Raven, Emerging from a BoxI’ve got a sick cat that I’m anxious about at the vet today so it’s hard to write. I’ve been picking away at what I can and started jotting down some stuff for a piece of the trilogy that’s excerpts from a guidebook to Tabat. I’d realized something about the morphology of the name when I was on the bus and I was riffing on it, including quotations from fictitious historical accounts, when it came to me that one of the more important historical characters that I’d thought in my head was male should be female instead.
Weird little things happen like this when you’re working on something big. It’s like a lens clicks into place and you perceive a section better. And that perception spreads out, affects the view you have of the overall piece, the unruly profusion of plot lines, each with its flowers of action scenes and climatic moments, that will become the lavish bouquet of the book’s world.
So, to the very few of you who know what I’m talking about: Verranzo’s shadow twin is female. All the shadow twins are the opposite gender of their counterpart. Why? I don’t know. It just makes better sense in my head that way and lets me do some additional interesting things.
I had a moment like that when I realized that an important secondary character (who drove events in the past) was angry with his mentor, and why. Suddenly, the entire THEME of a trilogy I’ve been working on for years clicked into place. Huzzah!
And I hope your kitty gets better. I know how upset and anxious I feel when my cat isn’t feeling well.
The daemons in His Dark Materials are (all, mostly?) opposite gendered. I loved that subtle cue to the fact that we are complex beings. And yeah, I love it when you realize something true about your work and it starts to gel.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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News: The Fathomless Abyss
I’ve got the okay to announce this, so here you are: I’ve got a story in the upcoming Fathomless Abyss anthology and I’ll be putting out a longer work set there next year. It’s a very cool project, and I’m pleased to be part of it, along with Philip Athans, Jay Lake, J. M. McDermott, Mel Odom, Mike Resnick, and Brad Torgersen. My story’s called “A Querulous Flute of Bone,” and it’s a riff on a favorite O. Henry piece, “The Pimenta Pancakes,” from The Heart of the West.
Here’s the cover for the anthology, which will be available early next month:
Even in the hospital, there are balloons. There are flowers right now, and in the evenings, the tree frogs sing to welcome their new overlord, Spring.This is a hard post to write, because I tend to keep my private life offline. Your attitude shapes your reality, and so I don’t dwell on the bad stuff. And going on and on about your problems is something readers/followers can get tired of when it’s going on day after day.
But sometimes bad stuff happens. Sometimes you’re dealing with a loved one’s illness, or your own, or a natural disaster, or something else, because the world is one filled with tragedies, large and small.
Earlier this year a relative was diagnosed with cancer. It wasn’t the first time ““ she’d had a bout five years ago ““ but this time there were a lot of words that were ominous, including chemotherapy.
And so, last month, this month, the next few months I’m working at getting my first novel launched and worrying desperately about its reception and writing the second one, and at the same time, trying to give her the support she needs. I take my laptop to the hospital, where they have excellent wireless, and I keep picking away at things.
I have always have a healthy sense (some might say too healthy) of humor and a disinclination towards taking myself seriously. Both have stood me in good stead here, but I can tell I’m stressed, nonetheless. I find myself, more than anything, filled with surges of anger at time. At the world, at cancer, even at my poor relative. I find myself sometimes lost, sometimes doing things unlike myself, or even irrational or forgetful, a thing that scares me, because my grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and that’s always been one of my secret fears. Other times I find myself sad and lonely and so full of self-pity it oozes out of my ears in a most unbecoming way.
There’s other stuff going on, and I don’t want to talk about it because it’s matters that are private for other people. But I can tell you this, from the heart of anger and sorrow and a life that is currently chaotic, it is still ““ for me ““ possible to write and what’s more, to take parts of what’s going on and make it into stories. And it helps. It helps you make sense of it. It helps you achieve distance.
We go to stories to find out what to do. How to be human. What we can expect and what’s expected of us in turn. If you have something to say about that, then write a story about it. That’s worth a thousand angry or preachy blog posts, in my opinion. If you don’t like the art someone is creating, don’t worry about theirs but go and make your own.
Go sing your song, and if you do, the universe will sing through you. And that, my loves, is the best sustenance for the battered and beleaguered soul that I know of.
2 Responses
I had a moment like that when I realized that an important secondary character (who drove events in the past) was angry with his mentor, and why. Suddenly, the entire THEME of a trilogy I’ve been working on for years clicked into place. Huzzah!
And I hope your kitty gets better. I know how upset and anxious I feel when my cat isn’t feeling well.
The daemons in His Dark Materials are (all, mostly?) opposite gendered. I loved that subtle cue to the fact that we are complex beings. And yeah, I love it when you realize something true about your work and it starts to gel.