Swan Tower

01:54 am - on we go

I forgot to post my landmark last night: 30K down. Not quite halfway through Part II.

We're moving into a bit of the book where, as I told ninja_turbo this evening, I would never dare make this shit up. Certain details would look too ludicrous, too over-the-top. But sometimes history really does that; truth, on occasion, is stranger than fiction.

Also more melodramatic.


Current count: 31,258.
LBR tally: All three, unexpectedly -- though it's a rhetorical kind of love.
Authorial sadism: Sending people to Hell!

12:22 am - Curse you, English language!

Words I can't use to describe the Army and their supporters in 1648, because these political terms weren't invented until much later: radical, extremist, republican, revolutionary.

What the hell am I supposed to call them, except "those guys with the sentiments that freaked the shit out of many seventeenth-century English but look pretty familiar to those of us living in modern democracies"?

(And that's a whole separate problem -- figuring out how to present Antony's feelings on the Levellers and their ilk, when many of the things the Levellers stood for are the conservative end of ideals we cherish dearly today. The easy solution would be to make him a sympathizer to their cause, but that's what we call an author cheesing out on historical accuracy. Most people at the time thought the Levellers were trying to destroy the fabric of society. So: find ways to say Antony thinks democracy is a bad idea, without making readers dislike him for it. Somehow.)

06:13 pm - open letter

Dear Gods of Overachieving Authors,

If I promise to do suitable penance and grovel a bit, will you promise that I never have to study seventeenth-century English politics again? Pretty please?

'Cause I'm increasingly convinced this flaming ball of contradictory disaster they called their government is the real reason nobody wants to write fiction about the period.


Pleadingly,
An Author Who Still Loves Her Book, But Wants to Light the Period Politics On Fire

01:45 am - new rule

I think I shall make a resolution never to read or watch or listen to a story that features a weak or stupid character named Kate, so as to preserve the current axiom that all characters named Kate are awesome.

Because Antony's wife just rocked this scene in so many ways.


Current word count: 24680, but that's cheating, since 500 is a direct copy of 500 still sitting earlier in the text. (I'll deal with the first version when I go back and fix all the other problems with Part One.)
LBR tally: Kate loves you, dude, but she also pays attention to politics.
Authorial sadism: Finding out your wife has noticed what you're up to.

07:49 pm - neglected history

Death-marching through The King's War (five hundred pages down; one hundred to go), I find myself considering a question that's been in my mind for some time.

Why is seventeenth-century England so neglected in fiction?

Seventeenth and eighteenth both, really, but I haven't gotten into researching the eighteenth yet. There's some stuff there, but they get trampled by the Elizabethan period from one end and the Victorian from the other. (Starting early with the Regency.) Tonight I'm probably going to take time off from the death-march to watch one of the only pre-Restoration movies I've been able to find (To Kill a King). I know of almost no fantasy novels set during the Stuart era.

Yet the seventeenth century is chock-full of conflict and change. You'd expect to find lots of fiction exploiting that . . . but you don't. Why?

( Possible reasons . . . . )

I know some of you are at least moderately familiar with the period, though, so I thought I'd toss it out there. Why the lack of love for Stuart-era fiction? And can you make me any good recommendations of pre-Restoration novels or movies?

11:41 pm - one fifth down . . . .

Word count: 22843
LBR quota: This is a classic case of rhetoric collapsing into blood.
Authorial sadism: All of it? Antony's on the losing side: neither Royalist nor Parlimentarian, but the voice of moderation. He's doomed.

That's Part One in the can. The good news: I found the books I need to make Part One 600% better. The bad news: I didn't find them until I had written 99% of Part One.

But, well, Antony's last scene here doesn't suck. Yay! And I won't have to rewrite all the fae-side stuff. Though I may have to adjust its timeline; I fear I may have to figure out a way to cut the Short Parliament out entirely, in order to make space for all the shenanigans of the Long Parliament. (Or rather, those shenanigans taking place between November 1640 and January 1642. All its shenanigans require far more wordage than this; it's called "Long" for a reason.)

So that's a fifth or so of book. What comes next sequentially is not what comes next chronologically, since I'm going to be cutting back and forth between periods of Civil War etc. and days of the Great Fire; I have to wait to write the Fire stuff until I've done everything leading up to it.

From here we go to 1648. I'm skipping over most of the actual Civil War because it happened almost entirely in places other than London, and in ways that I can't very easily integrate my characters into. This is lovely, except that I kind of need to read the remaining 554 pages of this book between now and, uh, tomorrow's work. And get another book and read that one too; who knows how long it is.

Why yes, I am behind on my research.

But onward we go, through the fog of civil war, and into what follows.

11:37 am - I am mighty(er)

I've come up with an analogy for what writing this book feels like. (Warning: weird metaphor ahead.)

Say you've been going to the gym for some months, maybe a year, and lifting weights faithfully. And the numbers have gone up, sure, but what does that mean? Then one day you find yourself messing around with a friend, and the two of you get into a wrestling match, and you're gasping and snarling and trying to get a good grip so you can exert some leverage and damn it's hard -- but then halfway through you realize that a year ago, this friend would have had you face-down on the floor crying uncle in about four seconds flat. And maybe all that weightlifting really has done something.

I don't think what I have so far is brilliant, but I also know what's what revision is for. I think I'm getting my foundations in more or less the right place, and that means bringing things up to code won't be too tough. Sure, for the first time in my life I find myself routinely writing three hundred words and then ripping them right back out again, that very night, to start the scene over from scratch -- I've written fully 15% more than I have of actual book -- but that isn't defeat; that's victory. That's noticing my friend about to get me in a pin I won't be able to escape, and squirming out of it before I can be trapped.

I'm stronger than I used to be.

(Though not physically. My puny self needs to get back to the gym.)

06:29 pm - accidental allegory?

The King saw any restrictions they tried to impose as infringements upon his royal authority.

Writing this scene of political debate, it occurs to me that somebody out there will probably decide I wrote this book as commentary on current U.S. politics. With, I don't know, faerie warfare as a coded metaphor for terrorism.

Or something.

04:49 pm - imponderables

The character who was John Highlord when I started writing has been replaced with Thomas Soame, because I realized matters would work better if I used an alderman who was also a member of Parliament later on, and both of them are minor enough figures that they don't rate entries in the DNB. (Ergo, I can make stuff up and not worry too much about somebody knowing I'm wrong.)

So I ask you: why, pray tell, does my subconscious want to insist that Thomas Soame wouldn't talk the way I had John Highlord do? Why does it object to him being broad-shouldered? Everything I know about both of these men would fit into a paragraph shorter than this one, and it consists of a handful of dates regarding their public service. I don't know what they looked like. I don't know what their personalities were. Yet my subconscious resists the swap.

This, chickadees, is why naming is sometimes a giant problem for me. If I don't find the right name, I often can't write the character, and it's like pulling teeth to change a name once it's settled in. Some bit of my brain decides nobody named Thomas Soame could possibly be a blunt-spoken, broad-shouldered guy, and god only knows how long it will take to convince it otherwise.

This job would be easier if my brain were rational.

02:53 am - Glimpses inside a writer's head

Dammit, Strafford, get out of my novel. I don't have the space to deal with you.


ETA: Also, how distracting would it be, if I actually put in the line, "Let them go, let them go, to do their endeavour"? One suspects it actually was the line used to start duels. At least in Scotland.


ETA #2: Actually, let's just do this the right way. Does anybody know of a book I could read to find out how duels and judicial combat were conducted in seventeenth-century England?

01:37 am - What are you, twelve?

Where did that come from?

The first scene I wrote yesterday was The Suck. Antony sitting around and being a spectator to history. It didn't quite get me to quota, so then I started a new scene, where introducing his wife helped liven things up. Two sentences into today's continuation, she verbally kicks him in the ass and asks just what he intends to do about the problems around him. So I send Antony off to pick a fight with Pym . . .

And he picks a fight.

Well, not quite. It isn't his fault the scene almost devolved into a riot. But for the love of baby Jesus, man, you're thirty-two. Aren't you a little old for fistfights in the street?


LBR quota: Well, it was supposed to be all rhetoric, but some blood got in there.
Authorial sadism: Having your wife call you on your cowardice, I suppose.

01:16 am - one week in

7,932 words since June 1st, at a little over 1K every day. It's a good start, and I'm on track to have 10K before I go driving off to California with kniedzw. Whether I get anything written on the road will be anyone's guess; I can write while traveling just fine, but I can't exactly take my research library with me in the car. Even if it's a total wash, though, I'll have 23K this month, and that's fine.

I suppose now's as good a time as any to outline the structure for this book. There are four days of the Fire, which I intend to scatter throughout the book. (Basically, this one will have four big flash-forwards instead of the ten flashbacks of MNC.) That means the rest of the story leading up to the Fire will also be in four parts. I'm aiming to have each part be roughly 20K, with roughly 5K for each Fire day, and the book is due at the beginning of October. Ergo, 25K each month will give me a completed draft in time (though without time for revision). That's my baseline, the minimum I need to do. It isn't precisely one part + one day every month, though, because I really need to save the Fire days until I've written everything that leads up to them; they'll be written last. (However much I dearly want to get to Jack, and see how he works on the page.)

Progress so far: Antony is starting to find his own personality instead of borrowing Philip's, which is good, because Philip would not make a good protagonist for this novel. Ben Hipley has randomly re-invented himself out of the NPC cast for Memento; I'm not sure why, but hey, sure. I can have a totally different character with the same name, if that's what he really wants. The Short Parliament is about to start, which is very nearly the same thing as saying the Short Parliament is about to end. (Hence the name.) I, er, ought to read about that before I write those scenes.

The story is developing in my head at a very slow and deliberate pace, but that's okay. Slow and steady wins the race.

LBR quota: except for that death in the first day of writing, it's been all rhetoric. Which is fine. I think I can make it exciting enough. And if I can't, well, I'm going to be Blowing Shit Up (by which I mean London) every 20K words, so there will be regular injections of Spectacle! and Excitement!
Authorial sadism: Sending Humphrey Taylor to the colonies because the protagonists are too soft to kill him themselves.

11:34 pm - justification

Working on building playlists for the novel looks like cat-vacuuming par excellence . . . until you realize that doing so has helped you figure out what's changed in the faerie court between the last book and this one.

I am vindicated!

03:55 pm - back on the treadmill

Time to bring out this icon again, as I get properly underway with AAL. Last night's writing was like pulling teeth, but that's the natural result of fighting jet-lag long enough to put the words down. (Normally I don't have this much trouble adjusting, but normally I don't have seven hours' difference and a cold to overcome.)

1,132 today. And, resurrecting the LBR tally: all rhetoric, today. But more fun than last night's blood, because a) I'm awake and b) the random alderman I picked out of the 1639 flock is coming out with lines like "The king pisses away money as his father did -- though at least he has the decency to piss it on war instead of drunkenness and catamites."

Now to clean up the downstairs so we have somewhere to sit while gaming.

01:54 am - it begins

1131 words into And Ashes Lie, and already I've killed someone.

I figure it's a good start.

03:44 pm - Day Eight: In which I do battle with handwriting (and lose)

Thanks to the Great LJ Overmind, I've managed to up my count of signed copies of Midnight Never Come from two to fourteen. (Not including the piles at Orbit.) On my way to fjm's lst night, I stopped off in Oxford Street and hit the Waterstones there; I did not, however, hit the Borders, on account of it being inside the police cordon closing off a chunk of the street after the fatal stabbing there the day before. Er. Yeah. Yikes.

So if you live in the London area and want a signed copy, here's the tally of where to find them:

So I will end my travelouge here. Tomorrow I go to Rome, at which point Internet access will likely become spottier. Don't expect daily blogging (or replies to pretty much anything), but I'll update when I can.

Ciao!

06:27 pm - Day Seven: In which I have a social life!

The Thames Path pleases me. I have no idea how far it stretches -- all the way to the headwaters? -- but if I were to keep walking east from Richmond, I'm pretty sure I could go without interruption on from here to Southwark. (If I had the endurance.) The companion trail on the north bank is the part of the same route I travel on my first day of these trips, along the bank from Blackfriars to the Tower. In the City it's pretty in a paved and urbanized way; out here it's rutted gravel and untrimmed verdage. It's easy to imagine myself back in the past, editing out the few modern notes that creep into my view.

But now it is eleven-thirty and I need to be in bed. Last day tomorrow, and while it isn't precisely a full one, I want my rest. If only because I have to get up at four-thirty the morning after . . . .

01:19 pm - Day Six: In which there is both failure and victory (and one undecided thing)

Today starts off very well: with a sighting of my books!

See, I have no idea where to find bookshops in London. Once I had checked the Waterstone's in Ludgate Circus, I was done. (And they didn't have it in.) But this morning, en route to Westminster, I spy a Books Etc. at Fleet Street and Fetter Lane. Victory! Two copies. The nice clerk even lets me sign them.

So I'm waiting on that. In other news, my Tesco's dinner was delicious. Victory indeed! If I can find one or two other decent things, they may become the Official Victualler of Onyx Court Research Trips.

03:23 pm - Day Five: In which I enjoy actual English sunshine

Normally I take notes throughout the day, whenever I need a break. This time the notes came after the fact, at first because, well, train rides are unexciting to write about, and later because I didn't even think to take a break.

In other news, insomnia last night gifted me with an idea: I know how I'm going to kill off a character in this book.

I feel quite bad about it.

I suspect this is a good thing.

02:58 pm - Day Four: Courtesy of the Goodemeades

One unexpected side effect of not having my camera cable: it's surprisingly hard to keep myself entertained in the evenings. I didn't realize how much time I spent last year, sucking the day's pictures down to my laptop, deleting the bad ones, and labeling the rest before I could forget what they were. I find myself at loose ends in the evenings, more than expected, and curse the combination of virtue and light packing that made the only book in my luggage Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down. I cannot brain enough to read about seventeenth-century socio-politico-religious movements right now.

Four days done; four to go. And then onward to Rome . . . .