Posts Tagged ‘writing’
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Home Again, and Back to Work
Book tours are wonderful. They are like six or seven days out of someone else’s life. I wake up knowing exactly what I’m going to do that day, down to the minute, and I arrive on time and organized, and I do it. It’s wonderful. That is due to the efforts of people such as Alice Moss who kept me organized and Tony Connell, who has handled the driving on every UK book tour I’ve done, and the rest of the HC staff who set things up and make them go so smoothly.
Then there are the book stores and the book store staffs. At every single store we visited, I felt very welcomed. It is always a pleasure to talk to book store people. They know what’s coming out and from who and give me tips about new writers to watch or the book that is hidden over in the YA section but is actually some of the best new fantasy they’ve seen. I love the delightful mess of book store back rooms. There are signed posters and teetering piles of books, notes warning you off of eating someone else’s sandwich in the frig, and the wonderful clutter of people who love books and stories. It’s an intimate peek into the day to day lives of the place where it either does or doesn’t happen for a book and its author. In the final accounting, if an author does not have book sellers ‘hand-selling’ the book because they themselves enjoyed it . . . well, then, you just may not sell your next book at all!
I never really know how to thank all the people involved. Without exception, they all put in a lot more than they are being paid to do. The editorial folks do all the extras because at the end of the day, what they really want to do is put out a book they are really proud of. The book store people are all about sharing whatever wonderful book they have just read.
So, for me, a book tour is a solid week of spending time with the sort of people I enjoy the most.
A special thanks is due to fellow writer Terie Garrison. Terie and I became friends first on the Internet, and then at conventions. When I took an extra week in England after the book tour, Terie appeared to offer my family and me a jaunt to Stone Henge. And then we went on to Avebury and the Long Barrow. Words cannot describe the wonder of those places. Stone remembers.
I am glad to be back home, at my desk, with my cats and dogs and various sorts of kids and neighbors wandering through. But it’s a bit hard to put windswept hillsides and towering cathedrals out of my brain and settle down to my work again. I think my best souvenirs are a handful of flints gathered from the fields around the Long Barrow, and half of a story about Goblins that came to my mind during a cab ride. If I can write that as well as I want to, it may possibly appear in the story collection I’m working on, though it’s much more Lindholm than Hobb.
Well, as fellow writer Fiona McIntosh puts it, I need to apply the ‘bum glue’ and keep myself in my desk chair and my fingers on the keys for the next few months now. It’s so much easier to write a journal entry or answer some email and pretend it’s writing work than it is to settle down and ask myself, ‘where is the next scene set, and how does it begin?’ This is my fourth run at writing the story of the Piebald Prince. I think I’ve finally found the right narrator, the person who is in place to tell the story first hand. The trouble with that is that she knows too much, and as a result, the tale is already longer than I thought it would be. It’s tempting to say, "It’s too long. Put it back on the shelf and write something else." But I fear that if Ido that one more time, it will never be written at all.
So, please, wish me well. If I stick to my resolve, you will not see much of me here for awhile. Time for me to pin down to the paper the stories I’ve been chasing.
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Dragon Keeper passes another milestone.
So, I’ve finished Dragon Keeper.
Yes, again.
The finish line this time was to go through the preliminary galleys looking for errors. Galleys are a print out of the manuscript that mimics the pages of a book. The title page is there, the chapter headings, the page numbers, all as it will be when it appear between covers. It is the last, final, ultimate opportunity to author and editor to find any mistakes. So, I don’t skim. I read painstakingly with a bookmark, line by line, word by word, character by character. And I find mistakes of my own making.
Such as a paragraph whereI changed a character’s name.
And one where the character’s gender briefly changes.
And little things such as changing ‘a’ to ‘an’. Checking to make sure that ‘stridden’ is really a word. Yup. It is. Not sure about yup, but stridden is definitely a word.
So I sat for three days, post-its in hand, and read the whole book yet again. Every time I found an error, I noted it on a post-it and stuck it to the page so that it protruded from the manuscript. In ‘olden days’ I would have made corrections neatly in the margin and sent it back, air express, to the editor. These days I sit down and compose an email that logs every change thus:
Page15, line 27 Change dragon to dragons
I had four pages of double spaced entries like that. And even as I send them off, I know that, as always, there will be little errors that escape both me and the copy editor. It just happens. The eye sees what it expects to see on the page, and I’ve seen this book so many times now that I’ve all but memorized parts of it.
A note to those who care about these things. I think I used the phrase ‘hare-brained’ too many times. Let me know what you think when you read it.
At midnight last night, I launched my email corrections,and thought to myself, yet again, "Well, that’s done, then."
But writing is never done. The process of finishing this book is always overlapped with starting the next one and tidying up threads from the previous one. There is always writing work to be done.
Today, bright and early, I sent the same list of corrections to the Dutch editor, so that he and both translators can catch any errors I’ve passed on to them.
Tonight, I submerge again in volume two of Chronicles, titled Dragon Haven.
Tomorrow, at 10, I will journey back in time to an earlier book, as I confer wtih Recorded Book about the correct pronunciations of names and other peculiar words in Renegade’s Magic for the audio book.
Taped to the wall is a note from Gardner, reminding me that although the deadline for that story is October he really hopes all the writers will deliver months earlier than that.
Another reminder tells me that I’ll be off to Conestogacon very soon indeed. Shouldn’t I think about getting my hair cut, and finding a clean pair of jeans to pack?
And littering the tidy schedule of a writer, thick as fallen leaves in a forest around the trees, are the bits of my real life. Easter. Spring Break. Send that daughter off to Nationals in Atlanta with her FIRST team. Find a First Communion dress and a gift for that grand-daughter. Weed the strawberry bed. Do four loads of laundry. Cut the dead raspberry canes out of the bed and tie up this year’s ones. Visit my son’s house and climb up in his big old plum tree to show him which branches I’d cut if I were pruning it. Then cut those branches. Make an appointment with the tax accountant to finally settle that hash. Balance the check book against the bank statement. Play Legos with my grandson.
Somehow it all fits together. And I wouldn’t trade it for any other life.
Robin
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The Overdue Book
So horrible a feeling. I was certain I was going to finish in November, and have a lovely laid back holiday season, followed by jumping on the new story collection this month.
Instead, here I am. Just passed Page 920. I thought I was nearing the end at page 700. Will these characters please just solve their problems and let me have a day off?
This past month has been a cornucopia of mishaps for me. First there was the really nasty computer virus that waltzed right in past my Norton. Luckily, I’ve experienced that sort of disaster before (Hm. Should that sentence start with ‘luckily’?) and as a result I’m both paranoid and fanatic about backing up my work. So I took my back up disk over to the beater kiddy computer and kept on working while mine was at the shop. Unfortunately, the CD burner on that computer is out of whack. And it’s too old to understand what a thumb drive is. So I then embarked on all sorts of hi-jinks to save my new pages and get them transferred back to my repaired computer.
A short time after that, my external hard drive started ticking like a clock. Not a good noise. Okay, take that to the shop.
Then the basement heater stopped working. Come ON! It gets really chilly in my basement office when the gas fireplace won’t kick on. And the Pi complained very loudly about having to help me write down here under such adverse circumstances. She’s a grand old lady of catdom at 17, and considers a warm hearth her right.
At one time, in a pique of frustration, I went out to do some yardwork in the hopes of making an attitude adjustment. I knew there had to be something going right in my life. Unfortunately, the best I could come up with was, "Well, at least frozen dog poop is easier to pick up when you’re cleaning the yard and it’s cold." Not exactly something I want to add to my ‘count your blessings’ list, but there it is.
Well, what can you do, except keep on typing.
So, here I am, 19 days past deadline, typing away. The fireplace is fixed–well, actually I discovered a work-around. And the external hard drive is back and purring quietly on the corner of my desk. My new Panda antivirus seems to be keeping the bad stuff away from my computer.
And life goes on.
And page 921 beckons me.
Robin
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Setting new goals
Well, September is upon us, and the deadline for Dragon Keeper is December 1. Which means that actually the publishers want it by December 31st, so I set my personal deadline a month early. That allows me that final month to do all my ‘go backs’ and fixes after I let it cool for a week or so.
The pace I’ve been setting up to now is 1000 words a day. That’s every day, no exceptions. IF I were actually faithful to that, I’d have 365,000 words by the end of a year. But I’m human, and sometimes I’m sick or lazy or the computer goes to the shop or whatever. Nonetheless, I’ve actually done a pretty good job of keeping up with that this year.
One prompter I use is a pocket sized notebook on my desk. It has the date, the page numbers I wrote that day, and a word count for the day. It helps me on those nights when I really want to push back from the desk and go to bed.
But now it’s time to turn on the steam. As of tomorrow, when the grandkids are back in school for full days, I’m going to be going for 2000 words a day. I’m putting this out in public as a good way to make me grit my teeth and stay up until that is what I get each night.
1000 words works out to about 3 manucript pages a day. Now I’ll be going for 6. I think that 20 manuscript pages makea pretty good chapter, so this is going to also increase the pace at which I’m writing the book. Chapters will go by faster.
I’m doing something a bit different in the way I’m telling this story. Farseer and Tawny Man were very linear and chronological, with few gaps in time. Dragon Keeper will have leaps, some of days, a few of years. It lets me go, for example, from a courtship to the character as someone in an established relationship a few years later. But I already think that I’m going to be doing a number of ‘go backs’ to insert more bridges in those gaps.
I’m already looking forward to 2009. In my mind, it’s The Year of the Short Story. I’ve got so many ideas stacked up. I’m trying to decide how to undertake creating new works for the collection. Spend the first months just writing stories, and the next six months tweaking and improving them? Write, polish, and move on to the next one? It’s going to be a very different year, unlike anything I’ve ever done before.
So, wish me luck on wrapping up this book, and on plunging into shorter works next year.
Robin
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repeat from the newsgroup
This was actually written in response to post #38275 on the Robinhobb newsgroup at sff.net. Mark asked some excellent questions about the Farseer books in relation to the Soldier Son books. I found myself writing a much longer response than I usually did and going into detail on an area that I’ve avoided up to now. So I think I’ll put it up here as well.
You draw some interesting parallells between the trilogies. My first impulse was to dismiss them (No connection at all!) But as often happens, readers may see more clearly than the writer when common themes are touched upon in different books.
When I first wrote Farseer, at the end of Assassin’s Quest, I firmly believed that I was finished with Fitz. Some people found the ending sad or even tragic.
My personal feeling was that he had fulfilled his role as a hero, which demanded a certain, oh very well, ah, a high level of sacrifice. Because of my own personality, I saw the final scenes of him as peaceful and fulfilling. There he was, in the solitude he’d always craved, with his wolf. (It was definitely a happy ending for Nighteyes!)It was over a year later that I began to feel twitches of writing more about Fitz. I don’t think I was trying to ‘fix’ the ending so much as that I’d realized the releasing of dragons would have a definite effect on things up in the Six Duchies. I knew where I was going with Liveship Traders. And I’d begun to have the feeling that there was more to Fitz’s story. A rough chapter or three convinced me I was right. But I set them aside to finish writing Liveships.
With Nevare, the ending was fairly clear to me from the beginning. As I’ve commented before, I think the most reasonable place to end a book is where the next story would begin. So, although on the surfae it looks as if Nevare has a ‘happily ever after’ there, I personally could see a lot of complications for what he had ahead of it. But it was a good place to say, ‘but this part of his life is now told.’ For me, it’s a satisfactory ending.
I think I will go ahead and admit that when I wrote Fool’s Fate, I thought that I would be returning to Fitz’s story. A few astute readers have written ‘Aha!’ letters to me about the line toward the end of the book where I spoke of how a minstrel may pause before he sweeps into the final chorus. And that was my intent, at the time. Fitz and Co. had exhausted me. I wanted to do something different for a time and give my own emotions a bit of recovery time. Because writing about Fitz and Co is emotionally draining for me. They are very intense tales to tell. I wanted to build up a head of steam again before going back to that world.
I have not, however, gone back to that world. I hope the following does not sound like a whine; I am sure there will be some who interpret it that way, but if I talk about this, then I guess I’ll just have to deal with that.
I received a LOT of negative feedback about the ending. Letters were sent to me and public posts were made saying that I had ‘copped out’ or ‘chickened out’.
Many of the letters and posts and yes, a lot of the fan fiction up on various sites tries to dictate that the story goes a certain way, i.e. that Fitz and the Fool run off together and live happily ever after.To those who believe the Fool is male, having Fitz suddenly surrender his heterosexual preference doesn’t seem to matter. If I wrote a gay character and then had him convert to being straight so that some readers could enjoy a ‘happily ever after’ scenario, I think people would accuse me of having an agenda. After all, don’t we all believe that the ‘right’ girl could make a gay fellow go straight?
Of course we do! (Oh, and before someone happily quotes that sentence somewhere, please know that is a Sarcasm.) Yet going the other direction seems just fine to many readers who will bend, spindle and mutilate Fitz any way they need to in order to reach the ending they desire. I don’t understand that. I like him the way he is. Such a radical change doesn’t seem feasible to me. In fact, I’ll put that as a question to the heterosexual male readers here; how much would you have to love your friend to want to have sexual relations with him if he, too, were male? Think of your very best friend, your long term, since-elementary-school buddy and let me know if he fills you with lust when you think of him. Do you want to leave your girlfriend/wife and run off with him? Inquiring minds want to know. How likely is that scenario?Now, if you talk to some people who believe the Fool is female, it all seems very simple to some of them. The Fool simply says, ‘by the way, I’m a girl’ and Fitz tosses Molly aside and takes up with the Fool. Now, knowing Fitz as I do, I don’t find that a likely scenario either. For all of his life, Molly and the stability of a home life is what he has clearly wanted. He loves Molly.
Neither of them are perfect people. But they do love one another, warts and all. So for me, as an author, to make him suddenly discard her and run off to follow the Fool (not to mention leaving his responsibilities in the Six Duchies)seems like it would put a real torque on a character I’ve spent years constructing.Now why would I do that?
Irony point. At the end of Assassin’s Quest, I received a lot of feedback at the editorial stage and later from readers that Fitz should have gone home, married Molly, and somehow become King and lived happily ever after. That ending never felt right to me. Because my editors allowed me to have the ending I’d first visualized, the second part of Fitz’s story unfolded in a way that I felt was far more powerful and compelling than if I’d given in to the ‘color by numbers’ ending that was suggested.
I really wish that, at the end of Fool’s Fate, some of the more vocal readers had trusted me to know what I was doing as a story teller.
Anyway. The negative letters and reactions were very disheartening. The fan fiction I looked at (yes, I know I shouldn’t have looked deep discouragement can make a person do some self-destructive things) convinced me that some readers had completely missed what I was writing about. That was downright depressing, in every sense of that word. In some ways, I felt like a good part of the readership didn’t really want to know what I had envisioned for these characters. They weren’t interested in the things I was saying about friendship and love and identity and gender. Sometimes it seemed that they just wanted a book that ended with a torridly romantic sex scene. For a time, I felt that if I wrote the concluding books that I’d visualized, people simply would not accept them, just as they’d balked at the ends of Assassin’s Quest and Fool’s Fate.
And so I set the notes and ideas aside as not being compelling enough to sustain a readership facing a book very different from what they’d envisioned. Given a choice between writing books that ended falsely and writing books that many readers would feel ‘cheated’ them, I opted out of writing them at all. I decided I would not return to the Six Duchies unless I had a story that readers would find truly compelling. The conclusion I had visualized was, I thought, probably not it. Sometimes I took the ideas out and looked at them, but every time I put them away again.
In France, on a day when I was not feeling well during Imaginales, I skipped dinner one evening and spent 6 or 8 hours going over the ideas again. (France is a wonderful place for me. It’s one place where the readers I’ve encountered are very supportive of me as an ‘artist’ with a vision. Every time I’ve visited there, I’ve come away recharged.) Anyway, I wondered if using a different narrator so that readers saw the events from an outside perspective would make my story acceptable. I toyed with the ideas again, I put down some notes, and in my mind I roughed out the first two chapters. And then I came home and set them aside and went back to work on my current projects. Because I still have my doubts. Some of the readership obviously has doubts that I knew where I was going with this story. Their feedback was like being interrupted by someone ju
st as you get to the climax of a joke or story. (You know what I mean. Someone jumps up and goes, “Oh, I know how that one ends!” And then they blow the punchline by saying it the wrong way.And all you can do is walk away, because delivering the final line at that point is just lame.)Even some of the editorial feedback I’ve received has been along the lines of ‘give them what they want.’ Unfortunately for all of us, I simply can’t write that way. I can’t force out an ending that seems illogical or untrue to the characters. I’ve tried writing ‘to order’ before. You know what happens to me? The characters simply sit down on the page and start playing 5 card stud and wait for me to start listening to them again. I can’t force Fitz or Fool into one of those sappy contrived endings. They just aren’t going there. And neither am I.
I’ve contracted for other books all the way through 2011. So I have plenty of time to ponder the wisdom of returning to Fitz’s voice and tale.
And all of that is a very roundabout way of saying that the end of Fool’s Fate wasn’t supposed to be the final ending of that tale. So, it doesn’t really reflect my philosophy on life.
As for dealing with loss in stories. I strongly feel that until people face a loss and deal with it, they cannot fully live their lives. I’m at a stage in my life now where, in my 50′s, a lot of my friends are finally facing and dealing with earlier blows. They’re talking about things that they’ve always blamed on other people, and finally taking some of the responsibility for them.
Divorces. Children that they left behind. Adventures they didn’t go on. Or peace that they squandered in search of adventure. Smoking too much dope. Never smoking dope. Everyone has regrets of some kind. Every choice you make in life shuts down an infinite number of other possiblities.I’m seeing some friends now who have turned, faced their losses and regrets, evaluated and incorporated them into their lives, and moved on. They’ve become wise. (That isn’t a sarcasm.) In each of those books you mentioned, my heroes turned and faced losses they had endured. They recognized that one cannot make all choices. And they became better people. In some ways they were more whole for admitting what they had left behind.
Each time we make a choice, we leave a bit of ourselves behind. I never became a journalist and traveled to the hot spots in the world to report on them. I regret that. That part of myself never came to be. But I did other things and they were just as rich in a different way.
Wow. This is a really long post. And it’s 9:37 here and I still need to get my words done. I’m daring myself to post this. It talks about topics I’ve avoided and tap-danced around for a long time.
Once I press ‘post’ I may very well regret this.
RH
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That moment in writing the book
I hit it today. Oddly enough, it came after taking a full day off from writing. Or perhaps, not oddly at all.
It puts me in mind of an old story about a traveler and his baggage carriers. Wish I could remember the exact tale. But basically, the traveler was in a hurry and pushed on day after day after day, until one day when he arose and prepared to travel for the day, he found all his baggage carriers sitting in a circle, refusing to move. When he asked what the problem was, they told him, “We have journeyed too fast and now we are waiting for our souls to catch up with us.”
I’ve been pushing on this book steadily, minimum of 1000 words a day. It’s coming along well, the characters are unfolding, the adventure is progressing, the plot thickens, the mystery deepens, and the page count grows. All is going well.
But there is a difference between competent, workmanline construction of a book, and that tingle when the book takes off. You know that feeling you get when you’re reading a really great story and you have to put it down to go to work or school or whatever. But all day long, you know that world and that adventure is waiting for you, and you can’t wait to get back and find out what happens?
Well, when the writing switches on, that same feeling hits me. I can’t wait to get back to writing the book so I can find out what happens next. I know what the rough outline says, but that is just a skeleton. It’s when the flesh goes on (and experience has taught me that it takes a certain word count to get there) that suddenly the story sits up, puts on its hat and says, “Come on, follow me, and please do try to keep up.”
So. That hit me today. I know a key thing about Thymara that I knew but didn’t fully realize before. And knowing that tells me a very important thing about Alise.
That was the Aha! moment.
And I was very glad to have it happen.
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Friends I'd Never Met
I had a wonderful afternoon/evening with friends I’d never met before.
For some years now, I’ve had a newsgroup over at sff.net Over the years, I’ve met a number of wonderful people there. Occasionally, I’ve had the opportunity to meet with them face to face at conventions or signings in other cities. The last time I went on a book tour, I posted on my newsgroup that I’d like readers to join me after the signing for coffee or a light meal. Those gatherings were great fun. Austin in particular was a blast, for we took over the restaurant and were the last folks to leave at closing time. But those opportunities are few and far between.
Today, about 4, I met Dave, Chris, Heidi and Linda. I know the first three from on-line correspondence and posts, and Linda I met just tonight. Dave furnished me with a lot of excellent and helpful information for The Soldier Son Trilogy. We’ve written one another for some years now, so finally getting to meet him was a special treat. Chris and Heidi are from the sff.net newsgroup, and Linda is Heidi’s friend and fellow reader. Also in attendance were Duane and Art from University Book Store, my assistant Kat, Erik who pitches in on computer technical advice and just all around ‘fix it’ stuff, and Soren who, at 3, is our professional heller-upper. Except that tonight he was on his best behavior, which included shaking hands with everyone as he bade them farewell.
It was great to eat good pizza, and talk writing and life in general with real live people. It makes me realize that I spend far too much time alone with my screen in the basement.
SO-ooo. I’m going to try to figure out a schedule and make this a regular event for myself. Some years back, we had SFWA pizza every month or two. I seldom made it clear up to Seattle for that, but I really enjoyed it when I did. And I’ve had such a good time meeting readers and other writers after out-of-town signings that I’ve decided there has to be a way to duplicate that experience.
I’m going to check around Tacoma for a good venue, and see what I can set up on a bi-monthly basis. I’ll post info here as I manage to make a committment to myself. And if any of you reading this are from Tacoma or the local environs, don’t hesitate to drop a line and let me know you might be able to attend.
Robin
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What Do Writers Do?
I make up worlds in my head. And I write them on paper. Oddly enough, people pay me to read them. I like people who know things I don’t know. I like storytellers, muppet makers, princes, queens, bathtub caulking repairman, chicken experts, taxi cab drivers and in short…anyone with a story.