bradford pears are nearly over; the magnolias are already dropping blossoms. A mulberry along my running route is putting out first leaves, and the lilacs have heavy clusters of buds. I'm going to have to start running earlier, because it's already too hot by 8.

3.5 miles Tuesday (I only ran about 1.5 of those and walked the rest) and 2 miles today (ran 1 mile, walked 1. My lungs do not like the pollen and humdidity. Foolish lungs.) 204.9 miles to Lothlorien.

---

Meanwhile, I am reading "Endgames" and working on "Overkill," and working on the page proofs for All the Windwracked Stars. So there is actual professional work-related progress going on, which is a nice thing. Then after that a novelette for a Secrit Projekt (I promise I will tell you all about it as soon as I can) and a novella for Subterranean. And then maybe I will have gotten enough distance on Chill to come back to it with some Mad Skillsh and make it a Book That Works.

Other work that awaits me in the next year--rewriting By the Mountain Bound and One-Eyed Jack & the Suicide King, and then rewriting The Sea thy Mistress.

I'm having a very hard time seeing anything positive in my writing currently, which is frustrating and hard. Mostly, it all feels quite banal and amateurish to me. Flaccid, even. Where is the muscular prose of yore? Where is my ability to characterize obliquely and well? I feel confident when editing other people's work, but of my own all I can say is Dreadful! Dreadful! DREADFUL!

It's hard to write when you can't see what's working anymore. It gets in the way of that "carve off everything that doesn't look like an elephant" thing when the elephant is no longer visible to your inner eye.

So I know what's wrong with my head.

I know I've said this before, but I think I'm just going to have to keep writing it down until I internalize it, and start to pry my fingers off the ledge a little.

I've overengaged my left brain on this whole writing thing.

See, when one is learning to write, one has to go through a stage of learning that one's golden prose and soating narratives are pretty much crap. Sorry, guys--that's just the way it goes. And part of that is learning a critical function.

The Internal Editor, people call it.

I have a pretty well-developed one, these days.

What it really is, based on my understanding of neurology, is the critical analytical left brain working over everything the intuitive creative left brain unearths from the depths of the id and the subconscious (If I may be forgiven for resorting to Fraudian metaphors here for a moment) and turning it into something comprehensible by other mortals.

Well, my right brain used to be really good at pulling up characters and narrative and atructures, and putting them together and making them go. Lately, however, I've been having to do that as a left-brain function--intellectual rather than creative--and it makes everything a hell of a lot harder. Because now I have to think through and construct all of this stuff that used to be automatic, which means it feels very artificial and awkward. And the worst part is, it's wobblier, because all that brain back there under the conscious processes is a lot more powerful--can do a lot more work--than this pathetic little scrap of self we call an "I."

Anyway, right now what's going on is that I am doing just about everything consciously, rather than with the back brain, and that means I am painfully slow and awkward and it all is really hard. I have become like the centipede in the parable--the one who has been asked how on earth he runs without tangling up all those legs, and suddenly can't do it anymore.

So I just have to keep muddling in on my inadequate little left brain--pushing along on craft when I don't have the inspiration--trust the right brain is doing its thing back there even if it isn't telling me what has it so busy, and figure it will be back out sooner or later.

Of course, it's also not helping that I'm over that bout of hypergraphia I was having between 2001-2005 or so, and writing has (mostly) stopped being a compulsion, except when something really gets me by the throat and I have to write it now. Which is pretty much a good thing.

Except when I have deadlines.

Like, oh, now.

First things first: I do not get a kickback for this, but--

For those of you who are, like me, wicked faerie apologists, F-Bod Studios offers new authorized Kelpie schwag. For the maneating pony in your life.

That's an old photo, from when Whiskey was still wearing the Black Stallion guise (by which he's better-known in folklore).

---

There's a nice thing about having this much of a manuscript written. Which is that, as long as I keep exceeding my quota by a little bit every day, every day the quota I need to exceed gets a little smaller.

It would be more thrilling if I weren't feeling quite so burned out on the whole process. Even characters I know and like--Tristen, Benedick, Caitlin, Gavin, Mallory--people who have been in my head for years--are turning in lackadaisical performances, and I'm having a hard time feeling them and just knowing what they would do or say in any given situation. And the words, right now, just lie there on the page, without insight or spark or beauty. Or tension.

Well, if I can't feel my way through it, I shall simply have to think my way through it. This is, after all, the reason why I've spent thirty years learning this craft: so I have it to work with when the art part is being recalcitrant.

It's no fun writing like this. It's work, and hard work.

The funny thing is, when you go back and read it six months or a year later, you can't tell the difference between the bits you slogged through, cursing every word, and the bits that came out as if Odin himself was feeding you the lines. (300 ccs Mead of Poetry P.O! STAT!)

I wonder what it is that my backbrain is working on so hard that it's got me flailing away without any sense of strength or balance or narrative control, and has been working on for so long? Usually, conscious incompetence a sign that the subconsious is preoccupied with working through some knotty problem of narrative or craftsmanship, and is making the conscious brain do all the heavy lifting that usually gets handled by the guys in the back room, while they stand around looking at the thing on the floor, cocking their heads, and saying, "Well, what do we do with that?"

Whatever it is, I'd like it to get on with it. This thrashing and hating is boring, and I am ready to start my long pathetic slide into complacency and mediocrity now. Especially if it means I might have fun with writing again.

(Well, I'm still having fun with Shadow Unit, mostly, although "Overkill" kicked my everloving ass and I'm still not sure I'm ready to face the revisions. But that's okay, because first I have to get a draft of this damned novel. Right? Right.)

In other news, the page proofs for Hell & Earth landed today. If you love me, and ever want to read Promethean Age #5, by the way, it wouldn't be a bad idea to pre-order Ink & Steel and its fraternal twin, because I'm out of contract and the early orders will of course have an influence on whether Roc picks up the fifth one in the series.

Also, I was paid for a short story I'm not allowed to talk about yet, which is nice, so I paid off my credit card. Life as a freelance artist is the opposite of how everybody else lives: instead of saving up for things, we put them off as long as possible, or buy them on credit and then pay it off all at once when the money finally comes in. The trick is, of course, to actually pay off the debt when the money comes in, rather than letting it pile up to the sky.

Getting paid in large chunks every six months or so is an interesting way to live.

Secrets to living by your wits #275: do not carry debt.

Well, I have student loans, but what are you gonna do about that? Fork over the cash every month, that's what.

And now, back to the unrelenting toil.