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Out of Ambit

Diane Duane's weblog

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The Five contemplate a Hugo Award
BooksDublin 2019ebooksEbooks DirectFantasy and SFMiddle Kingdoms

2019 Hugo Nomination Eligibility: the Tale of the Five Series

by Diane Duane January 16, 2019

(Above: the Five contemplate a Hugo Award, or at least something that looks like one)

So it’s that time of year when nominations open up for the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Awards, and it turns out that work of mine is eligible to be nominated for one in 2019. (I confess to being a little excited, since some of my earliest work is involved — not to mention my very earliest award-nominated work — in a universe for which I have something of a soft spot.)

The award in question is the one for Best Series. And the series in question is the Tale of the Five series (also known as the Middle Kingdoms series or “the Door Into…” books): The Door Into Fire, The Door Into Shadow, and The Door Into Sunset. Also involved here is the first of a bridging series of five novella-length works dealing with events occurring between the original trilogy and the main series’ upcoming completion in The Door Into Starlight.

The WSFS rules say:

To be eligible for nomination for a Hugo award for Best Series in a given year, a series must comprise at least three works totalling at least 240,000 words, and one work in the series must have been released during the previous year.

The first three works in the Tale of the Five series total approximately 330,000 words. The first bridging novella, Tales of the Five: The Levin-Gad, was published in August 2018. (The other four works in the bridging sequence will be published during 2019 and 2020.)

To make it easier for people to decide whether they’re interested in nominating the Tale of the Five for the 2019 Best Series award, all the nominatable (…’nominable?’ whatever…) works are available at a deep discount (75% off) at our store at Ebooks Direct. Please use this link so you’ll see the info on how to get the discount. (The trilogy is also available at Amazon, but not discounted. The first bridging novella is available exclusively at Ebooks Direct, and while it will become available at Amazon when the other four are complete, by then nominations will have closed.) The discount will last until Hugo nominations close on March 15th at 11:59 (US) PST.

…So there you go. Many thanks in advance for your interest and/or award consideration!

(Looking for more information about the series in general? Check out MiddleKingdoms.com.)

January 16, 2019
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Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal
BooksebooksEbooks DirectYoung Wizards

2018 Hugo Award eligibility: for those who were asking

by Diane Duane February 12, 2018
So nominations for the 2018 awards associated with the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, Worldcon 76, have opened up, and a lot of people have been posting and tweeting about what works they created in 2017 that are award-eligible this year. I hadn’t bothered doing anything similar, since when the issue came up I couldn’t think offhand of anything I’d done last year that was eligible. Between injury (early in 2017) and illness (in the late summer and fall) I got a lot less done than was originally planned. Yet others have apparently been paying attention to this issue on my behalf. (For which I thank them!) First of all: the 2017 e-publication* of Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal means that the Young Wizards series is once again eligible for Hugo consideration. In 2017 this would have been because of the 2016 publication of Games Wizards Play, which made the series eligible for the Best Series one-time “special” Hugo awarded by Worldcon 75 in Helsinki. That, however, was a different award from the new Best Series Hugo. (A distinction that apparently may make a difference for last year’s award finalists, if this year’s Hugo Administrator decides to rule out their nomination this year. But that’s hardly an issue for me.) So — as confirmed here on the list of Best Series Hugo eligibles at File 770 — the Young Wizards series is eligible for nomination for the 2018 Best Series Hugo. Yay! …And if (as someone eligible to nominate) you feel inclined to nominate it, then I encourage you to do so. Meanwhile, another question remains (it came up in a Twitter conversation with an old acquaintance last week, and as soon as I can find it again, I’ll link to it.) Is Interim Errantry: On Ordeal eligible this year for the not-yet-named Best Young Adult Novel (Not A Hugo) Award? I have no idea, because despite an afternoon spent hunting (probably in the wrong places) I can’t find the rules. I’ll get back to everybody on this when I have a moment… That said: on the off chance that the book is eligible for this (and because it’s definitely eligible for the other), if you’re interested in reading it as part of your pre-award consideration, then here’s a little help. If you go over to the Ebooks Direct store and put a copy of IE2: OO in your shopping basket (or use the widget at the bottom of this post) and enter the discount code FREEORDEAL on checkout, you can download the book gratis. The “how to purchase” walkthrough at the store will show you where to enter the code. And I hope you enjoy the book! *It’ll be out in paperback at Amazon during Spring 2018, if anybody was wondering.
February 12, 2018
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Landscape rough for new Wizard's Holiday cover
BooksDaz 3DEbooks DirectGraphic and plastic artsProcessTerragen

Re-covery

by Diane Duane August 18, 2017

The revised New Millennium Editions of the “primary continuity” Young Wizards novels started coming out at our Ebooks Direct store in 2011.* The project took a while to complete, in between other work; and as sometimes happens in a prolonged release situation like this, thematically and in look-and-feel the covers aren’t very unified. Slowly it became obvious that something was going to have to be done about this.

As it happens, along the way — as part of an ongoing fascination with digital art — I started picking up tools that were going to make this process easier. And slowly (because the learning curve is kind of high on these tools and I also have other work to be doing) I started acquiring the expertise to use them effectively.

So the process of updating the covers has begun. (Along with the business of correcting any typos that have turned up / been reported in the texts, and updating the ebook “interiors” to more modern / better formatted versions.) People on my Tumblr and elsewhere have occasionally inquired in a general way about what’s involved with this kind of work: so I thought I’d do a post about it.

The first and more complex of the two tools is Terragen: specifically, Terragen 3 at the moment (though I look forward to updating to T4 when I have the cash to spare.) Terragen is a cutting-edge landscape- and exteriors-production tool, widely used in the film and TV industries to produce both still work and animation. As an example, here’s the 100th anniversary Paramount film logo done using Terragen. The beautiful clouds and sky are something of a diagnostic: atmosphere work is one of the places where Terragen really shines.

 

I’ve been playing around with Terragen for the guts of a decade now, working hard to keep up as its newer versions grow in complexity and power. It’s capable of producing really beautiful results if you know what you’re doing. (That being the tough part. It’s equally possible to spend truly staggering amounts of time running down blind alleys if you’re not careful. Fortunately there are forums at Planetside full of kindly people who’re very willing to help struggling newbies as long as they demonstrate their willingness to go as far as they can on their own before asking for help.)

The other platform/tool that’s proven most helpful, for figures, clothes, interiors and some kinds of exteriors, has been Daz 3D and its design program Daz Studio. I initially spent a fair amount of time trying to get to grips with its main rival, Poser, but found its learning curve annoying and its documentation unnecessarily obscure, so that even doing quite simple things like putting clothes on a figure were (for me at least) something like torture. However, when I started using Daz’s user interface, Daz Studio, I found it much easier to use, and happily started the gradual process of acquiring the resources I was going to need for cover work. (The interface itself is free: sets, specific figures, and items of clothing have to be purchased.)

Teamed up, these two resources can produce quite lovely results. And they make producing covers a lot easier for those of us artistically-challenged types who can see art perfectly well in our heads but can NOT draw to save our lives.

Here’s a brief overview of the process involved in the re-covering.

I’m presently working on Wizard’s Holiday because of all the covers it needs the least work… relatively speaking. (For those of you not familiar with the work or the series: two young wizards are sent to what seems like a utopian planet on what initially appears to be a cultural exchange holiday, but turns out to be rather more complicated.)

For the “Nita version” of the cover (because there’ll be a “Kit version” as well, showing a different scene) I still like the basic concept: one of our primary protagonists relaxing on a beach on Alaalu, a mostly-watery planet halfway across the galaxy, enjoying the extravagant view of the Galactic core from much closer in than we are. The initial execution wasn’t completely awful, but it suffered from the fact that (a) my water management skills in Terragen were still developing and (b) I was still using Poser and could not get Nita’s damn bathing suit onto her. (We’ve had problems of that kind before, but that’s another story.)  So she appears only as a silhouette, as you can see below…

So… I was up against the edge of my technical-ability envelope there. But I can do better than that now. Among various issues that also need to be handled is that a far higher resolution is required nowadays for ebook cover images.  (Amazon, for example, wants ebook cover images that are at least 2400 pixels on their long side.) With increased size comes increased detail; and  a decent image really needs to have more of that than the one above does.

So. First to Daz Studio, to (re)create Nita’s figure. At the moment I’m using a slight variation on a figure called Teen Josie 7. (Don’t get me started on the character makeup shown in the product thumbnails. Daz is a hotbed of the Male Gaze.)

Working with Daz can closely resemble playing with paper dolls: you start with a basic figure that you then fit skin, hair, clothes and accessories to. Additionally you can either pose the character yourself, or buy pose packages online. Sometimes a character comes with a set of basic poses. In this case I used a “canned” pose that came with a different character based on the Teen Josie figure. I’ll probably change it to something more relaxed / casual — for now, this is acting as a placeholder.

Daz Studio has limitations that make it not so great for large-scale landscape work or landscapes that need both depth and detail. There are some brilliant workarounds available, but your “set” is inevitably smaller than the kind of spaces you can create in Terragen. So for me to produce a beach scene with the kind of look and detail I want for this cover, Nita’s figure will have to be exported as a Wavefront-format “object” file and then imported into a landscape in Terragen and positioned there. (This file will also then have to be run through a useful program called Poseray that does something or other magical to enable the textures applied to skin, clothing, etc in Daz Studio to follow the character correctly into Terragen. Don’t ask me to get technical about this because I don’t understand it in the slightest.)

Having done the necessary Poseray jiggery-pokery to Nita, I’m now ready to move on to Terragen. One of my problems — the too-simple beach and water — has already been solved (while doing other work) by the acquisition from Terragen’s lovely New World Digital Art file store (ETA 2020: not so much a store these days — more a gallery / resources guide) of Beach v3.0, an add-on package from an artist who goes by the handle Dune. “Beach by Dune” provides you with a beautifully detailed beach full of rocks, salt grass, wet sand, and extremely nice water.

Not that it looks like it at the moment on the Terragen dashboard, but never mind. The window you see here renders quick and rough so that the artist can get a general idea of what’s going on. The more detail you want in a render, the more computing power it takes, and the longer it takes… so if you’re working with a (whisper it) rather senior machine like mine, you don’t waste time on unnecessary renders.

Terragen dashboard

Doesn’t look like much at the moment, but trust me, it gets better. This render isn’t detailed enough to even begin hinting at the lovely ripples in the water and the little waves sliding up the beach.

Now to position Nita. I know in a general way where I want her, so all I have to do is use the dash image to determine the coordinates, load her figure and paste the coords in. A little wiggling and rotating and she’s sorted.

Terragen dashboard with beach and Nita

Now for the sky. The “galaxy” image is one of numerous gorgeous images to be found online that show the core region of the Milky Way as seen from Earth. (I think this one might be from Hubble: I have to check.) Once most other things about the master image are sorted out, this background image will be processed separately to remove a fair number of the stars at the edges of the image, which normally wouldn’t be bright enough to show in a twilight sky. For the moment I’m using the raw image as is, for positioning purposes, but before it’s right for the final cover I’d say there’ll be at least five or ten more hours of work spent on just that element of this image, if I’m any good at estimating these things.

Terragen allows such additions to a sky scene by making it possible to project them against a distant virtual surface. This image is being projected onto the virtual sky through the rendering camera. (If I told you how long it took me to work out how to do this successfully it would just be an embarrassment, so let’s not go there.)

Adding the galaxy

One final thing that needs to be added to this render is the radiance of the little wizardlight Nita has created to follow her around so she won’t trip over stuff on the way back to the alien family’s home that she and Kit are visiting. This panel of the dash will also show something I haven’t bothered boring you with: the six other light sources in this scene, all of which have to be tweaked and twiddled until they’re all in balance for the desired look of the scene. Don’t even think about asking me how long this can take.

Adding Nita's wizard light

The wizardlight itself will be added “in post” as a little sparkly lens flare in Corel Photopaint, as I like the effect I get there better than the one that would appear in Terragen if I toggled the “Visible object” option on for this light.

So, the rough doesn’t look too bad. Hit render, and after I do that one little bit of post for the wizardlight, this is what we get:

The full test render

…So the basics are there: the image as I saw it in my head, and plenty of room for cover text top and bottom. But I can still see ten or fifteen niggly things that need to be dealt with.

And when this one’s finished, all I have to do is the same thing (or something like it) eight more times… in images of (in most cases) far greater complexity. (ETA, Q4/2020: along the way the plan changed a little bit, so that earlier-cover versions like this wound up as insets/inserts in the newer “master design” Wizard’s Manual images that ended up being created for the NMEs. The new upcoming international YW/NME editions will be something like this — earlier cover elements being incorporated into newer ones, but all looking generally “the same” to help establish the international Young Wizards branding. For more information about the international-edition rollout, please see this recent post.)

Anyway, those of you who’ve been asking where the new covers are? Now you know why it may take a little while. Till the end of 2017, anyway.

But I think it’ll be worth it…

 

*For a detailed discussion of the rationale behind the revisions, check this post.

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August 18, 2017
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YOUNG WIZARDS: LIFEBOATS cover crop
BooksYoung WizardsYoung Wizards meta

“Young Wizards: Lifeboats”: files with new covers on their way

by Diane Duane August 8, 2017

For those of you who may have copies of this already, just a heads-up for you. We’re giving YW: Lifeboats a new cover so that it’ll no longer look identical to Interim Errantry. (That will also have a slightly spruced-up version of its cover applied to it later this month. Those of you who have IE will already have Lifeboats as part of it.)

The store will shortly start pushing out download links for the new, re-covered ebook to its previous purchasers. There’s nothing you need to do but click on the URL in the notification email when it arrives in your mailbox: it’ll take you to the page with the URL for downloading the file. Please note that these download links have the same five-day expiry time as regular purchases. If you miss the download window, naturally we’ll refresh your link if you email us with your order info. But try not to miss it if you can, yeah? Thanking You. 🙂

If you don’t have a copy of Lifeboats: as part of the Ebooks Direct Summer Reading Sale, we’re dropping its price by half for a few weeks. So now’s a good time to grab it if you feel so inclined. Want to know what happens between A Wizard of Mars and Games Wizards Play? This does. 110,000 words of it.

Thanks, all!

YOUNG WIZARDS: LIFEBOATS cover

August 8, 2017
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The Door into Starlight
BooksMiddle Kingdoms

THE DOOR INTO STARLIGHT: an update

by Diane Duane July 12, 2017

I got a few more of those plaintive emails the other day inquiring about whether I thought I was ever going to finish this series… and so it occurred to me that it was time for an update. (If you’ve missed previous discussions on this subject, please see this 2011 post (which discusses background on what happened to the series and why book 4 wasn’t conventionally published) and the more recent one when I committed to be working on book 4 this year.)

The short version: Yes, I’m working on The Door Into Starlight right now.

Is it doing OK? Yeah.

When will it come out? I’m not going to say a single word about this until I have a completed draft in my hand and have talked to my agent.

Can’t you tell us anything else?

In a general way, sure.

Those of you who’ve looked in on the slowly-growing collection of advice and thoughts-on-writing that is “Eating Paper”, or have looked at my contributions under the “writing advice” tag on Tumblr, will know that as writers go I’m extremely outline-driven: absolutely the antithesis of what is now known as a “pantser”. So this will suggest to you that I refuse to do anything whatsoever without a comprehensive outline. (Cue Peter [in the kitchen] hearing this sentiment and growling [as he always does when this subject comes up ] that one line from Hunt for Red October: “Russians don’t take a dump, son, without a plan.” Leaving dumps and ethnicities aside, it’s a sentiment I heartily subscribe to.)

While I’ve had an outline for TDIS for some time, it has always been sketchy because I never got to the point where I really needed to refine it. Now, though, that time has come. And the ride has been… interesting.

It’s not that I don’t know how the book ends. I’ve known that since 1979. The issue isn’t the beginning or the ending: as usual with me, the issues are with the middle. Significant portions of recent weeks have been spent examining various assumptions about the basic situations in book 4 that have lain unexamined for decades.

And most of these examinations have been uncomfortable. Almost-40-Years-Of-Professional-Writing DD has been looking closely at some of the situations on which Barely-A-Couple-Years-Of-Professional-Writing DD predicated some fairly significant plot developments, and Almost-40-Years-DD has been saying, repeatedly and with some concern, “And that’s it? That’s what you’ve got for this?” …while Just-Getting-Started DD squirms and tries to explain how simple and straightforward it all looked at the time.

It has to be said that I have kind of a sore spot about this issue. I once worked on a film production where the director not only was seriously married to concepts of the production they’d had when they were thirteen — or at least was meeting up with those concepts really regularly to shag — but actually tried to film from them. The results were horrifying. The director had never once examined those (competent-but-not-brilliant) adolescent extrusions to see if they still worked in terms of adult storytelling. They didn’t. This caused endless trouble from start to finish. (And nearly killed one of my producers — I mean, literally nearly killed him. Long story, and not one I’m gonna tell here, but that’s not a situation I’m ever likely to forget.)

Anyway, when a project has been in train for a long long while, to my way of thinking it absolutely demands to have all of its working parts disassembled to make sure they still work… and that they’re fit for purpose. A lot of things go into that determination: the state of the market and the field, the expectations and reading experience of the people who’re going to be reading it, the growth and development (please God!) of the writer.

That’s where I am at the moment. In the course of producing something I actually consider worthwhile as an outline — meaning around 50 single-spaced pages of material for what will wind up being 110K-120K of writing — I’ve been pulling the plot apart and putting it back together again in a form and as a structure that will stand up under the weight of the three novels before it and (please Thoth) the expectations of the people who’ve been waiting for it… some of them for the guts of four decades. It’s not enough to finish this story. It has to leave people satisfied. So I’m busy laying the foundations for that outcome.

That’s where we are at the moment. I’m making good progress with this; that’s all I’m going to say. But I will not write a word more on this thing until I’m satisfied with the soundness of its core construction.

Meanwhile, as I was typing this up, it occurred to me that there might be a way to keep people informed of progress that’s a little more robust than the “let me know about updates” signup form on the TDIS page at MiddleKingdoms.com. Instead, I’ve added a newsletter / mailing list at Mailchimp, which can be used much more flexibly than the WordPress plugin. The Mailchimp list is the usual double-opt-in arrangement they require, which makes perfect sense: and it’s hooked up to Ebooks Direct, which is the first place the completed book will appear. So if you’re interested in receiving periodic notes on how this project is coming on, please sign up to this.

Also for those who may ask about it: the discount mentioned in the 2011 post is indeed still live. Verbum sap.

And now back to work. Thanks, all!

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July 12, 2017
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Paperback wraparound cover for A WIND FROM THE SOUTH
AmazonBooksebooksEbooks DirectRaetian Tales

RAETIAN TALES: A WIND FROM THE SOUTH now in paperback!

by Diane Duane December 29, 2016

For those of you who’ve been waiting for a dead-tree version: A Wind From The South is available online at last! You can get it here from Amazon.com.

(A Kindle ebook version is available from Amazon too. But you can get it less expensively over here at Ebooks Direct at the moment, as our Winter Holiday Sale is on. And our ebook is available in multiple formats, and is DRM-free.)

There’s also an audiobook version available from Audible, for those who prefer a spoken-word edition.

In case you have no idea what any of this is about: here’s the blurb.

 

A goddess in the making… or a demon reborn?

In the remote mountain village where she was born, Mariarta dil Alicg lives the untroubled life of a peasant girl…until, soon after a mysterious stranger’s arrival, she starts to hear voices in the wind. The voices whisper strange secrets in Mariarta’s ears — promising her the power to command the stormwind, hinting at an unknown, magical heritage, and prophesying a fate marvelous past all Mariarta’s imaginings.

 

Then a curse falls on Mariarta’s village, shattering the lives of her family and friends. Mariarta must journey across the mountain realm of Raetia in search of a way to break the curse — while also hunting for the truth about the beautiful and terrible being who is trying to possess her soul.

 

Mariarta’s search will lead her into hidden domains of sorcery both dreadful and wondrous, and will finally embroil the young woman in the growing rebellion against her land’s cruel Austriac oppressors. But not before Mariarta comes face to face at last with the immortal Lady of the Storms, and challenges her to one final battle for control of her life, her soul, and her destiny…

 

“Duane is tops in the high adventure business.” — Publishers Weekly

“One of the finest current writers of speculative fiction.” — Kirkus Reviews

December 29, 2016
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BooksebooksEbooks DirectRaetian Tales

Reissuing RAETIAN TALES: A WIND FROM THE SOUTH

by Diane Duane November 26, 2016

I’ve been getting this ready for paperback* for a couple/few months now, and the only thing holding back the release has been the lack of a decent new cover.

I think we’ve got that sorted now — at least until I get the urge to start tweaking it again — so there’s no point in delaying the ebook re-release any further. Here, therefore, is v2.00 of Raetian Tales: A Wind From The South.

There’ve been a few minor corrections in the text, but nothing serious. Most of the changes have been in the internal format — now done in Scrivener instead of (as in the previous 2011 release) in Sigil. The book looks better overall, I think.

If you’ve already purchased a copy, the Ebooks Direct store will be pushing out links to the new version for you over the course of the next few hours. I just thought I’d post a note about it here so that people who read the blog will know.

Additionally, new versions in other formats (especially for the various Kindles) will be available early (UK/Irish time) tomorrow: check the dropdown menu at the product page to see what’s available.

And as the nice men used to say, “Thank you for your continued support.”

(Also please note that we’re having a Black Friday / Small Business Saturday / Cyber Monday sale at the Ebooks Direct store right now, in case you feel like picking something up at a bargain price…)

Meanwhile, here’s the full-size cover.

*Meaning a replacement for the old trade-size paperback that was on sale at Lulu.com for a while, and has been withdrawn.

*awfts_downsampled

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November 26, 2016
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ArtBooksebooksFantasy and SFRaetian Tales

Cover work: RAETIAN TALES

by Diane Duane November 22, 2016

Covers. Even when they’re almost done they’re not that almost done…

Here the mountain girl Mariarta dil Alicg and her great-stag Grugni look down at a bewitched Aletsch Glacier in a color “sketch” of the wraparound cover for the forthcoming paperback (and the re-cover for the ebook version) of Raetian Tales: A Wind from the South.

The character rendering is in DAZ Studio: the background rendering, in Terragen 3.0. The terrain is derived from Swiss radar data of the Jungfrau region, accurate to about a meter: the three-glacier junction known as “Place de la Concorde” is directly below.

…Yeah, I know, Mati needs a winter coat. I’m working on it. The trouble is that most of the women’s coats available at Daz seem designed to show as much of the woman as possible.  (In fact 98% of the women’s clothing there constitutes the most blatant proof possible of the Male Gaze concept.)  Right now Mariarta’s wearing men’s clothes (which is fine since she’s doing that in the book as well), but finding a decent men’s winter coat that also looks like something you might have worn in the 1100s is proving a little bit of a challenge.

And forget cloaks. I refuse to put Mariarta in a cloak. Every damn pre-medieval heroine seems to wear a cloak. And this is a huntress who doesn’t need a damn cloak flapping around while she runs around the Alps shooting chamois and hunting down rogue goddesses.

(sigh) Back to it. There’s work still to be done on the glacier and some of the snow, and I’m not sure I’m happy with the lighting yet…

November 22, 2016
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BooksStar TrekStar Trek and other licensed propertiesWriting

RIHANNSU: SWORDHUNT and RIHANNSU: THE EMPTY CHAIR; the outline

by Diane Duane September 29, 2016

Every now and then over at the Tumblr I wind up chatting with people about various aspects of writing, the writing business, and technique — usually under the “writing advice” tag. Some weeks back (don’t ask me when, it’s been busy around here) a question came up about outlining, and various people suggested that they’d like to see what one of my outlines looked like. So I made a note to myself to find an outline at some point and post it for those who might be interested.

Today I was going through one of the smaller portable expansion drives we keep around the house for temporary data storage, with an eye to cleaning it out so it could be used in updating my old laptop to run Windows 7. While I was sorting through the directories (and again and again muttering “Why the hell have I been hanging onto this…?!”) I came across what appears below. This is the outline for the Star Trek novels Swordhunt (later subdivided into Swordhunt and Honor Blade) and The Empty Chair.

This is an example of one of the ways I outline. It’s not a “beat outline,” in which every scene is laid out in book-chronological order and with considerable detail about action and sometimes even dialogue. I suppose it could be considered more of a “pitch outline”, intended to indicate both a story’s background and its foreground issues and action in broad strokes. It’s also intended for an editor already thoroughly familiar with my writing style and the way I handle a given license and its characters (in this case Star Trek).

One of the reasons I allowed myself to submit something so (relatively) relaxed in format is that I knew my editors — first John Ordover and then Marco Palmieri — were confident enough about what I would do with the actual novels to not mind an outline of this kind. It does however begin with a brief recap of previous work in the series for the benefit of anybody in the Trek offices (either at the book end in NY, or the licensing-and-approvals end in LA and elsewhere) who might need to be brought up to speed on the background; as Trek editors in general and the faithful and long-suffering Paula Block (routine overseer-of-things on the licensing side) always have so much other work on their plates that a reminder of the details might be welcome.

The outline weighs in at just under 3700 words, or about eight single-spaced 8.5″ x 11″ pages. Needless to say, if you have not read the Rihannsu sequence of Trek novels and you’re planning to, and you don’t want to be spoiled, then you should avoid reading any further….

 

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September 29, 2016
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Cover of 'Franklin Booth, Painter with a Pen'
ArtBooksHome life

In the “Returned From The Land Of The Lost” Department…

by Diane Duane June 4, 2016

If you’re someone who has a lot of books, you know how this goes. You’ve got a favorite volume, one dealing with a subject covered in no other books you have, or only covered glancingly or inadequately. And then one day either you take it out of the house for some reason, or you lend it to someone… and it’s never seen again. No one knows where it’s gone.

For months if not years, the space formerly occupied by that book in your in-head virtual library is empty. It aches every time you “look” at it. Again and again you try to figure out where the hell that book went, and how. It may not even be a particularly valuable one, but its absence drives you nuts. And if it is valuable — or is now — and as a result you can’t afford to replace it, that drives you around the bend as well.

Then suddenly, without warning… it reappears. And you get to experience a very strange brand of disbelieving joy, one that makes non-book-loving people stare at you if they’re in the area. You look with astonishment at the thing in your hands. You’re tempted to hug it (though you refrain if there’s a chance this might hurt it). And for that short time until the “This book was lost and now is found” feeling settles a little, the world is unusually bright.

This happened to me today. Back in the day I used to do art on scratchboard — it wasn’t all that great, I’m not going to reproduce any of it here — and during that period I studied the best scratchboard and pen-and-ink artists to learn what I could from their art. For my money, the king of them all was Franklin Booth. The incredible delicacy of his work, and the wonderful sense of sheer space in his illustrations, attracted me powerfully as soon as I laid eyes on it. When Franklin Booth: Painter With A Pen came out in 2002 — with an introduction by Roy Krenkel, no less — I bought it immediately, as it was the biggest assemblage of Booth’s works to be found.

And then, a year or two later, the book went missing. The last time anyone had seen it was when I took it over to a friend’s house to scan it. After that it was as if the Earth had opened and swallowed it. For years I hunted for it all over the house, then eventually gave it up as forever lost.

Until today… when Peter, doing some hunting through his own bookshelves, called down the stairs: “Is this that book you were looking for?”

“Oh God,” I said, because for the past several months I’d been trying to find a misplaced copy of Richard Hinckley Allen’s Star Names: Their Lore And Meaning, which had gone into hiding (I knew it hadn’t left the house, and was therefore in that legendary location called ‘Around Here Somewhere’).  “The Star Names book?”

“No, this — ” And he held out the Franklin Booth book.

Astonishment. “Where the hell was it?!”

A shrug. “Shelved with some art books.”

Yes, I thought, but not with any of my art books, what was it doing down on that shelf? …No point in even asking this kind of question. Sometimes when you have two book fans in one house, stuff migrates, gets misshelved, gets buried…

Never mind. The book is here, is in perfect condition, not even any spine fading (having been sitting for years on a bottom shelf of one of the darkest bookshelves in the house, at the top of a staircase where no natural light reaches). Gorgeous, lovely thing. I’m so glad to see it again. (And honestly, I don’t care that it’s now worth up to 400% and 2000% of what I paid for it. It’s not leaving the house.)

So, for today… for a little while, at least… we celebrate the restoration of the lost and the (local) triumph of order over chaos. Yay!

Meanwhile, to celebrate, here’s a typical Booth work (“Echoes”) from another (lesser) Booth book that I scanned some years back…

'Echoes', Franklin Booth

 

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June 4, 2016
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From the cover of THE PEDANT IN THE KITCHEN
BookscookingFoodrecipesUncategorized

I really like this book

by Diane June 18, 2004

The Pedant in the Kitchen is a lot of fun. Peter spotted the book in a swing through Hodges Figgis in Dublin, glanced through it, and handed it to me, saying, “This guy is our kind of people.”

I opened the book at random and found:

“How many cookbooks do you have?

(a) Not enough
(b) Just the right number
(c) Too many?

“If you answered (b) you are disqualified for lying or complacency or not being interested in food or (scariest of all) having worked everything out perfectly. You score points for (a) and also for (c), but to score maximum points you need to have answered both (a) and (c) in equal measure. (a) because there is always something new to be learned, someone coming along to make it all clearer, easier, more foolproof, more authentic: (c) because of the regular mistakes made when applying (a).”

The author then lists his twenty or so most-used cookbooks, which live in his kitchen (as opposed to the many others which reside in other parts of his house). Of his list, we have fifteen of his twenty, in just about the same order of importance. This impressed me, since I have to confess I love it when people agree with me.

The book has many other charms. Mostly it’s about Julian Barnes’ attempt to bring precision to the art of cooking: but there’s more to the book than that. Bits like this:

“Anthony Lane, reviewing the scarily efficient Martha Stewart, quotes this typical piece of advice about having folks around for a bite: ‘One of the most important moments on which to expend extra effort is the beginning of a party, often an awkward time, when guests feel tentative and insecure.’ To which Lane exactly responds: ‘The guests are insecure? How about the frigging cook?'”

“River Cafe Green has a terrific recipe for Penne with Tomato and Nutmeg (and basil, garlic and Pecorino), which I make regularly: the nutmeg is the key surprise element. But I did first have to overcome the recipe’s first sentence: ‘2.5 kg ripe vine cherry tomatoes, halved and seeded’. So that’s well over five pounds of cherry tomatoes. And how many of the little buggers do you think you get to the pound? I’ll tell you: I’ve just weighed fifteen and they came to four ounces. That’s sixty to the pound. So we’re talking 300, cut in half, 600, juice all over the place, flicking out their seeds with a knife, worrying about not extracting every single one. All together now: NO, WE’RE NOT GOING TO DO THAT. Leave the seeds in and call it extra roughage.”

“What do cookbook writers want? Mute obeisance? What kind of relationship would that imply? You’re not a spud-bashing squaddie after all, and they can’t put you on a charge for insolence, dumb or otherwise. Remind yourself who paid money for whose book. The only way to earn their respect is to rebel. Go on: it’s good for you. It’s probably good for them too.”

“Kitchen shops sell a lot of useful gadgets and time-saving equipment. One of the most useful and most liberating would be a sign that the domestic cook could place to catch the eye in moments of tension: THIS IS NOT A RESTAURANT.”

…Definitely a recommended book.

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June 18, 2004
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BooksWritingYoung Wizards

It’s such a grind

by Diane June 18, 2003

I have to take a break and blog a little here.

Tomorrow (it would have been today, but DHL in Ireland has done something weird to their pickup and flight schedules: never mind…) — tomorrow, I say, the copy-edited manuscript for Wizard’s Holiday goes back to the publisher. I’m in the middle of the last changes I can make before we go to page proofs, probably in about a month.

The MS is presently a pile of paper which has many, many Day-Glo Post-It notes sticking out of it. I thought I was done with the MS this morning, but noooo, I had to read it through again…and find all these things that need dealing with that didn’t get dealt with. Ah well: better to deal with them. But how is it I missed them on the first pass?

I feel like a complete basket case…but at this point in a MS-grooming, that’s completely normal. I find myself looking at things I wrote as if I expected my readership to just intuit them somehow…and I feel like I’m not the writer I was (if indeed I ever was that writer. If you see what I mean.) This perception has as much to do with blood sugar and eyestrain as anything else, I know that…but there it is regardless.

One by one the Post-Its come out as paragraphs and sometimes whole pages get inserted to clarify issues which I thought (at the time of writing) would have been plain even to paramecia, but which I now see were obscure to everyone on Earth but me. I roll my eyes at my own obtuseness. (Just once or twice I roll them at my editor and copy-editor, but only a little: here and there they’ve missed something that really is obvious. In 99% of the notes in the MS, though, they’re right on. And in Lynn I am truly blessed in a copy-editor who does not do what one of Peter’s did, correcting his MS not to house style, but to her own…which included removing all apostrophes from dialogue because “the use of apostrophes gave an unnecessarily modern flavor to a period fantasy novel”. He put every one of them back; the dialogue was “contemporary” to those speaking it, and if you take the C-E’s line of reasoning too far, you wind up writing novels in Gothic, or Norman French. “Which limits your market rather,” P. says.)

(sigh) This process is kind of like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. So much fun when you stop… I look forward to about 1 AM, when I should be finished, with great joy. …Yet good things are getting done here. At least one scene got written which made me tear up slightly: a rarity. A couple of other scenes made me chuckle out loud (also fairly rare). It’s too soon for me to tell whether this book is any good; ask me again in October, when it comes out. .

And this always happens. Always. The Big Mood Swing, spread over months — from finishing the first draft in a blaze of sweat and glory, to the rewrite and copyedit, usually spent cowering and clutching my head in multiply recurring fits of acute embarrassment, to the point where I go over the page proofs, a little calmer but still not fully convinced. But at the same time, there’s usually another book in progress, and this complicates the clinical picture somewhat. (There will be this year, for sure: Wizards at War really needs to go to the publisher in October.)

…Sigh. Back to work. I tell myself everything will be fine when I’m done. But right now I don’t believe it.

Mothers, don’t let your kids be writers!

(…As if you could stop them.)

June 18, 2003
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The blogger


40 years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV/movies, NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Young Wizards series, 1983-2020 and beyond; Middle Kingdoms series, 1979-2019. And now, also: Proud past Guest of Honour at Dublin2019, the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland.

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