What I’m thinking of doing instead is, take the writing- and book-related posts off Specnology and repost them here, at least for the near future. Does anyone reading this object to that? Or is there something better that you’d suggest for this site? Or should I let this site fade into the Internet? (Don’t pick that one.)

And if you’re new to this site, welcome! Take a look around and tell me what you think!

I’ve been struggling with this problem for years, feeling poorly read and somehow ‘less’ than everyone else because I don’t read what they do, yet being unable to process the bestsellers or finding the plots uninteresting. If I have to choose between a boy in Afghanistan, a middle-aged housewife in crisis, a young fashionista in New York, a half-demon cop taking down an amulet dealer, or a space captain discovering an alien species, I’m going to pick the cop or the captain every time. I’m proud of this fact. I’m proud of my geeky tastes. I’m proud that I know what I like and don’t bow down to pressure.

That doesn’t mean I don’t feel illiterate when somebody says, “What do you mean you haven’t read this? It won the Booker! It’s been a bestseller for ten months!” It also doesn’t mean I feel proud when someone says, “Who the heck are Charles de Lint and Orson Scott Card?”

I came across a post on Tor.com last night that really spoke to me. It talked about how sci-fi, and to an extent fantasy, are undefinable in terms of tropes, and how they’re largely lacking in metaphor. It talked about how non-SF readers don’t understand that, and are always trying to define and trying to read metaphors into things that don’t need metaphors. SF readers read the surface story and are good at picking up hints at the world, whereas literary readers can deal with metaphors and sublevels, and are used to lots of description and explanation. They think too hard when they try SF. Sometimes a robot is just a robot.

The article opened my eyes, in a way. I don’t read a lot of literary fiction, or women’s lit, or the other kinds of books that get shelved in the general fiction sections of bookstores and libraries, because they don’t engage me. I’m not interested in the plots, true, but so much literary fiction I’ve come across seems to rely on poetic language and literary devices and hidden meanings and metaphoric stories of personal growth. I really struggle with identifying those devices, I’m horrible with hidden meanings, and I tend to miss most of the personal growth because I’m so caught up in the surface story.

I’ve always thought that was just me, and that I was a bad reader for being that way. Now I see that it’s the outcome of having grown up on fantasy, science fiction, and mythologies. The Tor article also explained why I’m fine reading Shakespeare, Swift, Austen, and Dickens but struggle with Atwood and Steinbeck: classic lit are much more “surfacey” than what’s winning awards today. I think there may also be a quasi-fantasy element to my (and other geeky readers’) enjoyment of the classics, which Tor didn’t mention—the world of 1820 is far enough outside our worldview that it’s seen as another world entirely.

I’ve come away from that article comforted that I’m not alone, and more confident in myself as a reader. Does anyone else feel the same? Or is it really just me?

Speaking of the manuscript, I’m not going to have the third draft done by New Year’s. I certainly didn’t get it done for Christmas like I’d been hoping. I think I’m about halfway done it, in terms of time. I’ve finished getting my hero’s narration to cover the action the third-and-cut narrator was covering, and I’ve gotten my antagonist’s narration in sync with his new job. Now I just need both of them to be aware of the bad guys, and I need to get shiny things like robotic navigation systems and forcefields into more prominent positions. Right now my novel doesn’t feel all that futuristic, and I want it to.

I asked for and received a lot of urban fantasy novels for Christmas. I’ve been reading a lot in the (sub)genre for the last few months, since I’ve realized that my own novel is urban fantasy, just with superpowers instead of supernatural powers. I’m hoping the books I got are good, since I’ve read a few that have decent entertainment value, but I’m not absorbed enough into the world or characters to want to continue past the first book. I’m beginning to dislike how many heroines (and heroes) are 1) law enforcement, 2) whiny, 3) stupidly independent or untrusting of people, and 4) unable to see the solution staring them in the face. They also seem reasonably flat to me, like their authors have given them all this backstory (ex-husband, traumatic childhood, estranged siblings, friends and enemies, phobias, etc.) but then continued writing as if that backstory wasn’t really there.

I don’t know for sure how a divorced woman who no longer trusts men would act, but I’d like to see more from that woman than statements about her lack of trust and avowals of her need to be far from every male character. I want to get closer to the experience than that, I want a character’s flaws to have more of a bearing on the plot, and I want more realism. Is our divorced woman going to be flirting with a new guy a week later, without a major motive? Is she going to be so stubborn about not trusting men that she won’t trust a man who genuinely wants to help her (without sexual goals) and who has important information regarding the mystery/crime? Is she really going to think that man’s lying to her? I can’t say for sure, as I haven’t been in that situation, but something about those sorts of situations smacks of unreality.

I’ll stop with the editorial. You probably get the point. However, I’d just like to say (for the record) that I’m using the flaws I see in these novels as examples of what not to do. I’ll probably still be guilty of a few of them, but I’m going to try.

In more exciting news, I’ve started another blog, Specnology. In it (on it? through it? at it?), I’ll be discussing technological innovations both real and fictional, and how they might possibly relate to each other. It’s not just an excuse to be geeky, I swear! Geekiness is just a perk. I’ll be updating it Monday/Wednesday/Friday, and the subjects will be all over the map.

In case you’re wondering, I never planned for my WordPress blog, this one here, to be the Blog That Represents Me In The Blogosphere. This one’s for news and discussions of reading, writing, and editing. It only gets updated when there’s something new to say on one of those fronts. (You may have noticed?)  I’ve had the idea for Specnology for a while, since before my website even. I’ve just been waiting for a good time to start it.

Go on, check it out. You know you want to.

I suspect Draft Three will come to be known as The Never-Ending Draft. There still seems to be so much I have to work on…. *sigh*

Sorry to any and all who are reading this. I know I kind of dropped off there. I’d have given a status update on my writing, or several, but I figured those would get boring fast. So let’s just say I’ve made it my goal to edit 50,000 words worth of my novel by the end of the month, in a similar vein to NaNoWriMo. I’m pleased with what I’ve done so far, but I’m also behind. Life got in the way for a few days. I’m hoping to catch up though!

I realized some things about this novel structure yesterday.

1) It’s incredibly formulaic. You don’t really have to put a lot of thought into setting up a plot using it, though if you want the novel to be good, you probably should. All you need is a genre, character, and setting, and you’re in.

2) You can use the structure to write any kind of novel you want—literary, mainstream, sci-fi, horror, mystery, fantasy, young adult, whatever.

3) The degree to which this structure seems to be taught and lauded (by teachers, writers, agents, editors) implies to me that there’s quite a bit of “celebration of form” in the publishing industry. It may be that the ability to follow the structure and do interesting things within its constraints trumps quality of writing. And it may not. I’m just drawing a parallel.

What parallel? What’s celebration of form? I’m getting to that.

Eighteenth century culture was all about form. There were elaborate structures that had to be followed when creating a piece of music, painting, designing a building, designing or creating anything within that building (furniture, decorative molding, etc.), greeting people, and so on. Not so much writing novels, though, because people were inventing novels and working out the kinks. I’m pretty sure the main novels of the period don’t follow The Formula. They’re more along the lines of bildungsromans and travelogues.

What I’m getting at here is that in Eighteenth Century Europe, you didn’t become a master of something until you showed that you could do new and interesting things with the formula. This is what I’m calling celebration of form.

Take Bach or Mozart. They both had a limited toolkit. Sonatas, concertos, and symphonies all follow the ABA, three-movement pattern, where the third movement is a variation on the melody of the first. Bach had counterpoint, a completely separate and complimentary melody running in the bass line. Mozart had Alberti bass, a sequence of two alternating notes from the cords of the passage. One, two, one, two, one, two. They had 12 major keys, 12 minor keys, and 12 notes in the scale. What’s impressive, and what impressed the composers’ contemporaries, was how much they were able to do within the constraints. And they showed off, too. “Look what I just did with the sonata! Bet you didn’t think that was possible. Neat, eh?”

Doing impressive and varied things within a set structure … Sounds kind of familiar, yes?

What I find interesting about this is that music, art, and architecture all broke away from those constraints over the next two centuries, spawning impressionism, cubism, dadaism, atonality, jazz, rock, and this building. Jazz, rock, and some contemporary classical still follow the Classical forms and still have internal patterns (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus), but they’re less constrained.

Novels, on the whole, haven’t gotten to the experimental stage, at least not in the English-language publishing world. I’m not slagging the structure,  because it’s obviously still in demand and still working for writers, readers, and the intermediaries, but I do kind of want to see a bestselling novel that stepped outside the boundaries, or at least pushed up against them. I don’t know how it could be done, because I’ve spent my life reading formula novels so they form my conception of “novel”, but it’s got to be possible.

Mantra of the week: “It’ll be an excellent book when I’m finished these changes. No, really. Really, it will.”

Obvious statement of the week: “I’m such a nerd.”

*Hopefully my beta readers will still recognize the MS when they see it again. And not be confused. One can hope.

Most people, I think, start with what edittorrent calls the “sun sign” traits—the hard facts such as age, job, marital status, children, and siblings. Then, if they’re me, at least, they bring in the nuances while writing and never bother to lay them out in a character bio. Those nuances are the “rising sign” and the “moon sign” traits.

When creating a character, the “rising sign” part of it will be how others see the character. It’s a mixture of projected image and actual impact on others. Part of thinking through this part of the character requires us to understand where a character tries but fails to create certain impressions.

Using the three types of astrology signs seems like a pretty nifty and useful trick for creating realistic characters. It probably should, since the poster admits they got it from a creative writing class. Maybe everyone else has already heard of this method and uses it profusely, which would make me rather late in the game, but I know I’ll be referring back to this post several times, at least, when coming up with new characters.

And the link again.

I’m starting the editing process by reading through the manuscript (on my computer, of course) and making a note of every inconsistently, point that needs changing, reworking “opportunity”, and so on, much, I suspect, the way an agent or editor would do for a substantive edit. Hopefully, though, when I get to that stage, there’ll be much, much less red ink on my manuscript than I’m putting there.

One thing that occurred to me today is that I should probably start reading as much urban fantasy/mystery as my brain can cope with. Even if what I’m writing is science fiction, there are enough similarities between it and the aforementioned genre that I think I can learn a lot by Seeing What Other People Do. I love the kind of things I get to count as research.

Can anyone suggest a good series? Besides Jim Butcher, Tanya Huff, and Kim Harrison, that is. I’m familiar with what they offer.

If nothing else, I’m getting more practice at substantive editing, and wearing my Editing Glasses again. Unfortunately, that’s more fun when I’m not looking at my own work.