Myths for hire.

It’s a rainy day outside and my mind has been all over the place, but mostly in Alt Coulumb, the city setting for my novel Three Parts Dead.

In Three Parts Dead, we enter a fantastic world a hundred years after human magicians (called Craftsmen) first discovered how to manipulate the same powers as the immortal gods. An immense war ensued, many Gods and Craftsmen perished, and now, fifty years after the ensuing truce, the two halves of the world, faithful and godless, live in varying degrees of uneasy peace with one another.

That is, until a young monk in Alt Coulumb, the steam-powered city of one of the greatest remaining gods, begins his nightly devotions to discover something is horribly wrong. And Tara Abernathy, an associate Craftswoman in the nefarious firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, will be hired to put it right…

Three Parts Dead is a steampunk-urban fantasy-legal thriller with some religion thrown in; I’m very excited about it and I hope you loyal readers out there in the interland will enjoy it too.

China Mieville read from The City & The City at the Harvard Book Store last night. He was eloquent, impressive, and remarkably personable — one of the most social creative professionals I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.

A couple of his points struck me as particularly meaningful: first, he cares a lot for the worlds and the people he creates. Someone in the Q&A asked him whether he would want to live in the worlds he wrote about, and his answer was a straight ‘yes’: “When Perdido Street Station came out, all the reviewers were saying things like, ‘unrelentingly dark,’ and ‘bleak fog-drenched dystopia,’ and I thought to myself, ‘Really? I thought it was rather cool.’ Also identified himself as the kid who always hoped he would jump through the one-time-only magical portal that opened in his closet, but was always a bit afraid that he wouldn’t if the chance came around; I was that kid too, and still am.

I asked him, in a very unformed way, how he managed to get books like King Rat, Perdido St. Station, etc. published despite their not fitting into any easy categories. His response: while taxonomy is fun, it’s important not to let it get in the way of your storytelling. Make a good book, then don’t worry about how to pigeonhole it; rather just tell the story. That’s the way to get people to read it.

Good advice; I’ll take it to heart when I come to my next round of queries.

The Book of Exodi is now available for purchase on Amazon.com.

The Book of Exodi is edited by Michael K. Eidson, and features an introduction by Harry Turtledove, as well as stories by a host of awesome people, including yours truly!  It’s a very handsome volume, with fiction ranging in genre from hard cyberpunk to high fantasy to slipstream.  So far I’ve only read the first two stories, and I’m already impressed with the quality and range on offer here.  If you’re in the market for some good genre writing, I’d recommend it.

Yesterday the Substrate blog got its start with my first post!  Go there and check it out; the redoubtable Lauren M. will be posting sometime later today.

Also, pre-orders for The Book of Exodi just went live!  Get it to read my story, “On Starlit Seas!”  On the publisher’s web site you can also read synopses of the other stories, as well as watch a (literally) rocking video ad.

That’s it for now; more news as it comes.

In the last two months I’ve helped start a writing group called Substrate. We’ve had two meetings thus far, and both meetings have really helped me — both by getting a strong group together for support and analysis, and by helping me work out kinks in my work (the bad kind of kinks, natch).

We’ve decided to start a group blog covering the writing life from a variety of angles. The group’s got a lot of voices to be heard, and a lot of talent to strut. I’m excited to be sharing the stage with them.

Our first post, by yours truly, goes live at virgilandbeatrice.com/substrate next week, on the 20th. Mark your calendars.

I’m also working on a video ad for the Book of Exodi story, and some more submissions that should go out in the next week or so. More on that as it manifests!

Be well, and rock on.

So I’ve been having some trouble with scene balance in my most recent WiP. I have one character who is an expert in necromancy and the plot has been centered around necromancy thus far so it’s been a stretch to keep other characters pro-active rather than relegated to a “Certainly So, Socrates” role. This happens for me a lot when I’m working on procedurals, whether they are legal procedurals or police procedurals or, apparently, necromantic procedurals.

But problem solved! I did some old-fashioned background writing (by hand no less), and ended up not only with a better understanding of the motivations for some hitherto-problematic characters, but also with an awesome supporting character who will complicate the dynamic between the leading duo and peel back some darker aspects of the setting.

Does anyone else out there have the same problems with balancing out scenes and character time? I’d be very interested in hearing others’ responses to the problem, and what solutions have worked (or not worked, as the case may be).

I came across this on a Chinese blog, and it really hit me. It’s Haruki Murakami’s speech on accepting the Jerusalem Prize for literature. I’ve been trying to articulate something like the conviction below in private conversation for a couple weeks now, and he nails it.  Whatever your feelings about the particular political events he mentions, the basic truth of the essay hit me in the stomach like a 50-lb bag of sand.

Always on the side of the egg

By Haruki Murakami

I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling them. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies - which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true - the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.

Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.
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So, as I approach the 25kword mark on the new novel (which first readers have christened Necrolaw and is saved on my computer as Deicide, which might tell you something), I’ve often felt that the work’s proceeded more slowly than my previous two projects - in spite of the relative speed with which I’m ratcheting up the word count.

Rereading my work this morning, though, I realized that the sense of slowness had little to do with the actual story. My last book was a kidnapping mystery cum historical thriller, set in Mongolia and China during 1937 and 200x; the book before that, an attempt at a serious, contemplative slice-of-life novel that ended up having far more kung fu in it than Hemmingway usually does. It’s been three books since I wrote fantasy/sf, and even then the book was more of a picaresque.

This time around, my main character is a first year associate in the necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht and Ao. She’s accompanying her boss on a business trip one of the few cities still ruled by a god after fifty years of brutal war between the gods and the Deathless Kings, a group of human mages who unlocked the secrets of divine magic. And the story is at its heart an international thriller - which means I need to have my readers sufficiently immersed in the setting to know when something thrilling is happening.

So, in addition to knowing the details of the setting myself, I need to ensure I’m passing it along properly to my readers, and accomplish all this without having characters go on long exposition rants every few minutes. I’d forgotten how much fun this was — and how much precision it required.

Of course, all writers ordain their dark materials to make new worlds. It’s just that slightly different muscles are involved when writing coherent fantasy.  But more on this later.

Earlier this month, my author bio went live on the website for Eposic Diversions’ Book of Exodi, an anthology coming out sometime in the next month containing works by Harry Turtledove, yours truly, and a plateful of other authors. The concept is great: twenty different authors’ takes on the theme of planetary exodus, of the “We used up Earth-That-Was, and had to leave” variety. My story is a bit more of a think piece than my usual, and I hope you all like it.

Mike and the rest of the team at Eposic have been great to work with — helpful and absolutely professional the whole way through. I hope to get a chance to work with them in the future! In the meantime, check out the summaries on the Exodi web site (www.eposic.org/exodi) and get ready to order your copy, and watch this space for more information about Book of Exodi-related promotions and advertising.

I’ve been sitting on this for a while, waiting for the web site to update, but as it’s taking a while, I wanted to throw this out to all of you: I’m a finalist in the Writers of the Future competition for 2008! Writers of the Future is the biggest competition out there for amateur speculative fiction writers; it’s judged by professionals writers (Neil Gaiman has been a judge, as have Tim Powers, Larry Niven, Orson Scott Card, Anne McCaffery, and Roger Zelazney (!)), and has a good track record of helping people launch careers in the genre. There are thousands of entries every quarter, and I’m in the top eight for this time around. Now my story gets passed, along with the other 7, to a panel of expert judges, who will finish with the judging in late December/early January. Three stories of the 8 get prizes, expense-paid tickets to an award ceremony in LA, and publication in the Writers of the Future anthology. So I’ve got my fingers crossed. Even if I don’t get any further, though, being a finalist is an amazing honor out of a pool so large and competitive - definitely something to throw on the old query letter! Watch this space for updates! For now, positive thoughts!