Got another novel rejection last night that resulted in some bummerment. I thought I had a good shot with this particular agent, but apparently not, based on the first three chapters.

It led to a good talk with the Damsel, who has read, well, just about everything I've done at both work and on my own time. She made the point that at work, I'm the guy who wrote a ton of dialog while other folks worked on the galaxy map. And, well, I will unapologetically refer to myself as the Michael Bay of the writing team -- I am all about the explosions.

And she said (very nicely) that my writing at work had more "Holy crap!" moments than my own personal writing, in her experience. Maybe not because my personal writing isn't good, but because most of the time, I'm writing in fantasyland, and when I do that, I have to spend a lot of time building the world, which is my least favorite part of writing. I like the dialog, the fight scenes, the twists and turns. I am not, as everyone who has read my stuff will attest, Setting Guy.

So I'm doing some thinking about what to do moving forward. I think that each novel I've written since going to Clarion has been more marketable than the last -- Courtship and Cutlery is fun, but has all kinds of weird government geekery and people riding on ostriches. Palace Job moves pretty quickly, but everyone is still doing crystal-fu that takes a lot of getting used to. With the new epic, I feel like I've got a real world that I can play in for a long time, but I'm still trying to convince people to read about a world where folks fly around on crystal gliders and then get out and have swordfights.

And I don't know. I really love the new epic. Once ME2 is done, I want to clean it up and then get to work on the next one. But as the Damsel noted, I'm getting a common theme in my agent rejections these days, and it goes all the way back to the dreaded Competent I got at Clarion from David Hartwell (and pretty much every other teacher) -- the rejection letters almost all say that my story is fine, but they just work up the enthusiasm that would make them want to represent it. If my big weakness is setting, and that weakness is stopping stuff from selling, then maybe I need to do something closer to what I was thinking of before, where I write in a modern setting so that, you know, I can hide my inability to make up new worlds by going with the familiar.

Or maybe, again, I'm never going to sell anything on my own. Maybe I'm pretty much always going to be a video-game writer. I can think of worse fates. Seeing what the guys in Art and CineDesign and Tech Design have done with the words I wrote, what the VO directors and actors have made out of the scenes I've written... it's humbling. And hell, Mass Effect has sold, what, several million copies? I could do worse.

This isn't a giant emo whinefest. I'm just doing some thinking about where to go from here. Play to my strengths and write more modern stuff, or try to build my setting-making ability and get the epic to a level where agents can actually work up enthusiasm for it. I don't know.

Crits on the crappy first draft of Islands in the Mist are still coming back. (I'd asked people to try to have them back by the end of April, and I've got a pretty decent group of respondants already, ranging from gaming geeks to voracious readers to writing friends.) I'm hoping to get swamped with a bunch right as the closing bell dings. We'll see.

In the crit request, I'd asked for favorite and least favorite characters, and it's coming back interesting. Unlike some of my earlier works, the main character is coming back consistently positive, if not overwhelmingly so. The other two characters I'd consider protagonists (defined murkily by me in this large-group novel as "the ones with a lot of screen-time and many scenes in their POV") are this fascinating split, with, currently, several people loving each one and at least one person utterly detesting each one. I think that's mostly a good sign, given that the ratio of like to dislike is decent, and I'm trying to check myself from trying to make everybody happy by muddying the waters on characters that most people like.

That's actually a pretty decent reflection of the characters, I think. Gale, the heroine, is your basic hero (you know, ideally with a personality and such), safe and normal without too many sharp edges to actively bother people. That doesn't mean that I phoned her in, but it means that I took the fewest risks in terms of potentially alienating the reader. People seem to like her but aren't generally gushing about her. Alia and Jaybird (the other two) are a bit riskier as characters, and some people are loving the risks and the character that results from those risks, and others are utterly detesting the character.

(I also didn't deliberately intend to create a novel where the three heroes are women. I'm not complaining or changing it, but hunh.)

No big surprises yet with regard to people figuring out which characters really need an overhaul to give them some personality, any, at all.

I'll be taking notes for the next week or so, then figuring out an action plan over the next month, and ideally getting to work on kicking the novel in the shins starting in June.

Thanks to a good friend and very fast reader, I have my first complete crit of the first draft.

I sense that Advocate Piri Juhasz of the Church of Onifer is going to have a very bad month. Which is probably what I deserve for having the character description read "blond".

Islands in the Mist is off to my bold first readers. I can now write some more query letters and figure out where I want to send Conscience and Courtship, both of which have been sitting in limbo for long enough (multiple years, editor not responding to queries)  that I probably need to declare them dead and send them somewhere else.

I'm a bit concerned, in light of RaceFail and also in light of trying to write a novel with people of color in it prominently, that I didn't have a whole lot of chromaticism in my first reader list. Hopefully once revisions are done, I'll be able to get more viewpoints without having to be the skeevy white writer who goes around asking people to be THEIR BLACK FRIEND. And my first readers are a pretty awesome bunch, anyway, and will likely not be hesitant in telling me that I botched it.

And now I shall polish my query letters.

The Damsel, the Dude, and the Bud brought home things that they each determined I liked in order to congratulate me for finishing my novel.

I am now the proud owner of a Cars balloon (Mater & McQueen), a chocolate bar, and some sparkling juice.

I am incredibly blessed.

Chapter: 20/20
Words: 144,860

Aaaaand scene.

Twenty chapters, ten weeks.

That felt good.

Will now return to blabbing about it behind the filter to those that care until such time as I ask for volunteers for a version that doesn't have quite as many gaping character, setting, tone, and plot problems as the version I've got backed up in three different places.

One of the fun and exciting parts of RaceFail for me has been the fact that I've got one novel (written by me, a white guy) in the slushpile with a PoC protagonist (in the movie in my mind, she was played by a young Angela Bassett) while working on another novel that also has a PoC protagonist. Unlike some, I'm not taking the anger from the fan community as a sign that I shouldn't include people of color in my stuff, only that I should try not to screw it up, and it would also probably be keen if I showed it to some people of color before sending it out to get published, so that my first clue to there being stuff I need to fix is not having a polite fan tell me that I am pants-challenged several years post publication.

So with that in mind, I have one question and one request. All are welcome, whether I know you or not.

Question:
In my mind, there's a difference between a novel featuring a person of color prominently and a novel that is about racism as it affects that character. It's not a hard line -- I imagine it's a fairly smooth gradient that runs from "character's skin color is mentioned the first time they're described, and that's all you ever hear about it" to "the entire book is about this character's struggle with racism" with a ton of room in between.

I am writing a book with heroes who happen to range across the color spectrum. I am very deliberately not writing about racial tension. These are heroes who just happen to have skin tones and names that aren't all European. I have two reasons for this:

1) I'm pretty sure I'd screw up the other kind of story. I'm a white guy. I don't know dick about racism. I mean, I know enough to write a bad afterschool special, but not enough to write a novel that anyone but another white guy is going to be impressed by. I respect these stories, and I don't think that they're mine to tell. That doesn't mean that race never comes up in my stuff, just that it's not the focal point.

2) When I come home from work, I play with the kids, make dinner, get the kids to eat dinner, play with them a bit more, get the kids bathed, get the kids into bed, do whatever keep-house-working chores need to be done, and then have about an hour to screw around with before I go to bed. When I use that precious time to read, I want to read something entertaining and escapist and fun. I don't want to write about the stuff I've been grappling with all day, and while I can imagine that a PoC might come home and read a book about racism and see someone appreciating what they've had to deal with all day, I'm assuming that there are also PoCs like me who get home from a long hard day and
don't feel like emotionally exploring the same crap they had to put up with at the bus station.

So, with that in mind, what are the most common pitfalls that you've seen people writing a PoC protagonist make? What plot points do you see well-intentioned white folks put their PoCs into to the frustration of fans of color?

(For people who have incredibly legitimate concerns about tokenism, this a fake-fantasy world, but the racial makeup of the group maps to:

Indian-American woman
Indian-American woman (again)
African-American woman
Chinese man
Japanese man
Eastern European man
Irish man

So, two white folks out of the core seven that would be on the cover of the book in a big happy team shot.)

Request:
I've seen some people coming through whose blogs have information about disabilities. One of the major characters above has had a transtibial amputation (leg removed below the knee) and walks with the aid of a prosthetic and a cane. I'd like to do this justice on the second pass, but my pre-first-pass research didn't turn up a ton. I've been reading fact sheets from the Amputee Coalition of America, and I've gotten some basic understanding, but I would really like for amputees or people with disabilities not to scream in frustration at another author getting it wrong in a bad attempt to be symbolic.

If anyone has links to something would, for lack of a better term, be "Transtibial Amputation for Dummies", I would be really appreciative. I'd like to show the character doing exercises, treatments, getting frustrated by the limitations, and, you know, actually acting like it's a real thing. The fact sheets at the ACA have been good, but when I hit the second pass, I need to know more than I know now if I'm going to do it right.

Thanks, and good luck out there.

(Also, I'm assuming that one gigantic fake news post is funny, and two becomes me not taking the situation seriously. If people want Radio Free RaceFail, I can do that. Until I run out of ideas. In which case I'll just steal from Asian mythology and see if anyone notices.)

(Breaking out of filter)

And now, lesbian sex!

This one is harder. (I wrote a straight love scene earlier.) I've read enough Nora Roberts to fairly easily write a love scene that is more graphic than a pan to the lamp without it turning into something from Alt.Sex.Stories, but I haven't read a whole lot of lesbian romance novels, so trying to do it tastefully and respectfully is difficult.

I may have to lose the cheerleader outfits.

At some point I may have to start reading lesbian romance novels. (I keep wanting to add "If there are any," but I have no doubt that there are. I just haven't read them.)

If anybody has good lesbian romance novels, ideally with a graphic nature at about the level of a normal Nora Roberts novel (so, you know, still something that feels more like romance than flat-out porn), I'm open to suggestions.

Working at BioWare has helped my writing immeasurably. I'm much better at planning the structure of a novel, of charting the flow of necessary information and the pace of the action. I'm a lot less hung up on the fact that I am pretty much writing trashy doorstop fantasy, and I'm a lot more fearless about my first drafts.

What it hasn't helped is my setting.

See, at BioWare, I will describe the plans for the plot, and I will write the actual dialog. I don't do crap about the setting. That's pretty much for the tech designers and level artists.

This evening, for my own novel, I had to write a massive expositional infodump scene in which my heroes had to figure out where to go in order to get past the bad guy's blockade, with limiting factors including the location of the blockade, the distance their ship could fly, and the air currents in the area.

I was fricking infodumping about setting. For those of you not blessed with the fortune of having read one of my rough drafts, be aware that this is like hearing someone repeat what they heard a blind man saying about what someone's dress looked like based on a picture in a magazine:

"This area is more north," Talon said northfully, pointing at a northy place on the map, "but still south of the region that is to the north of it."

Okay, it's not quite that bad. But it's pretty close. Longest 2000 words of the damn book so far.

Tomorrow we get to troll-whacking.

As I mentioned on the novel-in-progress filter, I just finished a chapter in which a lot of named characters die, and it made me think about how the deaths of the male characters were handled, and whether it was different from how I handled the deaths of the female characters, and whether that difference was justified by the plot, and whether the difference being justified by the plot actually mattered if the end result was that I was doing something that was going to hurt people.

And last but not least, whether authors can afford to worry about hurting people. (Not in the first draft, I know -- this is something I'm going to hit myself in the rewrite.) But the definition of Women in Refrigerator Syndrome, according to Wikipedia, is "...the use of the death or injury of a female comic book character as a plot device in a story starring a male comic book character." Technically, by that definition, I'm in the clear, since the novel has female protagonists. Realistically, though, I don't think my main character having boobs gets me off the hook. And I did quite deliberately kill a female character as a plot device to show the reader that I wasn't screwing around, that the bad guy was not an honorable antihero. This was a character made to be killed as a gut punch to the reader.

I don't know whether this matters, but I killed a male character in the same chapter, and at the time I wrote it, his death was as emotionally affecting as the woman's, and was just as much a plot device. The purpose of the supporting-cast woman's death was to show the character of the villain. The purpose of the supporting-cast man's death was to show the character of the hero. These deaths had been planned for months. Everything I write is a plot device to screw with the reader's emotions, make them love or hate or pity or swear or jump.

So I don't know. Maybe this is different from WiR Syndrome -- it's not like I've taken an existing character created by someone else and decided to kill her for ratings punch. Maybe that doesn't matter, if it's still going to piss off female readers sensitive to having female characters killed for ratings punch.

People who write, what do you do? Have you ever been disturbed by the way you wrote a character's death? What's justified? What's not?

Chapter: 10/20
Words: 78434

Breaking my friend-filter silence, where the few posts I have made have been about how the novel is going, to note that as of last night, I am halfway through the first draft of Islands in the Mist. The fact that "halfway" translates to a titch under 80,000 words is somewhat alarming, but hey, it's only 37,000 words when I cut out all the adverbs, and that will make room for the setting I currently don't have.

The chapter ended with the most on-camera love scene I've ever written. God only knows if it's any good. Fight scenes? No problem. Exposition? Hell, I can make that fun with a few side characters interjecting. But panting shuddering sweat-slicked skin catching the candlelight is kind of new for me.

I've kept the writing going on a daily basis, but I'm taking the next few days off as we get ready for, and then leave on, vacation with the Damsel's folks down in Albuquerque. I am, I flat-out admit, hung up and obsessive about this stuff, and it irks me to lose the day. But, you know, the fact that I can say, "Hey, let it go for a couple days since you're flying on a plane with a four-year-old and a nineteen-month-old who has an ear infection," is what proves that I don't need pills even if I did go through a phase in elementary school where I had to touch doorframes an even number of times.

Got a little writing done last night. Not an enormous dive-in, but a little time after the lads were asleep.

Chapter: 0 of 20
Words: 1322 of 100,000

Throat-clearing, at least from a voice perspective. I've got the first chapter pretty well structured, although whether the structure works is anybody's guess.

I'll give it a "what was I thinking?" touch-up pass in free moments today. I'd like to have the first chapter done by the end of the weekend.

(As always, all future progress notes will be behind the "People who care about reading this stuff" filter.)

Now that that is out of my system...

I think it wasviking_cat who brought up the idea of the Fruit Basket problem, the issue in which the entirety of one's plot could have been avoided or drastically truncated by having one character send another character a fruit basket saying something like, "Hi, just so you know, I'm not a werewolf, I'm actually investigating them, so if you see me doing weird stuff, just ask me, and I'll be happy to explain it, so nobody has needless suspicions."

I'm working on that for the upcoming novel now. I'm going for politicking between several different power groups, and while I like the twists and turns and betrayals quite a bit, I have distant hopes for having those twists, turns, and betrayals hold up later on when someone thinks about whether what the individual power groups were doing made any kind of sense... or whether, as V-kitty would say, Country X should just have sent a fruit basket telling Country Y that they were concerned about potential invaders from Country Z working evil magic in the kingdom, so, you know, be on the lookout, and maybe we could form a committee or something?

I think that in general, this raises an interesting question. I'm quite happy to do the work to make sure that everybody's motives make sense, but honestly, there's a part of me that suspects I'm trying too hard. I'm not trying to write Ulysses. I'm trying to entertain people. If someone buys my book, reads my book, likes my book, and finds twelve plotholes later, is that really so bad? I mean, they liked it while they read it. They were entertained. Much as I don't advocate a ton of worldbuilding beyond what you know you need to write your work, I don't know if I should actually be that concerned. Shakespeare was happy to have Keanu -- er, Don John -- just declare that he was a villain, as he (Will the Thrill, not Keanu) did with Iago. And there are enough real news stories about people so caught up in emotion of some sort -- anger, lust, greed -- that they go through a ton of shenanigans, both comic and tragic, that could have been averted with the fruit basket.

A lot of it has to do with tension and pacing, I think. If you keep things moving quickly enough that the reader believes in the tension, believes that things are racing too quickly and that there's no time to think or pause or go on anything but instinct, then even if the reader has the fruit basket moment, they're still likely to be forgiving, because they can believe that the characters wouldn't have thought of the fruit basket, either. It's when the characters don't think of the fruit basket even though they go several days without seeing the person they are suspicious of and have plenty of time to send them an e-mail or messenger bird or cybersquirt or fruit basket, but inexplicably don't even though the tension is purely emotional and in no way related to any outside force that is actually hurrying them along, that my personal bullshit detector pings.

Mind you, I'm pretty forgiving. I read fast, and I also don't generally reread -- I don't have a ton of time, and there are always new books to try. So mileage may vary. And I should probably work out my plotholes just to be safe.

As always, anybody who wants onto the filter list, lemme know. Not a ton of regular activity, but more than I post publicly.

So apparently preparing to buy a house and move is time consuming. Who knew?

Work continues, although not in any capacity I can talk about. The boys continue to say adorable and inappropriate things. And in those few spare moments that come around, I am outlining the Overblown Fantasy Epic.

I think that I've discovered my ideal outlining method, which is to outline for five units, then cut one as completely unnecessary, and then merge another two. This is how The Palace Job went from a five-act novel to a three-act novel -- the completely unnecessary fourth act took a dive right before I was supposed to start writing it (at two in the morning, unable to sleep, I realized that it was filler, which is a great time to realize something like that), and then, in a rewrite, I merged what had been the fifth act with the third act, since the former had too much tension-drain time and the latter was decent but benefitted from a little punch-up.

I'm running into the same thing with the overblown epic. I had no idea how many books to plan for, so I started writing down everything that I wanted to have happen -- civil war, war with big evil nation, occupation by another big evil nation, betrayals, loves, returns from Joss-Whedon-esque simudeath, and all of that. It felt like about five books, which sounded pretty good as far as overblown epics went -- more than a trilogy, less than Martin or Jordan or Goodkind or anyone else who gets the "Just freaking end it!" club applied to them by the fans.

Then I realized that book four was filler. It was one line of "Yeah, war here," and while I'm sure that I could fill it up with some fight scenes and such, it wasn't absolutely necessary. There were about four cool bits that made me want the plots I was thinking of, and I could shove that plot into another book without too much trouble. And once I was down to four, the merger took all the slow breath-taking parts and lit them on fire, leaving only a series of increasingly large and colorful explosions.

So, three books. Classic trilogy. Working on areas now, figuring out which parts of the world I'm making are coolest and need some lovin' so that I actually buck tradition and have a freaking setting. Got some characters, need more, life continues.

I will probably have a specific filter for the overblown epic. Holler if you want on.

Ari (mouseferatu  on LJ) is changing some of his writing, and it made me take a step back and change some of mine. Or rather, it made me decide that I was writing something else. I'd been dutifully outlining the reincarnated saints novel, and it was going fine, but it was feeling like something I was doing to be smart, writing a standalone urban fantasy novel because, well, I don't have anything in an urban setting, and again, good to mix things up a bit until something hits.

Then, after taking with Ari, I had kind of a revelation. And the revelation is, "I'm doing okay." A couple million people have played Mass Effect, and even if they didn't all see any given plot, there's a good chance that they saw something I wrote. Maybe they laughed at the Elcor version of Hamlet, or the Big Stupid Jellyfish line, or maybe Samesh Bhatia made them think a little. Even if they didn't see any of my side stuff, even if they totally ignored the elevators, I feel like I made my mark on that game.

And if I never get an agent / sell a novel / hit it big with my personal after-work writing, I'm still attached to a game that sold a ton, a game that, almost a year after first shipping, still has people arguing and laughing and discussing it in forums all over the place.

All of which means that playing it safe and doing the more marketable thing is really not that important. And while it wasn't like I didn't want to write the reincarnated saints novel, it's not feeling like the awesomest thing ever at this point. I don't know why. Maybe it's because of work. Maybe it's because I'm feeling burnt-out on all urban fantasy save Harris, Butcher, and Briggs, and don't have any inclination to add another miniskirted heroine with a bare midriff and fishnets (not that I'd write her that way, but you know that's how she'd show up on the cover) to the bloated urban fantasy marketplace right now.

Whatever the reason, the thing pulling me right now is, as I have described it unflinchingly to friends, "a bigass overblown multi-book fantasy epic." I've always liked reading them. I want to write them. And while writing a book that doesn't end with all the characters neatly in their happily ever after places makes the book more dangerous for publication purposes (as I understand it, I have to convince the publisher to publish three books, not one), I... don't care. It's what I want to write. I don't care enough about the urban fantasy piece to make my wife care for the boys while I go downstairs and write. I do care enough about this overblown epic.

So get ready for authorial wandering. I'm keeping most of it in a private wiki, but I'm sure it'll spill over.

To those of you who read this blog and hate overblown fantasy epics, I am so sorry. I'd say something about how you're going to like mine, but really, I'm pretty sure you won't. I'm not just embracing the cliches, I'm grabbing them and jumping off a cliff while an ancient eldritch crystal blows up behind me. Here's hoping that it's a fun ride.