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Writing

"First Spaceship On Venus" poster
booksFilm and TVWritingYoung Wizards

The Mutability of (Your?) Dream

by Diane Duane

(Every now and then the need to tell this story comes up. I mentioned it one time on Tumblr, and thought I’d better import it over here so that (a) people who aren’t wild about Tumblr’s data handling can see it, and (b) so I can find it without having to cope with my present Tumblr theme’s dodgy searchability.)

…Anyway. The question that triggered the answer was this:

The clarification that you don’t mind/aren’t opposed to the reading of Tom and Carl as gay makes all the difference in the issue in my mind. Like, you’re not going to tell us what to think rather than you don’t want us to think they’re gay.

Well, that’s a whole different can of worms, now that (a) both of my good friends have, as we say in-YW-universe, moved on to a larger and more central catchment area, and (b) now that that particular cat is out of the bag. That said, this was the earlier response:

***

Oh, jeez, telling people what to think is always a nonstarter. (You wouldn’t get very far with me in that department, I can tell you.)

Leaving schools of literary criticism aside for the moment, I would have to be the Dimmest Writer On Earth if I seriously thought that people weren’t already doing exactly what they liked with my characters in their heads… just as I do with other people’s characters. This is just the way things are, and the writer who tries to keep this from happening is riding for a fall.

They’re also potentially cutting off their own nose(s) to spite their face, because a writer who tries to interfere with that fiction-shaping impulse in the reader’s mind is messing with something that has the ability to significantly enhance or even save their career. I’m referring to the reader’s ability to make what they read, in the act of reading, better than it was to begin with.

…This takes a little explaining. I believe that everybody who reads for pleasure is party to this effect to at least some extent, especially if they’re already committed to either the writer or (past instances of) the written. And this phenomenon slops over into others of the arts as well.

I first experienced it this way when I was ten.

On some summer night in 1962, my folks took me to the drive-in and we saw a film called First Spaceship On Venus. (God only knows why they did this, except I was already a space nut and they were humoring me.) To say I was absolutely smitten with this movie would be putting it mildly. Even so I wasn’t smitten enough to last all the way through to the end: this was the era of double features, I have no memory of what the first movie was, and then as now I wasn’t much good at staying up late. But I carried the memory of FSOV well into adulthood as a terrific movie with a beautiful spaceship and wonderful aliens – just a completely fabulous movie, a seminal experience in a life already grounded on an understanding that science fiction was a wonderful thing.

Fast forward twenty or so years, to the point where I’m working as David Gerrold’s assistant. David has always been an early adopter, and he had gotten one of the very first domestic VCRs, a massive U-Matic thing (I think this is the one. Dear God what a dinosaur). At some point or another I noticed that FSOV was scheduled on TV on one of the LA-area channels that showed old movies late at night. I begged David to record the thing for me, as though I hadn’t seen it since I was ten, I could still remember how it thrilled me way back when.

So he recorded it, and the next day after I finished what work needed doing, I sat down and watched it.

I wouldn’t be understating to describe this film as a train wreck from beginning to end.* (It’s been on MST3K, with reason.) I watched in horror as a badly put together plot full of stilted performances unspooled itself between two planets. And those cool little alien robots? They were ping-pong balls with pipecleaners stuck in them. I was, to put it mildly, disillusioned.

…And left in a quandary. What the hell had happened? Why were the little alien robots or whatever so wonderful in my memory? Why did memory insist it was a terrific movie when adult experience made it plain it was a turkey? It wasn’t about comparative critical
ability… not that much. I could be pretty scathing about bad movies when I was ten.  Don’t get me started on The Brain from Planet Arous. Or The Crawling Eye, which terrified me out of my wits for about a week until I saw it a second time on one of the local NY stations that would repeat a single film three or four times in a day/week] and thought, in a burst of terrifying clarity, “Boy is this stupid!” )

I came back to the problem occasionally as the years went by, and worried at it in search of answers, and got none… until I started getting fan mail on my books. The praise went way beyond heartening, sometimes. People were waxing enthusiastic over stuff I was sure I had not done—didn’t think to include, wasn’t smart enough (yet) to write. Textual inspection was no help. I knew what words were there but not how these readers were deriving what they saw and loved from it.

But slowly a theme started to emerge.  These readers, regardless of age, were making my work better than it really was—for the author’s value of “really”. They were doing with my stuff exactly what ten-year-old-me had done with FSOV. Their enthusiasm and wholehearted commitment to the material was helping them find virtues in it that I couldn’t feel responsible for… and maybe it didn’t strictly matter who was responsible, or if they were. Enjoyment happened. And who the hell in their right mind would step on that, just for the sake of being right?

At the end of the day, it’s just love, I guess. You fall in love with something and you’re impelled to make it better, willing to forgive it all kinds of faults and improve it inside your head. Here as in so many other places, perhaps it’s that simple: “love is the answer.” …Who knew. 🙂

Following this line of reasoning, I have to believe that readers apply their own readings of what’s going on with Tom and Carl to the characters at least partly because they like them so much. Gods forbid I should interfere with that.

So let’s let it lie there, as I have about fifty sort-of-businessy things to do today that have not been getting done, and then (for my sins) I think I need to watch FSOV again. It’s on YouTube, heaven help me. (And now I discover that Brain from Planet Arous has a sequel. I am doomed. Curse you, IMDb!!)

*At the meta level too, it turns out. Including uncredited, unlicensed music from other SF or horror movies, and a screenplay with three writing teams and twelve drafts of the screenplay. Sweet Thoth but the mind boggles.

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A pair of Perytons
Young WizardsYoung Wizards meta

Borges and the Peryton

by Diane Duane

(I’ve copied this post over here from its original location at Tumblr for those who’re not wild about visiting there and having to deal with their data permissions.)

A question from one of my Tumblr followers:

Reader requestI stole it from Jorge Luis Borges, as everyone else has. (And then tinkered with the concept to suit myself: just as Borges did.)

A little background first:

Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings was published in the late 1960s, initially in Spanish in 1967 and then in an English translation in 1969 (my copy is the Discus/Avon paperback published that year). It is a compendium/anthology of twenty or so of Borges’ short fictional works for The New Yorker, and at least as many more short works either written specifically for the anthology or published elsewhere without being cited in the book. Now, though a lot of people have taken the title of this book at its face value, assuming that it’s a reference to earlier mythological or fantastic creatures, it’s sometimes not. Some of the creatures in it show signs of being Borges’s inventions, despite being attributed to other sources, and the peryton to my eye is the most obvious of these.

It doesn’t hurt to remember that Borges as a writer is tremendously playful and quite often hilariously subversive. In TBIB he’s very careful with his cites when he needs to be — his entries on “An Animal Imagined By Kafka”, “An Animal Imagined by C. S. Lewis”, “A Crossbreed”, and “The Odradek”, all carefully cite their sources and permissions in the front matter. Some other works that were apparently out of copyright he identifies without citing in the front matter (such as the wonderfully titled Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With A Few Desert and Mountain Beasts, which is now available online!). And ancient out-of-copyright resources he obviously doesn’t need to cite in too great a detail if he doesn’t want to. Which allows him to lull the reader into a false sense of security, and in some other articles, like the one about the peryton, leaves you susceptible to having the wool gently and carefully pulled over your eyes.

Here’s Borges’s full passage:

The Peryton

 

The Sibyl of Erythraea, it is said, foretold that the City of Rome would finally be destroyed by the Perytons. In the year A.D. 642 the record of the Sibyl’s prophecies was consumed in the great conflagration of Alexandria: the grammarians who undertook the task of restoring certain charred fragments of the nine volumes apparently never came upon the special prophecy concerning the fate of Rome.

…Now here we already have a problem: indeed two of them. First of all, Borges has just signalled the incoming wool-pulling by using the inevitably suspicious “It is said…” construction in the very first sentence. And secondly — regardless of whether there were copies of the Sibylline Books in the great Library of Alexandria or not — Borges has now told us twice that he’s pulling our legs by giving the number of those books as nine. The best-known legend about these is quite clear: six of these books were burned by the Sibyl herself before King Tarquin realized he’d better buy however many books remained at whatever price she was asking. And then the remaining three were destroyed by fire in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill in 83 BC. So subtle and careful a scholar as Borges does not make such “mistakes” by accident.

So, having been doubly warned by the writer that we are now in the Classical Fibbing Department, we get the following.

In time it was deemed necessary to find a source that would throw greater light upon this dimly remembered tradition. After many vicissitudes it was learned that in the sixteenth century a rabbi from Fez (in all likelihood Jakob ben Chaim) had left behind a historical treatise in which he quoted the now lost work of a Greek scholiast, which included certain historical facts about the Perytons obviously taken from the oracles before the Library of Alexandria was burned by Omar. The name of the learned Greek has not come down to us, but his fragments run:

 

The Perytons had their original dwelling in Atlantis and are half deer, half bird. They have the deer’s head and legs. As for its body, it is perfectly avian, with corresponding wings and plumage.

Its strangest trait is that, when the sun strikes it, instead of casting a shadow of its own body, it casts the shadow of a man. From this, some conclude that the Perytons are the spirits of wayfarers who have died far from their homes and from the care of their gods…

 

…and have been surprised eating dry earth… flying in flocks and have been seen at a dizzying height above the Columns of Hercules…

 

…they [Perytons] are mortal foes of the human race; when they succeed in killing a man, their shadow is that of their own body and they win back the favor of their gods.

More about them follows, but what interested me first when I read this passage was the twin issue of the creature that does not cast its own shadow (something I’ve since used elsewhere) and the part about the souls of wayfarers who die out of reach of their own gods. In the back of my mind those two concepts started running themselves together into the idea of creatures which had been human once, at least in spirit, but had taken a wrong turn somewhere — into the Lone Power’s service, specifically — and were trapped there, possibly also tormented by the idea that if they killed a human being then that human’s spirit would be forced to take their place in bondage. (Though I don’t believe this particular idea made it through into the final text of SYWTBAW: it was enough that the mere sight or smell of a human [and human spirit] not in bondage would so enrage them that they would try to kill the person on sight.)

I thought about this for a while, and the general idea seemed to have merit. But it seemed to me that nobody was going to be particularly scared of some weird unfamiliar cross between a deer and a bird. Quickly enough, though, the answer suggested itself as the sequence started to form up in my head of Nita and Kit being attacked by the LP-on-nasty-horseback as based on the Grant statue on Central Park South. Almost immediately the Wild Hunt archetype jumped up and started waving its arms shouting “Me, pick me…!” and after that it was simple: for a hunt you need hounds. Except not hounds: wolves. Big wolves. With angry hating human spirits inside them.

By way of acknowledging the debt to Borges, I kept the name for the new fusion. (Also because it had the virtue of being unfamiliar to nearly everybody. TBIB had only been out for about ten years at that point, and was still a bit of a specialist text). And there you have them: perytons, sort of mark II.

That was 1983. Since then numerous sources, often associated with card or RPG gaming, have picked up on perytons in the Borgesian sense, and scattered around the Web are various pictures of stags with wings stuck on them. These make it plain to me that almost nobody has read Borges’ text… though many know about it, more or less, from the Wikipedia page, which does not cite the pertinent details. …Meanwhile others have been discussing where Borges got the word peryton (my guess is he coined it) and other issues.

So there you have it. Nothing’s ever simple, is it?  🙂

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A Martini
booksDrinkRestaurants

The Martini Rant

by Diane Duane

Everybody gets all hot under the collar about the composition and mixology details of James Bond’s (usually) favorite mixed drink. But one piece of Bondian lore about the drink that gets lost a lot of the time is the story of how Bond got (indirectly) schooled on how not to be cheated on his Martinis.

The source of the brief but memorable rant (in Ian Fleming’s novel Thunderball) is the indefatigible Felix Leiter, whom we must assume went around the block in the CIA’s service any number of times before he ran into Bond. At one point or another he and Bond stop into a bar for some refreshment, and when the Martinis arrive, Leiter is so annoyed that he sends for the barman to remonstrate with him.

The Martinis arrived. Leiter took one look at them and told the waiter to send over the barman. When the barman came, looking resentful, Leiter said, “My friend, I asked for a Martini and not a soused olive.” He picked the olive out of the glass with the cocktail stick. The glass, that had been three-quarters full, was now half full. Leiter said mildly, “This was being done to me while the only drink you knew was milk. I’d learned the basic economics of your business by the time you’d graduated to Coca-Cola. One bottle of Gordon’s Gin contains sixteen true measures – double measures that is, the only ones I drink. Cut the gin with three ounces of water and that makes it up to twenty-two. Have a jigger glass with a big steal in the bottom and a bottle of those fat olives and you’ve got around twenty-eight measures. Bottle of gin here costs only two dollars retail, let’s say around a dollar sixty wholesale. You charge eighty cents for a Martini, one dollar sixty for two. Same price as a whole bottle of gin. And with your twenty-eight measures to the bottle, you’ve still got twenty-six left. That’s a clear profit on one bottle of gin of around twenty-one dollars. Give you a dollar for the olives and the drop of vermouth and you’ve still got twenty dollars in your pocket. Now, my friend, that’s too much profit…”

Fleming was famously careless with his research notes regarding food and drink (some authorities claim that, having sought out and been given what purported to be the perfect Martini recipe, he got it backwards when putting it in whichever book it appeared in…), but this sounds like something that either happened to Fleming in his own travels, or was something he heard about from some other source he trusted. The terse quality suggests a memory of unusual clarity. (Or notes correctly transcribed…)

Anyway, I keep misplacing this quote, so now it’s where I know I can find it…

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A desk full of work (as usual...)
Young WizardsYoung Wizards meta

At the Young Wizards end of things: an update report

by Diane Duane

Just a brief note here on how things are going.

Those of you who saw the November post about the general updating of all the Young Wizards sites (secondary to this call for opinions/advice) will already know in a general way what’s been on the agenda. That agenda has been moving forward in fits and starts, and finally there’s enough action to be worth reporting on.

The most complex part of this has been the updating and relocation to a new domain of the Young Wizards Discussion Forums. With the very welcome assistance of the support team at vBulletin (and thank you, Trevor!), the Forums have been updated to vBulletin 5 and moved into their new home. They don’t presently look that much different from the way they did before, but that situation will change over the next few months as we start exploiting the various bells and whistles that the new version of the platform has had hung on it.

Also relocated (though not yet open for business) is the Errantry Concordance. All the content from the former MediaWiki-based ErrantryWiki has been successfully ported over into a new WordPress installation there, and the Concordance as a whole is being rebuilt as an online encyclopedia, preparatory to being seriously expanded. This is going to be one of those “do it when you have a few moments to rub together” projects, and there’s not much point in attempting to put an “opening-by” date on it… not least because right now I have several writing projects on the desk, including one that I can’t discuss at the moment but which will be occupying most of my creative time until mid-year.

The remaining Young Wizards website business will involve folding the contents of the present Young Wizards: Manual Labor and Young Wizards: Interim Errantry sites into the soon-to-be-refurbished Young Wizards portal and the upcoming YoungWizardsSeries.com site. The general purpose is to have a clearer demarcation in the online sites  between information about the books (and interstitial works) themselves, and the meta having to do with the series as a whole. When all this work’s been completed, these reconfigurations will make it a lot easier for people interested in the series (or interested in revisiting it) to find the information they’re looking for. Because… let’s just say it may turn out to have been a good idea, in the next year or two, to have all this business dealt with.

Anyway, that’s where we are at the moment! I’ll drop a post about it when there’s anything new to report.

Thanks, folks!

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The Owl and some Hugo-shaped ornaments
Hugo award eligibilityWritingYoung Wizards

2021 Hugo nomination eligibility: the Young Wizards series

by Diane Duane

So it’s once more that time of year when nominations open up for the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Awards (for Discon III later this year), and it turns out that this year, once again, work of mine is eligible to be nominated. (I don’t mind saying it’s delightful to have this happening again, with the addition that this time it kind of took me by surprise. In fact I’ve only rarely had a work jump my bones as quickly as this one did… and it took someone else reminding me about it to realize that it was a qualifying work. Well, it’s been an interesting year…)

The award in question is the one for Best Series (scroll down, it’s there…), and the series in question is the Young Wizards series. The work bringing this series into play for award consideration in 2021 is Owl Be Home For Christmas, a novella-length work published in late December of 2020.

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.

Just for reference purposes: the first three novels in the Young Wizards series total approximately 270,000 words. Those were followed by another seven traditionally-published novels, totaling in the neighborhood of 900,000 words, as well as several independently-published works totaling another 250,000 words or thereabouts.

2020’s relatively unexpected addition to the series takes us into previously unexplored territory: the present day.

JD 2459186.50000 / December 2nd, 2020…

Tonight’s the night when the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is about to be lit in an elaborate ceremony in midtown Manhattan. Like everything else in the COVID-stricken world of 2020, this tree lighting has been forced to differ from all the others that have preceded it.

But there’s another reason this particular tree lighting will be unique. This tree is the one in which the tiny saw-whet owl the media christened “Rocky” was discovered, trapped, when the tree was set up two weeks ago.

The humans who helped “Rocky” and released her back into the wild had no idea of the forces about to be unleashed on New York City. For the one thing they couldn’t give the owl was the one thing she wanted most: her tree.

As a result, she’s been forced to take matters into her own claws. And it’s going to take a crack team of New York’s best and smartest wizards to keep the ensuing events from destabilizing the whole planet…

This 25,000 word novella is a canonical work in the Young Wizards universe and is set in the revised New Millennium Editions YW timeline.

…To make it easier for people to decide whether they’re interested in nominating the Young Wizards works for the 2021 Best Series Hugo award, all the nominatable (…’nominable?’ whatever…) works were available at a deep discount (a total of 75% off) at our store at Ebooks Direct. Please note that now that the nomination period is over, the duscount is no longer available.

The main works in the series are also available from its current traditional publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, via Amazon.com and other online retailers (if you prefer to acquire it from those retailers), but not discounted.

The discount will last until Discon III’s Hugo nominations close on March 19th at 11:59 (US) PDT.

…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 YoungWizards.com.)

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WritingYoung Wizards

Owl Be Home For Christmas

by Diane Duane

ETA: Owl Be Home For Christmas is now complete! You can purchase it here:

Owl Be Home For Christmas at Ebooks Direct

…Sometimes work and life come at you fast, in tandem.

I was taking a break from work on Tales of the Five 3: The Librarian last week, and (as I do frequently during the day) having a look at Twitter, when something unusual came across my dashboard: this.


…There are writers who routinely get images before words. I would (often) be one of those. And the image I got—very much sparked by the expression of the small creature in the box—was straightforward and immediate.

The response to those tweets was pretty enthusiastic, and I realized that I was in the position of the fisherman wandering up the beach after work who finds a pretty stoppered bottle washed up at the tideline, picks it up, wonders what he could get for it, uncorks it to have a look inside… and finds that the situation has abruptly changed. Because (a) the image wouldn’t let me be: and (b) …well, just look at the responses. The saying in the PR-handling business used to be: “For every person who writes to you saying that they want a thing, there are ten more who want it who haven’t bothered writing.” And leaving that issue to one side… here were all these people who do want it, and said so.

And possibly the coup de grace was being delivered the title on a silver platter by the fabulous Airawyn—

So: nothing to do but rev up the storytelling engine and get busy.

It took me a day or so to sit with the concept and decide how it was going to be handled. Normally I keep my storytelling away from the here-and-now, but dealing with this situation was going to make that impossible. I then spent another day or two in data-gathering—not necessarily stuff that was going to show in the story, but stuff that was nonetheless vital: there’s no putting flesh on the bones until the skeleton’s assembled.

But I was also waiting for a specific event to occur, as it was going to have to be part of the story: that event being this.


Once that had happened, I was ready to go, and started work in earnest.

So: a status report. I’m well into the body of the story now. My estimate at the moment is that it will run about 20.000 words. (If I need more, I’ll take more: but I refuse to push a story into being longer than it needs to for mere length’s sake.)

My intention is to drop the story on both Amazon and at Ebooks.Direct in the early evening (7PM-ish US/EST) of December 2, 2020, to coincide with the lighting of the tree in Rockefeller Center. (ETA: This didn’t happen: the story dropped at Christmas 2020.) I’ll tweet the Amazon and EBD links then, and I’ll add purchase links / widgets on this blog post/page: so you might want to bookmark it. If you’re a Twitter user, you can also keep an eye on the #OwlBeHomeForChristmas hashtag there—I’ll use it to post the occasional update between now and Wednesday.

Please note that this will be an ebook-only release. The technical challenges of a paperback or hardcover release for so short a work are too significant to attempt to deal with between now and next Wednesday. Other formats for the book will be something I’ll consider after the ebook comes out. (In particular, I might do an author-reads-it audiobook. We’ll see.)

The Ebooks.Direct version of Owl Be Home For Christmas—available in Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple Books/iBooks, and generic .epub formats—will be less expensive than the Amazon version, by (ideally) about 15%. By getting it from EBD, you support the author directly and make sure that she gets a larger slice of the price “pie”. (Meaning “all of it” instead of “70% or thereabouts.”) Getting the ebook into your e-reader or system (especially Kindle) is simpler than it used to be, and store staff will assist you if you need it. Please consider this option: and thank you!

For those of you who’re curious: This story will be told in the Young Wizards universe. That said, there are a couple of situational differences from previous works set there. (a) The emphasis—as it should be—is on the owl as primary POV character. (b) The timeline means that we’re talking about the 2020 Young Wizards universe (as a natural outgrowth of the “reset” timeline in the Young Wizards New Millennium Editions). So while you’ll be seeing familiar faces… some of them won’t be kids any more. Be prepared. (Note please, also, that this work is hereby declared a canonical work in the Young Wizards universe. So if you see things you weren’t expecting… they’ll be real things.)

Also: please note that we’ll be making a 25% donation from all our sales of Owl Be Home For Christmas to the Ravensbeard Wildlife Center, which took care of “Rocky” in the aftermath of her discovery in the soon-to-be-Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. If you feel like offsetting that contribution by dropping something extra in the author’s kitty, you can use the PayPal.me link or the “Buy A Cuppa” option at this Ebooks.Direct product page to do that. (And those of you who feel inclined to encourage the author right now can do that, too. It’s gonna be a loooong weekend and a lot of caffeine’s going to be involved on this end…)

That’s all I have to tell you at the moment. December 2 is coming, and I’ve got a lot to do.

For your interest, and your continued support: thanks, all!

(And here’s the cover…)

Cover for OWL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

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On the desk...
Fantasy and SFWritingYoung Wizards

From the Young Wizards universe: an update

by Diane Duane

Let me start by thanking everybody who saw the previous posting  discussing the changes to come to the YoungWizards.com domain, and who took the time to get back to me with their thoughts. Some response to those (and action on them) will turn up in this post.

So first of all, let me answer what are likely to be some of the most immediate questions, and then get into some detail on present forward planning.

Is there another Young Wizards novel in the offing? Yes, there is! YW #11 (as yet untitled) is plotted, and is in the process of being written.

How soon will we see it? The simplest answer to this right now is “Not in 2021.” The book is not presently under contract to any publisher, and I’m not inclined to go much further forward with it until that situation is sorted out. Also, I previously set aside the 2019-2020 period to deal primarily with other fictional universes of mine — specifically the Middle Kingdoms LGBTQ universe — and that work has continued into 2021 and will still be ongoing in 2022.

Okay, how soon will YW #11 happen after 2021? Right now there’s no telling. I’m sorry not to have anything more definite for you at this point. I think, though, that I can safely promise you that the book will turn out to have been worth waiting for, when it does finally go to press… as issues are being resolved in this work that have been hanging fire since So You Want To Be A Wizard. As regards this one, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night…” seems like the right note to strike.

Are we going to see anything new in the Young Wizards universe in the shorter term? That’s the plan, yes! Also in the writing process right now is Interim Errantry 3: A Day At The Crossings. This book will contain (as UK/Irish people might say) “what it says on the tin”:  a detailed look at a 27-hour day at the Crossings intercontinual worldgating facility—an 80K-100K-word “braided novel” with several main storylines. The plan at the moment (assuming that other presently-running projects don’t interfere) is for IE3:ADATC to be published (in print and ebook form) in Q3 of 2021. (If you don’t know about the previous works in this group, they are Interim Errantry and Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal.)

…About those other ongoing projects, BTW: besides Tales of the Five #3: The Librarian, which is (finally!) nearing completion, I do have other work on my desk that’s either too early in its development to be discussed, or that I can’t talk about for contractual or similar reasons. Sometimes stuff under contract unavoidably interferes with stuff I’m doing on my own nickel… so please bear that in mind.

…Now on to less “new”, but still interesting issues. Some of you will have seen the post that went up at Ebooks Direct a couple/few weeks back regarding the effects of Brexit on our ebook sales business. The Young Wizards books went into their first non-North American English language editions via the UK’s Transworld/Corgi all the way back in 1991… and the thought that the UK YW fans (a steadfast, patient and faithful bunch) were going to be shut out of access to the YW-verse by the irrationality of their government has been bothering me.

That said, there’s no avoiding the likelihood that the UK government is having too much fun painting itself into an increasingly Europhobic corner to see sense before the end of the year and cooperate in establishing something like a Brexit-with-deal, as opposed to the catastrophic no-deal option yawning before them. So this has become an opportunity to advance some plans that have been bubbling around here for a while.

Therefore: during Q2/32 of 2021, we’ll be launching the revised-and-updated Young Wizards New Millennium edition novels in both paperback and ebook formats worldwide*, via Amazon. (And yes, I know: I share a lot of people’s ambivalence regarding using this particular distribution entity. But right now it’s the best way to go forward with this effort and still maintain control over which countries and territories are in play—as I must do to be in compliance with my existing contracts.)

A bit more detail on this. I can’t independently release the NMEs in print format in North America and the Philippines, because those rights are held by the present US/Canadian traditional publisher, Harcourt. Nor can I “go wide” on the NME ebook rights in the North American market: similar (if a bit more complex) reasons. But, that said… both print and ebook rights in the rest of the world are another matter.

So as 2021 progresses, if you’re in any country that is not the USA, Canada or the Philippines—barring any unexpected difficulties at the big-river end of things—you will be able to buy print versions of the Young Wizards New Millennium Editions via Amazon. (Hardcovers remain an exercise for some time in 2022.) Amazon is presently putting in place ways to deal with the UK’s Brexit madness, which will relieve me of the effort of handling the paperwork-and-VAT complications at my end.

An additional bonus: this tranche of books and ebooks will also include Games Wizards Play, which until now has not been available through sales channels anywhere outside of North America. …In countries which have previously had English- or other-language versions of the Young Wizards texts (France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Russia, China…) the books will be branded as New Millennium editions. In other countries, the NMEs will be the default editions and will not need to wear any additional branding.

We are also looking at doing outside-of-North-America audiobooks of the NMEs… but since there’s no publisher to finance them (or more accurately, I’m the publisher), I must bear the cost. And if we’re going to match the quality of the US-based Recorded Books audiobooks, it’s not going to be cheap. (In particular, I would really like to retain the fabulous Christina Moore, who has done all the YW books so far. We’ll have to see if that’s possible.) This side of the project, therefore, is one that is unlikely to start up before 2022, and will depend on the success of the NMEs’ world publication to finance them. So we’ll discuss this aspect of things further in a year or so.

Anyway: news about the progress of this project as a whole (which involves creating new print versions of the ten main-sequence books and new cover art, etc., for all of them) will be posted on YoungWizards.com and the soon-to-open YoungWizardsSeries.com as it becomes available. So watch those spaces for more details! This is going to be a ton of work, but it’s been waiting in the wings for a long time and I’m excited to be able to get it going at last.

Other somewhat less-fraught YW news: After some consideration, I’ve decided that the Young Wizards discussion forums should indeed be retained, updated, and polished-up preparatory for a relaunch. This work will take place over the next couple/few months as events permit, as it’s going to be (technically speaking) a bit challenging and will also require a moderately significant cash input for new software and augmented server space.

…So, to finish up: Some of you will be wanting to know how you can assist or speed one or more of these efforts. Right now the best thing you can do is go to Ebooks Direct and buy stuff. (In particular, the YW NME box set, which remains on sale at 50% off.) Or, if you’re all stocked up, you can always use the buy-the-writer-a-coffee option here — just use the link in the right-hand column. (Among other things, now I have to run off and buy a couple of blocks-of-10-ISBNs for the new YW paperbacks/ebooks, yay… So cash is always welcome for that.) If those aren’t methods of assistance that suit you at the moment, I’d ask that you’d pass the link to this post on to others who might be interested. Retweet it if you saw it on Twitter: reblog it, if you saw it on Tumblr: share it, if you saw it on Facebook. Please and thank you!

And thanks for being interested, everybody! It’s a pleasure to be doing this work for you. 🙂

*Except for North America and the Philippines. Weird, but that’s how it is.

(meanwhile: early noodling with YW NME International cover design and concept art is already under way…)

Nita, Kit and the Lotus

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Alma-Tadema, Sappho and Alcaeus
Hobbyhorses and General RantingMythologyPoetrythings that piss you offWritersWriting

Greek mythology, feminist reclamation of lost/ancient tradition, and an interface issue: or, The Thing I Got So Cranky About The Other Day

by Diane Duane

(The other day being April 2, 2014. This post is ported in from Tumblr — I’m in the process of moving some longer posts from there to here, where they belong.)

The passage below, when I ran across it last week, initially caused my mouth to drop open in sheer disbelief. And since then the thought that it is even now wandering blithely about unchallenged has been sort of gnawing at me. So some ranting is about to ensue. If you’re not in the mood for that, best turn your eyes away now and look at some nice pics of kittens drinking beer or something.

…I can’t now even remember what brought me to this particular page, and I want to emphasize that this isn’t in any way about the OP, who doubtless thought the source (or at least the quote) was reliable.

However…

…it’s not. And since this (as some around here like to say) is relevant to my interests, I just want to drop a few notes about this one quote, and leave further considerations to those who feel like going into them.

So here’s the material that got up my nose.

Greek myths mention several Islands of Women, where Amazons lived without men, only consorting with neighboring colonies of males at certain seasons when they wanted to conceive their children. Taurus, Lemnos, and Lesbos were said to be such all-female societies. The Greeks apparently feared them. They said the women of Taurus sacrificed to their Goddess all men who landed on their shores; and the women of Lemnos had risen up against their husbands and murdered all of them at once. The Greek writers seemed to have no doubt that women could destroy whole populations of adult males, and there was no effective defense against them.
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara G. Walker (p. 26)

(rolls up her sleeves) It’s hard to even know where to begin shredding this like wet kleenex analyzing this…

In order, I guess:

“Greek myths mention several islands of Women, where Amazons lived without men…”

Okay. Even though the Amazons were specifically known1 for living on the Anatolian coast of what is now Turkey — this being the location of their main city, Thermyskira or Themyskira, depending on whose orthography / spelling you prefer: Wonder Woman fans will of course recognize the name — well, who knows? Maybe the Amazons had some all-female island colonies as well. (They are reported by a historian or two as having founded Paphos, but that city [on the island of Cyprus]  was co-ed, and all the other colonies mentioned in connection with Amazons were in mainland Turkey.) So let’s run with that possibility for the moment.

“…only consorting with neighboring colonies of males at certain seasons when they wanted to conceive their children. Taurus, Lemnos, and Lesbos were said to be such all-female societies.”

…WHOOPSIE!

Let’s look at the islands in question.

Taurus / Tauros: Or as the more recent ancients came to call it, Taurica. Only an island by courtesy. It’s a peninsula (though one sort of hanging by a thread): in fact, the southernmost peninsula of the Crimean region, which has been somewhat in the news of late. Nonetheless, whether it’s an island or a peninsula, that didn’t stop the near-classical-era ancient (male) Greeks from planting trading towns all over it.

image

Lemnos:

A genuine island, maybe two thirds of the way between mainland Greece and Turkey. Myrina is its main town.

Lesbos:

Right there southeast of Lemnos, off the present-day Turkish coast. Mitylene / Mitilini is the major city.

…These places’ mythological associations are no less valid just because they’re real than are those of places like Circe’s island of Aeaea or the Isles of the Blest. But because these places do exist, that means we’re kind of forced to apply physical laws and common sense to them.

Two out of three of these places, with good weather and the right wind, are within two to four days’ sail (if not less) of the home harbors of some of the greatest sailors of antiquity. The third one is a slightly longer trip, maybe a week to ten days of coasting depending on the weather. But even if we knew nothing else about these places, their generally exposed nature and their propinquity to a significant group of the time’s major interlocking patriarchal cultures force us to set the odds very, very low against any of these places being woman-only islands… whether the women are Amazons or not.

And as it happens, we know a lot more about all of them. We can handle that issue one island at a time as we move through the quotation.

But first a warning about something specific: the phrase “were said to be…”. Anyone who’s spent enough time on the Discovery Channel to find themselves watching some of the dodgier documentaries — the ones where the bar for telling where you got your facts is set fairly low — will recognize this phrase and its friends “It is said that…”, “Legend has it…”,  “Some say…”. This formulation is a sign of someone who either can’t be bothered to provide you with a solid citation or doesn’t have one and just wants to get on with selling you their own merchandise without being bothered too much about the sordid details (i.e., “verifiable data”). Any use of these phrases, especially in a scholarly work, should make the reader slow down and look carefully at the details.

So, island by island:

[The Greeks] said the women of Taurus sacrificed to their Goddess all men who landed on their shores…

Bzzt! Sorry, wrong answer. No women of Tauris. In fact, no women. Just one.

The writer is here referring to the myth that is the source for Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Tauris, in which Agamemnon’s daughter, theoretically sacrificed by the King for good winds on the way to the war in Troy, is instead actually caught away in the act by Artemis (who as protector of maidenhood and young innocence wants no such crap done in her name, thank you very much). Artemis proceeds to dump a deer with its throat cut onto the ground by the altar as a substitute sacrifice, and then deposits the doubtless very confused maiden in Tauris to be priestess of her temple there.2 Iphigenia is understandably shocked and horrified to find that her duty as priestess is to sacrifice to the Goddess all strangers3 who come to Tauris. Not just the men: all woman strangers too, should any turn up.

And there are definitely men living in Tauris, before, during and after the unfortunate princess’s arrival. When Iphigenia’s brother Orestes and his best friend show up to rescue her, the messenger who brings the news that she’s going to have to sacrifice these strangers is male. Additionally, Iphigenia at one point, doubting whether Artemis is actually behind this barbarous rule at all, says to herself, “Would a Goddess command such things? Would she take pleasure in sacrificial murder? I do not believe it. …It is the men of this land who are bloodthirsty and they lay their own guilt on the Gods.”4 And finally there’s the King of the Taurians, whom Iphigenia refuses to be allowed to be killed as part of her rescue because “he was kind to her”. You would think all-female cultures who only send out for guys when they want to have babies would generally be kind of short on kings. Also: you will look in vain for any evidence of the women of Tauris being Amazons.

…So we have a bit of misrepresentation here about the population of the island, and about who they were killing, and (granted, the motives being unclear by the principals’ own admission, but we’re plainly meant to think it was a let’s-all-us-women-kill-all-the-men thing) about why. …Well, maybe the writer got confused, or it was an error: these things do creep in. Let’s move on.

…[the Greeks said] the women of Lemnos had risen up against their husbands and murdered all of them at once.

In myth, this did happen once. But it was (a) “a long time ago”, and (b) extremely situational and something that the participants seemed willing, if not glad, to get over and done with.

The tl;dr version of this story comes in a number of versions spread across five or six centuries. Basically it breaks down like this:

  • Women of Lemnos fail to perform proper rites honoring Aphrodite for (apparently) several years. No one seems to know why.
  • Aphrodite gets pissed off at the women and “afflicts them with a foul odor” which causes their husbands to avoid them and instead run over to Thrace and raid the place for female sex slaves. These they bring home and screw instead of their wives.
  • The Lemnian women, very very annoyed by this turn of events, all kill their husbands (some writers say their fathers, too). The only woman in on the plot who fails to do likewise is the Lemnian princess, Hypsipyle, who manages to smuggle her father the King offshore before the mass murder goes down, and then becomes Queen of an all-female island.
  • Jason and the Argonauts arrive. They apparently have no problem with any foul odors and during a visit of at least several months quickly bed down with various Lemnian women (this turn of events being from all available data quite consensual). Numerous children are conceived. Most if not all of these children are boys, as they’re given Argonauts’ names when they’re born. Regardless of their maleness, they are not killed or sent away.
  • Jason himself hooks up with Hypsipyle during this period, and she later bears twin boys as a result, one of whom when grown becomes King of Lemnos and turns up in the Iliad. (There are ancient writers who claim that this was the cause of the odor problem: Medea, they say, inflicted it on the Lemnian women in revenge on Hypsipyle for Jason’s infidelity. In any case, you wonder what the heck he was thinking; you’d think he’d have worked out by then that you seriously did not screw around with / on Medea. But it’s also true that evidence suggests Jason was not exactly the sharpest knife in the block.)

Anyway, the ancient writers go out of their way to make it plain that this long-ago event, distant even in mythological terms, had been a temporary situation (cf. Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 114: “Lemnos happened to have no males at the time [when the Argonauts visited the island]”) and had nothing to do with the way things normally went on Lemnos.

So… a wee bit more of the truth being bent, there? Or not being completely told, in order to buttress a point the writer’s trying to make? Also: these women are not Amazons, either. Somewhere along the line, with all this other stuff going on, someone surely would have mentioned.

Anyway. Last of all comes Lesbos, “said to be…” one of three “all-female societies.”

Well, not in any myth I can find a record of. And, historically, never. Certainly the mother-goddess Cybele was worshipped there in deep antiquity, to judge by the pottery, but there is no sign of the island ever having been an all-female reserve. As one can judge from the Lemnian situation, when such things existed or occurred, notice was taken in the literature.

Sappho in particular would probably have been amused to hear about this allegation. She lived in the island’s main town of Mitylene for most of her life, as far as we can tell, and had two (maybe three) adult brothers who to present best knowledge show no signs of having been murdered or exiled for their maleness. Yes, she sponsored a thiasos where the possibility or benefits of an all-female society were discussed with the participants. But Lesbos was co-ed — cf. famous male Lesbians5 like Alcaeus, Phaenias and Terpander. (And still no sign of Amazons.)

(sigh) So.

The multiple errors in the paragraph above could have a number of causes: (a) A confused writer. (b) A lazy writer. (c) A writer who’s pushing a specific thesis or agenda and doesn’t mind the reader being accidentally misled into it. I am not a mindreader and can’t be certain of which of the above might be accurate. But the impression I’m left with is that of someone trying to bend a complex set of facts to her own purposes.

Now, in fiction, as fiction, that kind of thing has its place. But in what purports to be a genuine history of the suppression of truths about female roles in religion, mysticism and spiritual life in the ancient world? Engaging in jiggery-pokery with the facts as they are known is not a good thing, no matter how good one considers one’s own intentions to be. One does not combat lies or suppressions of the truth with misrepresentations and other truths themselves bent out of shape.

All I can say further about Walker’s book (as I don’t have it and have never read it in detail) is that I have dipped into numerous quotes from it here and found a significant number of them to be at best kind of factually suspect and at worst as potentially error-ridden and misleading as the single paragraph discussed above.

I’m not saying that the book will not have been useful in forming (or opening up) potential feminist thought in many ways for its readers as  regards the ancient world and what has happened to the Goddesses of old, and as regards women’s interior/mystical/mythological lives and how they may be enhanced and enriched by thoughtful reclamation of the lost, strayed or stolen. But I do want to suggest that content in this book should be taken with a grain of salt, and checked before internalizing. Because if the above is broadly representative… then it needs checking.

…That’s all.

1Appolonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2. 370 ff (trans. Seaton): “[regarding the Black Sea coast of Anatolia :] Onward from thence the bend of a huge and towering cape reaches out from the land, next Thermodon at its mouth flows into a quiet bay at the Themiskyreian headland, after wandering through a broad continent. And here is the plain of Doias, and near are the three cities of the Amazones, and after them the Khalybes…” Plainly not some vague description of Someplace Far, Far Away In The Story, but a landscape the writer thought might possibly have been familiar to some of the people reading or hearing this. It’s like something out of a Michelin Green Guide.

2One has to wonder whether this particular misfortune of Iphigenia’s is meant to be thought of as a near-final operation of the curse of the House of Atreus, a godawful karmic trainwreck that had already gone on for generations. Certainly the ancient writers return again and again to the family’s alternately horrible and tragic doings with a near tabloid-like fascination.

3Edith Hamilton‘s great classic Mythology (liberally studded with Hamilton’s beautifully clean translations from original sources) narrows this specification down to “all Greeks”. Whatever: gender isn’t the issue here.

4Hamilton, ibid., pp. 366ff.

5How often does one get to use that phrase legitimately? I couldn’t resist.

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Figuring it out
Young WizardsYoung Wizards meta

Changes coming at YoungWizards.com: your opinion(s) solicited

by Diane Duane

(waving at the online Young Wizards fandom) Folks, it’s time to look at some changes that are coming to the YW online presence, and discuss at least one of them with you in detail.

The YoungWizards.com domain has been around for a goodish while now — since June of 2002 — and has gone through a fair amount of growth and change over that period. It’s been home to the series’s main website, a number of smaller/younger ones, a wiki-cum-mini-encyclopedia, and a discussion forum of great complexity and looniness. it’s been hacked a couple of times, and is attacked every day without fail by email-spammers and scammers and people who want to attach it to their troll farms… you name it. The usual stuff; and around here we deal with these vicissitudes on a daily basis and move on.

That said, the world (and its search engines and software languages/platforms…) move(s) on too. So it’s time for us to be doing the same. And as I discuss this process I’m going to have a question or two for those of you interested in responding, so please read on if you’re interested in having some input into this sordid enterprise. 🙂

First things first: YoungWizards.com is not going anywhere, but it’s going to be gradually repurposed as a gateway site for the other YW installations, old and new. Right now the crowd of stuff lodged at that domain is overtaxing the present server–not to mention making it difficult to enact some kinds of change in one part of the setup without making that change to all the others as well. (Right now PHP updating is a bit of an issue, for an example… but let’s leave the technical stuff to one side for the moment.) Having all the YW eggs in the same basket also makes everything more vulnerable to DDoS attacks, hacking, crashes, overload downtime, etc etc.

So. In a small, gradual way, the changes have already begun. The now-frozen Errantry Concordance, for example, is already in the process of being moved to its own site at ErrantryConcordance.com — WordPress, this time, not Mediawiki: we’re done with the wiki approach now. A full-blown encyclopedia makes more sense, and it can better be expanded in its new site, with plugins tailored to that purpose. (Fun fact: R*ssian hackers arrive every damn day to attack the new Concordance site, which amuses me while I repeatedly punch the Banning Your Whole IP Range Forever button. WHY are they attacking an encyclopedia? Or maybe the Lone Power’s just bored.) (eyeroll)

The structure of the YoungWizards.com website proper has been due for an update for a good while, and will shortly be getting one. With an eye to this (and to the terms people normally use on Google and elsewhere to look for information about the main series of books and the interstitial-works spinoffs), the pages having to do specifically with the core YW novels will shortly be moved to a new installation at YoungWizardsSeries.com. (Some time in Q1/2 of 2021.) When this is done, the YoungWizards.com gateway will send visitors there either by forwarding (i.e, 301 redirect, for those familiar with the concept) or very broad hints. 🙂

Other “cousin” sites that weren’t particularly well-visited are having their resources redistributed and their independent installations closed down. The Young Wizards: Manual Labor site, for example, has been shuttered for the moment and its contents will probably be restructured and moved — haven’t decided just where yet. (Some of the posts there might be folded into FicFoundry.com in the near future, assuming I can find a rationale for that.) The Feline Wizardry strand of the YW-verse will be rehoused at FelineWizards.com over the course of late August/early September. The fate of the Young Wizards: Interim Errantry site is still being considered. The site at GamesWizardsPlay.com will be closed down and will redirect to a page at YoungWizardsSeries.com. And so everything will be much tidier.

…But this leaves us with one last issue to be handled. Nearly as anciently-established at the YoungWizards.com domain as the main site is the vBulletin installation hosting the Young Wizards Discussion Forums. And I’m pondering what to do about these, for they’ve been migrated once already (from their initial home at the long-departed Groupee forum platform) and it was a serious nuisance and took (weeks? months?) off my life.

On one side of the argument: The Forums aren’t much visited these days (possibly because people don’t know about them? or have grown more used to meeting on bigger platforms). They consume a lot of server resources. They’re routinely attacked by hackers (once a week or so would be normal, though sometimes more often). Every update to their software costs me a lump of money that I can’t really tell if I get back.

And I’m up against this fact again at the moment. The server as a whole needs to move up to PHP 7.x if it’s to stay secure, but doing so will cost me a couple/few hundred euro…and for what? The present vBulletin install will not run on 7.x. The future vBulletin install, if I upgrade it, will not run on (the present) 5.4. Even if I do update it, the migration is going to be a pain in the butt at a time when, to put it gently, my butt already has enough pains. (There is also the possibility of migrating the Forums to a WordPress-based BBPress / BuddyPress or similar installation, but features would inevitably be lost, and as I said… Butt. Pains. Too Many.)

Yet the other side of the argument: In this time of increasingly badly-behaved Big Platforms, I kind of like the idea of reclaiming fan space from them and directing it back into hands that are more concerned about the people who use it: who’re able to see a fandom as having value besides mining for data and displaying ads to. I would also hate to lose the hundreds and thousands of ruminations, thoughts and squees, and the endless goofery and cheerful laughter of the many, many Young Wizards fans who have been our visitors there. Archiving the place, freezing it in amber (which would still require upgrading it to new and better software / facilities) would be sad. In particular, closing it all down and losing the voice of Peter Murray, our much-loved sysadmin who worked so valiantly for so long, before he died, on rationalizing the Young Wizards timeline, would be dreadful. And I say nothing of the Topic of Great Randomness: established 2003 (and its most recent post in April of this nutball year). Thirteen thousand pages of the Topic that Could Not Be Stopped: a whole fandom’s stream of consciousness in one place.

(sigh) Sentiment, yeah? Color me guilty.

…But still. I still need an answer to the question: Who would come to the Forums if they were moved and upgraded? Would you? The Forums were a vibrant, busy place once upon a time. They could be again. But not without y’all. Retaining them is going to cost me money that might have gone for groceries (and yes, of course this is an issue: do I look like a vast multinational corporation to anyone here? If so, you need your eyes checked), and time that might have been spent writing, and …You get the picture. I don’t want to be doing this for nothing.

So give me a sign. Let me know if you care about such a place, and visiting it. (Possibly by visiting it now!) Lacking data — lacking input — I don’t see that I have much choice but to consider closing the Forums down. …Otherwise: other YW work goes forward.

Responses in the comments here, if you’d be so kind: or over at the Tumblr, or at the Young Wizards page at Facebook.

Please and thank you!

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The outline tree can be bare at first...
booksWritingWriting adviceWriting process

Outlining: one writer’s approach

by Diane Duane

A note as we begin: Mostly this blog (per its name) is a place I talk about just about everything but writing. Over time, though, people have started asking me questions about the business and practice of novel- and screenwriting, and I’ve been thinking about where to put the answers. Finally I figured something out. So this post—along with various others on writing that have wound up here or on my Tumblr over time—will be colocated at the new FicFoundry.com site when it goes live in mid-2021. Eventually this post will be redirected from here to FF.com… just so people know.

First of all: The tweet from Rebecca F. Kuang that started off the thread is here.

Then adding:

…What followed was an off-the-cuff recreation of an ask-box answer on Tumblr that goes back a few years (so if you follow me over there and this seems familiar to you, you’ll know why).

…Let me say from the outset that from the beginning of my career as a professional writer I have always been a plotter. This started out, not as an instinctive preference or a random developmental thing, but as a mere fact of life—because after I sold my first book I went straight into screenwriting. And what’s important here is that, if you’re writing for series TV, there is no pantsing allowed. PERIOD. Your story editor (or producer, or showrunner, or head-of-story) needs to know immediately what the paying customers are going to be getting: needs to know exactly. Therefore the first thing you usually do (when not pitching verbally, or else having just done so) is submit a précis [very short description of characters and plot, 2-3 pp] or premise [same but longer: 8-10pp] for approval. Until this paperwork is turned in and approved, you’re not commissioned to do the work at all. So outlining—even if just a very simple sort—is at the very root of that entire creative process. Then you go on to a full outline (depending on the length of the script to come & how much money is riding on the work, this might be 20-30 pp…) before the screenplay stage. Every stage of the business of screenplay production has some kind of outline underpinning it.

So: multiply such a set of events by twenty or thirty scripts and you can see how with this kind of work history, if you’re not already an outliner, you’re likely to get hardwired that way in a big hurry. By the time I started my second and third novels in the mid-’80s, I was pretty much locked in as a plotter/outliner for life. And it’s worked quite well for me.

As regards the process of constructing an outline: C. J. Cherryh taught me a method which I now think of as “the Shopping List Technique” and which has served me well for the last three and a half decades or so.

Simply this: you sit down and make a list of the ten things that have to happen in your novel—the character actions or physical events without which your story simply cannot occur. Then, when you’re sure you’ve got pretty much the ten major “event beats” or character issues nailed down, you break each of those ten things into its own section and list the ten things that have to happen surrounding that event or supporting that character action. You take your time over this work, because this is the skeleton of the body of your work to come—the physical / emotional / action structure on which you’re going to build your novel.

And rather than being restrictive, being scene-by-scene detailed at this stage of the work is incredibly freeing. Having this solid scaffolding to build on lets you turn your full attention to character business and interaction… because you already know who’s got to go where and what they’ve got to do. You can now wallow in Drama and Spectacle and All The Feels, and not have to waste time sweating the workaday details of the who-goes-where-and-what-happens choreography.

You have, in essence, drawn your road map. Now you journey. If (along the way) you find that the road wiggles in ways that work better for your story than the original ones—then, fine, you redraw that part of the map. But the map preserves for you a sound basic representation of where you’re going; something you can fall back on in need, or if your focus shifts without warning.

Let me spend a little time here dealing with the actual process of outlining the way I do it. (And naturally I’m going to preface this with the caveat that just because this works for me is no reason for anyone to take this method as any kind of gospel. Finding your own way is a vital part of the Writer’s Journey. But if some part of this seems to work for you: steal, adapt, run off with the goodies! Others shared what worked for them with me: it’s a pleasure to pay that forward.)

Those lists of ten-things-broken-down-into-ten-more-things start out for me as incredibly messy scribblings on the fabled Magic Note Paper and then get typed into whatever outline processor I’m using at the moment. …Unfortunately I have none of those messy pages to show you, because as they’re transcribed, I destroy them to keep from confusing myself later as to whether that material’s been handled or not. …These days, anyway, the lists go into Scrivener …and the result is likely to look something like this.

Screenshot from the TALES OF THE FIVE #3: THE LIBRARIAN outline

…The formal breakdown-of-tens may or may not remain static or be visible in such a document at any given point due to sections or bits of business being combined or telescoped into one another, and the numbers of beats and sections may change without warning. This is perfectly normal for novel outlining. You discover as you start more closely investigating / filling in the Tree of Tens that some sections need different contents, lengths, or rhythms.

This is the “filling in empty spaces on your map” department, where (for me anyway) the real exploration and revelation of the story happens. In the outliner, scraps of scenes, dialogue, and descriptions of business can now get slotted in. (Scrivener makes it a lot easier to organize and rearrange them than it used to be in a Word document: but it doesn’t matter in the slightest in what kind of word processor you’re doing this. Just break the ten “big sections” into divisions big enough for you to comfortably work in.) In these separate sections, action can be amplified or refined: motives and character interactions can be expanded and explored.

In my case, the outline sections and subsections start to contain long text passages that arise to be written while considering the subsection titles. (Considering them as prompts may be helpful.) Or they may just contain very linear notes about what has to happen. Or both. And this part of the outlining can go on for a good while, as it becomes clearer what material is needed in the story and what’s surplus to requirements.

This business of describing what has to happen—in the strictly linear sense—will normally be pretty much complete before I’m ready to submit anything to an editor. It may be helpful to think of what we’ve been discussing so far as a much expanded or differently-structured version of what a scriptwriter might consider a beat sheet / beat outline. But also for consideration here should be what kind of outline you’re going to send to your commissioning editor when you’re querying and they ask you for a specific kind of “partial”, the traditional “three-chapters-and-an-outline”.

Around here, this sort of outline gets handled in different ways. The editor may have worked with me before and may already be familiar with how my outlines reflect the finished novel, even though they may not be broken out into chapters. Those editors will tend to get an outlined description of events that’ll be heavier on the emotional context. Example: the premise-cum-outline I sent Harcourt for The Wizard’s Dilemma. This is on the short side because I knew my editor was perfectly familiar with the first four books in the series.

On the other hand, one may be pitching to an editor one hasn’t worked with before, in which case breaking the outline clearly into chapters may be smarter. This version of a novel outline was what went to my editors on what became The Book of Night with Moon. Since in this case the editors already had chapters 1 through 3 as part of the pitch package, what they then got was the outline for the book onward from chapter 4. (You’ll have to just imagine the first three chapters. Essentially, a trio of cat wizards pick up an unexpectedly punk-ish apprentice.)

Now, the linear-looking stuff that you saw in the Scrivener screenshot above, and the outlines that went to the editors and sold the books, are obviously very different. The latter sort of outline is synthesized from the former. But it’s important to do so with the emotions, and the emotional content, fully in place.

And this is where the problem that @kuangrf was mentioning in that earlier tweet can easily be handled. While the List-of-Ten-Tens method is extremely effective for handling the mere business of physical action (“A goes to B, kills C, flees the country”), it’s just as effective for structuring the flow of emotional events and interactions among characters. I routinely include the two “streams” in the same section, particularly because for me they need to be driving each other; it seems inevitable to me that what you have to do will drive how you feel about doing it. So no need for an outline to be dry or abstract! In fact it works better (I think) if it’s not. The more emotional juice you can pump into it, the more will ooze out when the reader bites.

For example: the very first of the ten-of-ten for Tales of the Five #3: The Librarian (which we’ve been looking at in the screengrabs) said “[King] Freelorn has an unnerving dream that tells him he’s got to go on a journey…”. And the first of that chapter’s ten subsections simply said “He wakes up too early and spends a while looking at [his husband] Herewiss in ‘missing you already’ mode: then gets up, does his morning stuff, and goes to work.” And the first time I sat down to work on that chapter, I got this right back from that section’s prompt:

Text from TALES OF THE FIVE #3, THE LIBRARIAN
(A concept-art image of the moment is here.)

…So bake the emotion into the outline along with the physical action / broader thematic structure, and it will do it nothing but good. And make your job easier.

…There the thread pretty much ended. There’s just one background / thematic thought I want to add.

I think there’s too broadly spread-about (and often unquestioningly accepted) a narrative that says that outlines are somehow creativity-deadening or -defeating, or will suck the life or spontaneity or whatever out of your prose writing. Let me qualify this assertion immediately by saying that I understand perfectly well that there are writers for whom this mode of novel management doesn’t work; that they’ve attempted it, and feel that valuable creative energy is lost to them in the structuring process. That experience must be respected. Whatever you do that works for you is valid.

But I do feel that outlining isn’t given a fair shake, a lot of the time, by people who’ve never tried it and just don’t like the sound of it because it doesn’t sound fun enough. And what troubles me most about this is that too much unexamined advocacy for the Yay Let Us Be Utterly Free And Unfettered In Our Creativity school of thought* is depriving a lot of new writers of a really terrific tool that can keep you from doing something that over weeks and months and years is truly terrible: wasting creative time.

For my money, possibly the single most poignant line in Avengers: Endgame was Tony Stark saying to his dad (in both bittersweet and quite ironic mode, considering) that “no amount of money ever bought a second of time”. When you’re early on in your creative career, and possibly have your best energy levels at your command, it’s easy to feel as if all eternity is before you… as if blowing a week or a month (or six months or a year) on the free-and-unstructured development of a project is no big deal. But later on, in both the short and long terms, you may find yourself revisiting that attitude with considerable regret. And the paradox attached to the resistance of outlining among new / just-getting-started writers is that this is the stage at which it’s most likely to be useful to you. From that earlier post on Tumblr:

At the very beginning of this process, outlining is the easiest and most straightforward way to go, and eliminates the chance of you wasting time by running down a lot of blind alleys and getting caught up in choices that you don’t need to be trying to make at this stage of the operation. Later on, as you get better at this setup process and more confident about it, you can dump outlining if you find yourself disliking it and are able to produce reliable similar-quality results without it. For now, though? Help yourself out by making yourself a shopping list until you can be more certain you won’t forget the stuff you went to the store for.

So let an older writer just say here to the younger ones, the newer ones: We want more of your work, and of your best work: not less. Outlining might work for you—might indeed save you surprisingly large amounts of time, uncertainty and frustration that would otherwise be wasted in waiting for the stars to align or the Muse to arrive or whatever. Just give it a shot, okay? Please and thank you.

…So that’s that. Thanks for reading. And believe it or not, I actually do have to go work on the outline for something at the moment. So if you’ll excuse me? …And enjoy your day.

*Please don’t mistake me here. I’ve written in that mode often enough, and it’s utterly fabulous when it’s working correctly. But over the long run, over a career, with deadlines and other people’s jobs riding on your output turning up in a timely manner, depending on it always to work is dangerous. C.S. Lewis says somewhere that the greatest illusion in which creative people indulge themselves is that what they’ve done once, they can do always…

Also, for those who’ll inevitably ask: yes, I’ve tried pantsing! In fact I’m doing a pantsing project right now. And it is LIKE BREAKING ROCKS WITH MY HEAD. Excruciatingly difficult and painful! But I committed to [REDACTED FAMOUS WRITER] that I’d do this to give the concept a fair shake… so I will be following that project through to the end. (It’s this one. It is entirely possible that I’ll fail at this in ways that have never been seen before, but for fairness’s sake it has to be done. Because I can’t fairly ask people to do something, i.e. attempt the Completely Different Method, that I’m not willing to do myself…)

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CrossingsCon 2021 splash page
ConventionsCrossingsCon 2021Young Wizards

CrossingsCon 2021: We’ve got dates!

by Diane Duane

A lot of you will know that 2019 was kind of a busy year for me. Unquestionably one of the most fun things to happen during the year was CrossingsCon, the Young Wizards and adjacent-media convention in Canada — specifically, in Montréal, Québec. I had a fabulous time there (which frankly is only to be expected when people go out of their way to throw you a con…), and it left me immediately looking forward to the announcement of the next one.

It’s my great pleasure to tell you that we’ve reached that point in time. CrossingsCon 2021 will be held on August 6-8 of 2021, in Montréal! And the convention will take place in its previous (and extremely hospitable) venue, the DoubleTree by Hilton Montréal. (I have to say I’ve rarely been fonder of a convention hotel: perfectly located and surrounded by places to get good food in all kinds of price ranges.)

I am so looking forward to getting back over there and hanging out with one of the most affable and effective convention committees one could hope to meet… as well as all the other fabulous people, attendees and guests, who’ll be in attendance as well.

Convention registration is now open! All you need to do to get your badge is stop by the CC2021 website’s registration page.

I look forward to seeing as many of you as can make it to Montréal!

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Segnbora and an associate take five
Awards and award nominationsMiddle KingdomsMiddle Kingdoms metaWriting

2020 Hugo Nomination Eligibility: the Tale of the Five Series

by Diane Duane

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 this year, once again, work of mine is eligible to be nominated. (I confess to being pleased this is happening again, 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 second of a bridging series of five novella- or novel-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 work, the novella Tales of the Five: The Levin-Gad, was published in August 2018 (making the T5 series nomination-eligible last year). The work triggering nomination-eligibility this year is T5: Levin-Gad‘s sequel, Tales of the Five: The Landlady, published in May 2019—a novel set about three years in MK continuity after the events of Levin-Gad. (The remaining three works in the bridging sequence will be published during 2020 and 2021.)

In this 75,000-word novel set in the main character through-line of the Door Into… series, sorceress and swordswoman Segnbora tai-Enraesi—last scion of one of the Forty Noble Houses of Darthen and hero of the great War against the Shadow—is forced to come to grips with the one part of her life she’s successfully avoided for more than a decade: her day job.

 

With motherhood no longer enough of an excuse to get her off the hook, Segnbora’s liege lady Eftgan of Darthen sends her off to start restoring to working order the long-declined House of which Segnbora is now Head. Both of them know this will be hard work. But Segnbora doesn’t realize how hard until, while visiting her lands in Darthen’s rural north, one Holding of House tai-Enraesi turns out to be concealing a danger unexpected enough to challenge even a companion of Dragons and a wielder of the blue Fire of Power…

To make it easier for people to decide whether they’re interested in nominating the Tale of the Five for the 2020 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. If a sale is in progress at the store, this will render your discount even deeper.

The trilogy is also available at Amazon (if you prefer to acquire it there), but not discounted. The first two bridging works are available exclusively at Ebooks Direct, and will remain so until the next three works are complete.

The discount will last until Hugo nominations close on March 13th at 11:59 (US) PDT.

…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.)

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